New York City:

It's taken a few days but I'm starting-slowly-to feel civilized again. Despite my ceaseless desire to be going somewhere else I love New York City and can't imagine I'd feel any better anywhere else. ('cept of course, if I was maybe getting on a plane). I was trying to work out what's behind the wanderlust and I can only conclude-sappy as it sounds-that it's a form a romanticism; always thinking what we lack in ourselves is to be found somewhere else. Keen grammarians will note the sophisticated switch of personal pronoun in that last sentence). I'm only glad that this afternoon I didn't succumb to the urge to go to the airport and fly to the UK because of the fog and delays at Heathrow.

I fasted for two days to try to expedite the recovery from trans-fats and sugar--dietary staples for the past month on tour. It worked some, I'm feeling better than I was and my blood doesn't feel like a slurry of badness. A few other things have gone well too: I got my nice watch back from servicing which was free even though it was out of guarantee (that never happens in NYC). Also, I was about to go to buy a new I-pod and just for luck I tried my old one one more time as I was on my way out of the door and it started working again (why it couldnt' do this on tour when I had hours rattling around in a bunk, I don't know...my god is a smartarse god). Thinking I'd just saved $250 I celebrated by spending all that on Beatles CDs.

Which leads me to...and forgive me for stating the obvious but I forget from time to time...how good were the Beatles? Even now, 40 years on, the records still sound fresh and exciting. Admittedly they trigger a certain nostalgia for me (I can still remember riding my bike around with my friends near the local shops and singing Beatles songs when I was about 7. We used to do that for fun, me and my mate Paul). Paul McCartney is one of the most underrated bassists of all time. His playing is genius. And John Lennon's lyrics are so deliciously nasty. I think being working class and English adds some poignancy to what they achieved because in a way The Beatles, although pop stars beyond compare, were kind of like us. I certainly thought that music was a way out when I was growing up largely becuase I was listening to my big brother's Beatles records from ever since I can remember. I felt so much better just getting into these songs again--I hardly listen to them anymore. I'm always awed by how emotive and evocative music can be. Even now, listening to The Beatles, I can experience my first rock and roll thrill. If I listen to The Jam I can get that teenage sense of defiance and frustration. Music is a such an emotional shorthand - it can always go straight to the heart of things. Unless of course it's a support band soundchecking their drums. Then it's the slow screech of fingernails down an endless chalkboard in the ninth circle of hell. I guess I haven't quite got over being on tour yet.


I'm enjoying the pre-Christmas New York too. All those Christmas lights around Europe has me appreciating the lights in New York so much more. Both the tree at Lincoln Centre and the lights at the Time Warner Centre look great. Not too garish like the old tart of a tree at Rockefeller Centre. I've even walked through Times Square twice and not cursed once. The photo's don't really do them justice but this is the tree at Lincoln Centre...



And these are the colour-changing lights inside the TW Centre at Columbus Circle.



One other small detail about one of the statues in the TW Centre. Take a look at this picture...anything stand out?



If you look closely you can see that its willy has been polished to a different shade of bronze than the rest of the statue (and that's the correct proportion for size vs height by the way...I don't care what anyone else says). It cheers me to think that all the Upper West-Siders doing their shopping in the Time Warner Centre can't help but touch the statue's todger. That's some serious polishing to have changed the shade of bronze. I salute my prurient neighbours! You messy mobsters....

Tour Manager slight geek side-note follows: I've just submitted the tour accounts. Only a month of touring and two currencies so not so much cash changing hands--excepting the merch money (and what is it about local merch' sellers? Out of a month of touring only two could fill in the childproof inventory form and manage the cash easily...kind of shocking really). It was fun getting the merch money every night though. It felt old-school, back to the days of cash every night instead of fees being paid as wire transfers. I remember picking up $50K at a festival one year and carrying it around with me all night while I celebrated...ah, happy days. (There was another festival in Finland where I got chased by security off the scaffolding during Bon Jovi's set--they were being such pissy bitches backstage they deserved someone dancing on the PA during their set, I say. I was good too-groovy as fuck. Then I left the float on the bus...but that's another post). I'm so happy with the Euro. It used to suck having to do accounts for every currency in Europe. I was cursing the Swiss this summer when we visited for a day and I had to open a new sheet to account for about $20 worth of coffee receipts for the band. Poor me, eh?


Anyway, the tour accounts are done and it feels like I've handed in my homework and school's out for the Holidays. I've tidied my apartment, nearly done my laundry, a new Gong Li movie is released tomorrow and I am writing endlessly on my blog as a way of avoiding any "real" writing or studying. I guess I can only put it off for so long. Funny, now I've finally got the time to do exactly what I've wanted to do all year long the first thing I do is procrastinate...well, except about going to see Gong Li.



Keeping me smiling through the Times Square Christmas Tourist Crowds: Oldies but Goldies.

The Beatles - Here There And Everywhere.
The Beatles - The Word - even groovier than my dancing to Bon Jovi.
The Beatles - Girl. Still kills me everytime.
The Beatles - I'm Only Sleeping
The Beatles - Help. What a single--it doesn't stop.
The Buzzcocks - Ever Fallen In Love. Pete Shelly has one of those classic British whiney voices. I don't think anyone else could have sung this song so well.
Neko Case - That Teenage Feeling. Because it's good to be reminded not to settle for things.

And I got this link on a email blast today. The video is well worth a look. It made me laugh because he does actually drive like this. Not that he'll admit it.

Jarvis Single Micro Site

Emptying My Camera:

So before I close the book on this year's touring I found these photo's on the Camera.

These are the Christmas lights in Barcelona.



Hmm, yes, I know. After London and Paris they seem a little, Leeds-esque don't they?

And this the Christmas Tree in the centre of Madrid. I think it sits on Km 0, the point from which all distances in Spain are measured and I think, with the Ayuntamiento in the background, the administrative centre of Spain. Unfortunately there was a ton of construction so it was hard to go look properly. Oh yeah, and I was supposed to be working too...





These are the lights in one of the shopping precincts in Madrid. Note the mental-busy crowds at the bottom. I ate by myself at the top of this street in a sandwich shop in a break between soundcheck and the show. As I chewed on bread so crunchy it cut my mouth I saw a sign for a FunFurter. They looked dreadful but I wished I'd ordered one of those instead. I would have looked a lot more exciting hunched over a FunFurter instead of the not-very-spicey chicken thingy I was fish-hooking my soft-palatte with.

It seemed an anticlimatic way to spend the last night in Europe. I felt sad to be leaving. Much as I want to go home and not be on tour I do love the travel and romance that comes with it (unlikely as that sounds for a tour bus; but there's something to be said for going to sleep after leaving Paris, waking up in Milan, and watching the Swiss Alps rise in silhouette in the night as you fall asleep). I'll miss the people I'm traveling with too-they're warm and funny and bright and good friends. I've spent much of the past year with some of them so there's a kind of shorthand, I think, that exists between us that feels like home. A certain critical mass of shared experience. If only we could get weekends off so one could have a life too...





This is a friend (pictured on top of our gear at JFK when we got home) that someone acquired on the way to Italy, late at night, at a truck stop. To be honest it makes a change from the usual giant water pistols and monster truck videos everyone normally ends up buying. It's the size of a small child and has one leg sewn on backwards so it was instantly easy to warm to. His owner grew very attached to it and who could blame them? We all secretly wanted one and to compensate we discussed ways to vilify our little green friend. One idea was for everyone else on the bus to be photographed one at a time in a different compromising position with our furry friend and the photo's emailed to the owner after the tour. Another idea was to buy an oversized sex-toy for the little green loveball and leave it inappropriately dressed in its owner's bunk. In Barcelona I went as far as to go look at oversized sex-toys in a shop on The Ramblas. The girl in the sex-shop was very helpful. She looked like a Lit. Major and her breath smelled of garlic. She showed me a full range of strap-ons. In the end I didn't buy a strap-on. Buying a strap-on is a commitment, especially for a joke. They cost a lot of money, even the cheap ones. You've really got to want a strap-on, I reckon. And I didn't.

In the sex-shop I felt another piece of rusted tin crumble from the wall of my heart. Exactly a year ago I'd learned I'd passed my exam in Basic Mandarin from the Chinese Government. Now I'm looking at strap-on's in a naff sex shop in a touristy part of Barcelona. It's not even that funny a joke. Time to get off the road for a while. At least until my knuckles are no longer dragging on the ground.

Köln:


We have a day off on the outskirts of town where I sleep all afternoon and into the evening. I feel stupid for wasting a day off like this but what are you going to do. There was a good sauna in the hotel that I visited to compensate... It’s our last day and show in Germany and I’m sad to be leaving. It’s a boss country. This is not a popular view. Kind of English without all the English (and English is a dialect of German…linguistically speaking. But of course you knew that already…). However, the venue in Köln was one of the worst on the tour. For some reason, certain clubs achieve the basest of standards in terms of equipment and décor and facilities and stop there. I can only guess it’s because the owners don’t care and in some way view a grotty, run-down club as having some kind of rock and roll bona fides or something. This place looked like interrogations took place there.



And upstairs, in the production/office dressing rooms, it looked like the kind of place that interrogees were forced to sleep – as Brian and Steve are demonstrating after dinner.



The hotel where our day rooms were (for showers) had a vending machine in the lobby that dispensed miniatures of Whiskey, Vodka and this tour’s favourite, Jaegermeister. Supply always meets demand so in a suburb of Köln in a deserted two-star hotel people evidently like to get mullered on Jaeger…


Paris:

Another overnight drive and we get to Paris in good time and prepare ourselves to leap off a moving bus with all our luggage because the traffic is so bad and we can’t stop on the Blvd de Clichy for longer than the turn of a light. Like L.A., Paris is one of those Cities I always look forward to getting to, but when I do I invariably get bitchslapped as soon as I step off the bus.


… in the hotel I ask for the keys and the woman behind reception gives me an attitude. She complains that there are three rooms but nine people; these rooms are for one person each. I say c’mon, stop pissing about, we're only here for showers, here are the reservation numbers, give me the keys and we'll be gone as soon as we came. She boots-off and refuses to give me even one key even if I relent and promise that only one person is going into the room. She speaks no English at all and then only speaks French with a sneer. I give up on diplomacy and while Marc, our French speaking guitarists remonstrates with her in French, she complains that the hotel is only used to professional clients (it’s a toilet on the Blvd de Clichy – hard to appreciate the joke without seeing the crap hotel. There were no shower curtains in the bathrooms, for example..) I call the label who arranged the rooms to sort it out. It’s been a long time since I’ve had to start a day pissy to get even the basics taken care of. It's a long time since I've tried to check in to a hotel on the Blvd De Clichy. Last time I remember I ended up jumping over the counter and giving out the keys myself...

The quality hotel frontage....



Which is across the street from this...



Which looks old and tired in the grey daylight, doesn't it? Whatever, Montmartre has an enduring charm.

Sure enough in time it’s all sorted out. There’s a lot of Gallic shoulder shrugging and indignant conversations but finally we all get to shower ahead of a day spent doing press, radio and TV. Marc is by now enjoying himself with the woman behind the counter who is warming to us now she realizes that we’re not trying to rip her off. She even tells him that had we not been musicians (we’ve got three guitars with us for the day’s promo) she’d have thrown us out on the street, as though this is a consolation. While ten minutes previously she couldn’t understand my request for “An Extra towel, s’il vous plait.” She now regales me, in perfect English, with the difference between Berbers (what she is) and Arabs and how the Moors (her ancestors) colonized southern Europe. I guess she’s studied the chapter on “Introducing Oneself” in English but not got to the chapter about staying at a hotel. Or the one about not being a miserable, incompetent, acidic sow.

Paris is an amazing city. Despite the traditional rivalry between the French and the English I can’t help but respect their bolshie no-shit attitude (however frequently misplaced) and the fact that the French built Paris (and to be fair Rennes, where we also visited for a weird festival, was similarly beautiful). Even after all these years visiting it’s still breathtaking. While Albert and Matt did press I got to see some favourite sights – even if a little briefly.

Paris form Sacre Couer...



One of the funicular cars at Sacre Couer had crashed in the Place Suzanne Valadon. A ring of Gendarmes hung around while I and all the other tourists took photos. It didn’t look like anyone had been hurt.



I even had time to have a Chinese Movie buying accident in FNAC and Virgin and to wander around the Marais – something I haven’t done in over 10 years. There's a boss tea shop in the Marais called Mariage Frere's that's been around since 1854. On a recommendation I went for tea and cake - both were excellent. The kind of place where the service justifies the prices. It was packed...and one of the most polite places in Paris, for sure.



And the Champs Elysee looked amazing (well, maybe it loses something in translation here but...).



And so did Notre Dame...the great thing about Central Paris is that you can get around it so easily.




Even the chore of working in Paris (Like New York, London, L.A. blah, blah...) was easily overlooked because of the beauty of the place and the show was one of the best of the tour despite having to load-in up a hill and through construction. The night of the show I dreamt I was going out with Bjork. It was great, she was all into me. Then when I woke up and I realized that I wasn’t going out with Bjork I felt like I’d been dumped. By Bjork. I left the band at the label to do their last day’s promo at their label and wandered around the Marais and Pont Neuf alone and in the rain singing Paris Match by the Style Council to myself. I didn’t even have an I-pod to mope around with. Woe is moi.

This is the view from/of Pont Neuf where lovers go to hang out. As I'd been chucked by Bjork it seemed fitting that I sulk here by myself. Note the young lovers snogging next to the Seine. I'm in the City of Love and everyone is at it but me. I consoled myself by thinking they were about to throw themselves into the water.





The drive to Milan from Paris is about 1000KM. I slept for most of it. We were in Milan for about 12 hours. I like Italy for my vacations and nothing else. Oh, and the guy on reception was a dick here too--I’m going to start photographing them from now on….. I couldn’t get on the bus fast enough at the end of the night – except that our trailer with all the gear in wouldn’t hitch correctly so we spent 20 minutes trying to nudge a 1-ton trailer 1/8” to get the pin in it. Class. One hasn’t lived until one’s been covered in crap from a trailer that’s been dragged around the autobahns and autoroutes of Europe. Yum. I don't know what it was that made being in Milan so anticlimatic - Italy and the Italians are all so boss. Maybe it's just tour fatigue?

Outside of Barcelona I woke up on the bus and Brian, our lucozade swigging, cadbury’s button chomping, 20 benson smoking guitar tech’ was watching Supersize Me. I breakfasted on strawberry jam filled smiley face biscuits and cadbury’s buttons and joined him in watching the movie. By the end I was feeling suitably nauseous and it occurred to me that touring is very much like Supersize Me. We’ve eaten crap for nearly 30 days – everyone’s tired and lacklustre and there's a vague malaise floating around but spectrally, just out of the corners of our eyes. Intellectually I know we’re all hanging out with friends and getting paid for it and doing what we love but I am convinced the fatigue is partly because our diet is so bad. I feel like crap around the clock and am hoping for a bodyectomy when I get home.


In Madrid the band left the stage at 11:55 PM. By 7:45AM we were back at Barcelona airport for the flight back to New York unwashed, bleary-eyed and exhausted. 15 hours later, including many I missed thanks to vicodin and tylenol PM, I was home.

Back a day and I can’t quite remember how only 36 hours ago I was baked and falling asleep in my bunk, watching the Spanish service stations pass outside my window. It’s strange to come to the end of a tour and to feel the forward motion desist. Even while sleeping we’ve been traveling at 60 mph all week. Coming home to a quiet apartment feels a little like coming down from a sugar high. Wandering around the city it takes a while to feel grounded. When I got back I had an urge (I always do) to get a change of clothes and go back to the airport to get on another plane to somewhere. I think it's a sickness.
It took me 36 hours to book my next flight.

Berlin: Journey to the East.


We left Amsterdam around 2AM and drove overnight to Berlin. Everyone was in an ebullient mood, for obvious reasons. I watched Grey’s anatomy and fell asleep. I wasn’t alone in doing this. We ate Olliebollen, a heavy, raisin-filled sugared dough-ball my friend had bought for me as a sample of Amsterdam's finest food stuffs....they are delicious, and just the thing after a few hours in a coffee shop. Which is why there are so many cake stalls open around the Leidesplein in the evening I'd imagine.

Berlin is one of my happy places. I love the city. I can’t really explain why but when we arrived I breathed a sigh of relief. It’s such a cool place full of art and culture(s) and smart people. The city looks great and is steeped in history. Walking around doing nothing here is better than doing most things elsewhere. (I feel the same in Beijing too….go figure). Our hotel was on Wallstrasse and even the cheesy US Wall Street themed hotel with Stock Market figures as the corridor carpet design and a hundred dollar bill as the bedroom carpet design didn’t dampen my mood (Note also the chocolate Euros left as a welcome gift on the bed and the packet of tissues printed as dollar bills in the bottom left corner…). It was so naff I couldn't help but enjoy it and the room’s décor was Germanic in its pragmatism with kettles hidden in closets and doors with warped wood as handles. It's in a quiet corner of the city right next to a U-Bahn station so getting around the city was a doddle. I went outto dinner with friends for a while before finding myself so tired I had to come home to sleep. I did learn that there’s a German verb from the name of my home town: Coventrieren. It means to eradicate a city (Which is what the Luftwaffe did to Coventry during the Blitz in WW11). I felt vaguely pleased to know we’d been immortalized in language, even with such a negative connotation (I guess the UK version would be to Dresdenize…?). Sadly, given a day off in one of my favorite places it was all I could do not to sack out before 10PM. Shameful.



The band’s promo the next day was in Potsdam, about 40 minutes outside of Berlin. The radio station was along the street from the Potsdam film set where Marlene Deitrich used to make movies. The fake streets were still there and reminded me of the sets in California at Universal. There were some (genuine) mansions along the block that looked just like these movie-set facades and the film sets were set apart from the public suburban street only by a fence – they were very open and visible. Although judging by the state of the Streetcar on this set it’s not like the local kids seem to hold the perimeter fence in very high esteem.



Later in the day, after soundcheck, we took a walk along the East Side Gallerie. This is a section of the wall that was left in place and is now used by muralists. Behind this section of the wall is the river (Pictured from the other side—The former West—below). To escape the East one would have to scale two walls, then clear a section of barren no-mans-land under the watch of the guardtowers, and then swim across the river. I can’t imagine the desperation people must have lived with to try that. One of the saddest sights in Berlin for me is near the Reichstag. There are small crucifixes on the walls as memorials to those who died trying to cross over: they were shot, they drowned. Some of them were so young, and some of them died only a few weeks before the wall came down.









I love the architecture in Berlin. There’s such a mix of old and new and the old has such a presence and sometimes a fantastic monolithic feel in the former east. How can you not love a city where the U-Bahn stations look like this? Next door to my friend’s apartment building in Prenzlauer they are redeveloping a former mechanic’s garage that was a previously a bathhouse used exclusively by Stasi Officers. Although that’s a dreadful kind of history, how can you not be fascinated by the fact that this still exists? Maybe it’s just me but that the façade of our hotel was bullet-scarred from WWII did nothing but add to the experience of being there. The city breathes its history.



Tonight everyone’s gone to the same bar we visited in the summer when we played here before. It’s good to know places you like in cities abroad. It makes a place feel like home – which Berlin may well become one day. Certainly it has got to be one of the top places to live in Europe.

Got to Hamburg after a hazy night in Das Bus (it feels like a submarine as it’s a double-decker and all the ceilings are low. Low enough for me to keep cracking my head on) and on my way form the shower rooms at the hotel to the venue I passed a Gallery showing a Casper David Friedrich exhibition (German Romantic school). I’d tried to see his work before in Berlin but the wing of the gallery had been closed. This morning I snuck off while everyone was sleeping but got to the Gallery only to find it closed on Mondays. Same with the Chinese exhibit in the gallery across the square. Bobbins that, innit?

Tchoo Late and Tchoo Schmelly!


I think I can say my Anti-Amsterdam phase is over now. I’m just anti-scuzzers. And who could have a problem with that? We’ve just had a night-off in Amsterdam--the first quiet time I’ve had since the start of the tour. It’s taken nearly 12 hours of mooching around and doing nothing special to start to feel anything like normal again. Tonight I ate falafels and talked about nothing much with a friend. It felt so normal a small grateful tear rolled down my cheek at the end of the night. Or maybe that was because the falafels achieved a legendary spiciness. Either way, it was pure, unadulterated gratitude.



I wandered around the city a little at night. I was hoping for a little more by way of pagan lights but the lights here were very understated. Aside from the obvious red ones, that is. Understated but apt, I thought. See for yourself. When your City looks as cool as Amsterdam what do you care for Christmas lights?



The area was busy, not just with men in raincoats or gangs of men out drinking (although it was mostly this), but with couples and tourists safely enjoying the edginess. Walking past all the prostitute’s windows my second thought was that it’s got to be a hard, hard job. The men (not me of course, I'm different to every other man on the planet) really do view them as chattel. The whole red light area is steeped in a kind of workaday seediness – there are the dealers, the women, the storekeepers and the skeevy pimps all making a living by selling an assortment of fantasies. Then there are the punters (many of whom are so tightly coiled they almost flinch if you look at them) all slightly breathless with anticipation and eager to believe even the most exhausted hooker’s smile or the shadiest dealer’s spiel about his drug’s potency.



North African dealers hang around on the middle of the bridges hissing the names of the drugs they can sell to you. Along one street three people spoke to me, and I heard in order (I’ve tried to get the Dutch accent down phonetically, I really like the accent here…):

“You chlike any cocaine?”
“Porno! Come in before it gets tchoo late and tchoo schmelly!”
“Psst! Charlie. Chou want shome?”

This seemed so absurd and open it made me laugh. Then I saw five English guys pushing their friend into a hooker’s doorway and cheering and it all seemed less absurd and more obscene. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t have a sordid fascination with all of this (I will go to my grave believing you can gauge a nations psyche by looking at its advertising and its pornography) but I felt like I was slumming it in the end, going to look at the poor people scratching a living by ruining themselves before going back to my schmancy hotel to blog about how delightfully vulgar it all is. Voyuer would be a generous description, I think.



I was thinking it might be a chuckle to go for a smoke in a coffee shop (and it’s been a long, long time since I did that) but that would only be good in the right company and the only person I want to do that with isn’t here. Probably a good thing too. Or not. Seeing all that broken humanity somehow makes me want to steep myself in feelings altogether more aspirational and to foster those sensibilities that come from tenderness and not self-loathing. After wasting so much time I’ve a desire to make more of life instead of less. Watching people attend their own wakes is ultimately depressing; it’s always easier to say no to life. Which is ironic, isn't it?