10 Weeks Since You've Gone....

I got home (on the flight with the blathering man-child) after 10 weeks away only to find that absolutely nothing had changed. There were no problems, nothing to complain about, no new streets to navigate. In fact, an unkind judge could say that the Upper West Side had hardly noticed I'd been gone. Fickle bitch.

Still it was good to be home and while I had a ton of work to get stuck into I first exploded a couple of luggage bombs in my apartment. And then left them there - like a good single boy does - for most of the week until even I got bored of stepping over 10 weeks laundry. (Not strictly true, but not far wrong, either...)

So aside from realising I don't know what I like to do now that I'm home (True, sadly. Spent my first couple of days incapable of making decisions to do anything. Even going to see a movie was a HUGE decision), I reverted to my default position and settled onto the sofa to read. I reccomend Cold Skin by Albert Sanchez Pinol. It's perfect for anyone with a dark, gothic disposition; and Tourism by NIrpal Singh Dhaliwal, which is a very English (not British - and there's difference) almost tabloid read, but well-written nonetheless and with a great narrator. He's such a tosser.

I've also been listeing to Ok Go and The Tyde's new records. While buying The Swayze's genius "She's Like The Wind" from the Dirty Dancing soundtrack (it's time to re-stock the i-pod) a friend showed me the Dirty Dancing Havanah Nights soundtrack and Wyclef's on there with Claudette Ortiz singing Dance Like This. God Bless the 'Cleff. He had that one thing about shouting one-time, two-time over everything, now he's on his second idea of using the same song with a different singer - good luck to him. He was given two lemons and he's made gallons of lemonade out of them. And I really like the Shakira version. But if The Cleff stretches it anymore it'll snap. He should teach classes.

I can't read on tour, I can't concentrate for any period of time, but I do have to plan some travel for when we finish so I'm taking guide books with me on the next leg. I'm supposed to be going to Istanbul for mater's birthday (although after today's bombings I don't know if that still qualifies as a viable birthday present for her....) and when we finish touring I'm hoping to go to China for an extended period. That seems like a boss idea. But when doesn't it, eh?

We're off to Mexico soon. Just when I'd got used to being me, again. Oh well, time to dive for the last leg. I'm off to bed and then I'm going to take my personality suppressants....

Silly as it sounds....

I used to feel as though I were on the bottom of the world when I visited Australia and New Zealand, removed from everyone and everything. These days I feel much more as though they are both places I could live in and they feel more familiar than ever. For some reason they don't feel so remote. Even walking on a beach next to the Indian Ocean near Perth didn't feel freaky this time (usually I weirded-out thinking about how far away everything is). Everywhere's only twenty four hours away, these days.

I never get to see Brisbane. This time it was because I was catching up on some paperwork and I spent the whole day watching the city go through its day from my room, that overlooked the pedestrian access to the station. I felt like I was in one of those time-lapse photos. Still, I made a start on the tour accounts….






My current favourite game is trying to figure out what to do once this tour is over. I’ve a few vague concepts floating around, but most involve relocating from New York, semi-permanently. Consequently everytime I go somewhere new I imagine settling there. Sydney is beautiful but I don’t feel connected with it. Melbourne on the other hand, feels special. The bay it sits on seems vast and still (none of the gauche showoffiness of Sydney’s Harbour and poncy Opera House).

I’m a sucker for big f***-off freighters (See Korea entry) and there were a couple of those floating about. I had to take someone to the doctor’s office and the neighbourhood the doctor’s was in was amazing. Cafes, low-rise buildings, very neighbourhoody but still only a stone’s throw from the city centre. Melbourne, though, had me at the view from my hotel room. The thing I liked was that how distant the horizon looked through the spooky twilight haze. Dreamy, dreamy.




We passed through Adelaide, which felt like a quaint country town. On the giant video screen in the pub they were playing Transvision Vamp’s I Want Your Love video. Over and over. That was random. Wendy James – you can go to Adelaide and make a few quid, I’m sure. You could even visit Cliff Richard's mum, she lives there too.

We finished in Perth. Place where I formerly got the willies. Not this time. I had a blast there. Running around the Swan River, scoffing scones in the London arcade (Which is a misplaced Olde-Worlde English style shopping arcade in the Middle or Perth, buying rugby shirts, walking along the beach at Scarborough. All good fun. I don’t think I could live there, but I could easily spend some time there writing. After so long being in close proximity to so many people, personal space--and the opportunity to make ones own schedule--are heady prospects.

In Perth, as the entire tour party was leaving to fly back around the world to go home or on vacation we got the news about the terror plot that British Police had discovered. It was interesting seeing this news unfold around the world. First, the Australians reported the news that British Police had foiled a huge plot, etc, etc....then the BBC started updating their bulletins with more information, including a press conference where the British police admitted it was an inter-agency operation with Europe. A few hours later the US authorities started with their press conferences - the head of Homeland Security sneaking in the information that the Americans had been involved in the investigation (not that this was mentioned in the Aussie and European New Reports). By the time The President got involved he was speaking of the plot as an Islamic plot....you know how that one goes (Now ignoring for a minute that acts of terrorists bear as little relation to Islam as do the Klan's activities to Christianity). What was interesting was seeing a whole world's spin on the story so that what started out as a foiled attack turned into evidence to support an opposition to Islam. Oh, and the US was really involved in the operation too. Everyone gets a star. Hmmmm....

But enough of this. On the way home I stopped off in Hawaii for a week….as you do.



Pictures are worth several hundred rewritten, copy-edited words. Here’s my week in Hawaii. The first few days were strange because I couldn't adjust to the lack of stimulation. (Pay TV options notwithstanding!). As at the end / intermission of all tours I went from exhilerated to despondent at the drop of a hat, changing emotions very abruptly and often with no obvious reason. That would have happened had I been anywhere, so being in Hawaii only cushioned the blow somewhat.

Yes, I'm a lucky bastard. I make no excuses or apologies. And hate the playa', I say. Why wouldn't you?



And there were things to do in the hotel, too.



Although quite what the subtle differences were between Japanese Extreme and the Explicit Package, I'm unable to tell you....not at those prices.

I tried surfing and had only slight success (My floating and falling-off skills, however, are at International standard). It was excellent fun and as I was leaving I was already scheming to go to California to learn how to surf properly. One of the things I like about surfing is that outside of the pleasure of the actual moment, it's absolutely pointless. (Not that this takes anything away from it). Reading some surf stories and literature I was interested in the level of obsession around this kind of activity (And I'm speaking as a fan). It's strange that the ability to float on moving water can become so all-encompassing a passion, and I do understand. I was reminded of a time (last year?) in Beijing when some skateboarder had been sponsored by a corporation and had jumped the Great Wall of China on his skatebaord. The PR Person was talking it up and quoted the Skateboarder as saying he'd fulfilled his life's dream. What? To jump over the Great Wall of China on a skateboard. Erm...life's dream? I'm sure it was fun and all, but....

And now what does he do? Sit in bars getting loaded telling everyone, "I was the first guy to jump the Great Wall of China on a skateboard. Hey! Buddy! I said, back in the day I was the first guy to jump.....". It's all downhill from there.

I'm being mean, of course. Everyone needs a dream. I was going to try to help relieve African Debt or cure AIDS but if I'm really honest I've got this po-go stick....

On the Northwest tip of Ohau is a strip of very beautiful beaches. I drove there to watch the sunset one night. As I got further away from the town of Hale'iwa I noticed that the road and area got less and less developed and touristy. In the end there were just amazing beaches populated by Hawaiins all spending their Friday night cooking up BBQ's on the beach. It didn't seem like such a welcoming place to an outsider (not that anyone gave me a hard time, either. But people wouldn't respond when you said hello.) It was an interesting scene.



However, I can understand not wanting to share this. Especially with everywhere else on the Island overrun by tourists.



One thing that was common were burnt-out cars littering some of the less travelled roads. It seems it's a sport to nick a car, drive it into the ground, strip it of anything of value (or not) and either torch it, or f*** it up beyond repair. I've only ever seen this to this extent in provincial England before now...if it's something that happens everywhere, maybe it could become a new urban sport...









Pounders Beach pounded my bodyboard so thoroughly that it snapped in half. Then it tried to strip me. I took the hint and left. It won.



Maybe it was because I was leaving Hawaii but F*** me were people annoying on the plane. I know America champions its freedom of speech but couldn't the Government introduce a law to monitor quality of speech. Why are the dumbest F***s the loudest? The guy sitting behind me had no idea how close he came to me throwing food at him just to get him to shut-the-f***-up about how many miles he travels every year and why he has to fly business, blah, blah, blah. Me. Me. Me. Like a five-year old. F***in' peasant.

And on that note, I was back in my New York state of mind.

Korea:


Two days off in Berlin after Lisbon. Genius decision. I did laundry and ate lunch with friends and hung out in children’s playgrounds (with a friend’s child, not just by myself). Very mundane stuff; it was a well-needed intermission. It’s not normal to spend your life flying around with Rock-Stars. It does bad things to your self-image; in all sorts of ways. On our next break at the end of Australia I was offering to do people’s ironing for them. Do you think it’s a cry for help?

We all met again in a departure lounge at Frankfurt airport. The tour party--who‘d flown in from places as varied as Berlin, Malaga, New York, London, Glasgow, Amsterdam, Nice & Leeds--and three hundred Koreans flying home. It was a precursor to being in Asia: very busy; very noisy; and very exciting.

On the flight there was a problem with the air conditioning, they couldn't start it while we were boarding at the gate. It was so hot for the forty minutes prior to the engines being turned on. People were getting testy, everyone’s clothes were soaked through. It wasn’t a good start. One doesn’t like to start a ten-hour flight smelling like yesterday’s meat, never mind share a plane full of people doing the same.

Once we got going it was okay. There were enough things to play with on the business class seats to keep everyone amused.

We didn’t go to Seoul. The airport and the show was at Incheon, about 2 hours outside of the capital. The rain drizzled and everything looked oppressive, in quite a cool way. In fact, although we all wanted to go to Seoul it never happened. The 2-hour drive seemed impossible and I suspected that no one could be bothered to take us and consequently used a convenient rainstorm as an excuse as the "roads would be too dangerous." Even though the storm was bad it felt like a very Korean way of telling us to stay put. I got the feeling as with Japan and China, people don't like to say "no" directly.


Instead we wandered around the backstreets of Incheon's Chinatown (allegedly the only one in South Korea) before the show. It ended up being quite interesting, if only because wandering through the backstreets of any big city gives you a sense of place not always afforded to the visitors of Downtown or the tourist routes.




I liked the gritty, industrial feel of Incheon. The view from my hotel was of two scrap metal freighters being unloaded. I’m a geek for things like that so in many ways I felt right at home. The whole city felt like an industrial grinder, second-hand tyres stacked high by the roadside; store fronts selling only huge chains and shackles for the ships in the harbour; giant freighters full of cars putting out to sea.















It rained constantly while we were there, giving everything a post-nuclear holocaust kind of feeling. Our Korean hosts, and the staff at restaurants we visited, insisted we use umbrellas all the time to protect us from the rain, even when jumping from taxis to the restaurant. We asked why, and they told us there was so much pollution in China it made the rain in Korea acidic. We were lucky; the rain in the winter when millions of Chinese are burning so much more coal is allegedly much more toxic.

That was a stroke of luck, eh?

Lisbon: A Tube of Meat Toothpaste.

Maybe it’s because it’s the end of the tour that I feel so listless here and can’t settle. It’s beautiful enough, although as the day goes on I keep expecting to see Nick Cave riding a mule down the backstreet behind my hotel. He'd be wearing a suit and a hat and riding his mule slowly. He'd probably ignore me altough we'd be the only two people on the street. Then I'd get scared and sit in my room and read a book to pretend that I wasn't hiding from Nick Cave, but in reality I wouldnb't be able to concentrate and I'd just read the same page over and over and over. Oh yes, my friend, you say you wouldn't be scared if you saw Nick Cave riding around Lisbon on a mule, but let me tell you, you'd be terrified. Just like I imagined I was.

Once everyone leaves for the three-day tour break suddenly I get that Perth feeling (I get the willies in Perth when I realize that in some way, by being in Perth one is at the edge of the civilized world. I think it’s the most remote major city or something…I mean Perth Australia, btw, not Perth Scotland. It doesn’t do to talk about the willies one gets in Perth Scotland). After one night in Lisbon I get up at 4am to fly to Berlin to see my friends. We did go for one good meal in Lisbon and feasted on so much flesh (No chicken –we were only eating things that talked, not squawked) that by the end of the meal I felt stuffed as a tube of meat toothpaste.

I’ll leave you with that image, I think. It's how I like to think of myself.

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?

Lake Geneva.

This is the view from my hotel room at sunset. Boss, isn't it? Lake Geneva is one of the most beautiful places I've been too. Here you can see the shadow of the French Alps on the left across the water. This is where Evian is made in a huge industrial plant where it's wrung out of the rock like orange juice. That's why it's so pure. That, and all the chemicals they put in it to make it transparent and to get rid of the rock-mites.

Montreux is a pretty town, snug between the lakeshore and the moutains. It feels like nothing bad can happen in Montreux. Sometimes its hard to be agnostic with all this majesty in evidence.

However, if there's one thing to make me think that the universe is Godless it's jazz and blues and The Montreux Jazz Festival was in full effect. Aside from a few old duffers, who plays blues well? No one, right? People only like playing it because it's easy to do badly. All those pointless tossers blathering on and on about being down....BB King, Muddy Waters, Robert Johnson - what did you do to us! I mean, those guys sang the blues, but these days people are at best only moping. And Jazz...what's wrong with the right notes in the right order, eh?

I went swiming in Lake Geneva on the day that we left. The water was warm and fresh and I could swim and stare up at the Alps with the sun on my face. The air was so calm and still it felt like all of Switzerland was whispering so as not to distrub the beauty of the day. Then some selfish wanker started playing a gig on the outdoor stage behind our hotel. I think it was the deaf bastard son of George Benson pushing a barrow load of smooth jazz guitars off an Alp and scatting over the top of it. When I climbed out of the lake I noticed a strange thing....people were listening. What's up with that? And scratch that thing I said about nothing bad happening in Montreux...

Shakira! Shakira! Shakira!


To while away the hours I’ve dumped a ton of Pop Music onto my I-pod. It’s a guilty pleasure, for sure. That Shakira single is boss – riddled with naffness, but to be honest, being a bit crap is an essential part of pop, I think. Take Dusty Springfield’s cheesy “I love you so,” at the end of the perfect The Look of Love as an example.

Shakira, though; What a pop monster! The single “Hips Don’t Lie” is great. Infectious, sexy, short, more hooks than a butcher’s fridge but Christ the lyric is pants! Not that it's important but I think if you're writing a pop song you can at least come up with some decent words. You only need about 12 lines... That the song is by Wyclef--that should be enough in itself, but it gets better. Wyclef sings “Stop fighting” all the way through. Who’s fighting? Shakira and her legion of salsaing admirers? Nope. Oh, it’s ‘Clef, because he’s from Haiti and he’s still a ‘Fugee” at heart. He's the people's poet - keeping a nation together while talking about Shakira's dance moves. Utter Tosh! The guy is minted – money coming out of his ears. The last time this bloke was in a fight it was with Sheryl Crow about who got the next bag of cash for the Amex Sponsorship Gig. But I guess ‘Clef’s keeping it real for all those ‘fugee kids he still hangs around with.

Next, Wyclef sings—when he’s not busy placating the assembled mass of pugnacious Haitians—“She make a man wanna’ speak Spanish,” (And then, to prove a point, in Spanish)”What is your name, pretty? My house is your house.”
Shakira, replies with, “Ooh baby when you talk like that, you make a woman go mad.”
Ladies, tell me: is that really all it takes?
F*** me! I’ve been studying the Tang Poets in Mandarin in the hope of being able to pitch a little woo. I’ve definitely been overthinking things if you can say 'My house is your house' in Spanish and you pull Shakira…
There’s also a great line where she sings. “Oh boy, I can see your body moving, half animal, half man.” Manimal? Shakira likes Manimals?

Freaky.

Still, if you see the video it makes more sense. She’s very hot. But she does this thing with her chests; it’s a weird boxy/ in-out dance. The first time she does it, it’s cute. It definitely interrupted me while I was doing the ironing. But, then, in another video, the one where she’s been fixing a car and is covered in oil or something, she does it again and it’s not so cute. I’m all for unusual chest movements—we all need a little pep in our lives, don’t we?—but when its something done with the bold-font subtitle “this is sexy, isn’t it?” for me it loses some of its charm and it becomes a little naff. Shakira doesn’t have to try to hard, but she does: through most of the video, sadly. Having said that I still watch it to the end whenever its on TV, even though I obviously don’t like it….

On a side note there was a kid down my street who did something similar to Shakira with his chest (except he was 11 and didn't have a cleavage). His name was Steven and we used to pick on him mercilessly for having a pigeon chest and for being a freak. I hope he sees the Shakira video and finally feels some validation and takes his weird ribs out dancing somewhere. I’d like to think he’d be proud now, running along the trail blazed by Shakira, undulating his thorax in time to whatever music he's into. I hope he’s not another drunk with a shattered, lonely, unconsummated life because of a childhood marred with abuse about the shape of his body.

Hips Don't Lie is one of my four favorite songs of the year so far. Maneater by Nelly Furtado, Ain’t No Other Man by Xtina and Don’t Cha’ by the Pussycat Dolls are the others. I think all the songs are ruined by their videos – which make them perfect in a pop sense, I guess. Each one of them tries to hard to be sexy—like they were produced by men my age trying to make things hot and edgy. What’s with Nelly Furtado losing her dog and then leading an underworld S&M club in some dance moves? Why are those women rolling around on the bed in the Xtina video? The Pussycat Dolls are really only Nicole, aren’t they? Or maybe that’s just me missing the point. The other Dolls don’t seem to do much apart from some crap dancing. (However, maybe one of them drives the van, the other one knows how to fix the keyboards, one books the gigs, one does the tour accounts…. ? I don’t want to be presumptuous…).

Cee-Lo wrote Don’t Cha’. I felt vindicated when I heard that. What a burden it is to be a snob.

That three months ago I was listening to Neko Case and Emiliana Torrini and now I'm on Pussycat Dolls and Shakira. Whatever next?

It's been so long, so long, so long....


Just like Dave says in Cat People.


The tour’s going well but it’s relentless. Ultimately, for me, the hardest thing about tours is not that there’s a lot of travel or that there’s a lot to do; but that there’s a lot of travel and a lot to do for a long time--day in, day out (Look--more Dave!). And there’s no getting off. The past few weeks have been particularly grueling as we came out of a 3-month US tour into five weeks of festivals. The festivals are all like single shows rather than a cohesive string of dates (like a tour); consequently all the planning for the festival dates is very very bespoke, time consuming and full of duplicated fact-finding and detailing. As we don’t stop moving for five weeks there’s no real time to catch one’s breath. Still, it beats working for a living and I’ve no time for anyone whining about working too hard in the music business, so it would be poor form if I were to start. But that's why I’ve not been blogging…tour malaise.

A lot has happened over the past month, so much so that even the events of last week feel a long way away. Some selected highlights are:

Cat Power’s dancing during her appearance on Later with Jools Holland and the fact that she was having a crafty fag in the studio when the cameras panned around, cupping it in her hand like some kid behind the bike sheds at school (once taping starts no one is allowed to leave the studio and all the bands stay on set). That earned a collective “ooh, she’s so cute,” from all the assembled road-crews who all smoothed-out their Radiohead tour tee-shirts and wiped the crumbs of rider from their chins before smiling at her doe-eyed all through her performance--me included;

The sauna in the hotel in the small town of Jönköping, Sweden where we stayed when playing at the Hultsfred Festival. Jönköping is a tiny town and there was a little bit of culture shock when arriving from New York but the hotel had a sauna on the top floor with the view of the lake—it didn’t get dark until around 11:30PM and it started getting light at 2AM so it was easy to get confused, especially when schwitzing in a sauna. Saunas and steam rooms are excellent. Trust me, if you’re not middle class and don’t ponce around in these places already then get yourself in one and sweat the prole out of you…;

Zurich and that lake—gorgeous, clean, Swiss. ‘Nuff said;

Wireless Festival in Hyde Park – comedy backstage village – does someone give out uniforms for bands? Black! It's all gone black! John Major's young Conservatives go indie! Jack White was a geezer but really everyone else, ”must try harder.” Regressive and bland. And if anyone says, “but it’s all about the music” then get off a stage in front of thousands of people you drab numpty. Christ, so many black jeans, so little personality. At least it reminded me I’m a Mod at heart;

Berlin – there was a beach on the river behind the venue, completely man-made and completely genius and completely full of gorgeous Germans of both sexes. Danke schön, baby Jesus. For the first time ever I saw the crew all want to take some exercise and go swimming. Not me, of course. I only went there when I had to to remind people to return to work. Honest, I did. It would be easy to leave your heart in Berlin. I always do—have done for years;

Copenhagen—our hotel was on the beautiful, calm quayside. The water was blue, like liquid sapphire. I wanted to leap into it. I went out walking past the moored boats and the Little Mermaid statue (which was once beheaded by vandals). One yacht had a mini helicopter parked on the stern. I want one of them! In fact, I’d like to have one of them so I could crash it into an island. That would be rich, wouldn’t it? Crashing yachts and helicopters into islands and walking away like they were rental scooters. (btw: check out Yacht Rock on Channel101.com. The real story of Kenny Loggins, Hall and Oates, Michael Macdonald, et al). Also in Copenhagen I watched the world cup at the same time as a friend in LA where we texted each other on the relative merits of the game. Best use of communications technology in a long while, I reckon. I did it in Moscow and Scotland too. Also I saw the Christina Aguilera video on telly for Ain’t No Other Man and think it’s a genius single. Forever I will associate CPH with Xtina now. Pop music is the best thing in the world (ex-girlfriends, ex-wife, please don’t take offense);

Moscow - it was much more fun than I thought it would be. Last time I was there in 1994 it was hellish, this time it was like working in any European city. The show was in a theatre that had a giant (read 10 feet tall) bust of Lenin upstage behind the curtain. I think our Russian hosts were a little disappointed in us though, whenever they took us out I got the feeling they were expecting us to act wacky and drink lots of vodka and ask for hookers. We did none of the above but ended up watching the football at the aftershow party. It was strange, as though we’d kind of killed the party everyone had been expecting. And you could so tell people were waiting for it…I think they were let down we didn’t behave reprehensibly, there were lots of prostitutes in the hotel bar—unless it’s a custom for single Russian women to sit in bars reading newspapers at 2AM? Apparently it costs US$300 for a shag. Some of the women were so beautiful I wouldn’t have the nerve to try to talk to them if I saw them out in a bar somewhere. The horror of their job seemed evident when I saw a procession of fat businessmen approach them. These guys were so out of shape they must find it hard to jerk-off and yet here they are, renting beautiful women. I couldn’t help but wonder what went through both their minds. I went to see Lenin’s Mausoleum just outside the Kremlin--the line was an hour long. One Italian tourist and his three friends tried to cut the line because (from what I could understand) they had to leave at noon for their flight. The Russian official monitoring the head of the line called his colleague over who took the Italian aside. The Italian went through his whole spiel again and the 2nd Russian took him away from the other Italians and asked--I imagine--for some kind of ‘contribution’. As I passed the Italian looked genuinely shocked. His aghast expression said; ‘To think that you have to bribe to cut the line at Lenin’s tomb!’ Welcome to Russia, comrade. Lenin is dressed in a dark suit, and one hand was curled into a half-fist as a result of his stroke. The charcoal grey marble walls with red accents that lined the stairs down into the tomb was some of the best architecture I saw in Moscow. You have to keep walking past the body, you can’t stop--otherwise the soldiers guarding the corpse snap their fingers to usher you out. It takes maybe two minutes to pass by after an hour or so in line. I think they’re moving him soon, back to his hometown. One thing was still the same in Moscow, everyone tried it on for a tip or for some kind of pay-off. One of the local crew broke the window in a door during load-out at the venue and they were trying to blame our security to get a pay-off. Last time I was there I would have taken this more seriously (however, we did throw furniture out of an 18th floor window that time), this time I just told people to Fuck off and that seemed to work, here's a picture Jamie took in Red Square outside of the Kremlin - it's a strange place to be. I'm sure some bloke from the rag-end of Russia would feel the same in Times Square;



Oxegen Festival in Ireland and our boss guitar tech' Brian gets injured by some falling truss that was blown over in the wind—he’s hospitalized and so I look after the guitars for the gig. No one else on the crew has a clue how the guitar pedals are wired so we all of us kind of make it up and when the band go on (in front of 70000 kids) all we know is that their guitars technically make a noise and are in tune. It’s weird doing someone else’s job at a show—I quite liked it for a day. You know when roadies come out before the band go on and check the guitars? I had to do that and it’s great playing a guitar really fucking loud on a huge stage--even for a minute. Anyone who says different is a liar. Once we knew our tech' was okay the biggest bummer for me was the loss of my very expensive flashlight. It was like a light sabre and it (obviously) made me feel like a man. There, I said it.

Scotland – my same friend in LA is texting me scores while I’m at the side of stage and I’m relaying them to the band to relay to the 75000+ crowd. Removed as it is I'm glad to be hanging out with my friend via text, which sounds a bit strange now that I've typed it out;

Amsterdam – Jesus Christ. The original corporate alternative lifestyle. While it’s a great idea to have a place where people can do as they wish, it’s like the Libertine capital is overrun with philistines. Smoked out, drunk English, American and French tourists stumbling around. What’s the point? If you’re going to get that fucked-up you can do it at home with Thunderbird wine. It would save you the air-fare. I like that the Dutch have their lifestyle (although, as the original hippie nation they prove a point by being arrogant and elitist about it. Never trust a hippy. Ever. For any reason. They’re all smug fuckers who are dishonest about having an agenda—hippies, that is, not the Dutch. Having said that I’d be a bit pissy if I’d ceded Manhattan for Dutch Guyana…although to be fair it was probably one of those English swizzes, the kind that bagged us Hong Kong too. It would be enought o give anyone a chip on their shoulder. Yes, yes, keep yer hair on-the British are next. In twenty years the British Empire will seem as fanciful as Portugal's does now. At least Portugal gets some sun). When you get away from the monged-out tourists Amsterdam is beautiful and genteel and a great place to spend time. I think they should widen the red-light area a little and only allow tourists to visit there unless they have special culture visas. That way they can stumble and leer their way around to their hearts content without making the place ugly for everyone else…then the red-light section would be like Vegas, which would be apt. There’s no Starbucks in Amsterdam—do you think it’s because they worry about their corporate image? For some reason that made me happy. At some point, some knobby PR twonk has doubtless struggled with how to make a coffeeshop viable in Amsterdam without selling weed or without tarnishing the Starbucks corporate image. Oh, and I saw a guy wandering along with the back of his jeans so shredded he might not have been wearing any (his white keks were plain to see, though). He wore glasses and looked like an accountant from the front (maybe he was) and I wondered why he was trying sooooo hard to be so gay. I mean, fair enough, if willies is what you like then may you get all that you need, but to insist that everyone address that aspect of you before everything else seems ridiculous. If I were to be that hetro, I’d quite rightly be taken for a loop on the M25 in the back of a van and be beaten until I got a grip by my friends, or at least I should be. To me it seems a strange part of gay culture whereby it’s okay to be overtly gay, as if anyone’s supposed to give a fuck. Is it a reaction to years of repression? To me it just looks like another way little boys run around holding their willies out for everyone to see. We all of us do, one way or another. We want everyone to be as impressed by them as we are.

Or is that just me?

Speaking of which, we’ve just got to Austria and it looks just like the Sound Of Music. I’m off for a quick sing-song. “How do you solve a problem like Mari-ah.”

HOME IN NEW YORK



It took a while but I've finally stopped screaming into a pillow under my bed.

It took eight days, to be accurate. Eight long, bloody-throated days.

Still, that's all done now. I got a haricut today and a neck rub and if that wasn't enough to restore my faith in God (and it was, to be honest. I am e'er so simply pleased) then this link really made me believe that there has to be some impish intelligence to the universe.

Thank you, Jesus. Thank you.

www.stevenseagal.com

Toby Keith: Maybe I'm Amazed....

His video was on TV in the gym in the hotel in Vancouver.

Will someone please stop this fatheaded muncher?

Please?

Have you seen the video? it's the one where a woman is tied to the chair and Toby bricks her up in a cellar, all the while keeping her quiet? There's no cute punchline, no clever "out", just a guy murdering his girlfriend, with the only joke seeming to be that it's of course what the bitch deserves, for, like, talking to much or something. Wouldn't you all want to do that, eh guys? (tangentally, British Sea Power had a song refused by MTV standards because it contained the line “Makes us wetter, wetter” mumbled in the outro, yet Keith can show a woman being bricked-up in a cellar…) He also had that song “I Wanna’ Talk About Me” a few years ago; the one where his girlfriend/wife etc. wouldn’t shut up and he’s complaining he’s not getting enough attention or something.

What’s the problem Toby?

F***wit.

London, Ontario: Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret.


In London, ON it’s the last day on the tour for one of the crew. He is leaving us for a few days to get married. The rest of the crew decide to take him out to a strip club as a celebration. I stay out of the planning, chiefly because if I do it then it’s not like anyone really made any effort—it’s too easy to get the Tour Manager to arrange everything; and its good for everyone to make some kind of effort. Besides, I try to arrange as little as I can outside of work. It’s easy to get fucked-off with being the one who always makes all the arrangements.

In my life I’ve been to about three strip clubs and had exactly one lap dance. They’re just not my thing. I can’t deny that if there’s a woman nearby either wearing very little or removing her clothes then I’ll watch—even if (and I say this not to be coy) I don’t really want to. This place is no exception and while some of the women are good looking mostly the whole environment is cold and completely devoid of any erotic feeling. The pedestrian attempts at atmosphere, such as the low red and UV purple lighting, do not compensate for the lack of heart in the place. Women dance on the stage dressed as schoolgirls or as dominatrix. Sometimes they involve the audience in their dances—say, by grabbing some guy around the head with their knees and shaking him with their thighs while his friends cheer--sometimes they just strip. I feel an obligation to be aroused, but I’m not. I’m all for people having guilt-free fun and enjoying their bodies (even if I can't), and it’s not as if the women dancing in costumes or even—and get this for zany AND erotic--in a giant champagne glass offend me, but it’s just all a bit tired and tawdry. A schoolgirl? Null points for imagination. Still, we’re dealing with primitive urges here so maybe I’m overthinking things…its not as though someone dancing a scene out of a Rene Magritte painting would improve the quality of an erection, would it?

(Or would it?…..)

Cindy says hello to me, or rather to my money, and asks my money if I’d like a dance—she lets me know I’d better be quick as she’s finishing soon. She has a good sales patter; one hand is proffered to shake mine and establish rapport, the other drapes over my shoulder and all the time she stares me down. I wonder if this is how she overwhelms the nervous men who are afraid to initiate any contact. It probably works very well, I thank her kindly and decline. She totters off in her gold bikini and heels but tells me again not to wait too long.

Several patrons are getting private dances in the booths. The women are working hard – looking at the clientele you can’t think otherwise: imagine for a moment you are wearing only your underpants—got that? Now imagine you have to wave your bum in some fat bloke’s face for three minutes at a time, all night long. That’s hard work, however you slice it. I can’t imagine what tips might compensate for this kind of work; ones bodyweight in krugerands at the end of every shift maybe?

All the men in the club appear to think they are players. I can’t think why, they all, to a man, look like wankers--us included, I daresay. I hang around but leave after a polite half an hour. I was relieved to see that almost everyone who had come with our group looked as if they had stones in their shoes. No one looked comfortable or particularly excited to be there.

All that said, I can’t deny I felt a certain charge in the air—women were (technically) available and walking around in their underwear. One doesn’t have an intellectual reaction to that… However, the reality of someone writhing around in front of your face for money just lacks a certain….is it romance, for me? I know someone rented one of the women to go back to his hotel room. He didn’t sleep with her; he just wanted a trophy or maybe company. He got both, on the meter. She got paid and left after four hours. Doesn’t that strike you as abominably sad? And I understand it too, which is what spins me out the most. I think we hate it most when we see someone else’s weakness and it resonates within us. And no one wants to see even a sliver of their own loneliness and sexual insecurity shone back at them, not for a moment. In many ways I’m surprised the guy in question wasn’t burnt as a way of exorcising a certain collective shame…or maybe that’s a little over dramatic. It’s that Catholic spooky-ritual fixation rearing its head again, isn’t it?

My first strip club was in New Orleans at lunchtime. The sallow dancer looked exhausted as she wriggled around in front of us. My friend at the time was very excited and tipped well. I didn’t know where to look. I mean that. Certainly the bony groin in front of us wasn’t an option. Call me strange.

My one lap dance was a couple of years ago. It was embarrassing not only because it was at a stag-party and was therefore a very visible event—I think in some ways being seen by other men to have a lap dance is as much a part of the dance as the dance is, from what I can tell. You are supposed to emanate “I am enjoying this” vibes to the other men so they can admire your prowess. It was also embarrassing because the woman dancing was being very nice and chatty while simulating oral sex and swinging and shaking her breasts around inches from the tip of my nose. The dance may have looked like sex but it lacked any eroticism. Instead of being a public display of red-blooded masculinity it felt like a public charade that I wasn’t buying into. I waited for the song to stop and said thank you. Afterwards I felt stupid; stupid for sitting through it and stupid for not being more into it--I felt like I'd failed some male test: (Doesn't like lap-dances! Hah! What a sap!). The whole premise just felt absurd. It wasn’t foreplay. It wasn’t anything. I guess good dancers are the ones who can make you feel they like doing it for you (and maybe some do? What do I know? And maybe some men don’t care and are happy to be paying for it?). However, I don’t think I can suspend my disbelief that much. Or maybe I’m just so uptight about sex that I can’t deal with someone who’s comfortable with their body when they wave it around very much in my face? Maybe it’s a bit of harmless fun? After all, naked women look great. Who wouldn’t want one dancing only inches away? If I try to imagine when this would feel okay I can only think of somewhere very private with someone I knew was really into it…And even then I'm not sure…

Judging from the clientele at Solid Gold in London Ontario, I am in a minority. Plenty of people seem to enjoy such pleasures just fine. And good luck to them. It wouldn’t do for us all to be the same now.

Canadia:

After an overnight bus journey we cross the border at 9:30AM. Canadian immigration ask us to get off the bus and while they examine our passports and work visas three of the officers inspect the bus. They are always only looking for two things:

1. To see what kind of fancy bus we’re on.
2. To check for any drugs.

The only question I am asked when the three officers get off is. “What movie were you guys all watching?” (Coming back into the US once from Canada about 8 US INS officers got on the bus. Of course, it takes 8 people to inspect a bus. The only way we can get 8 people on our bus is by having people either sit down and watch TV or get into their bunks, so I’m fucked if I know how 8 immigration all fit…)

The guy stamping the passports is friendly and chatty (The Canadian borders have some of the most genteel immigration officers I’ve encountered) and he tells me about what it’s like at the border when the New York Yankees play in Toronto and all the Yankee’s fans cross over. “There’s always a few bad ones,” he says. “But it took me a while to realize that they’re not all trying to be rude. Most Americans say ‘Okay’ when they really mean ‘thank You’. You can’t get mad at them, they don’t know any better.”


After two late nights (which counts as after 3AM in my book) I am in a coma as soon as we leave Toronto. I wake at 7AM as we pull into the Montreal hotel feeling rested and full of beans.

Montreal is a glass of cool water after a few months in the US. The City feels like a town on the French / Swiss border. I love hearing French spoken, I love the variety of cuisines here, I love the clean air and the scenery—even for an isolated Northern City it feels good and actually not quite as creepy as places just as remote in the USA. Maybe it’s something to do with the specific character of the City; namely that it has some.


I spend a lazy afternoon eating lunch at an amazing French Café, wandering around the different neighbourhoods, and eventually running (it’s a very loose description) to the top of Mont Royal. Running along the wooded track felt amazing and even gulping for air wasn’t too bad because the air felt so clean. The view over Quebec and the St Lawrence River from the Mont was spectacular; the isolation of the city apparent in the flat flat landscape surrounding it—the three dark mountains on the Southeastern horizon and aside. There was nothing to see until the sky in every direction I looked.

At the top of the Mont is a cross. It’s about sixty feet high and at night it lights-up. It reminds me of the one in Rio De Janiero. Because it’s among the trees alongside the track it has a kind of spooky presence and somewhere in my reptile-Catholic brain I get a spooky thrill from it. Crosses in forests are pretty eerie. I run down the hill at sunset, amusing myself with a Hammer Horror narrative about escaping the forest before sunset. Later I feast (there is no other word for it) on legendary Portuguese food from a place called Ferreira on Peel Street. I eat for a solid hour. I feel like I’m on vacation. I feel stuffed. I get paid for this, at least today I do.

But the vacation doesn’t last for long – the next day we drive to Ottawa and resume to our tour of strip-malls and concrete stadiums.

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.

Tucson—A Long Days Journey Into Night:

We leave New York on a Friday and hit the rush-hour traffic into the Holland Tunnel. How people do this on a daily basis never ceases to amaze me, as does the lack of random homicides at the tunnel mouth every night. Everything today is late and I sit sullenly in the front seat of the van watching the traffic inch down Broome Street, quietly wishing slow, public deaths on every muncher blocking an intersection ahead of us. At one point I get so antsy that I get out and walk a block because sitting staring at the back of the immobile truck in front is driving me to distraction, and murder.

We make the airport with three minutes to spare in which to check-in. I pay the skycap the requisite two dollars per bag for the curbside check-in, then I tip him. I’m very English and I am frequently resentful when tipping. I understand tipping in a restaurant, and tipping someone who takes your coat, or tipping someone who delivers something to your house, but tipping someone to check-in your bags after you’ve paid? Or tipping someone to pour a two-dollar cup of coffee? I mean, what does the airline ticket pay for, or the subsequent curbside check-in fee? And the two dollars for the coffee? I feel guilty about feeling so cheap but at the same time I feel as though walking down the street can give you a nose-bleed in America. It’s not that I mind paying for things or rewarding service per se, but these are such quasi-obligatory tariffs for something that seems part of the initial service. Everyone’s working an angle. And I know that people don’t get paid what they should either. But couldn’t everything just cost what it costs to produce / provide—or am I being naïve? I half expect coffee houses to start charging for cups next—and I’ll wager they will slide it in as a discount for anyone using their own coffee mug first; within a few months the coffee will be cheaper but the cups will become more expensive (just like with headphones on planes—the movie is 'free' nowadays, but the headphones aren’t-altough that could have been a response to all the walkman headphones people have. Conspiracy theories...I love 'em).

Why only bring Scrooge out at Christmas, I say? Bah! Humbug to May, June and July too.

At Dallas/Fort Worth Airport (DFW) I learn our connection is delayed – at first by thirty minutes, and then by nearly two hours. Suddenly everyone becomes an expert on travel planning, on how we could have missed the rush hour, on better airports to fly into (because, like, storms in the southwest notoriously only affect DFW…. every other airport has clear skies and smooth landing 24/7/365—everyone knows that; except me, of course). Everyone is pissed-off, it is turning into a long journey. There’s not much open at any airport at 10pm at the best of times, at DFW there’s even less. Finally, settling into TGI Fridays with a leaden sense of resignation (TGI F***ing Fridays!) I order some food—although it seems half the menu isn’t available; between us we try several times before being able to order anything beyond an oversized maguerita.


Seated next to us are some new Army recruits. They're fresh out of basic training and en route to Tucson to start their training proper. They are all to a man and woman pleasant people. They are friendly and eager to chat—I think nine weeks cooped up on an Army base without any outside contact has given them a thirst for contact with anyone--and of course they get to meet a rock band at the airport. I am sure we are as curious to them as they are to us. (I’d think so if I ran into David Bowie at TGI Fridays in Dallas, or Beyonce at Sizzlers in Fort Lauderdale. I did run into Nick Cave in a coffee shop in Brussels once nearly a decade ago, and I can still remember it. I couldn’t think of anything cool to say so I said nothing, which was the right thing to do. It was an uncharacteristic response on my part. Normally, I’m a garrulous twonk in such situations.)

A couple of the soldiers seemed quite lost, as thought they’d be doing nothing if they weren’t in the army. I wonder how many recruits are in a similar position? I feel sad talking to them—aware that in a few months they might be killed in a car bomb outside Basra. The one thing that does strike me is how specific their vernacular is—they talk of "helping-out" and going “over there” to see what they can do. Certainly they don’t view themselves as anything but a positive presence over there. I’m ignorant, maybe they are going to be helping-out, but it’s the only time I’ve heard words like “helping” used in context with the conflict there. They certainly didn’t seem overly idealistic about the situation, but they viewed their role as a positive one. I’ve never encountered such an attitude elsewhere.

I hope they all get the education they seek in the Army, and find a sense of purpose, if that’s what they are looking for. Mostly I hope they get to grow old to enjoy a future with their families and all their limbs. Really I do. They seemed like good people.

I don’t recommend anyone arrives in Tucson at 2AM. When I finally get to my room--which I know is the last room available in the hotel—I discover that someone had indeed just been sleeping in my bed. The room hasn’t been cleaned since the last occupant left, the bed is unmade, the towels sop on the bathroom floor. My shoulders drooped to a curve and I hauled my luggage back to the elevator and down into reception where I politely, through the tighest whitest lips I could muster, requested someone Sort. This. Out. Now. As evidence of a God with a sense of irony, the hotel discovered they had double-booked one of my group and, proving that two negatives make a positive, I got a room.

The first show back after the break is in Atlantic City--Las Vegas on Sea. Fortunately, the casino we’re playing in is the nicest in town so it’s the only place I’d want to be in Atlantic City. The first night I stay up until 6AM catching up with everyone, well, as much as you can catch up with everyone in a casino. I pay for this for the whole weekend.

The next day is overcast. I’m feeling strangely comforted sitting looking out of the 31st floor into a fog. That‘s not right. I remember the feeling from tours past; the sense of only being settled somewhere on tour.

After the show I play blackjack for a while – mostly as a way of hanging out with my friends. I hate losing so much that I’m not a good gambler. (A good friend of mine last year looked at me like I was crazy when I was explaining that I was ready to gamble $400 of an evening and that was my limit. I told her I was going to win enough to go shopping – she looked at me and said “Why don’t you just go shopping in the first place?”) After I go to bed one of my friends plays $1000 and gets Blackjack--spawny get.

I was glad to leave everyone to it. New Jersey is in the house and drunk downstairs. However nice this Casino is—and at least it doesn’t pretend to be anything but a casino, unlike the Hard Rock in Vegas—it’s still a Casino and I find myself mildly resentful when I have to hand over any money, even for a coffee in Starbucks. To compensate I eat four meals in the employees canteen (to which we were given access as part of our stay) just to be sure I take away more than I came with. Pathetic really, especially when this casino has been very accommodating towards us. I have a small, black heart. There’s no denying it.

I sleep fitfully in my bunk when we leave Cleveland. Eventually I clamber out and sit in the back lounge with the windows open. The air is cold and damp and the outside the new New Jersey morning is lush and misty. I’m excited to be going home-however briefly-and I watch the countryside pass.

Nearly a week off. Driving down Ninth Avenue on Saturday morning and there’s no traffic and I haven’t seen New York for six weeks and it looks fantastic. Better still, with no traffic, I’m home in no time.

My friend has been watering my plants and collecting my mail so I’ve a pile of bills all ready to be dealt with. Ah, and then there’s the simple joy of taking my suitcase to the cleaners and asking for it back clean that evening. It cost a fortune but it was worth it. Sitting in my apartment that first night and I can’t settle. In some ways, it could be another hotel (It is a New York apartment, after all. Many of the rooms I’ve had on tour have been bigger…).

The following day I’m on a plane to San Francisco. It’s a busman’s holiday but you have to take the breaks when you get them. I get to advance the next leg of the tour from a friend’s apartment. I spend two days frantically calling promoters and trying to calculate the drive times between cities and when the band will sleep where for the next six weeks. It’s the part of my job that I like a lot even if every time I do it I’m always racing a deadline and trying to keep too many details in my mind at once. The band will never be able to commit to travel times, preferred locations, etc, etc this far ahead of a show so I make best guestimates as to routings and timings based on practicalities and when we have to be in certain places. I know for a fact that at least fifty to seventy five percent of everything I’m doing now will likely be changed as we go along. However, if we don’t have it to start with then we’d be in poor shape. (don’t get it right, get it written!) I’ve finally realized (Doh!) that I can’t plan the tour as I would do it (leaving in good time, planning to arrive early, etc) as that rarely happens, but I have to plan the tour as the band would have it from the get go. It seems obvious when I write it now, but for some reason it took a while for me to figure this out. Now it’s a way of entertaining myself, I give myself a small, discreet round of applause every time a flight isn’t changed, or a departure time is kept. My inner monologue oft resembles Billy Liar’s in many ways. (And if you haven’t seen that movie featuring Tom Courtney and Julie Christie then you should, it’s a pearler.)

It’s relaxing in the California sunshine and it’s good not to be responsible for anyone for a few days. I like San Francisco a lot. The first time I came to America I sat on the Dock of The Bay and had one of those “Fuck Me! I’m HERE!” moments while looking at the Golden Gate Bridge—which quickly turned into one of those “Fuck me, I’M here…” moments; which then led to many more months of drinking too much in an attempt to remove the me from all the cool places I was visiting at the time. It didn’t work, but you work with what you’ve got, right?


It’s the centennial of the San Francisco Earthquake which is a strange thing to celebrate, especially as the city is still sitting on a time bomb. Looking at the devastation that happened in 1906, and reading reports of what would happen to the whole of the Bay Area today if/when another large quake occurs, made me wonder quite what people are thinking by living here. It’s a beautiful place, for sure, and the City has a great feeling to it but it’s permanently poised to liquefy and sink into the bay. Maybe that’s where the atmosphere comes from? I mean, there’s nothing edgy about Tulsa or Tucson and maybe that’s because there’s nothing dangerous in the air (or underground) there?

Cleveland:

I'm on a high floor of our schmancy hotel staring through white net curtains bordered with faux Louis XIV style valances. I'm tweaky from lack of regular sleep. Tonight we'll drive home after the show. Part of me doesn't want to go back - there'll be mail and laundry and an apartment to clean and an unstructured life ready to swamp me. It's strange how touring can institutionalise you...

I'm listening to Neko sing Dirty Knives and Fox Confessor on I-pod paralysis. I feel autistic but I love more than anything 'getting' something - a song, a book, a painting. It's special when you feel you've caught the essence of a song and it resonates within you. God bless the repeat function on my i-pod. I thank the person who realised that somewhere, sometime in the future, there would be someone who wanted to endlessly wallow in a song or a mood, ad infinitum.

Huge, monolithic, ocean-going freighters navigate the sinewy Cuyahoga river narrows. The ships inch along at walking pace--slower even--past the coal and stone heaps piled high under the overpasses, past the deserted boatyards full of empty hulls waiting for the summer. The ships look too big for the river's twists and turns. Bridges rise in sequence to let them pass, a grinding steel ballet. This is not a beautiful place, unless the rusty mechanics of industry appeal to you. The water is a foul olive brown, untouchable. Birds swoop down to the freighter's wake, feeding on whatever slurry is stirred up by the huge propellors that rake the river bottom. This river hides bad secrets. I am sure there are bodies in the black ooze on the riverbed. Suicides and murder victims staring hollow-eyed through the corroded sunked car-wrecks and chemical silt, waiting to be found.

I've got that Friday feeling again, huh?

St Louis, Milwaukee, Minneapolis:

Cities at night in the American heartland feel like islands in the darkness. Driving out of St Louis on our bus and I think I’m in a submarine. Through the smoked windows I see the proud new Cardinals stadium glide past, then our hotel complex, and soon the city lights thin and recede into the darkness around us. The Springsteen song made more sense – in England, the darkness on the edge of town is a pause between the cities. In America, the cities punctuate the darkness. And there’s nothing, really nothing, for miles and miles. It’s spooky. The protestant paranoia makes more sense here.

In Milwaukee the lake was bare – no boats, no running lights in the distance, no rigs or refineries. The water was a cold crystal turquoise and it caught the light like hard polished gemstones. With my back to the sun the sky to the north looked cold and dark. From the 23rd floor of our hotel the land stretched on three sides, flat and featureless forever (looking West from our Chicago hotel was the same). I felt isolated and alone there. The city felt too quiet for me and because of the space around town the usual quiet Sunday feeling was amplified tenfold. It reminded me of being a teenager and feeling trapped in my hometown, knowing that life was taking place elsewhere and that here, the only thing to do was kill time. I wondered what despair you might feel living there day in and day out.

The venue was across the road from the hotel where Jeffrey Dahmer murdered one of his victims. I guess I answered my own question, from both points of view.

The venue (Eagles Ballroom) also had ghost stories of its own, and as the building was old with a nineteen twenties gothic feel to it. There were basements and sub-basements we all wound ourselves up, trying to find the empty swimming pool where supposedly there’d been sightings of a ghost and where someone had been beaten to death over a bad debt. (To get to it you have to go through the “Kid Rock” room – a dressing room specially created for Kid Rock when he played there. When anyone at the venue mentioned this room they chuckled, as if they had first-hand knowledge of some debauchery. One can only imagine what Kid Rock does in a basement in Milwaukee for kicks: Go on now, imagine it…see? Creepy, yes?)
We never saw the ghost – the door to the pool was locked, but either way we all felt thrilled to have tried. Part of me didn’t want to see the deserted pool with its flashes of mysterious light and its nebulous shadows. Part of me was genuinely scared.

Days pass on tour sometimes before you realize a week has gone by, then a month. I listen to songs on my I-pod like they’re friends. For this tour I have a soundtrack that I’ve condensed to one play-list that will forever remind me of lying in my bunk, rumbling through the night, trying to sleep and half-dreaming along to the songs. Suddenly I’m overwhelmed by an almost sappy urge to write to the artists and to say thank you. I like being a fan; it reminds me of what my job is about. I like remembering that the point of all this creation, all this effort isn’t about shifting units or tickets or tee shirts but about finding emotional connections through music. And with my playlists on repeat, it’s a comfort and a vindication to realize that despite the yawning black American night flooding all around me, and no matter what I am feeling, I am not alone.

Not completely.

Seattle:


Puget sound reflects a puff-white cloud blue sky and the Olympic Mountains rise snow-capped beyond. Ferries and frieghters score white wakes across the water. The shoreline is like frayed fabric with wharves and jettys. Onland, Seattle is busy, like all large American cities, with a constant stream of cars along the I-5 that winds through the center of town.

I take a walk from the hotel and visit Pike market. Most places are closing by the time I arrive but I find a restaurant. The sign on the walls boast “as featured in Sleepless In Seattle” with photos of Tom Hanks and Rob Reiner in scenes from the movie). The view over the Sound is beautiful, every window a picture. The water is a rich blue. The harbor is busy unloading a container ship stacked high with rusty Hanjin containers from China. I eat seafood by myself and eavesdrop on a nearby family as they talk about school projects and home. The city feels homey to me then, warm. An outpost on the edge of America, somewhere for people to camp and stay safe.

On the way back to the hotel I pass through a street full of destitute drunks. Suddenly the promenade doesn’t seem so benign. It’s pretty heavy; certainly more full-on than New York is these days. The faces don’t beg here, they demand--or at least threaten to. I’m six feet tall and rarely intimidated by things on the street (at least in broad daylight!) but for these two blocks I walk taller and straighter and remove any warmth in my eyes just in case; just like I learnt to back in the Midlands.

Northern cities have a strange feel to them. I think it’s to do with being on the edge of nature. There’s an atmosphere created by the cold northern horizon, a reminder in the dark distance that there be monsters, or nothing else at all. (It’s the same facing South below the equater – something to do with facing away from the sun, perhaps....some primitive trigger?). In New York, Los Angeles or Chicago you can feel in the midst of things. You can feel connected. And in some way there’s a sense that you’re in a controlled environment. Central Park in New York is man-made and framed by the city. In LA unless you drive up to the wilderness by Mount Wilson, every life is caught and lived in a net of roads (even the Wilderness behind Mount Wilson to some extent. It is beautiful and remote but at the same time you can drive there in easily less than an hour from Hollywood). In Chicago there are derricks out on the lake and the buildings tower above the shoreline – thousands of tons of steel that men have driven into the ground like tent-pegs to anchor the sky over the Loop and make it secular.

In Seattle you can see the snow-capped mountains, the freighters roll in through the sound from China and Japan, safe again in the tranquil waters after crossing the world’s largest ocean. The city feels like an encampment on the edge of Terra Firma. There’s something intimidating about it that I like, even fopping around in my soft-soled city loafers and my tailored suits. Somewhere I fancy I’m an outdoorsman: in another life I’d burn my books, sell my laptop, grow a set of balls and go live in a cabin. But not quite just yet. I’m content to watch Grizzly Man for now.

I am unsettled all the time in Seattle, permanently melancholy. Dark clouds roll in over the city: rain threatens but never arrives. Something in the air here makes me feel small and humble. I can’t tell if it’s the climate, or if it’s part of the post-Californian come-down (going to California always feels like going on vacation) but when we leave I am relieved. I like Seattle, and I want to like Seattle, but this time it feels like an exit to the fun part of my tour instead of an entrance. Time to head back inland…

Los Angeles: I could go on for hours, and I probably will.....


I come from a small city in the middle of England much like many other small cities in England. In my town people don’t talk about themselves much. If asked how they’re doing they’ll say, “Oh, fair to middling.” even if they’ve just had their legs taken off in a freak farming accident. When the boys in my town want to impress the girls, they start fights with the other boys and use glasses and bottles to emphasize a point. People in my town don’t talk too big, because that would be vulgar. Imagine, for example, you’ve found a cure for cancer and are a little excited and feel pleased with yourself; talking about it would be seen as having airs and graces; someone will say, “Stop going on about that bloody cancer. You’re not the first person to cure some incurable disease. Who do you think you are, Louis Pasteur?”. In fact, one of the only ways to big yourself up in my town--medical genius or not--is to denigrate everything else. This isn’t without merit or fun but it does give you a limited palette to work from. People from my town censor their aspirations; to try and to fail (and from such a background who isn’t predisposed to failing?) would be too shameful. Better to keep your head down. Seen from the outside my town is weird. I thought I’d qualify myself and ‘fess-up straight away. I don’t come from anywhere so special. I’ve got issues. I’m just saying…

I’ve given in. I love LA. For years I hated it – at least the work side of it. The lifestyle side of LA, once you’re away from the business, is amazing; beaches, mountains, sunshine – what’s not to like? But the business side of it seemed feral and undignified to me. And it is, but so is business everywhere else--one of the biggest shocks when I worked outside f the music business for a while was how many petty egos there were outside in the real world. And who am I to judge anyway? I come from a place where sophistication is gauged by what flavour Bacardi Breezer you drink or whether you buy kebabs or chips on the way home.

Because I am only ever a visitor in LA, I am completely fascinated by its rules and etiquette. While it is feral and vulgar and unscrupulous it’s participants aspire, sometimes ruthlessly, to a magical reality that informs everything they do. The rules of the city dictate you respect this. If you go to LA, much like going to Vegas, you can only expect to join in. Neither place will ever accommodate you or your ways. LA has a charm, a neediness that it scrambles to cover-up with faux-satin sheets and brave talk. It shakes its tail at you while biting its lip so as not to ask if you think it looks fat in this. It’s slutty and aloof. It has issues. It’s driven by fear and ambition at the same time. It feeds on hope and aspires to magic. Vegas is a pimp by comparison; a dealer in stepped-on coke and shop-worn virgins.

And have you ever met one of those you like?