Luxury Coach-Class Travel:

Trying to do everything in a tiny space sums up really one of the greatest stresses of touring. Even though we're traveling on a luxury coach (and yes, they come nicer than ours, but really, once you're on a half-decent tour bus it's all much of a muchness) we still all exist inside coach-class spatial confines. For example, this is my bunk and the only private space I (or any of us have). And by private I mean you're separated from everyone else by a curtain. A curtain that, say, Brian can yank open at any time and say, "Hullo Dicky. Are you havin' a wee polish in there, are ye'?" This is most annoying when you are having a polish; not because of the interruption but because it's Brian.

This is bedtime.




This is the back-lounge. In every back-lounge on every tour bus in the world exists red-eyed roadies watching something marginally crappy or very funny in perpetuity. And it smells of man. And cigarettes. And dead air. That said, look at Brian, Vicente and Jamie having fun. This is what it looks like to have fun. On every tour bus there is usually a tour-video/DVD that everyone watches and then quotes relentlessly. On this tour it was every episode of the British TV show Still Game.




None of it so terrible, just terribly small.

The best thing about this bus are the windows in the bunks - a rare feature. And they open too, which is a Godsend when you wake up in the baking heat inside a metal tube that 8 other men have been sleeping in.

A room with a view.



The first few days on the bus are okay. You get your little space sorted. You're hanging out with people you like and the tour stretches ahead of you full of promise for the excitement and romance of places you'll visit (Paris! Lisbon! Copenhagen! Reading....) but after a while something strange happens on every tour.

At some point you become tired of dressing and hopping around in a narrow aisle traveling at 60 miles an hour; and of watching people brush their teeth; and of trying to contort yourself to take a leak while being jostled around city centres; and of having to be with people around the clock (even people you like a lot and despite the fact that it's nobody's fault). This is when the bus starts to attack you. Suddenly every sharp corner jabs at you; every full cup is spilled at every short stop; every bump and lurch happens as you're just about to sleep; everything you need is packed in a bag you can't reach; everyone gets in each other's way and every time you want cereal there's no milk and every time you want a cold soda there's only warm beer. I've never been on a tour where this doesn't happen. Never.



When I first became obsessed with music it used to sustain me through the tedium and the desperation of living somewhere that life avoided. Time dragged in my home town, and the worst time of all was on Bank Holidays when the stores wouldn't open for Sunday and Monday. Time crawled for two whole endless days while I waited impatiently for my life to kick into gear and begin. Music was the one way I thought I could escape a dull life and get out to see the world. And I was lucky.

So it wasn't without some irony that at the end of this last tour that I was deposited in a village 12 miles away from my mum's house at 1:30pm on a bank holiday Monday. I felt like i was in an episode of The Prisoner, the series where Patrick McGoohan can't ever escape from The Village.




Cheery Bye.

Scandinavia:

Göteborg:




It seems very Scandinavian to have buildings with lots of lit logos on the outside. The above was in Göteborg.






Jamie enjoying the rider in Oslo. They'd kindly prepared some kind of deviled eggs for us. The aroma stayed with us all day and all night...

Strange Norwegian advertising...I didn't go into the store, funnily enough.



Copenhagen. Another logo building.



Rare shot of Brian not giving the V's.




People pay to go on this.



Nyhaven.



This is how it used to look backstage....perhaps it's for the best. So much Facebook.



Matt's Mardi-Gras drumkit.

A Curse on Thieving Pikey Bastards.


Truth be told, after 8 days I was quite looking forward to leaving Scandinavia. While it’s beautiful and the people are as friendly as people are anywhere I was tired of switching currency every day and of the high prices; it was time for a change.

Our last show was in Aarhus, Denmark’s second city, so we were told. I’d never been before – normally we don’t get further than Copenhagen or the Roskilde Festival. We arrived early, walked around town for a bit (it’s pleasant enough, a river banked by small café’s and restaurants in the town centre, a big redbrick copper roofed Danish church type thing – all the usual) and the venue was clean, warm and seemingy well-run. Before I set foot in there and before we’d loaded our gear onto the stage the local crew had hung our backdrop – usually the least favourite part of my day. I hate hanging that backdrop, big, unwieldy thing that it is…..it looked like it was going to be a good day.




A river runs through it.




Every city has a red-brick, copper roofed building in the middle - sometimes several.

We set up the gear, washed clothes in the laundry in the room next to the dressing room, and found good WiFi reception in the main dressing room. This meant of course that everyone brought their computers to go online, i-chat, download music, and generally stare at their facebook profiles wondering what obscure book, film or record they could add to make themselves sound more interesting.

After soundcheck, at 7 pm, the venue manager told us it was time to adjourn to the restaurant nearby for dinner. This we did in dribs and drabs and by the time the support band had arrived to eat I was on my way back to the venue to check my Facebook inbox.

When I got to the venue I thought, for one moment, that someone had moved them all. I called Matt back at the restaurant and asked him if he’d put the computers on the bus for safekeeping. He hadn’t. Someone had come into the venue, walked upstairs and taken all six Mac’s sitting from the table in the dressing room.

We were incensed. We accused the support band, we accused the venue, we ran around the neighbourhood looking for the culprits. I must have missed them by minutes. A hippy wandering around in the backstreet told me and Jamie that “three foreigners, 3 middle-eastern men” had come past him with computers, but he was vague about where they’d gone. I grabbed a bicycle and combed the nearby streets looking for them, for anyone, although after a few minutes I began to suspect the hippy more than any spectral arabs. I still do.

We didn’t find them – we found a sheet of paper that had fallen out of someone’s computer case. In the end the haul was 6 laptops, software, one ipod, cash, travelers cheques and Todd the bassist’s passport.

The police wouldn’t come to the venue so I went to them to file a report. The cop taking down the details couldn’t be bothered entering all the information I gave him so he told me to fax it in. If he’d been any less interested he’d have got his cock out and gone home. I know it’s not a murder or a violent crime, but it was US$20,000 worth of computers…..it didn’t look like they were so busy in there. Maybe we were just foreigners?

Back at the venue when I returned the security door was again unlocked. Nice.

The venue manager told me he didn’t believe any of his staff were involved. I pointed out that it would be almost astronomically coincidental if someone just happened into the venue just as we were at dinner to go directly to the main dressing room (without touching the support band’s gear or the guitars on stage or the venue's computers) to take only our computers and to leave again without being seen by anyone. I thought it more likely someone at the venue was involved. Its got to be a pretty short list too, and, I'd say, it starts with him.

The day ended sourly; venue staff getting in the way and being obstinate about it, people leaving the doors propped open like a bunch of fuckwits, and every one of us realizing that someone we were working with that day had stolen our stuff and was laughing at us – it made us suspicious of everyone there, which was a shame. It's no way to go through life and everyone we'd met earlier in the day seemed so hepful and amiable. In the end we were all glad to leave. At this point the senior venue manager hadn't deigned to call me back.

I replaced my computer the following day (but not the contents which has all gone) and insurance claims are already in process. None of us care about the machines as much as the irreplaceabe information and personal photos and documents that were lost. The shadow of identity theft still looms a little but mostly we’re over it. I was surprised at the violent fantasies we all share—there must be some kind of universal victim’s rage that has otherwise calm people wishing violent pain on the perpetrators (my favourite is jumping up and down on slow-cracking ribs – it’s not the worst by a long shot either. So much so that I wouldn't feel comfortable repeating them all here).

I hope whoever has the machines enjoys them, and that the money made from the sale pays for lots of cheap cigarettes, booze and fried food. I hope the thieves’ lives in the arse-end of Aarhus continue in the same vein until they become middle-aged men living on petty thievery. I hope the horizon frustrates like a line never to be crossed and that their lives become stale and tired like their imaginations and caabilities. I don’t believe in an interventionist god or a Catholic after-life accounting but I do believe that character is destiny. Just to exorcise this episode from my mind once and for all (in a couple of years you'll be an anecdote); I hope the bitterness of a wasted life eventually turns from a dark, despairing miasma over everything you do into a few black, pernicious cells that divide and multiply in your colon or your gonads or your spleen. And I hope, when you’re pronounced terminal and your family gather around, you realize what a waste of organs you were and what a tremendous amount of nothing you amounted too. And I hope you see disappointment and shame in your bastard offspring's eyes when they look at you.

This week we’ve been to Amsterdam, Brittany & London and been paid for it. Next week I'll spend an amazing three days in Paris. Then I'll go back to New York and live large. How much did you get for my laptop? Fuck you, you thieving pikey bastards.

Sneaky Days Off.

Proper, do-nothing, be-bothered-by-no-one, days off on tour are rare for me. It's my job to be on-call for problems so I'm used to it (If I'm honest, it freaks me out when I'm in Asia on vacation and I spend a day without something coming up; it feels unnatural to get back to my hotel room and there's no note about a problem with a ticket or someone needs some money or someone's put their trousers on backwards, etc, etc....). On Monday we had a day off in Lisbon and no one bothered me. I almost felt a bit guilty about having a paid day off but then I realised a couple of things.

1. There are so many days, even on the easiest tour, where you don't get any down time or rest for days on end, so somewhere some karmic credit must accrue.
2. There's a high likelihood that the reason I'm not being bothered is because I planned well beforehand. As Matt keeps saying: "We're professionals...."
3. Don't look a gift horse in the mouth.

But just to spoil things, this big-nosed, shiny-faced, ginger-eyebrowed git keeps getting in all of my photos.





I did what work I needed to do at the hotel and then jumped on the subway and ran around the old part of Lisbon for a couple of hours. This has to be the best perk of my job - you can keep the tedious avaricious after-show parties with limp-egoed wannabees, you can keep the meet and greets with celebrities in feral, stuffy dressing rooms, and you can fuck right-off with your impotent Hard Rock Cafe branded sex and drugs and rock and roll image and imagery (yawn) but please, leave me the good gigs and days off in cool places. Thanks.

View from the afternoon.



Bob Eiffel's left-over lift nestled deep in the heart of Lisbon's earthquake district.



I wandered around the Alfama and climbed up to the Castle de Sao Jorge on top of the hill. It was built by the Moors / Muslims and while there I pondered on the universal theme of organised religions everywhere: build big castles and consolidate your power base (Ever seen St. Peter's in Rome? Knoworramean?). Back in the day even the tiniest castle would have taken forever to build, and this one was a doozy on top of a hill. I'm glad they did though, the views from the ramparts were great. Shame about the busker playing the tin whistle inside while dressed in quasi-medieval gear. Still, I suppose the tourists liked him.

The parque at the castle. Things don't get much more typically Iberian.



Tourists and castle and Lisbon. (The tourists just aren't as round over here as they are in America, it has to be said. Unless, of course, they're American...).



Note the ironic framing of picture to show my scorn for organised religion. Even when I'm a tourist I am still, and always will be, sticking it to the man.




I went home for a run along the River Tagus, which was another treat. Going trotting in unusual places is always interesting and the riverbank by the Parque das Nações was peaceful and lined with interesting modern buildings and, more importantly, hardly any people.

In the morning we were scheduled to fly on a budget airline to Göteborg via Brussels. I tried not to brood on the potential for disaster and instead enjoyed one of a diminishing number of nights in a bed. Once we play Göteborg we will have exactly 2 nights in a proper bed to look forward to in 17 days. Now that I've realised this, it's a wonder I'm out of my pajamas and on my feet at all this week.

Do You Remember the First Time?

I came to Lisbon about 16 or 17 years ago with a girlfriend. I was a spotty twenty-something with possibly the worst shorts known to man. Walking around the Prata again tonight reminded me of being here in (something like) 1990. I remember being very skittish back then, and very excited. I would get anxious when the dealers hissed "Hashish" at us down near the Tagus; tonight I barely looked up from my book on the subway as the token Saturday night crazy loudly created in front of everyone's faces. I've lost the naff shorts too somewhere along the way. When I first came to Lisbon I'd hardly traveled anywhere and now I gauge my excitement levels when I go somewhere new against my first trip to Lisbon, or Amsterdam, or Berlin.

Last year when I was here with The Strokes I was a little overwhelmed by the gothic decay of the place (It seemed like the kind of place Nick Cave would kill you in); tonight I found it endearing. I walked up to the Barrio Alto for the view in front of the Port Wine Institute but the park was closed for rennovations and the funicular (who doesn't love a good funicular,eh?) was on blocks for repairs. However, the Barrio Alto is as byzantine as ever and there were good buskers singing Fado for the tourists on the streets. Nothing ominous about the place at all. I guess last time I was feeling a little overwrought being half-way through a ten-week tour of the world.

What I should have done last year is prayed at the Bank of the Holy Spirit. Or maybe my Portuguese isn't what it should be? I'm a little fascinated as to how this bank works - is it really taking deposits for Catholics to cash-in on the other side like I learned as a kid? How do you make a deposit? Can you accrue interest on Good Deeds, or is it just like a crappy checking account? How does one marry the Holy Ghost and rapacious commerce? Or is it just me that thinks this is more hypocritical tartuffery...? It's probably just me. It often is.



The architecture in Lisbon reminds me of South America and the language sounds like Russian. The subway echoes Deco design and is full of clean-lined marble. The public buildings are as grand as anywhere else in Europe. Below is an example of a more recent design - it's the train station at Oriente. Huge and flowing and overbearing and spacious all at once. Loved it.



Mr Eiffel built an elevator here. Bugger was at it everywhere, wasn't he? I guess back in the day no one wanted to walk up the hill to the Barrio Alto. Or maybe Bob Eiffel just went to unsuspecting cities with his meccano. "You know what you lot need....? What you need is a big fuck-off lift right in the middle of town and I've got just the stuff you need for it outside in the van left over from another job..."

2651 Romeo

Yesterday I took a flying lesson. The hardest--or at least the most trying--part of it was getting to the Essex County Airfield in New Jersey. Even at 11AM on a Tuesday morning navigating the traffic entering the Lincoln Tunnel was a chore - it felt more like a Friday. In fact, since I got back from tour, New York's felt hot and oversubscribed. Either more people are here because it's the summer or more people are out on the streets because of the weather. Either way, too many people. Not enough speed. Go play down your own end.

My instructor was late. Not the most auspicious of starts and while he was polite and apologised, I didn't feel reassured when he told me he was late because he'd got lost on his previous lesson--they'd tried to land at the wrong airfield.

Still, once I stepped through a door into a hanger full of small single prop Cessnas I didn't care so much. There is definitely something exciting about aircraft, especially piles of them in a big shed. He rushed us through the pre-flight checklist where I felt like a kid waiting for the batteries to be put into his Christmas present.

This is what we flew in. its a Cessna 172.




Taxiing is hard - you steer the plane on the ground by moving the rudder with your feet. I was crap at that; it was like my Salsa lessons except without the tinkly music and the B.O.

Then we lined-up for take-off.





When we got to Five Hundred feet the instructor gave me the controls and told me to turn right while still climbing to One Thousand Feet. It was exactly the same feeling as first driving a car where there are too many simple things to do at once. It pitches, rolls and yaws; it accelerates or stalls; it drifts off-course. The mild wind bounced the aircraft and buffeted us around, which gave the feeling of flying diagonally.

I kind of got the hang of it soon enough (thanks, in no small part, to X-plane 8.60 the simulator programme I've been practising on / playing with instead of writing and/or advancing Albert's next European tour - Sorry Albert....) and suddenly there I was flying over New Jersey; looking down on the I-287, turning 180º above Lincoln Park Airfield at 1200 feet and doubling back for the instructor to bring us in to land. Sitting in a cockpit for landing is a rush like few others. And I've tried many.

In the far distance you can see Manhattan. And below us, the good people of Montclair, NJ: you poor, unsuspecting fools....







It was the toppest fun I've had in a long time. I'd love to be good at it, or even competent. It's completely addictive (or maybe that's just me..?) and, I imagine, a lifestyle one could immerse oneself in--like surfing, or diving or somesuch. I could see how one would want to, but not necessarily how one could afford to.

For now, I might try taking cheap introductory lessons wherever I can. My next chance will be Baginton Airport but in truth I've got my eye on Santa Monica Municipal to try flying over Venice Beach and the Pacific. How boss would that be?