Visas: Man in a Briefcase.

Because we’re traveling so much I feel like I’m playing a game with border patrols and foreign consulates. During the course of this tour we’ve had to get visas for Russia, Japan, New Zealand, Korea and Australia. For us Britishers it is (sometimes) easy – we are allowed to carry two different, valid UK passports and while we travel on one the other one can be on a desk somewhere getting a visa stamped in it. Easy-peasy. But for the Americans it’s not so easy; they can only carry one passport.

This means whenever we want to get visas we have to do so when we’re not using the passports to travel. Now there’s the EU this should be a doddle, right?

Should be, except where you’re going in and out of Switzerland. Except when you’re going into the UK and Ireland. Suddenly this becomes quite a song and dance. We got the Russian visas while we were in England for three days doing the Wireless festival, the passports arriving back at the festival site while the band were on stage and one hour before the crew bus pulled out for continental Europe to go to the Southside festival in Germany. The Australian visas are done electronically and probably don’t really count; the Japanese visas I processed on a quick fly-back to London while the band were in Cologne, borrowing their passports to take them to the Japanese consulate on Piccadilly. Just to make this interesting, the consulate refused two of the passports because they didn’t have enough pages in them which meant the following day in Berlin I had to go to the American Embassy to get new pages put in the offending documents and take these back to London when I went back 3 days later (while everyone was in Paris) to pick up the visas. To the Japanese Consulate’s credit they turned the two errant passports around inside 25 minutes when I returned. I must have looked pitiful (But they won’t thank me for telling you they did this). We were in London for 2 days just after the Russian show just before the Oxegen festival in Ireland so we got the New Zealand visas inserted then (again, the consulate helped us out and did it quickly) and now I’m at Charles De Gaulle airport after taking the train to Paris from Lyon this morning while everyone else went to Nice. I’m flying back down to the south of France to rejoin the tour tonight and then returning on Thursday, on the day off before the overnight drive to Spain, I’m flying back to Paris to pick up the passports, hopefully full-to-brimming with Korean visas. I had to forge a signature on an application on the train. The guy sitting next to me looked puzzled as to why I was obviously forging signatures while carrying a pile of fourteen passports. I felt like Donald Pleasance in the Great Escape. I probably looked like him too after so long on the road eating all the crap food I’ve been eating…

So today I had breakfast in Lyon, Lunch in Paris and tonight I’ll be eating something rich in Nice. (On Saturday we woke up in Switzerland, played a show in Italy and went to bed in Lyon. There’s a pattern here). As the travel becomes more ridiculous, (and I’m fascinated by people who’s jobs are always like this—write in and tell me your extreme travel schedules) I find myself getting more and more used to the idea of flitting anywhere for anything.

(Jumping forward: In Lisbon at the end of the tour I’ll find myself sitting in a hotel lobby, checked-out, with no idea what I’m doing that afternoon: staying in Lisbon? Flying to London? Flying to Berlin? Suddenly going anywhere becomes nothing more than a phone call to a travel agent and a series of automatic procedures to get on a plane. I end up flying to see friends in Berlin, btw. But once you’ve got a couple of hundred quid and a passport it’s very easy to imagine flying anywhere. What a giant fat luxury that is...).

Three days later….

Getting an 8AM flight to Paris was okay, kind of like taking the bus to work – it’s only an hour and a half flight. Once the wisecracking consulate guy gave me the passports back (The guy at the Koran consulate likes to make witty remarks…things like “If you don’t speak French or Korean why are you in the Korean Consulate in Paris?” “Because I’m a twat, obviously.” This might just be clumsy humour on his part and not intended to be condescending, but I’m like Beyonce in that my mother taught me better than that. We came to an understanding when I asked him in Mandarin if he wanted to speak Chinese. Not that I can speak it very well, but it was enough to stop the thinly veiled ridicule at my language inadequacies. Twonk).

After my chat with Oscar Wilde at the Consulate I had a couple of hours to kill. I took myself on an impromptu date and walked along the Seine, finally taking an early lunch in St. Germain Des Pres. It was a first date so I didn’t talk myself into going back to a hotel, instead I jumped back in a cab to return to Orly airport to fly back to Nice to get to the buses just in time to give the crew their passports so they could drive into Spain and make the load-in at the Beniccassim festival.

As I arrived at the hotel I ran into some of our party leaving for dinner and we all left to go eat at a very good but very slow Mexican Restaurant run by the most unfriendly host I’ve met in a long while. He kept telling us we didn’t want the things we’d ordered and curling his lip in contempt. It was a strange sales technique because everyone started ordering more to spite him, until we were bilious and had doubled the check.

That showed him, eh?