Tucson: No time for anything but nothing.


I’ve never spent any time in the desert. I’d like to, it has a lot of romance about it. I think all places that have space have a lot of romance in them--I think the space allows us to fill them with what we'd like to find there. From my Tucson hotel room the city looks flat and dry but beyond the mountains rise up like every Western I saw as a child back in England. I might come back to visit the locale when I have some down time; maybe in February when the Northeastern winter is at its most suckingest.

I get a taste of the desert backstage by the trailers. The ground is mostly dust. It’s not really the place to be wearing a pinstripe suit and black leather ankle-boots from Jermyn Street but I have discovered a sartorial stubborn streak, usually only evidenced in teenagers and self-martyring Goths. Aside from the gig-in-a-dustbowl vibe, the stage is also a short stone's throw from a sewage treatment plant and depending upon the direction of the wind the atmosphere changes dramatically. Add in the fact that the sewage plant looms beind the stage and as the sun sets its industrial-scale sodium lighting acts a counterpoint to the stage light show and you have a smelly, dirty painfully orange example of Genius Show Planning. All of that desert out there and this is the best place for the gig? The heat and the dirt does give me pause for thought about what I’ll wear in place of suits at the summer festivals this year. I have such shallow concerns. I am very passionate about my shallow concerns. Is that irony?

We have to fly to Los Angeles the next day for the band to shoot a video. We barely get to see the city; we go from the airport to the shoot, from the shoot to the hotel at 1AM, and then back to the airport 12 hours later. Video and film shoots are all about waiting around in a kind of semi-on-call state. I don’t have the disposition for either, I’m too abrasive and impatient. Its strange how different entertainment professions are populated by fundamentally different people. Music people are abrasive and direct (read: crass). Movie people are smooth and positive, even when they’re not (read: oily). I used to think in "entertainment" it would be easy to flit between disciplines – I don’t think it really is. We're like cousins who can hang-out occasionally but end up bitching about each other when we go home to our mum's houses. I’m a music person. I have a music person’s sense of what’s appropriate. I tried other fields but they’re not me. I sense it when people from other areas come to our shows and don't quite get it or can't quite find a place to be without being in the way. I feel like that at shoots, even when I'm working. It's like I don't understand why it works the way it does or something, even though, on paper, I do understand completely.

The only quiet time I get this weekend is at breakfast before we leave. I order an cheesey-bacon omelet at Mel’s Drive-In on Sunset. I like the warm morning sun, I like being in California. I think I’ll move here for a while when we’ve got a break. I chew on the thought for hours on the flight home like it is juicy toffee. It is such a luxury to be able to decide to go live somewhere else for a few weeks. Maybe I will, maybe I won’t. I am already fantasizing about living in Beijing at the end of the tour for a couple of months. Maybe I’d be smarter to concentrate on that? Such worries. I am a lucky boy, there’s no doubt about it. And crass. Really fucking crass.