SHOW # 347
Clwb Ifor Bach, Cardiff, UK, 19 September 2007
After the triumph of Reading, it was time to get back to the normal business of touring. Earlier in the year, an idea had been hatched between Jonah Matranga, Josh English and I, about them coming to the UK so we could reprise our American adventure. In conversation a concept had arisen. The three of us all used to play in heavier hardcore or post-hardcore bands and were all now playing acoustic music. At the time that career path was rare and was more remarkable for it. We decided to do a tour that emphasized this, so the Softcore Tour 2007 was born. The line-up comprised the three of us plus Jacob Golden, a singer from California who was a friend of Jonah’s and who had been in the band Birthday, who you could just about describe as post-hardcore, at a push. To commemorate the tour, we put together a CD featuring each of us playing two acoustic covers of hardcore songs. I picked ‘Pay to Cum’ by Bad Brains and ‘Fix Me’ by Black Flag. The schedule for the tour was pretty hardcore itself – seventeen shows in a row without a break.
The four of us drove around the country in a splitter van, with four acoustic guitars and Graham Kay. Graham (or G Man, or the Grinch, or G-Bold, or … you get the idea), as I mentioned much earlier, had been Million Dead’s sound guy. Since the summer he’d started coming out with me for shows with the band, doing both sound and tour managing. It felt good to have an old hand back on board. Despite the almost constant Geordie moaning he’s damn good at what he does and remains central to my crew today.
The shows were a blast. They were well-attended and the crowds were enthusiastic. I was playing a lot of new material, as part of the point of the tour for me was to try out new stuff and see how it felt in front of a crowd, so songs like ‘Substitute’, ‘Photosynthesis’ and ‘Love Ire & Song’ got their debut outings at this time. The four of us on the tour got on well, we sold a ton of the limited-edition CDs and we were duetting at the end of most nights with a cheesy cover or two – Guns N’ Roses or Abba mostly, as I recall. We covered a lot of ground and had a great time.
The show at Clwb Ifor Bach in Cardiff was pretty typical of the tour in many ways, but it sticks in my mind for sad reasons. Lexie, founder of Lexapalooza, Million Dead stalwart and my good, old friend, had been ill again with cancer. This time, she didn’t pull through. The details are not mine to share here; I’ll just say that I managed to see her one last time before the tour started and I knew then that I wouldn’t see her again. She passed away, the funeral was arranged and I knew that I had to be there no matter what. It fell on the day of the Cardiff gig, so I ended up getting a train down from Newcastle to south London and afterwards travelling over to Cardiff for the show. I knew she wouldn’t have wanted me to miss the gig, but it wasn’t an easy one to play all the same, emotional and exhausted as I was. Graham, the other players and the crowd were all brilliantly supportive, but it was hard to sing that night, especially ‘The Ballad of Me and My Friends’ at the end. Lexie was definitely there in my glory days when I sold my soul and the memories of my time with her are cherished and will never leave me. I’d say rest in peace, but she’d never want to be that passive – if there’s a beyond, she’s at the bar keeping everyone entertained.
SHOW # 373
Pete’s Candy Store, Brooklyn, NY, USA, 12 November 2007
After the Softcore Tour was done I jumped on a plane and headed back to the United States. A little while back, a random email had arrived in my inbox from someone called Casey Lee, from Naples, Florida. Casey had heard my music somewhere and wanted to know if his label, Good Friends Records, could put out a 10” vinyl of Campfire Punkrock. I excitedly said yes. As part of the deal Casey invited me over to the USA to play some shows with his band, Fake Problems. I jumped at the chance and a slightly ramshackle run of dates was cobbled together for the autumn.
I arrived in Gainesville, Florida on the Sunday of The Fest, an annual underground punk-rock festival that is legendary. Unfortunately, Sundays are generally the worst day to arrive at a festival as everyone is wiped out from the wild partying of the night before. I met the Fake Problems guys, lifelong friends-to-be, and played a small show in a bar to them and a handful of other people. After The Fest was done we careered around Florida for a week or two, with Casey’s brother’s band, Barlights, in tow, playing house shows and community centres. It was a great time, real American punk touring. We finished up in Naples, which is in the south-west of the peninsula. The last show finished with a titanic party, so it was lucky that I had a few days’ rest scheduled afterwards.
I bade a fond farewell to the Fakey Ps and made my way up the coast, via basement shows in Harrisonburg, Virginia and house shows at university halls in upstate New York and Massachusetts. The run had been enjoyable, but all the shows were on a small scale, the drives were exhausting and I’d been drinking a hell of a lot as we went along to sustain my optimism. By the time I arrived back in New York I was exhausted.
I had two shows scheduled for the day I got back. The first was opening for a band called God Fires Man, which included Arty Shepherd and Joe Grillo, two old friends of mine who had toured with Million Dead in their former band, Gay For Johnny Depp. I played to a smattering of people in a typical toilet-circuit club, before jumping in a cab and heading across town to Pete’s Candy Store for my second show of the evening.
Pete’s had been sold to me, by the person organizing the show, as a classic Brooklyn folk dive, a great place to play. I guess that’s true, but as with many ‘classic’ venues, it can often be a pretty depressing experience playing there when no one shows up and the staff have the attitude that comes with working at a venue with a reputation. In fact, the reason Joe had got me on to the bill earlier in the evening was so that I would at least play to some people while I was in his city.
So, as you might have guessed, the show at Pete’s was not exactly packed out. In fact, the sum total of the crowd was my holidaying friend Rachel (she of the house show and the documentary), her local friend and another couple. Four people in the room made the PA system seem a little surplus to requirements, so instead of plugging in I decided to fall back on the natural sound of an acoustic guitar. I made my way to one of the tables in the middle of the room and sat down on one side, with everyone else across from me. I played whatever songs they wanted to hear, told stories, chatted between songs and generally had a great time. This actually sticks in my mind as one of my favourite shows – I was playing for the love of it, really relishing the songs, dropping some of the showmanship that edges into playing music when confronted with a large crowd and just enjoying myself.
A small, strange but fun footnote to this show: unbeknown to me, one of the other people in the bar that night was a writer for Playgirl magazine. She enjoyed the show and for quite a long while afterwards I always got glowing reviews in that publication, which was nice, if a little surreal.
The next morning I boarded a plane to California to meet up with Charlie, my manager, and play a few shows in Los Angeles. I had a good gig at The Hotel Cafe and everything felt like it was back on track. This American run was definitely one to file under ‘character building’, but of all the shows, it was the one at Pete’s that stays with me the most.
SHOW # 383
Brixton Academy, London, UK, 31 December 2007
I got back to England and spent December flitting around London, playing a few shows here and there and catching up with my fragmented social life. Most of my friends had either got used to my sporadic comings and goings by this point or had faded out of my life. That’s a price you pay as a touring musician, though I don’t want to overstate the hardship – the friends you do have are as close as can be and the upsides of life as a touring musician greatly outweigh the downsides for me (and if they didn’t, I could just stop). Nevertheless, a little effort in catching up with people goes a long way, so I often spend my short breaks at home grabbing drinks, coffee, food or whatever with disparate groups of friends.
For the celebration of New Year, I’d been booked to play a slot at Brixton Academy, a cavernous and historic venue in south London. The night was being put on by XFM, a UK radio station that’s been very good to me over the years. I was set to play a half-hour solo set in between various DJs. Kid Harpoon was also set to play. Kid is a friend and I maintain to this day that he is a transcendently brilliant singer and songwriter, one of the best I know. Around this time was when he was at his best, in my opinion, but alas the stars did not align for his own solo career (he’s happily now a respected songwriter for, among others, Florence and the Machine). Naturally, I had plans to head off into the night after the gig, so I invited a bunch of close friends down to hang backstage and watch the show.
The gig was pretty much an unmitigated disaster. I was tired, nervous about the size and make-up of the crowd and irritable. Before my stage time came around I’d had a fair bit of time to kill at the venue and had, unwisely, started down the road to oblivion that I was planning to advance along later in the evening – in other words, I’d started drinking hard, and more besides. Added to all this was the fact that the billing was pretty uncomfortable, to say the least. The punters at the sold-out night were there to shake their drunken booties to indie club classics like The Killers and the Kaiser Chiefs. What they quite specifically were not there for was a largely unknown skinny drunk guy with just an acoustic guitar stumbling fractiously through half an hour of songs they were not familiar with. As every minute of the set wore on I felt worse: tense, strung out, feeling like I was losing the fight, slipping slowly over the edge of a cliff of indifference.
The show was over quickly enough (though it didn’t feel like that at the time) and I scuttled offstage and back to the dressing room to start on the serious business of cleaning the stink of defeat from me with the medicine of alcohol. Afterwards, the rest of the evening was frantic – I ran into my friend Dan Smith (who is now the singer in the band Bastille) and dragged him up onstage while I played guitar with Kid for an REM cover. I spent the actual countdown to the New Year in a cab with some friends heading for a party on the other side of the city. It was an OK night (and following day) I guess, but all through it the memory of the gig was sticking in my craw.
It was a strangely appropriate way to end the year. On the one hand, I was playing a show at a huge venue, sponsored by a major radio station, to a large crowd of people. These, if anything, are the signs of success, of things heading in the right direction. But I was still pretty off kilter in my personal life – my family a mess, my love life worse and my ‘partying’ (this always strikes me as a particularly insidious euphemism) a problem. I was heading somewhere, but not without stumbling all over the track. The main thing driving me forwards was the new songs I had in my back pocket, new songs that felt like they were special.
SHOW # 397
Pappy & Harriet’s, Pioneertown, CA, USA, 24 February 2008
In between shows on both sides of the Atlantic in the second half of 2007, I’d been working on making a new record. There were various things about the process of making Sleep Is for the Week that I’d really enjoyed and wanted to reprise; and there were some things I wanted to change. I had enjoyed working on the songs with Ben a lot, but it didn’t seem like it would be possible to occupy Tarrant’s house in Oxford again, not for such a long time, and to be honest I wanted to spend a little longer for this session and, if possible, to get away from the distractions of the road and what passed for my social life. I felt like the new songs I had deserved my full attention and focus.
Back in Hampshire, near where I grew up in the Meon Valley, my friend Simon’s parents lived on a small farm. They had recently converted a dilapidated old barn into a large, modern outhouse. It had one large open-plan room, a small bedroom, a bathroom and a kitchen. I’d seen it over Christmas 2006 at a party and had instantly thought that it would be a good place to record. It was in the countryside where I’d grown up, it was pretty isolated and it felt like the perfect place to shut ourselves away for a while. After some negotiation, we booked ourselves in for two separate sessions in between tours, in October and November.
Ben and I went down there together and lived in the studio. We took all the equipment with us – a mixing desk and a pro-tools rig, plus Ben’s collection of microphones. Nigel came down and played some drums, and visited us again later to play the piano and organ parts. Various other friends came and went, adding upright bass, strings, backing vocals and the like, including The Holloways and Jase from Unbelievable Truth. The sessions were relaxed but focused and over time the outlines of Love Ire & Song came together.
Once the recording was finished, I took the files to my friend Tristan, who I’d worked with before, for him to mix them. He did his work in London in January and pretty quickly we had a finished record on our hands. I wasn’t entirely sure whether it was better than the previous record in terms of songwriting, but I was confident that it sounded better and other people seemed to like it, especially Nigel and Ben. Charlie and Xtra Mile were also pleased, so we set about getting ready for the release.
It was decided around this time, in the lull between finishing the record and release, that I would go to Los Angeles for a while. The record industry is, it has to be said, a little obsessed with America. I suppose there’s a good business reason for this: it’s the largest music market in the world. All the same, the obsession with ‘breaking’ the place always seemed a little overcooked to me. I’m more than happy for America to keep functioning smoothly. Nevertheless, my management were keen for me to get out there again to try to sort a proper deal to distribute and promote my music on that side of the pond. LA is where it’s at for music, so we set up a bunch of showcases and other shows, booked a motel room and I got on a plane.
In all I spent about a month in California. Much like London in the UK, the fact that LA is the place to be for the music industry in the USA means that it’s crawling with people on the make, with hundreds of different dead-end projects classed as ‘great opportunities’, with artists and bands desperate to catch anyone’s attention. The Rodeway Inn Motel on Sunset and Highland where I was staying was pretty run down and as I don’t drive (I know, I know, I’m planning on starting lessons as soon as I’ve finished writing this book) I was basically stranded there when I wasn’t actively being bussed around for shows, meetings and interviews.
I can’t say it was the happiest month of my life. Some of the things we were doing felt good and at the start Charlie was out there with me, but after he headed home I had a fair few evenings of playing what were essentially glorified open-mic nights, or sitting alone in my room wondering why the hell I wasn’t at home.
After a few weeks of solitude, Chris T-T arrived. Chris is a folk singer from Brighton, England, and someone I’m happy to call a close friend. His manager at the time, Stephen, was based in LA and he wanted Chris to come over for a similar testing of the waters. It made sense for us to hook up and play some shows together, a pair of beardy Englishmen zooming up and down the coast. Packed into Stephen’s car with our guitars, we played Sacramento and then drove down the Pacific Coast Highway to play another show at a hippy student house in Isla Vista. We filled out the bill at some LA nights and even managed to play the same venue in Oxnard twice in a week (for reasons that now escape me). I’m not sure that we were laying the foundations for Beatles-style American success, but we had a good time and became closer friends.
Towards the end of the run we headed out into the desert of the Joshua Tree National Park for a couple of shows. I’d never been into the legendary expanse before and was keen not only to check out the scenery, but also to try and get some mescaline and trip out, Hunter S. Thompson style. Unfortunately, the drug now seems to be as scarce as facts backing up Gonzo journalism, so we had to settle for some hash cookies that a friend had legally procured, thanks to a little weed medical permission slip from the state government.
After a pretty uneventful show in Yucca Valley, we hit our motel out in the desert. The scenery, the emptiness, was breathtaking, the panorama of the stars a real sight to see for us city dwellers. We ate the hash cookies and spent the night staring up into the beyond – well, some of us did. Chris had something of a freak-out trying to decide whether he should sit down or stand up, or indeed kneel, which kept the rest of us entertained.
The next day we drove on to Pioneertown, to Pappy & Harriet’s. We were all a little wiped out from the ingestion of the night before. The place is somewhat mythical for me, being mentioned in the Counting Crows song ‘Mrs Potter’s Lullaby’. However, the gig left much to be desired. We later found out that the girl doing sound, and indeed pretty much everyone at the venue, had managed to find the mescaline I’d been looking for and had taken it all. That at least would explain the utterly bizarre delays and reverbs they kept putting on my voice and guitar, before running for cover away from the swirling noise. No matter in the end, as there can’t have been more than ten people there, none of whom had come for the show. I finished my set with gritted teeth and resignation, doing my best to remain professional and entertain Chris and Stephen at the very least. I headed back to the UK shortly afterwards, America remaining firmly unbroken.
SHOW # 404
Bar I Love You, Riga, Latvia, 16 March 2008
Back in the UK, momentum of a kind was building for the new record. Mike Davies at BBC Radio 1 was playing ‘Photosynthesis’ on his punk show, thereby making it the de facto first single from the record, and tickets for the album tour were starting to sell. Before embarking on the proper promotion, I headed back to Latvia for a short run of shows. This time round, Ben Dawson, drummer of Million Dead, came along for the ride. He’s one of my oldest and best friends, and it was fun to invite him out to experience the Latvian chaos.
Latvia was awesome, as ever. On our first day there, Ben and I found ourselves on a bus to Liepāja with an American Jehovah’s Witness. The poor kid made a valiant attempt to engage us in a conversation about the divine, but hadn’t reckoned on Ben’s militant atheism and total failure to give a shit about upsetting him. Believe me, four hours is a long time when your friend is philosophically deconstructing a teenager like he’s picking wings off a fly. Nevertheless, it was nice to be back in the country, seeing old friends and having a blast.
The main reason for us being there was a big gig in Riga organized by Veto magazine, through the good auspices of my old Latvian pal Andzs. Ben and I actually rehearsed a couple of my songs with him on drums for the occasion, and a song by Kneejerk, the band that we’d been in when we were sixteen and that had prompted our first invite to the country many years before. The show was in a big club, was professionally organized and it went off fine, though I have to say it lacked some of the chaotic charm that I associate with that country. Thankfully chaos was restored the next night at a bunker squat show in Cēsis. Finally, before our flight home, we headed back to Riga for one more show in a small bar.
The show at Bar I Love You was utterly unhinged. Ben and I decided to drink White Russians, but the poor barman didn’t seem to know what they involved. After some negotiation, and realizing that they had all the necessary ingredients, Ben was behind the bar mixing them for us. It only occurred later to us that, in a former Soviet country, Russian drinks (even if in name only) might not have been the best idea. My old friend Karlis showed up, ready as ever to do battle with alcohol, and took an instant liking to Ben. I played in the basement and the show itself was OK, but my throat was pretty fucked from the night before, though people sang along – but it was afterwards that things got really out of hand. The last I saw of Ben was him lying in the gutter outside, shortly after having been sick on the DJ (classy), with Karlis stood over him, pouring red wine into his mouth and shouting ‘Drink, you soft English bastard!’ Meanwhile, I have some haziness in my mind as to the sequence of events of what happened to me, but I do remember waking up in an office at about 4 a.m. on a sofa without some of my clothes and with company.
Man, I miss Latvia sometimes.
SHOW # 434
The Railway Inn, Winchester, UK, 24 April 2008
Ben and I returned fuzzily to home soil. After an album launch party and a few warm-up shows, I was ready for the release of Love Ire & Song. The record came out on my little sister’s birthday, 31 March, and on that day the band and I embarked on a twenty-four-date tour of the UK to let people know about it, starting at the Brudenell Social Club in Leeds.
At this time we had a girl called Ciara Haidar playing keys in the band. The new album had even more piano work on it and it was getting increasingly incongruous playing as a four-piece, either skipping the parts completely or using a sampler to trigger them. Ciara sang backing vocals on a few songs on the record and was (is) a great keys player, so it made sense for her to play with us, as well as for her to open the shows with her own solo material. Also along for the ride was Andy Yorke, who had played with Nigel in Unbelievable Truth in the 1990s. At this time he was coming out of a self-imposed musical exile and starting to record and play shows again. I for one was honoured to have him with us.
The tour visited the same kind of venues that we’d played on the two UK band tours we’d done to promote the previous record, but this time round something felt decidedly different. Shows started to sell out and did so before we even got to the towns in question. There might only have been two or three hundred people at the gigs, but now they knew the words and people started badgering me to get on the guest list to sold-out gigs. Things were definitely starting to change – and for the better. On top of all of that, the reception to the new album was considerably more positive than I had dared to hope.
Two-thirds of the way through the tour, Ciara jumped ship, having been offered some much larger shows with Kid Harpoon and The Kooks. I can’t say that I was over the moon about it at the time, some heated words were exchanged, but looking back I understand. All the same, this left us without a keys player for a few shows. After a slight panic, I had a brainwave. I called Chris T-T – who, as well as being a great songwriter himself, can really play the piano – and after some emergency between-show rehearsals, he joined us for the last few dates of the tour.
In London we sold out the 100 Club on Oxford Street, a venue steeped in music history. Many famous jazz and rock ’n’ roll bands played there back in the day and the Sex Pistols tore the place up in 1976. My gig at the 100 Club stays in my mind more clearly than most to this day. Things felt so exciting, so full of promise. I opened the show with a short abbreviated acoustic cover of a song called ‘Rock ’n’ Roll Singer’. It’s originally by AC/DC, but personally I prefer the delicate, laconic version that folk singer Mark Kozelek recorded and that’s the style I chose to play it in. It felt appropriate to the moment, the softly spoken lyrics of simple, innocent, adolescent ambition, which felt somehow a little closer to being real that night. With Chris in the band, everything was really starting to gel and suddenly the horizons that I could imagine for what I was doing started expanding rapidly.
The final show of the tour was in Winchester, at The Railway Inn. The Railway is pretty much the only music venue in my hometown, a place where I’d seen many shows and that I’d played countless times, both solo and in previous bands. I’m very fond of the place. The show was sold out and went great. I was exhausted and I knew I had to fly back to California the next day, but I felt exuberant. After the gig I was hanging out with people from the show, drinking and talking nonsense, and in the fug of it all missed loading out the gear into the van for the band’s final drive back to Oxford (I was staying at my mum’s in Winchester, before heading to the airport).
The next day I got an email from the boys saying that they were peeved about that. In all, despite us being a much better musical unit, the tour had been pretty hard on Ben, Tarrant and Nigel. It wasn’t just the schedule (which was tough, but we’d all done tough tours before). Now that we weren’t opening the shows with a set from Dive Dive, their motivation for being on the tour was different. As much as they’re my friends and great players to boot, what we do is not like being in a normal band together. They are kind of session players, though I shy away from using that word to describe them as it seems somehow belittling. They’re much more than that. But at the same time, the reality is that it’s not an equal situation. The motivation for me to be there is obvious. For the others, of course they care about the music and the project as a whole, but it’s at one remove.
When you’re playing to 200 or so people a night, the amount of money in the budget for paying people isn’t huge and I didn’t have a massive label behind me pumping cash into the coffers. Essentially, the guys were working their arses off for very little money. Obviously, there was the understanding that we’d keep working at this and get to a place where things would be more equitable, which we have done, thankfully; but that doesn’t necessarily mean much in the short term when you have rent and bills to pay.
In short, there was tension between the boys and I, and looking back on it I might not have handled it in the most sensitive way. It took me a little while to grasp the situation from their point of view and this was not the only occasion on which some hard words were exchanged. I guess I’m mentioning this here to show, firstly, that even when everything is rosy during the show, the mechanics of touring on this level can be pretty punishing financially and personally. And secondly, it’s important to me that people understand that the boys in the band have been dedicated to working with me since way back when. I couldn’t do what I do today if they hadn’t backed me up at times like this and I will always be grateful for their belief and hard work. Thanks guys.
SHOW # 437
The Viper Room, West Hollywood, CA, USA, 2 May 2008
Charlie and I returned to the States after the UK tour for one more bout of Los Angeles-based schmoozing. Despite my pessimism about my last stay in the City of Angels, it seemed like we had made some headway. We headed back out for a long weekend of showcases and meetings and this time round things were much more positive. I played a radio session at the House Of Blues and had meetings with a lot of people who seemed more serious than some of the others I’d met out there before. In particular, we signed up with Caitlin Roffman, an agent at United Talent (and an awesome person to boot), who was now on board to book my shows in the USA.
The final show in California was at The Viper Room, a venue that was once partly owned by Johnny Depp and outside which River Phoenix met his maker. There was a great turnout for the show and it really felt like people over there were starting to take notice of what I was doing; not to quite the same degree as back home, but still.
One other thing happened that night. I met an English girl at the show; she was on a business trip and had a night off and decided to check out The Viper Room without knowing who was playing. Her name was Isabel. It’s a date that’s marked in my diary still.
SHOWS # 447 / # 448
University Union – Mine, Leeds, UK, 15 May 2008
The next instalment of the never-ending tour of everywhere involved a trip back around the UK, this time opening for The Holloways. I’d done a few solo shows with them before and of course we’d played chaotic late-night impromptu gigs at Nambucca plenty of times. But now I was down for a full UK support tour and I was bringing the band with me (albeit we were a four-piece once again).
The Holloways had had a degree of success on the indie rock scene, with support from the NME and BBC Radio 1, and their song ‘Generator’ was riding high in the charts. Their previous bout of touring had been a great success, packing out venues up and down the country. Alas, in the meantime they had started to fall prey to the terrible luck that often creeps into a band’s career. The American record label with whom they had signed had gone into receivership and their rights to their own music had become tangled up in the ensuing legalities. More fatally still, the complications had led to a slowing down in the momentum of their career. For a band, at the stage they were at, that’s pretty much everything and losing the drive to go forwards is often terminal.
As a result, the run of shows we did with them was a mixed bag. Some of them were great, but some of them were poorly promoted and poorly attended. I was spending money from my own pocket to take the band out with me and there were some slightly demoralizing moments, seeing the smattering of people at the shows and thinking about how much the exercise was costing me. All the same, it was great to be out on the road with my friends and there were some great shows to make up for the tough ones.
I have a bunch of good memories from the tour. In Bournemouth I played an aftershow gig at the iBar, which ended up being more fun than my set at the gig proper. In Reading some kid tried to steal the hat that I was wearing, which led to a titanic late-night chase through the university grounds and a small punch-up. Most memorably of all, in Leeds, I was onstage with the band and halfway through a great set the fire alarm went off and everyone was ordered outside. Never one to let the moment slip by, I’d taken my guitar out with me so stood on a small grassy hillock among a bewildered crowd, half of whom had not even been at the show, and started to play a few songs, yelling to compensate for not having a PA. At first people were sceptical, to say the least, but after a while people started getting into it and by the time the alarm stopped and we were allowed back in, I’d led the crowd in a sing-along to that old favourite, Abba’s ‘Dancing Queen’. We ran back inside and just had time to play one more song, ‘Photosynthesis’, before making way for the main act.
The other thing to mention from this run of shows was that I was spending a lot of time hanging out with The Holloways’ crew: their guitar tech, Tom Barber (known as Barbs); their merch girl, Sarah Crowder; and their tour manager, Tré. They were all people I knew from around the bar at Nambucca, but I definitely got to know them properly on this tour and saw them at work. In time, they would start coming on tour with me and become members of my touring family.
Playing support shows with my band is something I really enjoy doing, because when we get it right (which we often do), we really have it in us to smash through a disinterested crowd and force people to pay attention. It’s a challenge and therefore can be more rewarding. We did well on this run of shows and in a way it was a forerunner of later American tours we did where we proved ourselves night after night.
SHOW # 460
The Loft, Xscape, Castleford, UK, 8 June 2008
By this time, Love Ire & Song had been out in the UK for a few months, we’d done two tours around it and we were still steadily shifting copies. As summer crept on, my gig schedule was a little less meandering and a little more regimented. Nowadays, things are pretty much always militarily planned, as they have to be with the amount of shows I want to play and countries I want to visit. But back in 2008 things were still shifting from one model to the other. So at the start of June I had a slightly odd run of shows running into the beginning of festival season. I did an in-store in Cheltenham, a club night in Kingston, a house show in Fulham and a small festival in Durham. Most of these were solo shows, so I was back on the train with my guitar, but the shows were larger than they’d been last time I was out like this and the mood was different.
One show on the schedule that I was not optimistic about in advance was at The Loft in Castleford. I confess I hadn’t really heard of Castleford prior to the show. During pre-gig planning I found out that the club was essentially in a large motorway services area with a train station, a hotel, a bowling alley, cinema and, tucked away in a corner, a venue. I was not at all convinced that anyone was going to show up for the gig. Train schedules for the day were such that I arrived in the early afternoon. I checked into the hotel, dropped my bag and wandered over to the club. It was nice enough, a small 200-or-so-capacity room on the top floor of the leisure complex. After a cursory sound check, I met up with my little sister Gilly (who was still living in nearby Leeds) and her boyfriend and we went downstairs to go bowling.
While I was being thoroughly shit at knocking down pins (as per bloody usual), we started chatting with the people in the lane next to us. They were there for the show and were pretty excited about hanging out with me, all stifled giggles and photograph requests. It sticks in my mind because, while I’d experienced people being a bit weird around me before, it generally only happened immediately after coming offstage. Here we were, hours before showtime and these guys and girls were excited. I found it a little odd and it made me wonder how the show was actually going to turn out.
In the event, the gig sold out, much to my surprise. The room was packed with people, all full of energy and excitement, and when I played they sang along with all the songs – the new ones, the old ones, pretty much anything I could pull out of the bag. I was stunned. I’d had packed-out, sing-along shows before, but not in (no offence) Castleford. It felt like everyone was buzzing about the songs I was playing and, I’ll not hide it, that felt fucking great. This little gig, in a prefab roadside leisure complex called, of all things, Xscape, stands out for me as another moment of realization. People were starting to like me.
SHOW # 463
Eton College, Windsor, UK, 18 June 2008
Yes, it’s true; I was educated at Eton College.
To people outside the UK, this is generally not much more than a piece of passingly interesting trivia, usually accompanied by a dull question about Prince William. In mainland Europe, America and beyond people have a habit, which I am a huge fan of, of judging people on where they choose to direct their lives, rather than on their past, their education, their class, their hometown, etc. For better or worse, that’s not the case in the UK and this is as good a time and place as any to say a few words on the subject.
I got an academic scholarship to Eton when I was thirteen years old. My parents put me up for it. They wanted me to get the best education that was available. They were also, it has to be said, interested in the social aspects of the school. My folks are like that. I’m by no means from anything other than a middle-class background (and have never said otherwise), though I doubt they would have been able to scrape the funds together to send me there without the bursary.
So I went. The educational facilities were amazing. A lot of the kids were kind of snobbish dickheads, although I have to say I find it hard to hold that against someone who is fourteen. They haven’t seen the world or emerged from the social bubble in which they’ve been brought up. If you want to point fingers, point them at the parents. Personally, I felt very socially awkward at school – I vividly remember kids referring to friends of mine from back home as being ‘plebs’, a disgusting word that I didn’t initially understand. In that context, when I came across punk rock it made a huge amount of sense to me – the rage, the defiance, the way it made a virtue out of the necessary agonies and isolation of adolescence. Reading about Joe Strummer made me feel like it was possible to survive my current predicament.
I’m more than aware, as a thinking grown-up, that I had a privileged start in life. I’m not sure whether I’d send my kids (should I ever have any and should I ever have the cash) to a similar school. I’m politically uneasy about these types of schools to say the least, but then the instinct to do the best by your offspring is both powerful and understandable. Some people might say ‘Who cares?’ Well, actually there are an awful lot of people who’ll happily yell ‘CUNT!’ at me at the top of their voices because of where I went to school, who’ll dismiss me out of hand, shout me down, call me a fraud. As I said, it’s a peculiarly and depressingly British impulse. I don’t think there’s anything I could change about my life that would satisfy those people, which I think highlights the irrationality and stupidity of their hatred. It’s a hatred of an abstract idea that’s been grafted on to a person and that can never be altered by reality. Judge me on the choices I’ve made, the paths I’ve voluntarily taken, not on what was decided for me when I was a kid. One of the things the place gave me was a broad experience of prejudice and a fervent desire never to let that be part of my character.
When I left the place, I was more or less set on not going back ever again if I could help it – I was pretty angry and conflicted about the whole experience at eighteen. But many years later, I got an email from a kid at the school – not anyone I knew – saying that someone had pinned up an article about me from a music magazine on the noticeboard at the school and written this underneath in black pen:
‘SEE? YOU DON’T HAVE TO GROW UP TO BE A BANKER.’
That seemed cool to me. I was flattered and it made me feel good to know that maybe there were more kids at the place who weren’t sleepwalking into the City. A little while later I got another email, this time from a kid who was organizing the Rock Society at the school. He asked if I could come back to give a talk and maybe even play. I thought about it for a really long time and in the end decided that it was something I would do.
By this time, Isabel, the girl I met in The Viper Room, and I were in a serious relationship. She and I took the train down there. She had had a very different educational experience to me and laughed her way through the whole thing – the uniforms and the etiquette. Her uncomplicated amusement made me relax a little. We had supper with some of the teachers who’d been there when I was a pupil. One or two of them had been supportive to me as a rebellious kid, but most of them thought I was crazy for coming back.
The show itself was OK, a little formal perhaps; they set me up in a stuffy, wood-panelled assembly hall I knew well from my incarceration there. It was lined with marble busts of former headmasters – not perhaps the most rock ’n’ roll place to play. I’d had plans to give some rousing speech about confounding social stereotypes and choosing your own path, but it kind of died in my mouth once I was up there – I’m really not so confident in myself that I want to start lecturing teenagers on what to do with their lives.
All in all, I’m glad I did it and I feel now like I really don’t need to go back again. If I lost you in this entry, if you’re mortified that, like Joe Strummer, I’m not the working-class hero you really wanted me to be, well, sorry. It is what it is.
SHOW # 473
Boring by the Sea Festival, Weymouth, UK, 29 June 2008
Summer, as I’ve said before, is festival season. Year on year, it’s got busier, crazier for me. In 2008, I spent the first half of the hot season bouncing back and forth across the Channel. My friend Cham had joined a band called Jedethan, which also included Dave Condon, a long-haired and loveable New Zealander who had guitar-teched for Million Dead back in the day. Cham had set up a run of shows for Jedethan around France and Belgium, a larger-scale version of our ramshackle trip from back in 2006, and he asked me to come along for the ride. I agreed, before realizing that the trip ran across a number of UK festival calendar entries, not least the behemoth that is Glastonbury. After some head scratching, I had a schedule that was a little intense but looked like it would be fun.
We played at La Fête de la Musique in Paris at the start of the run. We rolled across Belgium playing around campfires, in decrepit old punk venues and even did a gig in a Scout hut supported by a punk-rock covers band, all of whose members were about thirteen years old, who had a kid on bagpipes holding the vocal melodies instead of a singer. Seriously. They did the Ramones, the Pistols, the works, while their intimidating skinhead dads rollicked around drunkenly in the crowd in matching band T-shirts. That was a pretty weird show.
After that gig (in Écaussinnes, around thirty miles south of Brussels), I got an early-morning cross-Channel train back to the UK and met up with the band on the drive from Oxford down to the vast, out-of-control, gloriously disorganized party on a farm that is the Glastonbury Festival. This was my first time going to the festival, having never been before as either a performer or a punter. The guys in my band, particularly Tarrant, are not massive fans of festivals per se and as we drove in through the massed hippy crowds and oozing mud, he was gloomily threatening to call the UN and report a humanitarian crisis.
Once on site, we played a set on the Avalon Stage (it was a slightly ramshackle performance as we hadn’t rehearsed recently) and later I played solo at the Left Field in the middle of the night. There were plenty of friends of mine at the festival and it being Glasto they were all keen on getting out of their heads as soon as possible. I was trying to maintain a degree of decorum, given that I was technically in the middle of a tour, but even with the best will in the world you can’t stay sober for long at that festival. I partied my way through the night and into the next day, my putative day off, which turned out to be nothing of the kind as far as my metabolism was concerned.
The next morning I woke early, in a tent, feeling like death and aware of the full horror of the journey ahead of me. First of all, I had to make it off the festival site – no mean feat and one I only achieved thanks to the saintly helpfulness of a passing golf-buggy driver, who ferried me and my guitar across the desolate sleeping festival ground to an exit. From there, an expensive cab took me to the nearest train station, which isn’t exactly a main-line affair. About three minor rural Sunday services later I was in Weymouth, where I was due to play a little festival called Boring by the Sea. It’s at times like this that I find myself cursing my booking agent (while secretly remembering that it was me who was enthusiastically bolting dates on to the schedule with gay abandon during the planning phase).
It was a gorgeous sunny day and having arrived a little earlier than was strictly necessary I went down to the pebble beach and sat in the sunshine, soaking up the peace and the vitamin D in the hope that it might bring me back to health in time for the set. In the event my plan worked perfectly; it’s amazing what a little rest and sunshine will do for the constitution and for morale. The show went just fine, my friend Sam Isaac played a great set as well and I slept happily in a cosy bed and breakfast. The next morning I was hopping trains back to the Continent to rejoin Cham and pals for the rest of the French shows. It was pretty exhausting, but hell, it made me feel alive.
SHOW # 483
2000trees Festival, Withington, near Cheltenham, UK, 12 July 2008
The festival scene in the UK has deep roots – Glastonbury has been with us since the 1960s and there are many other long-running field parties, from Reading to Download (or, as I prefer to call it, Donington). In more recent years, as the live-music scene has grown exponentially, the number of smaller festivals has bloomed commensurately. Some of these have grown into much larger, more established events in their own right, such as Bestival. The proliferation has also led to many not-so-spectacular shindigs, run by people better described as chancers than promoters, which has meant many an afternoon of bands milling aimlessly around a boggy field with inadequate staging, PA, crowds and sanitation.
Occasionally, though, you come across real gems, the perfect small festivals that have a charm and intimacy that the bigger ones lack and a character all of their own. 2000trees is such a festival. Set up by a small group of friends and run in a field in Withington, near Cheltenham, it holds a few thousand people in a cosy farm setting. Each year they showcase the best of underground rock music in the country and the mood is always convivial and welcoming. The festival took place for the first time in 2008 and the organizers contacted me and asked me to play. After I agreed enthusiastically, they suggested that I play a secret (ish) set on the smaller acoustic stage on the opening Friday of the festival, as well as a main-stage full-band set on the second day.
So it was that I pulled up at the farm in a friend’s car in the middle of the day, unloaded my guitar and headed for a small tent with a stage, a sound system and a good crowd of people. The first set of the weekend was great. I was really surprised at how many people were there already and how up for it they seemed. After I was done, I had the rest of the day to enjoy wandering the site and checking out bands, then a night to sleep, before meeting my band on site the following morning.
There was a moment in the mid-afternoon when there was no particular band I wanted to see and rain was starting to threaten. I glanced through the programme to see that a certain Jim Lockey was playing right then on a stage that had shelter to the sides. Not only that, but he was described in the blurb as sounding like me. Curious, I set off to get myself out of the rain and to check out the alleged competition.
I’m pleased to say that Jim and his band (Solemn Sun) were ace – Gloucestershire’s best-kept secret – and they’ve gone on to become firm friends and touring partners in the years since. I introduced myself after their set and we ended up hanging out for the rest of the day, and indeed the night, and, well, let’s be honest, into the next day as well. The night was filled with a set of campfire sing-alongs led by a group of kids who had set up ‘Camp Reuben’ in honour of the fact that my old friends Reuben had been booked to play the festival but had, alas, broken up in the meantime. I think I ended up playing long into the night – it was hard to tell exactly how long, given the circumstances.
The dawn came grimily through the English summer weather to find me, Jim and a few others still wandering the grounds looking for adventure. After a brainwave, we managed to get someone better rested and more sober to drive us into nearby Cheltenham, where we grabbed some food and even a shower back at Jim’s place. It was then that I remembered that I had an in-store appearance booked at local indie record shop, Rise. We hightailed it over there just in time for my third set in two days, where I played to a small but happy crowd. We returned to the party, refreshed and ready for more. The second day of the festival kicked off with some great bands and by the time my own finally arrived I was in good spirits and we played a great set on the main stage, despite my lack of sleep. Four sets in two days with no sleep – not bad.
As we all prepared to get in the van and return to Oxford for the night, I climbed out of the deep mud leaving my trainers behind me in the mire (where they may still be, for all I know) and took off my sodden jeans, much to the alarm of the guys in the band, before settling down for the journey. It’d been a great weekend and the start of a relationship with that festival that endures to this day.
SHOW # 491
The Duchess, York, UK, 6 August 2008
Because of the proliferation of festivals, doing an actual normal tour in the summer months is generally considered to be something to avoid. People tend to spend their cash on the festivals and often don’t have enough time, money or party spirit to venture out to normal shows. That said, there are occasions when it makes sense, especially for artists from other countries; if they can fill in the gaps between festival dates with local shows, so much the better. In the summer of 2008, the singer Evan Dando was booked for just such a filler run and Joanna and I managed to get me on the shows as the opening act.
Dando basically is The Lemonheads. They’re one of my favourite bands and I rate him enormously as a songwriter. I was really excited to get on to the bill for the shows, although a number of people had warned me that the man has a bit of a reputation for being a handful. I was ready to deal with that, though. Simply sharing the stage with him for a short run of solo shows (just over a week, in fact) was great for me, something to put on my CV at the very least and a chance to watch a master up close and in action.
Evan was accompanied by his English tour manager, who we’ll call Chris. Chris is a nice guy, but a little long-suffering in his care for his American charge. For the first few days, Evan was friendly enough, although he was clearly a little more interested in where he was going to score that day than in talking to some kid who was opening the shows. Chris occasionally asked for my help in tracking down disreputable people in the towns we were in and as long as Evan got what he wanted, things went off OK.
On arriving at the York show, where the Dando touring party had, for once, beaten me to the venue, Chris took me aside and asked the standard question: did I know anyone in town? As it happened, I had a phone number or two for people who indulged in illicit things who might know someone who could help, and I cautiously agreed to see what I could find out – with the proviso that, it being early in the week, it was not a guaranteed deal. Chris said fine, and I made some calls. My sound check and my set came and went without a hitch – the crowds on these dates were generally new faces for me, but polite, curious and mostly appreciative. As I was packing down, Evan asked me where the gear was. I just told him that I hadn’t heard anything.
This didn’t go down well at all. Evan swore at me angrily, claimed I’d promised him a score and kicked his way back into the dressing room. I was a little taken aback. Chris shot me an exasperated but apologetic look. Evan took the stage shortly after and played a short, unfocused and unfriendly set, before storming off to head to his hotel without a backwards glance.
I guess they say you should be careful about meeting your idols. This experience was something of an eye-opener for me. As anyone who has read this far into this book will be aware, I’ve been no stranger to illicit substances in my time and have indulged out on the road; I’m no angel and I’m not one to point fingers in any case. But there was something so nihilistically focused about Evan’s quest for getting high (and it really didn’t matter if it was weed, coke, pills or whatever) and something so viciously self-centred about his anger when I didn’t, as he saw it, deliver the goods, that was really shocking to me. It made me think again about that whole world, which sounds slightly lame now that I say it out loud, but it’s true. I was a little sad to see someone I so respected as a writer be such a dick to people around him and, most of all, to play such a disrespectfully poor show for the people who’d paid to be there. It all sat uneasily with me because of the work ethic that I subscribe to.
I thought pretty hard about whether to include this story here, as I don’t want to sound like I’m putting the boot in. Far from it – Evan remains an incredible writer and when he was on form on that tour he was a joy to watch. But the true facts of being lost in drugs, when encountered up close, just aren’t pretty and it’s not a road I want to go down myself. Since then I’ve been a lot cleaner on tour – never perfect, of course, but a lot more mindful of treating my audience with the courtesy they deserve. Sometimes you need to see someone else make your mistakes before you can correct them in yourself.
SHOW # 499
Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre, London, UK, 24 August 2008
The summer of 2008 was a great one for me. It was a transitional time; everything was shifting from the old, ramshackle way of doing things to a set-up that was better organized, more efficient and on a slightly larger scale. I think I had the best of both worlds at this time.
After the tour with Evan Dando, the band and I did a bunch more festival appearances before the season wrapped up. Since the UK tour in April, Chris T-T had been occasionally holding down the keys in the band. It was an absolute pleasure playing with the guy – he’s a fantastic musician and a great friend. But I think we all knew it wasn’t going to be feasible in the long term, as Chris has his own career and his own songs to tend to and share with the world. So as August ran down, there was a slight sadness in the knowledge that these would be the last shows we did with this line-up. Thankfully the shows on offer were great. We played at Beautiful Days – the Levellers’ festival down in Devon – and also on the Lock Up Stage at the Reading and Leeds festivals.
The Lock Up is run by my old friend Mike Davies, the punk DJ at BBC Radio 1. It was another massive step up for me to be at those festivals, for the second year running, with significantly larger crowds than the year before. While the shock of their scale was less than it had been in 2007, it was great to feel that everything had moved up a gear. In 2008 I was the only person to play at both the long-running Cambridge Folk Festival and on the punk stage at Reading – and may still be the only person to have done that as far as I know. That’s something I think I’m allowed to be proud of.
The last show of the summer was the day after Reading, a booking that was always going to be a little trying for my voice and constitution. Seth Lakeman was making an appearance at the Open Air Theatre in London and I’d been asked to open the show. Seth is a fantastic folk singer and songwriter from Devon and it was a great privilege to play with him. The venue itself is a wonderful place – a steep amphitheatre right in the middle of London’s finest park. It being a folk show, the full band had not been invited to play, but Chris and I put together a duo set, with him on piano, which seemed like a fitting end to his official time in the band. The sun was hanging low in the summer sky as we took the stage and my ragged vocal chords rose to the occasion for what I remember as a magical set.
Quite the summer.
SHOW # 500
Lexapalooza 3, Nambucca, London, UK, 6 September 2008
I’ve already written about the first Lexapalooza, which took place back in 2006. The second one was held in 2007. Lexie was very ill at the time so most of the organization was handled by Evan Cotter, a close and old friend of mine. I couldn’t make it as I was in the USA. Lexie passed away soon afterwards. In the aftermath of her death, Evan decided, along with a few others, to keep doing the Lexapalooza festivals, partly to continue raising money for the Breast Cancer Campaign and partly in memory of the friend that we’d all lost.
This was the first of the festivals to take place after Lexie left us. Evan sorted Nambucca as the obvious venue and put together a great line-up of bands and singers. I was technically not supposed to be playing extra London shows at the time as I had a gig at Scala coming up (more on that later). But there was no way I was missing this event for a second time, so I was booked as the not-very-secret headliner for the day.
I think of this event, in a way, as being the first proper Lexapalooza. It had all the things that I’ve come to love about the day: a firm crew of awesome people running the show, managing the stage, selling cookies at the cake stall and generally having a ball; and a varied line-up of old friends and new acts. The day is usually pretty drunken, as we all figure that Lexie would not have wanted it to be any other way. It’s always a blast, we raise a load of money and we all shed a tear here and there for the one person who’s missing from the party.
By the time my set rolled around at the end of the day I was far from being sober. During the day Evan had been selling song requests for my set and a large bagful of slips of paper was proffered to me once I got onstage to help me direct my set list. Alas, the people at the show had used the occasion to call for songs I don’t play so much any more and alcohol had the predictable effect of hampering my memory for old words and chords. As a result, my set was chaotic, with more than one false start and abandoned song. But the vibe was so great that it didn’t matter and at the end of the night I played ‘Long Live the Queen’, the song I’d written for Lexie’s passing. After she checked out, back in 2007, I’d written the song very quickly. The words came together one afternoon when I was in Paris, sat on a bench in Montmartre looking out over the city trying to come to terms with my loss. Since then it had become (and remains) something of a crowd favourite, which is simultaneously gratifying and disconcerting. In the end I’m reassured by the thought that, at a guess, Lexie would approve – or at the very least find it funny. Somehow it was both very hard and very easy to sing that night.
The festivities continued into the small hours and I ended up catching the first Tubes back across London with Isabel in the morning, feeling ropey as hell and trying not to make eye contact with more fresh-faced travellers. It had been a great party. As it happened, it was also the last time I would ever play at Nambucca, though I didn’t know that at the time. Looking back, it was a good way to say goodbye to the old place.
SHOW # 507
The Warhol, San Antonio, TX, USA, 27 September 2008
The state of my career has always been a little behind in the USA compared with the UK for the obvious reason that I started touring my home country well before I went over the Atlantic to the New World. This has actually usually been something of a bonus for me – switching between playing shows at different levels and with different atmospheres helps keep me fresh and my faculties of entertainment sharp. So after some increasingly healthy touring and a great festival season back home, I boarded a plane to rejoin my old buddies Fake Problems in California for a run of shows that was a little more hand-to-mouth.
Also in tow was a band called Cobra Skulls – a great punk ’n’ roll combo with an obsession with skulls and, well, cobras. After a couple of shows on the West Coast we headed inland into the desert. I made my first visit to Las Vegas (where I shivered with fever after the gig and singularly failed to do any gambling). We played a seriously ropey last-minute show in Anthony, New Mexico, in a youth project a mere stone’s throw from the Texan border, to a handful of kids who seemed to be trying to decide whether it was worth robbing us.
Eventually we rolled into San Antonio, the site of my first American show in March 2007. This was to be Cobra Skulls’ last gig on the run with us, although the Fakey Ps and I were continuing all the way to the Florida coast. As with many of the shows on this run, we were a little hazy as to where exactly we’d be staying the night, but we were resolute in our faith in the punk community’s ability to provide (and I have to say that it has rarely let me down). We played a fun show to a half-full room before getting stuck into the serious business of drinking with friends who were soon to part ways.
At some point in the evening we arranged to stay with a Hispanic guy from the show called Pepé. Pepé was (and indeed is) an enthusiastic punk kid who simply could not get over my accent. The English accent is a curio to many Americans and can often be used to great advantage. An English friend of mine was once accused by a girl in a bar in Brooklyn of faking his accent in order to get laid (even his passport wouldn’t convince her that he was a genuine Brit). Pepé just thought it was hilarious and adopted me, much the worse for wear, as his evening’s entertainment, feeding me sentences to repeat in my mother tongue at regular intervals through the night. We all made it back to his house in the two tour vans. The photos I found on my phone the next morning featured Devin, the Skulls’ singer, wearing lipstick, so we were clearly having fun. Come midnight, it became John Berna’s birthday. John was the Problems’ tour manager at the time, so the festivities were given an extra boost. At some point in the night we fell asleep in a motley heap in the front room of Pepé’s house.
The following morning, we woke gingerly. When crashing round at strangers’ houses on tour you often have to get up a little cautiously and re-evaluate the situation. One resident’s late-night opinion that eight sweaty strangers sleeping on the floor is a great idea can often be overturned by his or her housemates (or indeed their own sobriety) come morning. So the more sensible members of our party were scouting things out, creeping into the kitchen to find Pepé. Derek Perry (of Fake Problems) and I, meanwhile, were in the bathroom, shaving ourselves comedy handlebar moustaches, which made us look like a cop duo from a 1970s’ TV show. Were we still drunk? Well, maybe.
Meanwhile, the scouts had found our host, apron on, happily preparing a barbecue for his considerable extended Mexican-American family. Derek and I stuttered our apologies, feeling like idiots, while our whole party quickly started gathering our things and preparing to skedaddle out of the way (an almost instinctive activity to the road dog and one well-practised), embarrassed at having gate-crashed a family day. Pepé, however, hastily informed us that the meal was essentially being held in our honour, the family had been invited over to meet us and that we were to stay and enjoy the food at our leisure before the day’s short drive to Austin. So we stayed and continued John’s birthday celebrations, heartily eating some incredible food before winding on our weary way. Pepé has remained a touring friend ever since.
One of the great things about taking to the road on the underground punk circuit is that you end up with friends like that in every city of the world – people you see once a year, but who are always happy to drop what they’re doing to help out their itinerant friends, to take you to the decent local bar after the show and to let you sleep on their floor. In the UK, that’s something that is a little less remarkable, given the size of the country and the fact it’s where I come from (or maybe I just take it for granted). When you’re many miles from home, on the other side of the Atlantic or even further afield, you learn to appreciate it more. In a way I feel like these people are the unsung heroes of independent touring. Without them the road would be a harsher and less survivable place. One time when I stopped by, Pepé gave me a little Catholic postcard with a picture of the Archangel Michael on it as a good-luck charm and protector for life on the road. I keep it in my wallet.
Whenever I’m at home I always try and put up any bands passing through, to vaguely rebalance my karmic debt.
SHOW # 519
Blender Theater, Manhattan, NY, USA, 13 October 2008
The shows with Fake Problems took us to the East Coast – 3,000 miles along the I-10, from sea to shining sea – and then up through the endless flatness of the Midwest, finishing up in Lansing, Michigan. After the sweet sorrow of our parting, I boarded a plane to New York City for a few shows on a different tour, shows that would turn out to be pivotal for me in the USA.
Chuck Ragan is one of the singers from Hot Water Music, a Gainesville punk band that soundtracked my youth, as they did for pretty much anyone else into that scene in the late 1990s. At one point I had a little picture of Chuck – singing live, all veins bulging from the neck and pure passion washing down his brow in sheets, torn out of a No Idea Records mail-order catalogue – stuck up on my bedroom wall. Hot Water continue to tour from time to time, but sometime in the early years of the first decade of the century Chuck decided to pick up his acoustic guitar and start writing country and folk songs on his own – a move that I can very much identify with.
In 2008 he put together a new idea for a tour – Revival. The idea of Revival is to take singers, mainly but not exclusively from punk backgrounds, and throw them together for an acoustic, roots-based tour. It’s a different kind of tour – there are no real delineated sets, everyone shares songs and the stage and it has more the feeling of a travelling revue than anything else. The first run included Chuck, Tim Barry (lately of Richmond, VA’s Avail) and Lucero’s Ben Nichols and Todd Beene (pedal steel), as well as Jon Gaunt (fiddle) and Digger Barnes (upright bass) as a sort of house band. On top of that core lineup, they were picking up extra players along the way. Revival as a concept and a tour continues to this day, but it can’t be denied that the shows that first year had a special kind of magic to them.
I was asked to play four of the shows – Asbury Park (NJ), New York, Hamden (CT) and Washington DC. I’m not entirely sure how Chuck came across my music and what I was doing, but he had decided he liked it and offered me the gigs. I accepted gladly and took a bus down to New Jersey; I was very excited to play.
The first show was at Asbury Lanes, a classic punk venue in Asbury Park on the North Jersey Shore. I wasn’t really too clear on how the Revival shows worked at first. I didn’t know anyone else on the tour and generally felt like a little bit of an impostor, surrounded as I was by musicians who were older and better travelled than me and to whom I massively looked up. These were also the best-attended and biggest American shows of the tour to date. The Lanes was packed out with 300 or so people and it was with some serious trepidation that I took my turn in the spotlight. In the event, it was one of the most affirming shows I’ve ever played – the crowd went crazy and after half an hour the room was mine. It was then that I realized that these were to be game-changing shows for me.
That, however, is not the reason why I wanted to write about the gig at the Blender the following night. It was similarly epic for me, even if the surprise was slightly less than it had been twenty-four hours earlier, but it became significant for a different reason. After my set I wandered into the crowd to see how things were going at the merch and to make some friends. I ended up chatting to an English guy called Will. Unlike everyone else at the show, he’d come to see me play. Neither of us really knew too many other people, so we became conversational and drinking partners for the evening.
We were discussing life, the universe and everything when Will said a curious thing to me. He said he loved reading the stories about the characters in my songs, it seemed like a charmed life to him and he wished he could inhabit that world, have those kinds of experiences. I said there was no real secret to it – I just try to seek out interesting people and places; life comes to those who look for it. I genuinely don’t think I have any special password or secret key to life. Anyone can do what I have done, or at least embark on the journey. He shrugged and said ‘Maybe’ and we talked about something else.
At the end of the gig, a general plan was formed by the Revival touring party. Jesse Malin, the former singer of D Generation, had joined us on stage (he and I sang a Hold Steady cover together) and was now inviting us to join him at his bar, Niagara, in Manhattan. So after everything was packed down we were gathered on the pavement outside the club flagging down a small fleet of cabs to take us across town to our designated watering hole. Will was still with me, shooting the breeze and suddenly we found ourselves together at the front of the taxi queue, looking at an open yellow door.
Will hesitated, not sure if he was really invited to come with us. I looked at him and said, ‘This is it man, this is the moment where you choose. Either get in the cab and come adventuring, see where the night leads us or go back to the youth hostel and keep listening to records and imagining what might have been. So get in the fucking cab!’
Will did get in the cab and came to the bar and we all had a memorably raucous evening. The Revival crew were there, as were the Gaslight Anthem boys and Matt Skiba from Alkaline Trio. Will in fact, I think, managed to cop off with one of the bar maids (though I’ve never been sure about this). I ended up winding my way back to the tour bus and the next day I got an email from Will saying that he’d wandered back to where he was staying through the empty New York streets as the sun was coming up, buzzing from the night.
I think the story stays with me for this reason: I spend a lot of time talking about something I believe passionately, which is that life is what you choose to make it, for the most part, and more often than not all you need to do is seize it by the throat and demand more from it. This is probably the most obvious, succinct example of this point that I can give. Even if it was nothing else, it was a beautiful night, a moment in our time not to be forgotten.
SHOW # 531
The Rescue Rooms, Nottingham, UK, 31 October 2008
I came back to the UK just in time to start the second official headline tour for Love Ire & Song. It was another reasonably long run around the country, fourteen or so shows in about as many days, with the band in tow. By this time, Chris T-T had bowed out of playing the keyboards for me – he had his own musical commitments to attend to, not least opening for me with his own backing band, the Hoodrats, on this run. I’d been concerned that this would lead to another protracted search for a band member, but luck was finally on my side. On the previous tour of the year we’d met Matt Nasir, a prodigiously talented musician who had been playing for Andy Yorke. He’s one of those guys who is just better at everyone else’s instrument than they are (the piano is actually his third calling, after bass and guitar) and he’s a fun guy as well. So I asked him if he’d be interested in joining me, Ben, Nigel and Tarrant. He said yes. Though we didn’t come up with the name for some time, this established the firm line-up of The Sleeping Souls, the band I am more than happy to play with to this day.
We also had the first proper incarnation of my road crew on this tour. Graham was tour managing and taking care of the live sound, Barbs was guitar-teching and stage managing and Sarah looked after the merch in her own idiosyncratic way. The family had grown.
The venues on this run were notably a step up from the previous jaunt – averaging about 400 people to a show rather than 200 – and they were all selling out in advance. The first gig was in the large room at The Cockpit in Leeds. We’d decided to change the set around and open with ‘The Ballad of Me and My Friends’ (a song that had tended to be a finisher). I remember walking on to the stage from the door at the back at the start of the set and being met by a wall of noise as the crowd sang along. As a band we were starting to properly gel together and become a relentless musical proposition. The London show was at Scala in King’s Cross, the venue I’d played for the Stop the War Coalition more than a year before and, again, it was a sell-out. I felt like we were on top of the world.
This was a UK tour where London wasn’t the last show. I always think that’s a bit of a drag – you expend all your energy playing and socializing and then have to force yourself not to coast through the remainder of the dates. That’s not because I think London is inherently better than anywhere else in the UK; it’s just that it’s usually the biggest show and it’s the one most of my friends come to. After Scala we had a few more shows, including Winchester (where we were a little tired), before driving north to Nottingham to play The Rescue Rooms.
I suppose my immune system wasn’t in the best shape at the time, but I’m reasonably sure the actual culprit was a chicken and mayonnaise sandwich from a garage near Oxford. During sound check I felt a little drained. As showtime rolled around I felt increasingly weird, but there were 500 people waiting for a show so I went on nevertheless. As the set list slipped by I knew that something bad was about to happen – my guts, my head, everything was starting to swim. We blasted out the song ‘A Love Worth Keeping’, which has a long high note at the end. When the note was done I knew I was as well and after a few bars of the next song (‘Father’s Day’, as I remember), I suddenly took off my guitar, threw it to Barbs at the side of the stage, ran into the dressing room and heaved my guts into an ice bucket.
It really felt like I was throwing up my own pelvis; like I was pushing every single thing held in my thorax out of my throat. The gig was over. After I was done throwing up I lay on the floor – grey, sweating and shivering. I felt awful, not just physically, but also because I’d let an audience down. I’d never abandoned a show mid-set before and it hasn’t happened since. Nigel courageously let the crowd know that I was quietly dying in the next room and people filtered out, confused and angry (at least in my fevered imagination).
That night the band headed home while Barbs and I checked into a hotel next to the venue. I was alternating between being freezing and unbearably hot and he, great friend that he is, was on watch to make sure I didn’t quietly shuffle off this mortal coil during the night. The next run of shows, including Ireland, was clearly not going to happen. The marathon run of gigs on both sides of the Atlantic (plus the sandwich) had done for me.
It was a sad way to end the tour, but I suppose the great thing about this job is that the road stretches ever onwards. There are always more shows to play.
SHOW # 539
Grabenhalle, St Gallen, Switzerland, 23 November 2008
I was, in my solo career, a latecomer to the European continent, I’m sorry to say. With the exception of my slightly manic runs to France and the Baltic, it wasn’t until this point, late 2008, that I started playing shows across the Channel. Looking back now I think it’s a shame it took me so long. I think maybe I had some underlying fear that the music I was making, particularly if I was playing without the band, wouldn’t translate (quite literally) for the crowds in Europe. I know now that I shouldn’t have been so judgemental or so dismissive of people’s capacity to understand English, or at least the more universal language of music.
Joanna had put together a slightly ramshackle tour, which was hung around a few key pegs – some dates in the Netherlands with the Levellers (more on them later) in particular – and a run of shows in Italy had been put together by Eric, an enthusiastic local promoter. Chris T-T was along for the ride – to play keyboards with me for some of my set and to play his own songs as well. Chris was also down to drive, given my lack of skill in that area.
We took the Eurostar to Paris to play at La Flèche d’Or at a trendy new bands showcase kind of night. As per usual with those kinds of events, it was poorly organized and attended. I have a soft spot for Paris nonetheless (not least thanks to an ex-girlfriend I may have mentioned in a song) and it was good to be back. Unfortunately, the whole excursion was then nearly sunk by a fuck-up with the rental car we were using to get around for the whole tour.
There then followed a panicked evening of problem solving. As stressful as it was, I often think that it’s moments like these that remind me why I love a life of touring. You have to be completely alert, open-minded, resolute and proactive. The problem has to be solved, there’s no safety net, no buffer zone – you have another city to be in the following day. Somehow or other we got it sorted and in the morning we headed for the Netherlands.
We did two shows with the Levellers and then headed south on our own to Switzerland, where promoter Martin Schrader had organized some low-key headline gigs. Martin is, in my opinion, the best at his job in the country and we continue to work (and drink) together now. Switzerland is a quite unbelievably beautiful country, so Chris and I had a whale of a time checking out the fields, mountains and the architecture in Lucerne and Basel.
The third Swiss show was in St Gallen in a venue called the Grabenhalle. It’s a big room, but we played through a vocal PA on a small stage in the lobby, a better setting for an acoustic show. It was also better, though still a little roomy, for the crowd that showed up – about ten people. Being the professionals that we are, Chris and I had a nip of whisky and then threw ourselves heart and soul into our respective sets. The small crowd was delightfully appreciative. As I finished I looked out of the windows of the building to see that a huge amount of snow had fallen in the time that we’d been on stage. In fact, as the stage had a large plate-glass window behind it we’d been framed by a scene of falling snow as we’d played. After the gig we didn’t so much disappear backstage (actually there wasn’t one) in a puff of glitter and dry ice, we more just kind of stepped forward into the crowd to hang out with our new friends.
Chris and I and the small audience made our way out into the biting cold together, the two Englishmen rather more filled with wonder at the scene than anyone else. Nevertheless, it was strikingly beautiful, enough to silence us all for a little while. I stood at the top of a hill, knee-deep in fresh snow, with the sweat of a gig freezing rapidly on my brow, next to good friends – old and new, the intricate, archaic rooftops of the old town stretching out before me and thought that I was lucky.
After St Gallen, Chris and I took a long train ride through Austria, where we got ripped off by the promoter at a show in Vienna. On the plus side I met some remarkable people at the show – two Englishmen and a girl from New Zealand, who were living in Budapest and making their living through gambling, pool sharking and throwing house parties at their squat. I christened them The Grifters and they made it into a song I was writing at the time about the road. Finally we flew to Italy for some slightly weird shows and then made our way back home, resolving to return to Europe as soon as the opportunity arose.
SHOW # 561
Proud Galleries, London, UK, 19 December 2008
When I was a little kid, throwing myself first into metal and then into punk and hardcore, my older sister had bombarded me with other types of music, most of which bounced harmlessly off my angry adolescent carapace. Some of it got through, however – the sisterly trinity comprises Tori Amos, Counting Crows and the Levellers. The Levellers have never been a fashionable band, but like pretty much all Levellers fans I couldn’t give a tuppenny shit. I’ve loved the Levs for a long time, so it was something of a dream come true when I was asked to do some shows opening for them, first in the Netherlands (which I’ve just written about) and then around the UK.
The tour featured me playing solo, then a Czech punk band called Divokej Bill, then the main event. The shows were in big venues around the country. Like most bands of their size, pedigree and longevity, the Levellers have fans that are not always, to put it kindly, all that interested in checking out new, unknown acts, so I knew I had my work cut out for me. For this run I took my old friend Tré – Nambucca resident and former tour manager of The Holloways – with me in a hired car as we tailgated the tour bus up and down the motorways.
I had a great time on the tour. As well as the joy of making friends with a band I grew up idolizing (and they are truly lovely people) and getting to watch them night on night, I also went over pretty well with the crowds and added a whole new group of fans to my team. In Lincoln I ended up playing a second set in a pub around the corner for some people who’d come to see me and missed my set; in Southampton we had a massive Christmas dinner on the floor of the Guildhall before the doors were opened to the public. It was a good run.
In a spectacular piece of logistical planning, someone had tacked a few extra dates on to the end of the tour that meant the itinerary included a gig in Inverness the day after a show in Oxford. That’s just about doable in a tour bus, where you can combine travelling and sleeping time, but if you’re driving it’s murder. So after the Oxford set, Tré and I packed up quickly and drove towards Scotland, planning to make as much time as we could before we got tired, then turn in for the night in a hotel, before finishing the drive in the morning.
As we tore north through the night, windows down and radio blaring, Tré got a phone call. It was from Ally, a DJ and promoter who was also living at Nambucca at the time. He asked if she was in the pub – she said no, she was on tour – and he said that was a relief, because the building was on fire. As in, it was burning down.
We pulled off the motorway at the next available exit and found a cheap hotel somewhere in Lancashire. I checked in while Tré frantically spoke to everyone she could get hold of on the ground, trying to find out what was happening to her home. The whole place was in flames and seemed to have already passed the point of no return. We settled in for the night, Tré heartbroken and glued to her mobile, me feeling slightly useless and also sad as the full extent of the damage unfolded to me, second-hand.
The following day Tré dropped me at a train station and I made my own way to Inverness. The Levellers agreed that I could travel on their bus for the remaining two shows of the tour while Tré went home to salvage what she could. The next few days passed me by in a grey blur; it was much worse for her and everyone at the pub, all good friends of mine who’d lost everything in the fire. There’s still some debate about what actually happened, though this is not the place to discuss it, but the bald facts remained – Nambucca was gone and a lot of my friends were essentially cast out on to the winter streets of London.
As is often the case, in the midst of tragedy humanity chooses to reveal its good side. Nambucca was more than just an indie pub in north London – it was representative of something, something anarchic, communal, decadent, hopeful and chaotic. Many of the people who had passed through its doors as punters and residents came together to help out those who had been made destitute. Clothes were provided, living space was found. Hell, even the local dealer gave everyone a free round of his wares. It was heartwarming and tragic at the same time.
For my own part, I had a London Christmas show already booked for the day after the end of the Levellers tour, at the Proud Galleries in Camden. The show had been planned as a charitable event and was sold out. Once the full horror of the situation with the pub became clear, I called the charity that had been the intended recipients of the cash raised (Shelter, a housing and homelessness charity) and asked if they would mind me cutting out the middle man and giving the money direct to people who were having trouble finding places to stay over Christmas. They readily agreed, so the show became a benefit for the Nambucca refugees.
It was an emotional night. I played solo. It wasn’t so long after the Scala headline show, which had been a triumph for me and the band, and on a personal level it felt like a reconfirmation of that achievement to have the 400-capacity room crammed to the rafters – not least because everyone from the pub was automatically on the guest list. Tré also made it to the show and we had an emotional reunion. The crowd roared their way through my set, singing along with pretty much everything I could think to play. At the end, the ‘Ballad’ ripped a fresh hole in everyone’s heart as we sang about ‘another Nambucca show’ knowing there would never be one.
The dust has long since settled on all that now. There’s another bar of the same name in the same place, but it’s not the same people and it bears no relation to the memories I cherish. The people involved have gone on to other projects, other bars, other lives. I think we all still pause, though, when we’re on the upper Holloway Road and think about the times we shared. A lot of people have a glorious moment in their lives, some halcyon days, and mine were spent there.
SHOW # 563
London Astoria, London, UK, 14 January 2009
It was, it seems, the season of farewells. The Astoria, as I’ve mentioned, was a central venue for London and for me personally. Sadly, after many years of swirling rumours, it was finally confirmed that the entire block in which the building sat was to be demolished to make way for a high-speed railway line across London. Naturally, it was decided there should be a final show, a last blow-out, so a random, last-minute bill came together.
On the night itself I found myself giving quite a few interviews as the British music press came together to mark the passing of an era. Everyone wanted me to give lofty, nostalgic, bittersweet quotes about what a travesty it was that the place was closing down. I found it hard to oblige. I was still reeling from the end of Nambucca a few weeks before and, as much as I loved the place, the Astoria was kind of a shit-hole – it hadn’t been done up in many years, not least because of the constant threat of arbitrary closure.
But there was another, deeper reason: rock ’n’ roll is, at base, an ephemeral art form. It’s an explosion of youthful energy; it’s all about the moment – a Polaroid picture rather than an oil painting (I might have mentioned this in a song). It was never supposed to be about monuments and museums, about permanent records. It’s about that one night where everything came together, the band tore up the stage, you danced and kissed a pretty girl and watched the sun rise with a bottle of whisky and some good friends. To me, trying to constantly lock down places where rock ’n’ roll happens seems to run against all of that, to miss the point. Even Nambucca, which was so much more than just a venue, had to end somehow or other. And sure, it’s a problem to have one less venue to play in. But rock ’n’ roll is a rebel idea, something that is supposed to thrive in adversity, not be sanctioned and subsidized by the authorities. To all the people bemoaning the passing of the Astoria, I said, ‘Let’s go out and find the new place that will be like this and we can be the tedious old farts at the back telling everyone it isn’t as good as the old days and we’ll be dead wrong, just like the old-timers were who castigated us when we were kids.’
The gig was a weird one. Because it was so last-minute, the bill felt thrown together (because it had been) and there wasn’t ever a critical mass of audience appreciation for any one act to really bring that feeling of togetherness to the room. A lot of people were there just for the event and I saw guys with screwdrivers taking doors off their hinges while bands were playing. It was oddly anticlimactic, as if the real spirit of the place had already moved along; which, in a sense, it had.
After my set, I could sense the beginnings of a monstrous party coming together. As tempted as I was to hang around, I opted instead for an early night. The following day I had to be up early and head to Europe with the band to play a set in Groningen, in the Netherlands. The gig was a little disjointed – the room was half-empty and due to a family crisis we were a man down (Nigel couldn’t make the show). In keeping with the spirit of changing times, it so happened that at that show I met Carolina, who worked for Epitaph Records in Europe, who was mighty excited about my set. It was a meeting that was to have huge implications for where things would head in the future.
SHOW # 578
Underground, Cologne, Germany, 10 February 2009
After my initial foray into Europe with Chris T-T in 2008, I was keen to get back out there and make further inroads. Early in 2009 I got a call presenting me with a fantastic opportunity to do just that. A new (at the time) and up and coming American band called The Gaslight Anthem had a UK and European tour booked and wanted me to be the main support. I have to confess I hadn’t heard of them prior to this and if it had been just the UK shows I would probably have declined as I was planning to headline many of the same venues within a few months. However, there was a long European leg of the tour, so after consultation with Joanna and Charlie I enthusiastically accepted.
The first phase of the tour was in the UK, which at the time was buried under an unusually heavy snowfall, which led to the first gig being postponed. For the tour, which I was doing solo (with the exception of the London show), I had arranged to travel with the opening band, another American outfit called Polar Bear Club, who play heavy, hardcore-influenced rock. I hadn’t met them before, but jumping in a van with strangers for a long stretch of travelling was something I had a fair amount of experience of by this stage.
After the London show, at Shepherd’s Bush Empire, we boarded a ferry and headed for the Continent. The first show was in Cologne. I’d never set foot in Germany before and didn’t speak a word of the language, so I was unsure of what to expect. In fact, to be perfectly honest, I was a little nervous. I was playing solo, without the weight of my band behind me. In that circumstance, lyrics are of paramount importance and I really wasn’t at all sure if the Germans would understand what I was saying, both literally (could they speak good enough English?) and artistically (does an Englishman have much of interest to say to German punks?). Gaslight’s merch guy, Gunnar, was German and he prepped me with a few introductory sentences before I took the stage with some trepidation in front of a packed room.
Within about five minutes I was ashamed of my previous doubts. The crowd was awesome – receptive, attentive, respectful and raucous in all the right measures. I don’t think many people had any idea who I was, but by the end of the set the reaction was great and at the merch table that night I sold a mountain of records and shirts, as well as making a whole lot of new friends. Many people with world touring experience will tell you that Germany is one of the finest countries to play in. That night I discovered the truth of that fact first hand.
The rest of the tour was a fantastic ride. We got stranded in Stockholm for four days after Gaslight’s van was broken into, meaning that we all missed the ferry to Finland (Polar Bear Club and I, seven people in all, spent the time sleeping in a single hotel room, which was intense). We got hammered in Munich, met old friends in Vienna, had an altercation with arsehole venue staff in Milan, crossed paths with Katy Perry in Amsterdam (well, sort of – we were playing at the same venue) and finished up exhausted in a bar in Dublin. Along the way I made new friends not only in crowds across Europe, but also with the two bands and their crews. Gaslight have gone on to become a major part of my story and I remember this first tour with them with great fondness. As for Polar Bear Club, well, we shared enough cold floors and cramped van time to make us as close as anyone I’ve toured with. Gunnar put out some of my records on vinyl in Europe (on his label which he, y’know, named after himself, Gunnar Records).
All in all, one hell of a trip.
SHOW # 604
Friends Bar, Austin, TX, USA, 20 March 2009
After the Gaslight tour, I headed back out to the USA, back to Austin for another shot at SXSW. My previous visit, two years before, had been good fun, but from a purely business point of view had not achieved all that much. Things were very different this time around. Charlie and I were working hard at sorting out a record deal for me in North America and had been having a lot of the long, suggestive, faux-enthusiastic conversations that characterize contractual flirting and negotiation. In particular we’d been talking to a Californian label called SideOneDummy, who looked after Gaslight and Fake Problems, among others, and the legendary punk-rock label Epitaph. We set out for Texas with an exciting but uncertain prospect before us.
After a pretty tumultuous journey to the USA (involving cancelled flights, rerouting via San Antonio and a late-night bout of driving by my saintly Texas friend Adrienne), I was happy to get back to Austin, a town for which I have a lot of love. The morning after my arrival, still exhausted from the journey and jet-lagged to boot, I drove to the outskirts of town to a small rehearsal studio to meet some new friends. The guys at SideOneDummy had suggested that it might be fun (and affordable) for me to play some shows with an American-based backing band and to this end had contacted a friend of theirs, Steve Soto. Steve is an early SoCal punk old-timer, having formed and played in the Adolescents in the early 1980s. These days he also has a solo project – Steve Soto and The Twisted Hearts – and they had happily and kindly volunteered to back me up for some shows.
So it was that I walked into a rehearsal studio to meet my new band. A lot of the old country singers regularly play with ‘pick-up’ bands, but it was not something I’d done before (or since, for that matter). I was pretty nervous and not sure whether we’d sound any good at all. But I’d sent a selection of songs through to the guys with some chord sheets and it was delightful, if slightly surreal, to count off the numbers and have them all come in pretty much note perfect. We ran through our short set a few times, settling into playing with each other and relaxing in each other’s company. A few hours later, we were ready to go, which was great because our first show was that afternoon.
I should say at this point that playing with those guys was great fun and I’m thankful to them for helping me out. But at the end of the day, playing with The Sleeping Souls is in another ballpark. There’s no substitute for the years we’ve put in together and for their musicianship. They’re the band for me – the best band in rock ’n’ roll as far as I’m concerned.
Over the following couple of days I had what I suppose is a ‘classic’ experience of SXSW. I played a lot of shows, made a lot of friends, got wined and dined by plenty of record-label people and did a lot of partying. The shows with The Twisted Hearts all went well. I saw The Hold Steady, Two Gallants and Ed Harcourt play blinding shows. I felt a little bit like I was in the film Almost Famous – the archetypal depiction of the rock ’n’ roll myth – a feeling I don’t get so often. It was a great time.
My final show was a solo affair as part of a showcase of British acts in a venue at the end of 6th Street called Friends Bar. I was playing last and in all the chaos of the festival the stage times had run long, so by the time I was up to play I was told there was only time for a couple of songs. There were a couple of hundred people in the room who were dismayed by the prospect, so I resolved to play through the curfew. However, after a few tunes the PA was cut by the tired and inflexible venue staff. I wasn’t done playing and the crowd was not done listening, so I headed out into the street with my guitar and started playing in the middle of the road, standing back to back with Jay (Beans On Toast) who was helping me out with fighting the noise of the street by singing and playing along with me. It was one of those moments – a growing crowd surrounding us, traffic stopped, songs howled out at the top of my lungs. Every now and again I meet people who were there and we all agree that it was something memorable, something special.
There’s a short coda to this story. By the time that last show was done, and despite the care and attention of the good people at SideOneDummy, Charlie and I had pretty much agreed to go with Epitaph for my future releases outside the UK. I was in a great mood, all my shows done, good friends around for the party and a record deal in the bag. So I went for gold in the decadence stakes and pretty soon I was several sheets to the wind. I was hanging out with Fake Problems and a mutual friend, Derek Martinez, a tattooist from Austin who runs a shop called Lucky 13. We decided after a while to head back to Derek’s place and drink cheaper beer and party in more private confines. However, Derek’s place was also where his tattoo materials resided and soon some pretty silly drunk tattoos were under way. Thankfully Derek is straight edge and doesn’t drink, so he was able to keep some kind of order amid the chaos. Nevertheless, I managed to tattoo some of my lyrics (‘Dead but never dying’ from ‘Vital Signs’) on John Berna’s chest and Derek inked a small outline of the state of Texas on my left bicep, where it remains (obviously) to this day, a small reminder of a remarkable weekend.
SHOW # 608
The Viper Room, West Hollywood, CA, USA, 26 March 2009
Thankfully, after the SXSW debacle I had a drive across the vastness of West Texas in which to recover. After Austin, The Twisted Hearts, Look Mexico (more on them shortly) and I played a show in San Antonio. I remember going to sleep on the back bench of the van as we set out after the show, just before midnight, driving west. I woke up a full ten hours later, bleary-eyed, feeling cramped and sweating in the glass-filtered sun, asking where we were. The answer rang dead in the air: ‘Still in Texas.’ Thankfully I was starting to feel a little better.
We made it to the West Coast, playing a show in Arizona en route. The main stop on the run after Austin was a show at The Viper Room in West Hollywood. My previous stop on these hallowed grounds had been a red-letter day for my personal life, meeting Isabel. This time round I was headlining in the main room (rather than in the broom-cupboard-like basement room), with a backing band, as a label showcase of sorts. We pulled up outside and as we hastily lugged equipment out of the burning sun into the shadowy interior I glanced up and saw my name tacked slightly unevenly to the masthead on top of the building. That felt good.
Later that night, Brett Gurewitz, the founder and head of Epitaph Records, guitarist with Bad Religion and all-round punk-rock legend, came to the gig to check my set and, effectively, give his final seal of approval for me to sign to his label. Epitaph was the mark of musical quality in my formative record-buying years. I used to go to the local Our Price record shop with my scrimped and saved pennies and pretty much buy anything with their logo on the back of the CD. Through them I discovered The Offspring, NOFX, Rancid, the Descendents, Propagandhi and countless other bands that still pretty much define my taste in music. In recent years, under the auspices of their imprint ANTI-, they’ve also released records by Tom Waits, Nick Cave, Billy Bragg, The Weakerthans and others – in short, the other main subcategory of ‘music I like’. In the meetings that we’d had since the start of the year I’d met most members of their team on both sides of the Atlantic and made some firm allies already.
Or to put it all another, much shorter way: when Brett said he liked the show, I was pretty stoked.
SHOW # 614
Bar Deluxe, Salt Lake City, UT, USA, 1 April 2009
On the long, winding road from Texas to the coast and then north to San Francisco, The Twisted Hearts and I had been accompanied by a band called Look Mexico. They are an awesome bunch, originally from Florida but since relocated to Austin, that I met through Fake Problems on some early runs around the United States. In between wowing audiences with their resolutely poppy brand of post-something-or-other, they habitually rode in their own van, which is a wonder to behold. It was originally a minibus for ferrying pensioners around the old-people’s homes of the Florida suburbs, but they converted it not only to hold a band (with enough space for most people to properly stretch out and sleep, if needs be) and its equipment, but also to run off vegetable oil. This was both an ecological and a financial measure – most of the fuel was procured by asking around fast-food restaurants just before they closed at night to see if you could get their leftover cooking oil. The van then chugged slowly but resolutely across the wilds of America, making everything in and around it smell of chips (or fries, to my American friends). It was quite the touring vehicle.
The tour continued up the coast from LA to San Francisco, where, after a wild night at Thee Parkside, we parted ways, the Californian Hearts heading south to their homes and loved ones. Look Mexico and I, being rather further from our respective base camps, continued north into the wastes of Oregon. I particularly remember this stretch of shows for being one of the most hardcore bouts of driving and playing I’ve ever experienced. The northwest coast of the USA is famous for being sparse on shows and thus requires long hauls, but if you’re doing it in a chip-mobile with a top speed of sixty miles per hour (less on hills, of which there are many), it gets brutal pretty quickly.
We made it to Portland and had a wild and virtually unprintable night hanging out with strippers in the city. We then headed inland and drove alongside the majestic Columbia River towards Boise, Idaho. There, after an eleven-hour drive, we were greeted by an audience of ten people. A dismaying performer-to-crowd ratio, but they gave us a warm reception. Immediately after the show we considered our next stretch – across the mountains to Salt Lake City in Utah. After some discussion, we decided that we should start driving right away, despite our exhaustion and van-sickness, and get a few hours in before stopping at a motel to grab some sleep and continuing in the morning.
What we didn’t bank on was the weather. A spring snowstorm descended on the high-altitude passes just as our fast-food-powered home began the torturously slow climb through them. Visibility dropped to about ten metres and in the swirling snowflakes we caught glimpses of large trucks jackknifed off the side of the road, cars smashed into the central reservation – total desolation. Crawling along at almost walking pace, we shivered together, terrified, gazing out of the windows, desperate to stop but unable to tell if any of the exits would lead to any kind of accommodation.
After a couple of hours, our indecision and slow progress assumed its own logic and as daylight loomed and the snow abated it seemed to make sense to just keep slogging through, however slowly, to reach the relative sanctuary of Salt Lake City. At about 10 a.m. we rolled dejectedly into a car park on the outskirts of the city, near the university, and shuddered to a halt. There was silence in the van. The accumulated long drives, the sleepless fear of the snowstorm, the claustrophobia of the cramped interior – sometimes on tour, it’s best for everyone to just shut the fuck up and say nothing. We all lay down and attempted to get some kip, however brief.
On waking, unrefreshed, an hour or so later, a couple of pertinent facts dawned on the assembled company. First of all, we had two shows that day – a matinee all-ages affair at a community centre called SHO, followed by a bar show in the evening at Deluxe. Secondly, we were in Salt Lake City. The home of the Mormons is not, as I had thought, a dry city, but they do have mandated low-strength alcohol – weak beer and watered-down spirits. Given that we were all spoiling for a hard drink, this was something of a problem. Usually bands just drive to a liquor store on the city limits to stock up, but more driving wasn’t really a popular option just then.
We loaded in and played the first show to a small but cool crowd of local kids who – like so many people who live in the scattered, isolated towns of the western USA – were just grateful that we’d made the effort to be there. Increasingly crabby and tired, we loaded back out and hauled across town for our second show. This, at least, was in a bar and we were each given enough drink tickets to get a pitcher of local brew. I settled into mine as fast as I could, but was disappointed to find out that, far from getting me hammered, it barely touched the sides and just made me need to pee a lot.
I sat down at a table with a guy from the local punk band who were opening the show for us. The attendance was very sparse – it seemed like we’d drawn everyone we were going to draw at the first show of the day – and I was a little disconsolate. The local offered me his ticket for the band-issue pitcher of beer and I happily accepted. As I was pointlessly chucking that one down after my first failed attempt at drunkenness, I asked him why he didn’t want it for himself. ‘I know that if I have one drink, I’d be an alcoholic,’ he said, quite cheerfully. I immediately assumed he was a recovering drinker and fumbled an apology, but asked if he’d had problems himself, or in his family. ‘Oh no,’ he continued breezily, ‘I’ve never touched a drink. I just don’t want to be an alcoholic.’
Given that I wasn’t drunk, I can’t blame my crappy logic on the booze – maybe just the tiredness. But it slowly dawned on me that he was a Mormon and thus not someone given to chugging down pitchers of beer, however watered down they were. I guess it was a small culture shock for me. I mean no disrespect to the guy – he was nothing but friendly and his band rocked – but it was a strange encounter for an Englishman so far from home.
I played my set and spent the rest of the night at the bar with the Look Mexicans, trying and failing to get out of our heads on weak drinks in order to forget the fact that we had another ten-hour drive to Denver the next day. At some point Matt (Agrella) pointed out the date – 1 April. We had to laugh.
SHOW # 618
The Wheatsheaf, Oxford, UK, 29 April 2009
By the time I got back from that run in the USA, things with Epitaph Records had basically been settled. We’d agreed a deal whereby they would release my records everywhere in the world except for the UK, which was to remain with Xtra Mile. That was my dream set-up, so I was very happy to say yes. Epitaph were to release Love Ire & Song first and then crack on with the new, third and as-yet-unrecorded album.
So the main project on the table when I got back to the UK was to make that record. As ever I’d been writing a lot on the road. Writing is something I find difficult to talk about properly – not because it’s uncomfortable for me, but because I lack the vocabulary to adequately describe the process. In some ways I feel like a sleepwalker waking up; I come to with a finished song, but can’t remember how it ended up in my hands. I jot down ideas in notepads and on my phone all the time, but the process of massaging those fragments into a recognizable whole remains slightly mysterious to me. I’m fine with that. The process doesn’t seem to be broken (yet) and I don’t want to examine it too closely in case I do break something.
Onstage at the London Underworld with Million Dead, 22 September 2005.
Graffiti (by Ben Dawson) on the dressing room wall at The Joiners, Southampton.
The French / Belgian tour 2006.
Onstage in Tolouse, playing ‘The Ballad’ for the first time; whole crowd in shot.
The legendary Chamoule holding up some French lyrics for me to sing.
Restringing my guitar onstage mid-set at Nouveau Casino.
Playing the freezing carpark outside The Fenton, Leeds in 2006.
Onstage (with a bass!) at Nambucca in the midst of some lost weekend. The photo was taken by Laura Marling.
Clockwise from top Left: Leaning on Justin Pistolet’s shoulder in Devizes, 2006; Jamie with the destroyed car after our accident in Lithuania (not funny at the time); Jamie and I arriving at our destination, Liepaja, after the longest day on tour ever; Looking up the local lingo onstage in Moscow, 2006; Onstage, accompanied by the audience, at the end of a Barfly show in Camden, summer 2006.
Clockwise from the top: Finishing up at the Roundhouse before Biffy Clyro in 2007, a job well done; Live at Cave 9 in Birmingham, AL on a very early US tour; Love Ire & Song Tour, 2008: Nigel, me, Graham, Ciara, Tarrant, Ben, and a dog; Hanging with Andzs, the man who brought me to Latvia; My first ever show in New York, at Matchless. In shot: the whole audience, hence why I ditched the stage.
Giving it a bit of the old Freddie Mercury at the Scala in London, 2008.
A lovely poster from my hometown venue, the Winchester Railway Inn, the last show of the Love Ire & Song tour.
With Charlie Caplowe – my manager since day one and the man behind Xtra Mile Recordings.
The awful tattoo I did on John Berna’s chest in Austin.
An early incarnation of the band, on the set of the ‘Long Live The Queen’ shoot: Ben, Chris T-T, Me, Tarrant, Nigel.
The first Revival Tour, at the Blender Theater, NYC: Tim Barry, Chuck Ragan, Me, Ben Nichols.
Onstage in Austin, SXSW 2009, with Steve Soto.
Playing solo at Plush in Austin; another shot from this set got used on the Poetry Of The Deed liner notes.
The last show of 24 on ‘The Road’ video shoot, with director Adam Powell, at the Flowerpot.
Nervous in an empty Wembley Stadium, pre-Green Day show.
Walking up the ramp to the stage for my first festival headline at 2000 Trees, 2010.
German Photomat selfies!
Onstage at 2000 Trees.
Casey Cress and I at the end of a not-very-sensible Canadian Folk Festival weekend.
Cooling off in a fountain after a very hot festival show in Switzerland.
Getting tattooed by Matt Hunt on the set of the ‘I Still Believe’ video.
…And outside in the parking lot.
Playing at Inside 8 Seconds at The Fest in 2010 with Fat Mike…
The Leftfield stage, Glastonbury 2010, with Beans on Toast and Billy Bragg.
Selling my own merch on the road with Social D in Florida, 2010.
With the late great Josh Burdette.
Wembley, April 13, 2012. The full band and crew, the setlist, and the crowd. L-R: Shaun, Ant, Ben, Tarrant, Me, Nigel, Graham, Matt, Josh, Gill, Johnny, Billy, Emily, Anna, Jo, Jovka, Charlie, Griff, Dani, Tré.
This time round, in contrast with previous album sessions, I knew that I wanted to take the band into the studio with me. In fact, I wanted to record the music as live as possible and on to tape (rather than a computer) to give everything a raw, unpolished and old-fashioned feel. That meant that the songs, such as they were, needed to be fully rehearsed with the band before we hit the studio.
Tarrant, my bass player, also runs a van-hire firm for bands and has a yard just outside Oxford from which he runs his business. In the yard are some Portakabins and garages, so in early 2009 we set about turning one of the spare ones into a rehearsal room. After much blood, sweat and tears (not so much on my part, if I’m honest, because I was on the road in the States) we had a small but comfortable soundproofed room that was ours to call home. At the start of April 2009 we loaded our equipment in, set up and began arranging and rehearsing a new record.
We spent a gruelling three weeks in that tiny space, powering through the songs again and again, fleshing them out from skeletal guitar-and-vocal compositions into full-throttle rock songs. There was some tension. The conflict between me as a solo artist and us as a band – something that has reared its head many more times in my career – mirrored the cramped physical conditions, but on the whole it was a good experience, our forging as a musical unit and I still feel like you can hear that context on the resulting album, Poetry of the Deed.
At the end of the three weeks we decided that we should play some shows in Oxford. Playing new songs live in front of an audience knocks them into shape much faster and more brutally than is possible in the practice room. We arranged four small shows in a row in town and sold them on the basis that we would be playing the new record in full. All four sold out pretty much instantly.
At the first of these shows, at The Wheatsheaf, it worked out that the people from Epitaph Europe would come over from their Amsterdam office, check out the set and sign the final deal. I remember the atmosphere being slightly odd – even though we’d warned people what to expect, it’s still a lot to ask of an audience, playing thirteen new songs in a row. It was a tough sell and while the songs felt good, I could tell the moment we were in front of a crowd that there were little tweaks that still needed to be made. Nevertheless the Epitaph crowd were pleased, the deal was signed and it felt like I was starting out on a new phase of this journey.
I went off into another room with the label people to sign the record deal, leaving the guys in the band packing down the equipment. After we were done, I went back to hang out with Ben, Nigel, Matt and Tarrant. While they congratulated me warmly, I could sense something was amiss, though I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. I was starting to get really weirded out, when I finally realized that they were all refusing to make any eye contact with me when we spoke – a joke they’d arranged in my absence. It was around this time that the guys in the band gave me a nickname – ‘The Product’ – designed perfectly to annoy the hell out of me. I love my band.
SHOW # 622
Bar Matchless, Brooklyn, NY, USA, 23 May 2009
After the four Oxford shows, the band and I headed for the studio. We’d chosen Alex Newport to produce the record. He’s something of a legend to me, not only because of his studio work, but also because he’d been in early 1990s’ sludge band Fudge Tunnel. I was excited about him working on the sound and getting us somewhere near the Two Gallants records that he’d made, but I was possibly more excited at the prospect of getting tour stories about Napalm Death, Fugazi and Sepultura. We spent a week playing the songs live in a studio in Norfolk, owned by Dan Hawkins from The Darkness, and then Alex and I hopped on a plane to New York. Alex has a studio in Brooklyn, so the plan was to finish off the vocals and the mixing for the album there.
My first week in New York saw me being studiously well-behaved. My voice takes some looking after and given that we were recording for posterity I needed it to be at its best, so it was all early nights, no drinking or going out and generally being boring. By the end of the first week, the vocals for the album were done and now all that was left was for Alex to mix it while I ‘supervised’. That meant I was off the hook, so I immediately called my friend Arty Shepherd.
Arty has been in a number of awesome underground punk bands, from Errortype:11 through to Gay For Johnny Depp (who opened up on the final Million Dead tour). He also used to work at a bar called Matchless in Brooklyn. I wasn’t supposed to be playing any shows while I was in New York, because I had a gig in town with The Offspring in the diary for July, but I figured that a small, last-minute, word-of-mouth-type affair wouldn’t hurt. And where better to do it than at Arty’s place?
A sign that word was really starting to spread about what I was doing, at least in some parts of the USA, was that the small gig ended up being packed out. After weeks of no sunlight and the weird discipline of the studio it felt awesome to be out on a stage again, with my audience in sweat-dripping distance of me. The show was a blast, new songs went down well and old songs were like old friends. I felt like I was back in the saddle again. The studio isn’t really my natural environment. There, you’re constantly making decisions about the minutiae of songs that are irreversible – will I sing this line up or down? Slow or fast? Will I drag this part out or cut it short? And the versions you lay down become the permanent record. That always seemed false to me – songs are organic, they continue to grow and change and fluctuate at the edges. The great thing about playing live is that you get a chance to reinvent the songs, night after night, to play a new definitive version to be revelled in for that night only, before being invented anew the next day.
SHOW # 652
Pitkä Kuuma Kesä Festival, Helsinki, Finland, 27 June 2009
When you’ve finished making an album, thoughts naturally turn to methods of promoting the thing. A big part of that is picking a single, a lead track from the record to send to radio stations and so on. And when you’ve picked a single, you generally make a music video to promote the song. The whole process really isn’t my favourite part of what I do, but it’s a necessary evil and within the confines of the process it’s possible to have some fun.
As we were preparing for the release of Poetry of the Deed, the song ‘The Road’ was decided on (by me and Charlie – though he’s a much better judge of these things than me) as the best tune to introduce the world to the next album. For the video, all I knew is that I’d wanted to work with a director called Adam Powell for some time. He’s a busy guy, but this time we finally nailed him down to work on the promo clip. We had several long phone conversations about what direction the video should go in. The song is about movement, travel, touring, the road, so we were naturally discussing a visual interpretation that reflected some of those things. A subtle game of one-upmanship began. Adam suggested a performance video in a number of locations. I suggested that it could be shows in different towns and cities around the UK. Slowly but surely, we started edging towards the cliff, until finally someone blurted out the dreaded words: ‘Why not try and do twenty-four shows in twenty-four hours?’
Once the idea was on the table I knew we had to go with it, but organizing such a stunt, let alone actually doing it, was a daunting task. And as is always the way with me, everything was a bit last-minute – we didn’t have masses of time to plan or shoot the video. A public appeal on my blog got me an awful lot of offers from people to play at house parties, offices, record shops, bars and the like, and after a bit of logistical trickery we had ourselves a route. The plan was to play one show on the hour every hour for twenty-four hours, playing for twenty minutes or so and then travelling to the next location. Everything was in the Greater London area and I managed to put together a schedule that made some vague geographical sense. The team was also set: we had Barbs driving the van, Adam and a friend running the video and my friend Brad Barrett coming along for the ride, shooting little bits for a behind-the-scenes clip. We were starting and finishing at the Flowerpot, the new bar in Camden that the people behind Nambucca had opened up. We were all set.
The experience of playing those shows is one that I’d file under ‘Glad I did it, don’t want to do it again, thanks’. Things started well – the first eight shows or so were a breeze, jetting between house parties across north London full of cool, appreciative people. We were filled with cups of tea and the occasional beer, my voice was holding up and everyone was full of vim and vigour. However, as the night went on our first major error became apparent: the schedule ran from 8 p.m. to 8 p.m., which meant that we’d already been up and about for a full working day before we started. As we reached the early hours it became obvious that this was going to be tough. My friend Pete had jumped onboard in an effort to boost morale. Some of the shows, particularly around the 9 a.m. mark, were pretty bizarre – playing to a handful of people in their bedroom while their parents left for work, that kind of thing. Energy levels went from high, to low, to in between, to weird, to unquantifiable.
The home stretch, from about 5 p.m. onwards, got a little easier, as a kind of kamikaze spirit started to infuse the situation. We realized at one point that we’d missed a show somewhere along the line and needed, with some urgency, to add one more performance. My friend Jenny Hardcore (a photographer who has taken many album-sleeve shots for me) happened to be living near the Flowerpot, so I called her and asked if I and about ten other people could drop round and play a fifteen-minute show in her front room. She was, naturally, a little confused, but said yes and thereby saved the day.
Finally we reached the Flowerpot again, to a full room of well-wishers, many of whom had been at previous stops on the run. Everyone, myself included, was slightly incredulous that we had actually made it and the adrenalin and glow of success enabled me to play a full forty-five-minute set to an awesome crowd of friends and fans. After I finished a shindig of sorts got going and I stayed up for another couple of hours, drinking and partying.
This was a terrible idea as I had only one night to catch up on sleep before I had to head for the airport to get a flight to Helsinki. I was playing a new festival there called Pitkä Kuuma Kesä (PKK). I knew that this was my schedule, but in the delirium of exhaustion the realities of that fact kind of slipped my mind. I got to sleep eventually, but my alarm went off a few hours later and it was then that the full force of tiredness hit me square in the face. The cab journey to the airport passed by like a dream and I think I slept through the flight – in fact, I was surprised that they let me on the damn thing in the first place, so incoherent was my check-in attempt. I was met at the airport in Helsinki by someone from the festival. By that point I could barely remember what my name was, so I stared uncomprehendingly at his welcome sign for a while before twigging that he was looking for me.
The show itself actually went OK, apart from the fact that my voice was a little ragged around the edges. There was an appreciative crowd of people waiting for me to play and when I told everyone where I’d been and what I’d been doing in the past thirty-six hours I think they were a little more forgiving. After the gig I was due to hit a bar to catch up with some old Finnish friends, but when I went up to my hotel room to drop my bag and guitar off I ended up falling asleep, fully clothed and with all the lights on, for a good fourteen hours.
The video stands as a pretty cool testament to that little adventure. I’ve since had half-joking conversations with Adam about ways in which we could top the achievement: the only real suggestion being to try and do twenty-four cities in twenty-four hours, using a helicopter. But I don’t know anyone with a helicopter and, to be honest, I’m happy for that one to stay on the drawing board indefinitely.
SHOW #658
Starland Ballroom, Sayreville, NJ, USA, 7 July 2009
One of the more surreal phone calls that I’ve received in my life happened when I was stopping over at my sister Jo’s house in Colorado in April 2009, just after the end of the run around the USA with Look Mexico. Charlie called me to say that, out of the blue, he’d received a request for me to open up a bunch of outdoor arena shows in America for The Offspring.
The Offspring were one of the punk bands of my youth, just like for a whole generation of kids whose introduction to the scene was through their record Smash and Green Day’s Dookie. Smash is still the biggest-selling independent record of all time and I can sing along with the songs on it in an almost Pavlovian fashion. The prospect of touring with The Offspring in the USA was both exhilarating and daunting. These would be miles and away the biggest American shows for me to date; but I’d be playing solo, completely unknown to large, restive, punk-rock audiences and I really wasn’t sure how things would go down.
I called my friend John Berna (Fake Problem’s tour manager) and arranged for he and I to drive the tour in a hired car. It wasn’t a particularly long run of dates, though it did meander down from Canada and the north-east to southern Florida. The tour began in Canandaigua, upstate New York. John and I ended up staying with a guy called Donny Kutzbach, a promoter from Buffalo who had seen me play in Austin at SXSW that year. He also put on a show for me at his venue, Mohawk Place, on an off day. To complete his hat-trick of kindnesses, as we were pulling out of his driveway and heading for Toronto, he asked if we had somewhere to stay that night. When we said no, he gave us the number of his friend Michael, who dutifully came out to that gig (my first one in Canada) and put us up. Michael and Donny are both part of a group called Postcard From Hell, a network of music fans that began as an Uncle Tupelo appreciation society but that has grown into an organization with a will of its own. I think of them as a musical illuminati and I’ve run into and been kindly treated by their members all over the world.
Playing before The Offspring (and the main support band, Sum 41) was a strange experience. Pretty much no one at the shows knew who I was and my arrival onstage each day was generally greeted with some consternation. In fairness, it was a reasonable reaction to an English guy with an acoustic guitar onstage at an arena punk show. But night on night (or more usually, afternoon on afternoon), I was just about holding my own and making a few new fans here and there. The Offspring guys were all thoroughly welcoming and I was having a good time.
The tour rolled into Sayreville, New Jersey, an army town distinguished by the fact that Jon Bon Jovi grew up there. The Starland is a somewhat dilapidated 2,000-capacity ballroom that sits in the middle of nowhere in a car park. On arrival, I discovered that, while the show had been advertised as being me, Sum 41 and The Offspring, in fact the bill was to be a local competition-winning band, then me, then the headliners. This didn’t bode well. As the crowd rolled up, it became apparent that I might be in for a tough show. Not wanting to be unkind, but the crowd that night was overwhelmingly made up of drunk, tough, south Jersey dudes, who were there to drink and mosh to punk tunes they knew, not to listen to a skinny English guy with an acoustic guitar.
My arrival onstage was not an auspicious start – the simple, stark fact of my not being Sum 41 didn’t go down so well. The acoustic and English nature of my whole act was also, apparently, not what the crowd was looking for. Half a song in, some people in the crowd started chanting ‘USA! USA!’ People were heckling, spitting and throwing empty (and some not-so-empty) drinks vessels at me. The mood was ugly. I’m not one for taking that kind of shit lying down, so I decided to rearrange my set a little and play some quieter, more folky numbers, as well as aiming a few barbed remarks at the flag-waver jocks. ‘So this is what passes for punk rock in Sayreville, is it?’ They didn’t appreciate the question.
By the end of my set things were starting to get decidedly raucous, if not actually homicidal. I made a beeline for my dressing room as soon as I was done, deciding to forego my usual stroll over to the merch table. The promoter came to see me, paid me for my set and then advised that I leave by the back door – probably, like, now. John, my friend Evan (visiting from the UK) and I did just that and headed into Brooklyn to drown our sorrows. None of the rest of the shows was as bad as this, though it was a pretty weird billing all told. That said, in years since I’ve met plenty of people at my own shows whose first experience of what I do was on this run, so some people were definitely paying attention.
I think this is probably the worst reaction I’ve ever had from a crowd. I wanted to include this gig here to point out that this touring life isn’t all roses. I can laugh it off now and play up how fucking punk I am for lasting it out, but the truth is it’s really unpleasant being on the receiving end of that kind of shit and I’m happy it’s not something I’ve had to deal with too often.
SHOW # 664
Titan House, Philadelphia, PA, USA, 12 July 2009
When you’re on a tour of large venues opening up for a band like The Offspring, you quite often have to sign up to something called a radius clause. This is a condition that you won’t play any headline shows of your own within a certain time period and distance of the show that you’re opening. So, for example, because there was a New York City show on this run with The Offspring (at the Roseland Ballroom), I wasn’t allowed to play any other shows in the city for a couple of months before. It’s a way of the headline band making sure that they maximize the crowd-pulling potential of their support acts. I’m really not sure how many people I brought to the show in New York, but I can understand the principle behind the clause. What it means is that, practically speaking, if you want to play a show on an off day on the tour you sometimes have to miss out obvious towns and drive slightly crazy distances to reach places that aren’t off limits.
The other option, of course, is to play a show off the radar; something not at a traditional venue and that doesn’t have tickets for sale in advance, that kind of thing. A house show is perfect. So it was that John and I arranged to stay in Philadelphia on our drive south at a place called Titan House, home of Jon Murphy. Jon used to play for the band Barlights, who I’d shared shows and a van with back in 2007. Initially we were just looking for somewhere to rest our bones between New Hampshire and Baltimore, but once the stop had been agreed, Jon suggested that I could play a set in the house and I readily agreed.
I put the details of the show up on my site and didn’t think much more about it. I wasn’t expecting much, but if we had a small but appreciative crowd then that’d make for a constructive way to spend my evening. Titan House, like all Philly punk houses (of which there are many) was a pretty run-down place in a less-than-salubrious part of town. But everyone was friendly when we arrived, they had a small PA set up for the gig and everything was set to go well. It was hot as hell, East Coast summer weather.
As the afternoon wore into the evening, people started arriving for the show. A lot of people. In fact, after a while it became clear that the little room in which the gig was being held, which basically constituted the entire ground floor of the house, was going to be absolutely rammed full. In order to try and cut down on complaints from the neighbours (and thus visits from the cops), all the doors and windows were shut, with only a pathetically useless ceiling fan as any kind of respite from the monstrous heat. The Menzingers, who at the time were a small local band, though they’ve now gone on to much-deserved, bigger things, opened with a great acoustic set. By the time I fought my way to the front there were probably 150 people in a small-sized living room – wall-to-wall sweating humanity.
I took up my position at the front. John Berna was crouched at my feet leaning back into the shins of the front row of the crowd in a vague attempt to stop people pushing forwards and smothering my playing. The PA speakers were right next to my head and the sound was distorting pretty badly. But right from the get-go the atmosphere was insane. The whole crowd came together and sang the songs at the top of their lungs from the first chord to the last. At one point my guitar strap broke and I ended up with two people holding it at the right height, one at either end, so I could keep playing. I took my shirt off it was so hot and still sweat was pouring off me. I played for about an hour or so, feeling completely at one with the crowd, blown away by the experience.
Every once in a while I play a show that affirms why it is I do this; that reminds me how lucky I am. This is one of the most memorable, most tangibly electric shows that I can think of that I’ve played. Since it happened, videos from the night have been on the internet and the people who were there have talked about it incessantly, spreading the word to the point where it gets mentioned in interviews around the world. I still meet up with people at shows across the East Coast who were there and we talk about it like it was a special, magical evening. Because it was. If I could relive just one evening, just one show, this might well be it.
Afterwards we celebrated, drank till dawn and I slept on a sofa in the corner of the room that had previously been packed with people and strewn with empty beer cans. The rest of the run with The Offspring was cool, but nothing, none of the arena shows, quite lived up to that night in Titan House.
SHOW # 675
Y Not Festival, Pikehall, Derbyshire, UK, 31 July 2009
After the Offspring run, I came home again to resume the usual run of summer festival shows. At this point I was still oscillating between solo shows and full-band shows, but the arrangement was more dictated by finances than anything else. It’s a lot easier and cheaper for a tech and I to do a show than it is to take four extra musicians and the associated equipment. This was slightly frustrating, because from an artistic point of view I wanted to be playing with the full band line-up, but in the absence of a big label pumping tour-support cash into the operation, I had to make do with the resources at hand.
This particular weekend Barbs and I loaded up a car with guitars and drove north from London for a couple of regional festivals – Y Not and Kendal Calling. I had played Y Not before in 2007 and it was a welcome return. The festival started as a guy called Ralph’s birthday party. Ralph, being the proactive type, has grown the event year on year. So what started out as a small shindig featuring friends’ bands, has become a serious, well-run, mid-level UK festival. Situated out in the Derbyshire hills, it still has a great vibe to it, like it’s a secret that everyone there is in on, that the rest of the world hasn’t cottoned on to yet.
Barbs and I arrived at the festival, with Barbs driving our small car carefully around the edges of the muddier patches in the field. We went through the standard festival arrival rigmarole – trying to find some kind of artist entrance or at least a check-in, then trying to find a relevant stage and maybe even someone who knows who you are, why you’re there and what on earth is going on. We succeeded in these various missions without too much trouble, dropped our equipment in a storage area near the stage I was due to play and then considered our options.
Camping at festivals is not my favourite thing in the world if I’m honest – I feel like I did quite enough of that in my late teens and early twenties, thanks. If you throw in having expensive musical equipment and a show to play, it’s really not a great way to get your beauty sleep. So on this occasion Barbs and I were booked into the nearest Travelodge hotel. That, however, was a good fifteen miles away – like I say, this festival is remote. Barbs fancied having a beer or two at the festival and we had quite a lot of time to kill before my show, so we decided to drive back to where we were staying, check in and then get a cab to and from the festival.
We checked in, decompressed a little and then called the taxi number on the card provided by the receptionist. A car driven by a creaky old guy duly arrived, though it did feel like the taxi firm was basically this guy, with his wife working the phone back home. No matter. We had wheels, we were good to go. We told him we were heading for the nearby festival in the hills, which he immediately said he knew and he set out confidently on the picturesque B roads.
I’ve never had the best sense of direction, so the fact that it felt to me like we weren’t heading in the right direction didn’t seem to matter too much. It also felt like we’d been driving for too long after a while, so some gentle enquiries were made as to whether this guy actually knew where we were going.
‘Yup, big ol’ festival, lots of tents, in the hills, I know it,’ he asserted. So we piped down again. A while later he turned off the main road on to a smaller one and then again and again until we were basically driving down a farmyard track. At one point I had to get out and open a gate that was keeping a flock of sheep in the next field. We were driving down an incline into a small valley and as the road finally petered out altogether he pulled up on the side of the road.
‘Just up over that ridge, there’s the festival,’ he said, squinting and pointing to the top of the hill in front of us. It seemed like a dubious proposition to me, but he pretty much kicked us out of the car, took our money and rapidly reversed back the way he’d come and out of our lives. Barbs and I stood in a dell, looking up at the hill and wondering if this time we were finally, well and truly fucked.
We traipsed up to the crest, hoping against hope that the revealed landscape would be dominated by the expanse of tents and parked cars we’d left behind an hour or two before. Alas. On reaching the summit, the achingly beautiful (but festival-free) hills of Derbyshire spread out before us, gently rolling and unending in all directions. Fuck.
After a discussion, some amateur taking of bearings and a fair amount of guesswork, we struck out boldly in what we thought was the right direction, hoping that the next crest, or maybe the one after, would reveal our destination. We had no such luck. We started out calmly checking our watches, seeing that we had many hours before showtime, but after a while the possibility that we might miss my set, wandering haplessly through the countryside, started to become real. When we eventually stumbled across a road we tossed a coin to choose which way to go and hiked for a good few miles until we finally came across a farmhouse, the first proper sign of civilization since our driver had ditched us.
We cautiously knocked on the door, which was opened by a nervous, middle-aged woman, who was understandably a little weirded out by finding two bearded, tattooed men wandering around her front garden. We explained our predicament and she told us her husband would be home shortly and that he knew where the now-near-mythical festival was. He duly arrived and laughed his rural arse off at the two of us. It turns out the cab driver must have driven in pretty much completely the wrong direction and had dumped us like so much dead weight when he realized his mistake. The husband very kindly offered to give us a lift the twenty miles or so back to Y Not, which we gratefully accepted. So it was that Barbs and I, like returning Argonauts, made it back to the festival site, thankfully in time for my set.
The gig was a lot of fun. A great crowd had gathered in the place we’d had so much trouble re-finding. I seem to remember also doing a guest spot with my friends The King Blues that night, in which Itch, their lead singer, encouraged me to try freestyling over a verse of one of their songs (always a terrible idea, my career in hip-hop is clearly a nonstarter). At the end of the night we got a lift back to the Travelodge with someone who definitely knew where they were going, but Barbs had his phone mapping our journey just to make sure.
SHOW # 701
The Yellow Dog Tavern, Winnipeg, MB, Canada, 1 October 2009
I wrapped up the summer of 2009 with a return to the Reading and Leeds festivals, something that was now becoming pleasantly habitual. Immediately afterwards, Poetry of the Deed was released, my first proper record with Epitaph. Their international team immediately kicked into gear and whisked me off around the world. After brief promotional stops in Cologne and Berlin, I was back in North America, meeting up with the Gaslight boys for a tour of the USA and Canada, along with The Loved Ones and Murder By Death.
We started in Denver. I was renting a bunk on Gaslight’s bus, so I got even closer with them and their crew on this tour. It was a pleasure to watch them tear through the material from The ’59 Sound, their second record, which they were promoting at the time, night after night. I also enjoyed getting to know the music and the players of the other bands on the bill, especially Dave Hause of The Loved Ones.
We passed through Los Angeles (where I met Tim Armstrong from Rancid backstage, a big deal for me, and played some in-stores and house shows) and then on up the West Coast. Shows in Portland and Seattle allowed me to guest-list friends from earlier, more down-at-heel tours. We then entered the vastness of western Canada, the first time for me, playing in Vancouver, Edmonton, Calgary (where I did an aftershow in the bar downstairs) and Regina.
We pulled into Winnipeg the day before our scheduled show at the Garrick Centre, meaning that we had a much-needed day off in the city. Winnipeg had long held a fascination for me because of the music of The Weakerthans, a local band who have documented their city beautifully. They also happen to be my favourite band. So I spent a little time in the afternoon scouting out landmarks from the lyrics of John K. Samson and taking cheesy tourist shots.
That night, we found out that another punk-rock tour was in town, starring New Jersey’s The Bouncing Souls (a band I knew and loved from my youth) and Off With Their Heads (a new band to me, but one that I liked). They sent word to our bus that we were all invited to the show and would be on the guest list. However, sometimes on the road if you get a day off the last place you want to be is in a gig venue, back among the bustle and the noise. I decided to politely decline the invitation and spend the night watching DVDs in my bunk on the bus.
Just after 11 p.m., the door to the bus was flung open and an unfamiliar American voice roared down the gangway: ‘Where the fuck is Frank Turner? You English son of a bitch!’
This turned out to be Ryan Young, singer with Off With Their Heads, a man who was a fan of my music and who’d been excited about me seeing his band. When he discovered that my name was not checked off on the guest list, he’d resolved to come and find me and demand some kind of restitution. I was, at this point, in whatever passes for pyjamas on tour (usually just T-shirt and underpants from the day), but nevertheless he dragged me from my repose.
On finding himself holding me up in my underwear, a little sleepy, in the gangway of an unfamiliar bus, I think Ryan realized that his plan lacked an endgame. After some consideration, he decided that we were going to have a drink, dammit. Resigned, I threw on some jeans and followed him out into the cold autumnal air. The nearest drinking establishment was across the road, a small dive bar called The Yellow Dog Tavern, so we decamped over there to get to know each other and take a chunk out of the house whisky supply.
As it turned out, with some kind of grim predictability, there was a tiny stage and PA in the corner of the bar, complete with an old guy playing traditional folk and country tunes on a battered old acoustic. After a few drinks Ryan demanded the stage and the guitar for me, but the old guy (quite understandably) refused to hand over his prized instrument. So before I could say ‘This is my day off …’ Ryan had run back to the bus, grabbed my guitar and brought it back to demand a show. The old guy finished his set and I set up at the corner of the bar, on a stool, with the faintly amused barman feeding me shots after each song that Ryan called out and I played. After a while the Gaslight and Bouncing Souls crew all gathered in the bar as well, so we had a genuine show on our hands.
I finally put my tired reticence behind me and started to enjoy myself. In the end it was a great evening. The owners of the bar couldn’t quite believe that I was also playing with Gaslight across the way the next day and they took my offer of guest-list spots with a fair amount of cynicism. The following night, after my opening slot with Gaslight, they found me at the merch table and conceded that I hadn’t been bullshitting.
Every time I swing back through Winnipeg, I make sure I have a drink at The Yellow Dog.
SHOW # 731
Berbati’s Pan, Portland, OR, USA, 1 November 2009
I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about, and changing my mind about, whether or not what I do for a living can be described as a ‘job’. On the one hand, obviously, I do something I’m passionate about, something I did for much less than a living for a long time, something most of my friends would give their eyeteeth to do. I’m not just working here for the fucking money. I’m also not doing something as meaningful or socially useful as, say, a nurse or a teacher. On the other hand, what I do isn’t exactly easy – a lot of people try to get to this point and fail or can’t take the physical and emotional strain. The amount of time I spend each day doing the fun, vocational part (making music) is much less than I spend travelling, waiting around, doing admin chores and so on. So in the end I suppose I subscribe to the old B. B. King* adage: ‘I play for free; it’s the rest of the shit I get paid for.’ Some days, the rest of the shit can be almost overwhelming.
After the end of the Gaslight tour in North America, I headed home for a very quick turnaround before the official UK tour in support of Poetry. This tour was a real step up for me, moving from the 500-capacity level up to around 1,000 – and sometimes more – people a show. We had Fake Problems and Beans On Toast out as the support acts. It was a solid run around the UK and Ireland, starting in Dublin, and a lot of the shows were starting to sell out before we hit the road.
It was a memorable run. In Glasgow, we crashed the open mic at the Student Union after the show (and got given lifetime honorary membership cards). In Nottingham, at the legendary Rock City, we had a transcendent moment. We’d booked into the big room there for the first time, which holds 1,800 people, but had been expecting to sell it without the balcony, roughly 1,000 tickets. On the day, we arrived to discover that the whole room had sold and there were still people queuing outside in the hope of getting a ticket. That was a real moment of knowing that things were starting to go crazy. We played the Winchester Guildhall – not usually a venue for rock ’n’ roll shows, but the biggest room in the city that was available, so we booked into it and sold the place out. As a band we were playing better and better, coming together with new material and old, while also spending a fair amount of each night staring with barely disguised wonder at the crowd, which seemed to be forever growing, but never losing the feeling of togetherness, of connection, of dedication.
The London show was at Shepherd’s Bush Empire, and it was a special one. Charlie, my manager, and I had jokingly made a deal many years before that if I were ever to sell out the Astoria, he’d do a stage dive during the set (not something usually in his nature). The Astoria had closed, but the capacity at the Empire was the same, so as far as I was concerned the deal still held. All 2,000 tickets for the show had sold. With a little encouragement, he kept up his end of the bargain, leaping into the audience at the triumphant end of ‘Photosynthesis’, performed with everyone from the tour on stage at the same time. The atmosphere was electric.
After the show we celebrated and I went back to Isabel’s place to sleep. I had a grand total of one day off before I had to trudge my weary way back to Heathrow and get on a plane to the USA, to rejoin Chuck Ragan and the Revival Tour, in Portland, Oregon. The scheduling was pretty insane, a tight turnaround not conducive to my sanity or health, but I can’t really place the blame on anyone else. I’ve always pushed my team – Joanna, Charlie and the rest – to get as much stuff in the diary as possible, to fill the gaps and deal with the consequences later. They have usually been the voice of restraint – not the way things habitually work in the music business.
This particular journey was very, very tough for me. I was absolutely not recovered from the UK tour (and arguably the Gaslight run before that) as I squeezed into my economy-class seat for the twelve-hour flight. I made it to Portland late and at night and crashed out in a cheap hotel room, completely exhausted, before predictably waking up a few hours later, frazzled by jet lag. I spent a weird and lonely day wandering around Portland, waiting for the venue to open and the rest of the tour to arrive in town.
When they finally did, it was lovely to see Chuck and friends, and to meet Austin Lucas, Audra Mae, Jim Ward and others, and indeed Casey Cress, the tour manager, a man who will feature heavily in the rest of this story. Even so, I was drained and fighting a losing battle against time zones. No matter how many times I do long-haul flights, there simply isn’t a shortcut or trick to beat jet lag (regardless of what I may have said in a song), it’s just a bitch. Somehow or other I ended up being given the last slot of the night, which meant I was due onstage for my solo performance at around 11.30 p.m. I vividly remember sitting on my own in the dressing room, clutching a pillar and a beer, desperately trying not to shut my eyes in case I fell asleep on the spot. I can’t actually remember much of my set, it went by in an unsteady blur, albeit with a little help from my Revival friends. I collapsed into my bunk on the tour bus straight afterwards and slept like the dead.
That was one of the days when it felt more like a job.
SHOW # 745
Juanita’s Cantina, Little Rock, AR, USA, 15 November 2009
My stint on the Revival Tour in 2008 was brief; this run was a much more substantial chunk of shows. We started in Portland, in the north-west of the USA, swept down the coast to San Diego, before trekking through the desert via Vegas and Texas, across the South and finishing up in Florida. With the exception of a brief pit stop in upstate California right at the start of the run, we had no days off at all. There were a lot of players on the bus, which, with the Revival format of an opening ensemble followed by individual sets, made for a long and booze-soaked show every night. At various points the run featured: me, Chuck, Audra Mae, Jim Ward (lately of At the Drive-In and Sparta), Austin Lucas, the Anderson Family Bluegrass Band and Jon Snodgrass and Chad Price of Drag the River. I made new friends, learned new songs night after night and was inspired to write new ones of my own during the day, putting together the first foundations of what would become England Keep My Bones.
I also covered a lot of new ground, in particular the American South. A friendly return to Birmingham, Alabama set the tone, but I loved being in Arkansas, Louisiana, Georgia and Tennessee. I have a real soft spot for that part of the world and the people there – it seems to me that they’re so beaten down by the negative aspects of their recent history that they end up being more open, more relaxed, less uptight than other people (something I’ve found to be the case with people from Northern Ireland). They also have the best manners in the world – and that’s a fact.
In all honesty, not every show on the run was the best organized or attended. Chuck’s enthusiasm for the road occasionally outpaces his logistical planning. There were a few nights where the crowd was a little sparse, to say the least, if not actually outnumbered by the touring party. One such was Little Rock, Arkansas. Everyone – the venue staff and the crowd – was lovely, but at the end of the day you can’t make fifteen people fill a venue built for 400. Thankfully, we’re professionals and if thinking about Black Flag taught us anything, it’s that you should throw the same passion and energy into a show for one person as for a thousand. By the end of the night we had a circle of chairs on the floor of the venue, with everyone sat around and hanging out. At one point Jim poured a shot of whisky for every single person in the room from one bottle. In the end it was one of the best gigs on the whole tour.
A few days later, in an alleyway behind the venue in Orlando, Florida, Jon Snodgrass and I decided to immortalize our time in Arkansas with a song, which we threw together in about ten minutes. ‘Big Rock in Little Rock’ is a fun song. It also gave rise to the idea of the two of us writing together, which gave the world ‘Buddies’, which we recorded in Colorado the following summer.
SHOW # 770
Union Chapel, London, UK, 19 December 2009
After the end of the Revival Tour, I hopped back across the Atlantic to rejoin the band and head out on my first proper headline tour in Europe. Matt, Ben, Nigel, Tarrant and I loaded up in a van, along with Graham, Barbs and Sarah for three weeks’ driving and playing across the Continent, relying mainly on the Gaslight shows I’d done in February to get the word out. They were small gigs but for the most part they were packed out, which felt great, like I was making some proper headway outside the safety of the UK, as well as being a welcome confidence booster after some of the sparser shows in America.
Organizationally, many things were shifting around this time. One part of it had to do with tour management and budgeting. In the past I’d done it all myself, as more often than not I was the only person on the road. Now that we had a full band and crew, I was keen to hand off that responsibility to Graham – it’s pretty unusual, not to mention unworkable, to have the main person in the band running the tour logistics as well. Having the intention to do something, however, isn’t the same as actually doing it and I found it hard to relinquish control at first. This led to something of a fuck-up on this tour.
I’d sort of assumed someone else was minding the budget, and so had Graham. I was also lulled into a false sense of security by the fact that the UK full-band tour in October had made a fair amount of cash. Basically, oversight was lacking. I remember realizing that something was awry and running a quick provisional tour budget in a hotel room in Sweden. To my horror I worked out that we were on course to lose a serious amount of money. Touring with a band and crew is expensive and even factoring in merch sales, it’s hard to break even when you’re playing to 200 people a night across hundreds of European miles.
After a mild heart attack and a panic-stations phone call with Charlie, we resigned ourselves to the facts – after all, we were now on the road, so there wasn’t much to be done about it. It all came out in the wash in the end and this tour set a pattern for my business plans that, to some extent, endures today. The money I make touring in the UK (and these days Germany and some other parts of Europe) mostly goes towards funding my ability to take the full band and crew show on the road in other parts of the world. I’m not trying to garner sympathy – I make a decent living out of what I do now – but it’s not quite as simple as some people think. Playing big shows in the UK doesn’t automatically mean I’m rolling in cash. I’d be better off if I didn’t bother touring quite a few of the places that I go to, but where’s the fun in that?
The actual shows were a blast – small sweaty rooms in Germany and further afield packed to the rafters with people who knew the words. We also had the amazing Jaakko & Jay on the road with us, a perfectly bonkers Finnish folk-punk duo who kept everyone entertained with their bizarre broken English between-song banter. I had a mad and exhausting dash back to Manchester for a radio show in the middle of the run that nearly wiped me out and the whole touring party apart from me and Matt was laid low by a vicious bout of food poisoning in Vienna. The gig the next day in Graz went ahead as a duo show, but even then Matt played piano with a bucket next to him in case of disaster. We finished up by the calming waters of Lake Geneva in Lausanne, before winding our weary way back to the UK.
I spent a bunch of time in between tours in 2006 and 2007 hanging out in Paris, because I was dating a French girl at the time. We’d long since broken up, but I had (and still have) a fair few Parisian punk friends from that time and from the tour I did with Cham. So I’d arranged to jump ship from the touring party on the way home and play a solo show in Paris on a boat called La Péniche Alternat. Gigging in France is a logistical pain in the arse thanks to their arcane tax laws, which meant I could only really afford to play a solo show, rather than getting the whole band in town. It was also a chance for me to catch up with friends. The plan was that I’d play, stay at Cham’s place and then get the Eurostar back to London to rejoin the others for a special end-of-year show at Union Chapel. UC is a beautiful old church in Islington where they have acoustic shows and we had a special set of alternative versions, covers, rarities and guest spots planned. The show was sold out.
The plan was going well – the Paris show was great and Cham and I relived our memories from 2006 by tearing across the city late into the night. Waking up slowly in the grey light of the following day was when the plan started to fall apart. Overnight there had been a massive blizzard, blanketing the city in a few feet of snow. Over coffee and painkillers for breakfast, it wandered across my mind that getting home might be problematic. Cham checked online and discovered that the whole cross-Channel train system had ground to a halt, all trains cancelled (and one caught in the tunnel itself) with no prospect of things getting back to normal. Oh shit.
Tour-managing (or disaster-response, call it what you will) instincts built up from years on the road kicked in, with a healthy dose of adrenalin and panic. Cham and I set up a battle station in his front room, complete with laptops, coffee and cigarettes. How to get one Englishman and a guitar from Paris to London before a show-time of 9 p.m., on one of the last travel days before Christmas, when the weather had paralysed everything? Secretly, moments like this make me feel alive. We tried everything. All train activity was dead. Flights seemed to be booked out and no one was certain if they were going to take off. We even, at one point, called a rich friend of Charlie’s who might have had access to a helicopter (disappointingly, that option was ruled out, not least by the eye-watering cost).
Finally we managed to buy a ticket for a flight – I’m pretty sure we bought the last seat going that day – for over £500, which put the whole tour even further into the red. My troubles weren’t over yet, however. On attempting to get to the airport I discovered that the French railway workers, lovingly living up to their stereotype, were on strike. Back to Cham’s and into his car for a fraught drive to Charles de Gaulle. Having finally checked in, I settled into a moment of luxury in the departure lounge (the ticket I got was business class out of necessity; this was the first time I ever saw that side of the fence), only to be told that the weather was possibly going to ground my flight.
Throughout the whole ordeal I had, of course, been in regular phone contact with both Charlie and Graham, keeping them updated on my progress (or lack of it) and trying to work out if the show that night was going to go ahead. One of the additional problems was that all the special extra material we had planned for the show was as yet unrehearsed. The plan had been for us all to gather at the venue at 2 p.m. and have an extra-long sound check to make sure that the collaborations with Emily Barker, Adam Killip (of The Tailors) and others would go smoothly. That obviously wasn’t going to happen now, so even if I did make it, what, precisely, would we be playing?
After sitting on the runway for some time in a stationary plane, we finally took off for London. Following a problem-free flight, it felt good to at last be in the country where I was meant to be playing. However, in keeping with the spirit of the day, they saw fit to leave us sat on that runway too, for an hour or so. I finally escaped the airport with my guitar at about 8 p.m. An hour until the show; this would be a race against the clock. I took a train into Paddington Station, where I met Charlie in his car. He drove from there to Islington like a man possessed – I actually thought we were going to die in the Euston underpass – and I ran in through the back door of the venue, greeted by cheers and high-fives from the band and crew, about five minutes after our scheduled stage time.
I took a breath, had a drink and handed Barbs my guitar to be tuned. I then sat down with the assembled musicians and the set list, as well as a thick marker pen, to try and work out what we could play in the time remaining. Some judicious editing and overconfident estimations of people’s ability to wing it through various new arrangements later, we finally took the stage, to a massive round of applause from a patient and hopeful audience, who’d been kept posted about my whole adventure.
As is often the case, victory was snatched from the jaws of defeat. The show wasn’t the carefully constructed, complex exploration of my songs that I’d been planning on; but the given circumstances, the exhaustion and panic combined with the relief and the camaraderie of everyone in the room, and indeed the beautifully resonant room itself, all combined to make for a magical evening of music. We finished with an under-rehearsed romp through Wham!’s ‘Last Christmas’ with all our friends on stage with us, thankful just to have made it to the end of the show and indeed to the end of a crazy year.