SHOW # 781
Emo’s, Austin, TX, USA, 8 February 2010
Sometime in 2009, something changed. At the start of the year I was still spending time rolling around on trains, playing weird, chaotic shows. By the end of the year, we’d sold out Shepherd’s Bush Empire and I had a tour bus and a proper touring band and crew (in the UK at least). That’s a huge oversimplification, of course, but there was definitely a gear change in there somewhere. And I still didn’t feel like I’d played that many shows; time flies when you’re having fun, I suppose. I get asked a lot in interviews about when the change was – what was it that lifted me up into the next league? I always reply that it wasn’t just one thing, it’s been a series of little steps up – and that’s the truth. Thinking back over everything that’s happened for the purposes of writing this book, I’m not any clearer on what precisely switched. In the end I’m actually quite happy about that, it perhaps proves my glib soundbite true – there wasn’t just one thing that happened, it was cumulative, a wave, a momentum.
We headed into 2010 and things moved on again. While retrospective categorization is, by design, teleological, I think it’s fair to say that 2010 marked the start of the second phase of my career. A phase that is marked by longer, more gruelling but more regimented touring, especially in the USA. In some ways it’s a less chaotic, more coherent phase, with less sleeping on the floor, waking up and playing in strange places and so on. But it also meant I was taking my music to a much, much wider audience, forging an unbreakable unit with the band and moving into new territory creatively. The new phase was emphatically marked by a new tour, which opened with a baptism of, well, maybe not fire, but certainly hot south-western sunshine.
I can’t now remember how it was that we got offered the tour with Flogging Molly in the USA. It probably had something to do with Epitaph, something to do with the fine work of Caitlin (our then US agent) and hopefully some musical appreciation of my work, but I’ve asked a few people and checked some emails and the exact reasoning has been lost in time. Regardless, we got offered the main support slot for Flogging Molly (or the FloMos as we came to call them) at the start of 2010, playing full band, with a four-piece from Kansas City called the Architects opening. I’d done a few American tours before this, but this was the first time taking the band out with me.
I accepted the tour immediately – it was too good an opportunity to turn down – but I was also a little nervous about it. Taking five musicians with backline (amps, drums, guitars and so on) and a van and trailer on the road is a considerably more difficult thing to do than just borrowing a seat or a bunk from the headline band as a solo artist. We’d need equipment, transport, an American tour manager; probably start making enough money from shows and merch together to be liable for American taxes. It was a big undertaking and one that looked set to lose me a lot of money. But big picture it was clearly worth it as it would put us in front of a whole new audience over the pond, so Charlie and I set about making the numbers work.
Our first task was hiring an American to help out. I’d met Casey Cress on the second Revival Tour. Casey was hired as tour manager and sound guy for the run and a long and fruitful touring relationship was born. Together we managed to scrape together a van (borrowed from our friend Craig Jenkins in Santa Barbara, owner of the Velvet Jones club and future crew member) and a backline (mostly borrowed from Epitaph Records). Flights were booked, merch was ordered and the tour was set to go.
Before we got started, I spent a little time jetting around North America on my own doing some promotional work for Poetry of the Deed. I made a return to Canada for some shows and then went to Los Angeles for more (including a great house show in Riverside, about sixty miles east of LA). Having pleased the label bods, it was time to get on the road for the tour proper.
There was a slight logistical hurdle to be surmounted first. The van, Casey and the backline were in Santa Barbara, California. The first show with Flogging Molly was in Dallas, Texas. We had a warm-up headline show booked in Austin the night before so that the band and I could get to grips with our unfamiliar equipment and blow out the cobwebs built up over the festive-season break. A quick glance at a map will show you that Santa Barbara and Austin are, to put it mildly, fucking miles away from each other. But it was a journey that had to be made. So Casey and I loaded up at his house and set out on a journey that we conservatively estimated to consist of twenty-four hours’ solid driving. (Our show in Austin was in thirty-six hours’ time.) We planned a break in El Paso at Jim Ward’s house for some sleep. I, as you might remember, don’t drive, so I was on duty to play DJ and keep Casey awake and generally entertained. I don’t think I’d ever even thought about driving that far in one go before and I was a little nervous about it.
The journey was unlike anything I’d done before. The first eight hours just flew by, but at the first pit stop we realized we were barely out of California. We left in the morning and planned to be with Jim by the evening, but as these things always go, we were running behind. In the end we pulled into his yard at about 1 a.m. Jim greeted us sleepily, accepted the gift we’d bought (a 3-D picture of a tiger from a gas station) and put us to bed. We slept for a few hours then got back on the road – we had to get to Austin Airport in time to pick up Ben, Nigel, Matt and Tarrant and then get to the venue for a sound check.
It was a race against time in the end. We bundled the exhausted band into the van after pulling up a few hours behind schedule, then hightailed it over to the venue – Emo’s, a classic Austin punk venue that was, alas, closed down not long afterwards. We spent a frantic hour unpacking boxes, tuning drums, restringing guitars, counting T-shirts and generally trying to put a tour together. We just about succeeded and played our first ever full-band US show in front of a couple of hundred enthusiastic Texans. It was panicked, ramshackle, exhilarating and a taste of the tour to come.
SHOW # 807
Egyptian Room, Indianapolis, IN, USA, 8 March 2010
The Flogging Molly tour was a crucial experience for me and the guys in the band (we still hadn’t decided on them being called The Sleeping Souls at this stage). It was a gruelling, draining, testing experience and there were times when we came close to not surviving as a unit. The fact that we did bonded us together. I often think back to that run and if we made it through that, we can make it through pretty much anything.
The pressures of the run were endless. The drives were long and boring and we were cramped together in the back of our Econoline van (Flogging Molly were in a bus), making infrequent pit stops at faceless gas stations to buy shitty food. When Subway sandwiches become miles and away the healthiest option and you’re drinking beer and whisky every night before sleeping on the floor of a crowded motel room, you have to watch your health. Extra pressure came from financial and logistical factors. I didn’t have enough money to pay the guys in the band very much, yet the tour was still costing me a fortune. We didn’t have any crew to help out with loading in and out, to mind the stage or to sell merch – I was doing that part myself, counting in and out every day, selling from when doors opened right up until our set and then again until the end of the night. The whole thing was suicidally draining.
Of course, I don’t want to complain too much about life on the road or about self-inflicted problems. We were touring the USA, playing to thousands of people a night and winning a lot of them over. We were making new friends, getting drunk, kissing pretty girls (those of us who were single, which I temporarily was – the road and relationships are not exactly conducive) and seeing parts of the world we’d only ever read about in books or seen in movies. America has a romance for rock ’n’ roll kids from England that never quite wears off.
We sweated through Texas and the South; Matt got crazy drunk in Florida, put an ‘Out of order’ sign on the bathroom to keep it for himself and then got upset that the bathroom was out of order. We saw alligator farms in South Carolina and played sweaty punk-rock headline shows in Gainesville (Florida) and Richmond (Virginia) on Flogging Molly’s off days to make ends meet (days off cost money). We drove through unbelievable blizzards in the north-east, argued with in-house merch sellers in New York and played our first ever show in Boston. We triumphantly headlined Asbury Lanes in New Jersey, the site of my first really exciting US show. I played a basement show in Pittsburgh on a day off and got really sick afterwards. It was never boring.
Towards the end of the run, everyone was starting to get pretty worn down by the whole thing. Due to the lurgy I’d picked up in Pennsylvania we had to cancel one of the shows to give my battered voice time to recover, so we spent a pretty miserable day laid up in some faceless highway motel. The following day we had a fill headline show booked at a dive bar called Mac’s in Lansing, Michigan, a place where I’d played a solo show before with Fake Problems. After some hacking and coughing in the morning, I decided the show could go ahead – I had little option, financially – and we loaded in for the gig.
The gig was packed out, sweaty, fun and the Michigan crowd were forgiving of my rasping vocals, lending their voices where they could. Being a dive bar kind of show, there wasn’t much in the way of a dressing room, so the promoter had given us tokens for the bar instead of a case of beers. This is where the trouble started.
The stress of living in a van with five other people, driving long distances, eating terrible food and being broke often decompresses through the medium of alcohol, but it’s a dangerous situation at the end of a long tour. Tarrant was wiped out after the show but managed to make it to the bar with a fistful of tokens – pretty much all of them in fact – and exchanged them for almost an entire bottle’s worth of vodka, which he put away efficiently while I sold merch and equipment was packed and loaded into the trailer. He was a little miffed to be told that it was time to drive the ten minutes back to the motel, but grabbed a few cans of beer for the journey.
In the state of Michigan they are very strict about drink-driving laws and even one open container of alcohol in a moving vehicle can result in a DUI for the driver. When Casey heard the telltale hiss of a can opening, he suspected, correctly, that Tarrant was continuing to drink. He immediately shouted for him to toss the beer out of the window, which Tarrant obstinately refused to do. A brief argument ensued, in which I made the fatal decision of weighing in on Casey’s side. The beer was eventually tossed, but Tarrant’s tour-strained mood quietly continued to blacken as we rolled up to the motel.
Our sleeping arrangement for the tour was to have two rooms – the most we could afford – with three people in each. The Oxford contingent – Ben, Tarrant and Nigel – took one, while Matt, Casey and I were in the other. Each night two people would get a bed (or share one) and one person would take the floor. That night I was in bed, in my pants and shirt, reading a book, while Matt slept next to me and Casey was on the floor. Suddenly the door to our room burst open and Tarrant stormed in, quaking with drunken rage.
‘Fuck you, you fucking cunt, you think I need your money, the peanuts you pay to put up with this shit, you bastard?’ he shouted in my face. Tarrant can be intimidating when he’s riled up, but I did my best to just sit there and let the outpouring of frustration wash over me. Which it did, for some time – a spit-flecked tirade, all the tension of the tour spilling out over me and my bedspread.
He concluded his rant with a threat to head to the airport in the morning. ‘I quit. Fuck you!’ he shouted and marched out of the door. Two seconds later he burst back in, but apparently had forgotten what his postscript point was, so just shouted the (now immortal in our touring crew) line:
‘And another thing … uh … Fuck you!’
And with that he was gone, the door slapping uselessly against its broken lock in his wake. We managed to get the door shut and then I spent an awful night tossing and turning, sleep out of reach thanks to my sickness, my tour stress and my anger and worry about everything Tarrant had said. Come 6 a.m. I gave up trying to sleep and walked to a nearby diner to try to gather my head and think about what I was going to say and do. If Tarrant was leaving the tour, we were a man down with a week of shows left to go; in the long run I would’ve lost an amazing bass player and a good friend. I was very shaken up.
Van call (that is, the time the van is set to leave for the next show) was set for 9 a.m. I wandered nervously and reluctantly back over to the motel for that time, dreading what might await me. In the end I found Tarrant by the van on his own, his hoodie pulled up over his head and the worst hangover face and eyes I’ve ever seen. He coolly looked me up and down, and then whispered:
‘I forgive you.’
Like that the ice was broken. A whole slew of tension was released and the others all set about mocking both him and me for our falling-out as we drove on to Indianapolis to rejoin the Flogging Molly tour. Tarrant felt like shit all day, unsurprisingly. Word went around the whole touring camp about what had happened the night before and when Tarrant arrived on stage for our sound check he found a crowd of ten or more people around his bass rig, each holding a bass guitar, awaiting the open auditions.
The rest of the tour slipped by in a blur and before we knew it we were heading back to the UK for the next tour. We survived this run by the skin of our teeth, but in the end I feel like we came out of it stronger, tighter, more determined than ever to succeed.
SHOW # 820
Roundhouse, London, UK, 24 March 2010
Our journeys back to the UK were fragmented. Casey and I dropped the band off in Chicago (in the midst of an apocalyptic storm) to fly home a few days early in order to get the UK tour prepared. The two runs, American and British, had been booked with no daylight in between them. It’s a common feature of life on tour – often the logistics are organized by someone sat in an office looking at flight schedules, which show that, on paper, everything is doable. When you’re on the ground, it all gets a bit more hectic and there was a certain amount of preparation that needed doing. So it was that Casey and I rolled on to Milwaukee together, reprising the start of the tour, while Matt, Nigel, Tarrant and Ben flew to Newcastle to put together the show.
This was our first ‘full production tour’ of the UK – full production being a run where you take trucks with your own PA system, your own lights, sometimes even your own stage, often catering supplies and a lot more crew. You essentially become a self-contained unit. I remember the first time I saw one in action – Million Dead were the opening act on that run – and thinking it an extravagant waste, given that a lot of the venues had staging and lighting already. Now that I’m a little older and wiser, I know that often it’s more economical to take your own system with you – and it’s certainly much more reliable – and it makes for a better show. Bottom line, a full production tour was a much larger undertaking than just jumping in the back of a van. The fact that I’d reached the stage of being able to do this at all was both exciting and daunting. Usually a tour like this has a good week of prep work from the band and crew. The crew had stepped up, the band had flown in a few days early and, as per usual, I’d arrived on the morning of the first show, jet-lagged to hell but ready.
We started in Newcastle and wound our way around the main cities of the island for just over a week of sold-out shows. In tow we had Chuck Ragan and Crazy Arm, a band from Plymouth who’d recently stolen my heart and signed to Xtra Mile Recordings. As mentioned, we had our own sound system, our own lights and a light show to go with it. We had bigger backstages, bigger crowds, official tour merchandise – the whole nine yards. The crowds were great, the shows packed out and in the middle of it all, I felt a touch uncomfortable.
Reconciling the increasing levels of success I’ve enjoyed with the basic character of what I do has never been easy. It’s still something that I spend a fair amount of time thinking about and trying to get right. There are two conflicting imperatives: on the one hand, I want to be successful and I want everyone who is into my music to be able to come to shows and enjoy them; on the other, I don’t want to lose that sense of connection, of community, the egalitarianism between the stage and the floor that made me enjoy this and find it interesting in the first place. It’s a difficult line to walk and I certainly have not always got it right. This tour is an example of that, for me.
It’s important to stress that I’m not laying this on anyone in the crew, or the band, or indeed the crowd. The fault is entirely mine. Somewhere in the middle of the full production, I lost sight of the importance of the connection with the crowd. There were moments at these shows when I felt like I was starting to lose something that mattered, that I was starting to become just like the other acts at this level who flounce off in cars after the shows back to fancy hotels, who never meaningfully converse with the people standing in front of them, who regard their audience as so many interchangeable heads. It freaked me out quite a bit.
The London show was at the Roundhouse – a famous, 3,000-capacity venue in Camden. Somehow I felt disconnected from the show, even though it was rammed to the rafters, my friends and family were in attendance and on the surface everything went well. I almost feel bad writing this down, because I don’t want to detract from the retrospective enjoyment of anyone who was there – by all accounts the show was a good one. But it set my mind whirring as to how to overcome this problem in the future. I’m not sure it had been so starkly presented to me before – standing on stage in front of thousands of people feeling like I wasn’t quite part of the proceedings.
I’m pleased to say that I think that it’s a problem I’ve largely overcome since this show, though it’s not always been plain sailing. Maybe this gig was a wake-up call of sorts, a reminder that I needed to keep my eye on the ball if I was going to continue down this road and maintain my interest and integrity. I think what I’m doing is working.
SHOW # 835
Coachella Festival, Indio, CA, USA, 17 April 2010
After the UK tour was done, we’d made enough profit to be able to tour in Europe without totally breaking the bank. So we headed out on a short run around the northern half of the Continent, playing slightly bigger shows, feeling like we were making headway. After that, the next item on the agenda was a whistle-stop visit to the West Coast of the USA for a few shows around the Coachella Festival.
Coachella is a massive festival in the desert in southern California. It’s one that people who work in the music industry generally regard as Important, with a capital I. In practice that means it’s usually something of a pain in the arse, with a pretty hipstery crowd, but there’s a significant media presence and a lot of glad-handing opportunities, so it is (allegedly) worth the effort. I’ve done a fair amount of stuff like this over the years and it does serve a purpose, but it can be pretty depressing all the same.
We flew out to San Francisco to meet Casey, the van and our American backline, and to play a warm-up headline show at the Rickshaw Stop (the show was opened, incidentally, by Franz Nicolay, who we’ll meet again later). I remember sitting on the metal stairs that led up to the dressing room feeling utterly desperate in my jet-lag fug, wondering if I’d be able to keep my eyes open until showtime, let alone do an actual show. In the end we made it – but barely. After that I flew north for a solo stop in Vancouver while the others went south to Los Angeles. We reunited the following day and prepared for our sojourn in the desert.
If there’s one thing the British do well, it’s festivals. I feel like it’s a cultural innovation we can happily lay claim to and, unlike cricket and football, we’re still the best at it. Our American cousins, bless them, are still getting to grips with the format and despite their best efforts, there’s always something slightly off about the whole thing. Coachella is a case in point. Everyone is very good-looking; everything is very clean and tidy. The festival site is carpeted with fake grass – I actually saw some people walking around in bare feet – and there are misting guns all over the place that make you feel cool, damp and terribly LA. In other words, it’s totally against the grain of what I, personally, feel a festival should be – dirty, chaotic, exciting, unpredictable and weird. Imagine walking around barefoot at Glastonbury – you’d probably do yourself a mischief, and a good thing too. I’ll take that over AstroTurf any day of the week.
So we arrived at the site in the burning desert heat, but with confusingly cool feet, and wandered aimlessly around, getting our bearings. We were the first band on the smallest stage, which in itself can be a little demoralizing when you’ve flown 6,000 miles to be there. In the event the show was great fun, with a decent-sized crowd coming out of the woodwork for our set. Afterwards I pressed some media flesh and we got ‘gifted’ some free sunglasses and jeans (Tarrant immediately cut his off into shorts in front of the horrified ‘gifting’ rep). We then had some time to hang around, as we were staying in a condo nearby.
The whole thing felt too sterile, too safe, too predictable for my taste. So it was that Casey and I decided to set about making things more interesting. We had a ferret around the assorted people we knew in the guest area and managed to locate an afterparty that seemed like more fun than standing in the designated drinking area watching Muse’s light show. Off we went into the night. From here on in the details get pretty hazy, but I do remember seeing in the dawn with Casey, both of us in swimming shorts sat on a green of a golf course with a bottle of gin, talking absolute bollocks. When the van, with the rest of the band rested and sober, came to pick up the sleepless pair of idiots, we declared ourselves winners of the festival and passed out on the journey back into the city.
SHOW # 843
Brisbane Hotel, Hobart, Tasmania, 1 May 2010
Australia. Down Under. Land of soap operas, convicts, retirees, emigrant surfers and other clichés. Home of two of the original members of Million Dead. About as far away from where I come from as it’s possible to get while remaining in the terrestrial atmosphere. Not a place I ever thought I’d get to, least of all through the medium of playing guitar and singing.
And yet there I was, in the departure lounge at LAX, preparing to board a plane to Brisbane with Chuck Ragan, Tim Barry, Ben Nichols and other assorted touring people (Todd Beene, Jon Gaunt, Jill Ragan et al.). We were headed Down Under for the first Australian Revival Tour. I was beyond flattered to have been asked to go by Chuck – although it was partly a case of him putting his money where his mouth was. He’d spent many hours on the road telling me that this was the promised land of touring and now he was going to prove it, apparently.
Regardless of which way you come at the place, flying to Australia is going to fuck up your body clock. I was still a little stuck on UK time, having only been in California for a week, so by the time we landed in Brisbane I was thoroughly bamboozled. We were met at the airport by the wonderful Mel Kraljevic – she would be our tour manager, merch person and general guide for the next week or so. My first taste of the truth of Chuck’s assertion was the hotel in Brisbane; it was, by the standards of hotels I’ve stayed in on the road, luxurious. We had a day to acclimatize (not nearly enough, but nice all the same), so Ben and I headed to the bar to settle in.
We were booked in for eight shows and, as usual in a country I’d never visited before, I had no real idea what to expect. I imagined that no one would know who I was. After a surreal day wandering around the hotel desperately trying to convince myself that my watch wasn’t lying, we loaded into the van to drive over to the venue. Given the collaborative nature of the Revival Tour, the first show is always a little ramshackle, so we spent a long sound check trying to remember each other’s songs and learn new ones in time for the show. It was all made more difficult by the dazed state we were in. By the time the doors opened we had a set of sorts together and we’d also found out that the show was pretty much sold out, which was a pleasant surprise for me. I wandered into the street to find some food before things kicked off and got waylaid by a group of guys coming to the show. They excitedly showed me their tattoos of some of my lyrics and told me how much they were looking forward to the show. I almost thought I was being pranked – how on earth did these people on the other side of the world know who I was?
In the end, a lot of people were excited to see me and I had an infinitesimally small nugget of Beatlemania as I garnered a sing-along or two at my first ever Australian show. The rest of the run passed in much the same way, something of a dream, to be on the other side of the world meeting people who’d been listening to my records for a long while. It gave me an undying love of that continent and I’ve been back as much as the road has allowed since. We rolled through Sydney, Newcastle, Perth and Adelaide. It meant early morning starts and flights every day but the schedule didn’t get to me, I was so into the place. We played two shows in Melbourne, including one at the legendary Arthouse (the CBGB of Australia).
The maddest show of the run was easily the one in Hobart, Tasmania. Hobart is a cute but remote little town, a place where a lot of tours don’t go but that nevertheless has a sizeable community of music fans waiting for shows. Places like that often make for magical evenings and that was very much the case here. We flew in in the morning and settled briefly into our hotel, before heading over to the venue for sound check. There was a small bunch of kids hanging around as we got there, waiting for the show, and they were friendly enough, so we said hello and hung out while strings were changed and mics were arranged. They ended up singing along with pretty much every song we played in check, which was cool but a little bit weird.
The crowd filled out for showtime and we had ourselves a time on stage – a classic Revival show, old songs and new, playing together and alone, sinking whiskies and losing ourselves in songs. The audience as a whole was great, though our friends from earlier were a notably hardcore presence down at the front. We finished, as ever, with Chuck’s anthem ‘Revival Road’, before retiring en masse to the bar to drink the night away. Our new friends joined us, but they had, during the course of the show, managed to hit a new level of weirdness.
They were now dressed in Mexican wrestling masks and declaring loudly that they were ‘The Suicide Crew’. Apparently membership of said crew involved two things: undying loyalty and dedication to the musicians who’d just played the show; and a willingness to do some seriously dangerous and stupid shit. A girl I was talking to at the bar pierced her own cheek with a pin badge apropos of pretty much nothing halfway through a conversation, while Chuck stood bemused as kids smashed heavy duty shot glasses on their foreheads after downing the contents. Even Ben Nichols, ladies’ man par excellence, was seen backing away in some confusion and heading for the hotel earlier than he normally would.
I come from a small town myself so I don’t want to indulge in too many clichés, but yes, the people of Hobart were, shall we say, intense.
SHOW # 853
D-22, Beijing, China, 15 May 2010
As if touring in Australia and New Zealand (where I’d done a couple of shows) hadn’t been wild enough, my itinerary now took me from Auckland to Hong Kong, for my first shows in Asia. The idea had come about thanks to Justin Sweeting, a Hong Kong native who’d spent time in Oxford and had become a good friend of Ben, Tarrant and Nigel’s. A live-music enthusiast, he’d suggested that I could play a show in Hong Kong on my way back to Europe. Not only that, he’d then put me in touch with a company called S-Plit Promotions, a booking agency in mainland China run by a Scotsman (Archie) and an American (Nathaniel). After much slightly shady back-and-forth emailing, we ended up with a run of shows starting in Hong Kong and finishing in Beijing.
Being born and raised in the West, where I have done the vast majority of my touring, it’s debatable whether or not the music I make and the themes I address can really translate into other cultural and social zones. That’s a debate I was keen to have, so I was excited about the prospect of the shows, if also a little nervous about them. All things considered, however, I just felt lucky to be able to go to new places, all on the back of me playing my acoustic guitar.
The Hong Kong leg of the trip was actually pretty easy. Justin met me from the airport and I spent a few days falling desperately in love with the place. Since the British officially left in 1997, the city has acquired its own identity and pride – it’s no longer just a playground for arsehole rich kids on holiday from Chelsea – it has its own distinct feel and culture, a mix of European and Chinese. I stayed in a fancy hotel and got taken to weird parties and generally soaked in the post-colonial atmosphere. The place reminded me of a Graham Greene novel somehow – everyone seemed to be a character with a story to tell. The show, at Rockschool, was good fun if a little amateur – the live-music scene was very much a new thing there, especially on the underground level. But there were a couple of hundred people in the room, ex-pats rubbing shoulders with Taiwanese punks, American military personnel and plenty of locals. A lot of people knew words to my songs, which remains a thing of wonder for me, regardless of where in the world I’m playing.
The day after the Hong Kong show, Justin put me on a train towards the Chinese border, where the tracks stop. I was then due to walk across into Shenzhen and meet Ciga, my tour manager and guide for the next ten days, on the other side. I was a little concerned about the border crossing – I had a visa in my passport, but my name was down as Francis rather than Frank, I was on my own, and those situations make me nervous at the best of times. Thankfully, I successfully sweated my way through the checkpoint (partly because of the humidity) and made it smoothly into China.
I had some reservations about playing in the country. Nominally, the place is still a Communist state and the regime that massacred the students in Tiananmen Square in 1989 (to say nothing of the famines and depravity of earlier years) remains in power. That said, I’m interested in music as a force for engagement and I suspect that the social liberalization of Chinese youth will have unavoidable long-term implications for the country and its government, for the better. I also think it’s important to differentiate between people and their state – I don’t want to be associated with many of the things ‘my’ government has done in my lifetime. Archie, Nathaniel and indeed Ciga told me that the tour would be fun, interesting and worthwhile, both for me and for the Chinese who decided to come to the shows.
The first show was in Shenzhen – a startlingly new city built in twenty years or so from a fishing village, the result of Deng Xiaoping’s economic liberalization policies in the 1980s. That gig was a little weird – I was more like the piano player in the corner of the restaurant entertaining the diners than a performing headline act. I was also shattered from the journey and taking time to adjust to the Chinese food, so I went to bed early feeling a little out of sorts.
Thankfully everything picked up from there. The show in Guangzhou was great and we had a few days off there to explore and for me to get to know Ciga, who I found fascinating. A vivacious, entrepreneurial and sassy woman around the same age as me, she was a fashion blogger and live-music promoter with a love of Western style that was in no way culturally slavish – she makes everything her own. Discussing politics with her was wild – she was proud to live in a Communist country but had never heard of Marx, condemned Mao as a murderer but was unaware that anything of note had happened in Tiananmen Square in 1989 and so on. I felt like I was having my eyes opened to a whole new side of human existence. Plus she’s loads of fun to go drinking with.
We took a frankly insane internal flight to Wuhan – the plane would be flattered by the description ‘junk bucket’ and it seemed like the pilot was new to the concept of ‘landing’ – where we played a proper punk-style venue, an old air-raid bunker converted into a grafitti-covered squat. The promoter, Dostav, was from Kathmandu originally and talked up a wild plan for me to cross the border for a show there – a plan that has never yet come to fruition. We took an incomprehensibly packed train to Wuxi, where I played another dinner-style show and then made our way to Ciga’s home city, Shanghai. There I played to a sold-out house at Yuyintang and got to meet Archie. Archie is a remarkable soul, a mad Scotsman living in China, fighting to bring live music to the locals. We had quite the night out before and after the show, which itself was one of my favourites that I’ve ever played – locals, ex-pats, a birthday boy, sing-alongs, new songs and old. Life affirmed in all its glory.
I bade Ciga a fond farewell the following morning and flew north to Beijing for the last stop on my whirlwind Antipodean-Asian trip. In the capital I was met by my friend Qiang. Qiang was in a band with me when I was at school with Chris Lucas and Ben Dawson, but he disappeared after a while. His father was a Chinese diplomat but he had an Australian passport and so was able to travel more freely. I hadn’t seen him in a decade (Chris, Ben and I had gone on to form Kneejerk and with Ben I progressed to Million Dead) but he’d surfaced when he heard about the shows, as he was a friend of Nathaniel’s, the other half of S-Plit Promotions (with Archie). We had a fond reunion, during which he told me mad stories about time in Chinese jails and other unprintable things. We met Nathaniel, had a final excellent Chinese meal and got ready for the show.
The venue for the evening was another punker bunker called D-22. There were a bunch of other Chinese bands playing on the bill with me, ranging from Libertines-esque punk bands to weird folk-rock fiddle-based hybrids. I had a little time to reflect on the whole scene. Live music of any kind is such a recently tolerated phenomenon for young Chinese, everything is so new for them and so there is an electric atmosphere in the air. It’s like New York in the mid-1970s combined with Elvis on TV and Beatlemania all at the same time. But it’s also weirdly iconoclastic – it’s not based around any one band, it’s a decentralized, organic thing, that takes much from Western music but makes it defiantly its own. It was a privilege to witness, in a way. It also made me think hard about the music that I make, the cultural world that I inhabit – rock ’n’ roll is my life, my passion, but it’s also culturally ubiquitous, blaring from restaurants and endlessly co-opted by advertising campaigns. Somehow, standing in the middle of all those Chinese kids who were so brimming with life and enthusiasm and passion for this new-found voice, I almost felt ashamed at taking the music I love for granted.
Over the course of this run of shows, a new song had been taking shape in my head, an attempt to right that sense of dereliction of duty. ‘I Still Believe’ got its first, very tentative outing at the Shanghai show. After a hasty rewrite or two on the plane to Beijing I played it in its (mostly) final form at D-22 and knew instantly that I had a serious song on my hands, one that said something strident and important and personal all at once. I flew back to the UK feeling confident about the next record.
I wrote another song on that run. During the layover at Sydney Airport, heading for Hong Kong, I was so battered by time zones and lack of sleep that I made a weird phone call to Isabel, who I was separated from at the time. I probably shouldn’t have made it and I had no idea what time it was for either of us when I did, but it rekindled something. In the hotel room in Guangzhou I demoed a rough outline of a song called ‘The Way I Tend to Be’. At the time it felt too raw, too personal, so it got shelved for quite some time, until I felt like it had a home on a record and I was ready to share it. But it was born there, in China.
SHOW # 862
Sublime, Tel Aviv, Israel, 4 June 2010
My summer of exotic touring locations wasn’t quite over. I had one more place to visit, and a controversial one at that. Many years ago, my friend Nadav worked in London at a record store, but after a while he moved back to his home country, Israel. He’s a punk guy and a live-music promoter. We had vaguely stayed in touch and earlier in the year he asked me if I’d be interested in playing some shows in Israel. As per usual, I said yes, keen to get to new places, meet new people and experience new things. I was aware, of course, that playing in Israel was not a choice without some ramifications, but I had thought them through and it seemed like the right thing to do.
The temperature of the political debate was raised enormously right before my trip was due to happen, thanks to the Israeli government forces choosing to storm an aid flotilla bound for Gaza. At the time there was a huge international outcry and a lot of other artists, including Elvis Costello, cancelled upcoming shows in the country. I think a lot of people looked to me to do the same thing. In the event, I thought even harder about my choices and stuck to my guns.
I’ve rehearsed this argument to a degree in talking about China, but once again, I feel it’s important to make a distinction between a people and their government. In the case of Israel, with the complications of Jewish identity and the lurking spectre of anti-Semitism, it seems even more important to me to be very careful who you condemn for a political action and why. The events around the flotilla did not change my initial decision to go and play. I’d been asked by a punk collective – about the most anti-establishment group you could find in the country – to go play shows that were in no way endorsed or sponsored by the state. Bands have kept coming to the UK despite the Iraq War (which, as I’ve already written, I proudly marched against in 2003) and I’m glad they have. To change my schedule and not visit Israel in this instance seemed to me to be, at best, grandstanding. Israel is a small country and no international touring acts make their full living there – boycotting the place is kind of cheap, in other words. The same logic would dictate boycotting tours of the USA as a result of the actions of their government, but bands don’t do that because that’s where they make their money. That seems pretty lame to me, so I stuck to my principles to go and see the place for myself, meet the people and try to understand what was happening.
At the same time it seemed important to me to see if I could find the time and the means to play in the West Bank. I have some friends who are activists who have been there and I have heard of shows there as well. My Israeli friends had no problem with me following that lead, though they were sceptical about whether or not I’d be successful. In the event, I managed to email a promoter there, but he told me that as I was playing shows in Israel, I was not welcome to play in the West Bank as well. I completely understood and accepted his point, but at the same time my plans and obligations had already been made so I decided to go ahead with the original itinerary.
Flying to Israel from London is unlike any other journey I’ve ever taken. The security vetting starts before you even check in for the flight, which you have to do in a totally separate part of Heathrow Airport. They fired questions at me in Arabic (I think) and grilled me on my reasons for going, trying to ascertain if I had ulterior motives for my visit. At one point they were even suggesting that they might have to dismantle my guitar to check for bombs – thankfully that didn’t actually happen. It was an intense experience all in all, but it gave me an impression of how seriously they take their security.
My time in Israel was absolutely fascinating. Nadav picked me up from the airport and showed me around for a few days. I played shows in Haifa and Tel Aviv and spent some time hanging out, as well as visiting Jerusalem. The entire time I kept my eyes open and my mouth mostly shut, trying to learn as much as I could. It was pretty crazy seeing things from the ground. The people I was hanging out with, Israeli punks, are fucking serious. It’s not an easy social choice to make, as it is in the UK, and everyone has had to serve in the Israel Defence Forces to some extent. They were all pretty radically opposed to their own government and had some crazy, crazy stories to tell. The shows themselves had an electric atmosphere. Because of the recent events and cancellations, everyone was very effusive in their thanks to me for coming to play and for making the distinction between them and their leaders.
Tel Aviv in particular was a wonderful show for me. Again, people knew some of the words and they listened intently to the rest of it. I tried out new songs, as the material for my next album was starting to come together. We had sing-alongs, we smoked weed after the show, talked politics and I revelled in the Mediterranean atmosphere and (to be honest) the sublimely beautiful women. In the end I left feeling like I knew even less about the world than I did before I went, though perhaps I was a little more informed about that part of the world. I haven’t had a chance to go back as of yet but it is something I would very much like to do.
SHOW # 869
Southside Festival, Neuhausen ob Eck, Germany, 20 June 2010
Playing live, over and above radio play or press coverage, has been the main motor driving my career forwards. Within that, headline shows are a kind of consolidation, but the main work of spreading the word happens at festivals and with support slots for larger bands. The summer of 2010 saw that lesson writ large in what remains one of the most logistically insane few days of my life.
Hurricane and Southside are two large German festivals, kind of like Reading and Leeds in the UK. They are massive, rock-oriented affairs, with a revolving bill between the two events, one in the north of the country and one in the south. We’d played the year before but had been invited back for a bigger and better slot in 2010. We got ready to drive out there in a bus with the band and our live crew. So far, so simple. Then we got the phone call.
Joanna, my agent, had been doing some serious behind-the-scenes work while I was away in Australasia and China. While I was on the train to Shanghai, she called me and told me the news. Green Day had asked me to open their two UK summer shows, one at the Lancashire County Cricket Ground and one at Wembley Stadium. In total we’d be playing to 150,000 people at two shows. It was an amazing opportunity, a fantastic piece of news and I jumped up and punched the air, terrifying my fellow train passengers.
There was, however, one small, well, actually quite major, logistical snag. The two shows fell on either side of the Hurricane Festival. That meant we’d have to play in Manchester, drive to northern Germany, then drive back to London and finally back again to Germany for Southside in Baden-Württemberg. Or else we’d have to look at flying, with our equipment. Otherwise we’d have to choose between the two opportunities.
Never one to turn down a challenge, I decided that we couldn’t possibly cancel the German festivals – we’d already been announced, after all. And there was no way that I was turning down the Green Day shows. So it was that we set about trying to work out how to do all the shows without anyone dying. The main credit here has to go to Graham, as tour manager, who put together a schedule that really might have killed lesser bands.
The first stop was easy – at least as far as driving schedules go. We trekked up to Manchester and loaded into the largest venue we’d ever been anywhere near, the Lancashire County Cricket Ground, an open space set to hold around 60,000 Green Day fans. We were playing first, before Joan Jett and the headliners. There was a crazy amount of production, endless tour buses, frantic crew members shouting at us for being in the wrong place, fluorescent taped lines on the floor explaining that things would be exploding on one or other side of said line at some point. It was all quite overwhelming. Our backstage area was a box in the stands and we were hermetically sealed off from meeting Green Day – we might as well have been at a different gig.
That said, their crew were nothing but helpful to us, showing us where to be, what to do when and helping us to get our equipment in and out for the show. Once we were set up and completed sound check, we retired to the front balcony of our box, overlooking the empty field, and waited for the gates to open. As they did, a veritable sea of humanity flooded across the grass up to the barrier and I remember being genuinely intimidated by the scale of the occasion. Our set time rolled around and there were an awful lot of people waiting out front, mostly dressed in Green Day T-shirts and making a point of looking thoroughly apathetic about any opening bands that might be standing between them and their heroes.
The set went … OK. In all honesty I was very nervous and didn’t really settle into a rhythm until about halfway through the gig. I don’t usually get nervous unless I’m in an unfamiliar setting – and this was very much one of those. My sense of tempo goes very awry when I’m out of my comfort zone and I suspect I played the songs too fast. I noticed at one point that the guys from Green Day were watching the show from the wings, which gave my confidence a boost. That, however, was quickly shot down by a prime piece of onstage idiocy from me. There was a little ramp running from the centre of the stage out into the audience. It was clearly part of the headline show, but no one had told me I wasn’t allowed out there. As we played ‘Photosynthesis’ to finish our set, I decided to stride boldly down the ramp towards the crowd during the solo section. Alas, we were not at a stage where we could afford wireless connections for our guitars, so I was tethered by a long guitar lead plugged into my tuner pedal at my microphone centre stage. As I walked down on to the ramp, the lead neatly and efficiently unplugged itself, leaving me holding a guitar not making any amplified sound in front of 60,000 people, most of whom were still deciding whether or not to give me and my band the time of day. Not, perhaps, my finest hour.
After the show we had time to relax, calm down and watch the other bands. Joan Jett & the Blackhearts were great and we met them afterwards – lovely people all. Green Day’s show was a revelation of how to work a massive crowd. I think most musicians who watch other bands play are secretly taking notes on the stagecraft and I was certainly learning a lot about how to engage and connect with that many people all at the same time. Once they were done, with the smoke and reverberations from the pyrotechnics ringing in our ears, we boarded our tour bus and headed south, towards Germany.
We had a whole travel day in which to make it to Scheeßel in northern Germany, so by the standards of the weekend it was an easy ride. We drove down to Dover, boarded the ferry and arrived in good time on the Friday morning at the festival site, seventeen or so hours after setting off. We had band, crew and a host of drivers aboard – restrictions on the amount of time any one person can spend driving a bus in Europe being such that we needed at least three to complete our mission. Hurricane Festival went off without a hitch. It was a fun show and almost relaxing after the pressure of the Manchester one. It was once we were done there that the real madness began.
We finished our set and band and crew as one packed our equipment down as fast as possible for the return journey to London. We had to be at Wembley Stadium the following lunchtime to load in and get ready for the second Green Day show. We drove hell for leather, made the ferry and arrived in the northwest of the capital in good enough time. Wembley stadium is pretty much the biggest gig in the country – 90,000 people were set to come and watch the show that night. Despite the fact that it’s a new stadium, it’s also kind of where Queen played in the 1980s, which is a huge deal for me. We were excited and nervous, but the fact that we had Manchester under our belts made it all a little easier to handle.
Sound check went fine and we then hunkered down in our dressing room deep in the bowels of the stadium to await stage time. As is standard practice, just before we were due to go on, Barbs, our guitar tech, wandered on to the stage to run a line check with Graham at the sound desk. That essentially just means playing each instrument briefly to check that everything is still plugged into the place where it should be. Line checking in front of a restless stadium crowd is a weird job. On this occasion Barbs was busy doing his job and didn’t see that the crowd were lackadaisically knocking a beachball around the floor of the venue. The ball rolled on to the stage behind him and when he noticed it he casually kicked it to the side of the stage to get it out of his way. The assembled bored masses booed in unison, thinking him a spoilsport. When he returned to the dressing room we asked him how everything was looking, he told us the crowd was hostile. The tension ratcheted up again.
In the event the Wembley show was fine. Actually, scratch that ludicrous understatement – it was an amazing experience; to play that stage to that many people. It helped my career no end, it was a massive tick on my bucket list, it was an honour and a privilege. Unfortunately it was not one we had much time to savour. Once we were offstage it was time for another manic pack-down of our equipment, back on to the bus (after a very quick Wembley tattoo for me backstage and a quick hello with the Green Day guys in a backstage corridor) and off towards Germany, yet again.
By this time, the people working in the canteen on the ferry had started recognizing us and gave us a friendly, if slightly bemused, hello as we collapsed once more into the uncomfortable plastic seating. The drive from Calais down to Neuhausen ob Eck, home of the Southside Festival, is considerably longer than the one to Hurricane and all the accumulated time on the tour bus – close to fifty hours by now – was starting to take its toll on everyone’s mood and morale. This was compounded, on our eventual arrival at the festival, by the fact that the weather had taken a turn for the frightful and the whole site was ankle-deep in mud. In all the excitement of the Green Day shows, no one had really thought to bring any suitable footwear.
We dragged our exhausted selves on to the stage for the last show of the weekend. As ever in these situations, the mere fact of being onstage in front of a willing crowd always pulls the last reserves of energy out of me and the actual gig was great. Once we were done, however, we collectively collapsed in a heap in the dressing room. We had utterly spent all the possible driving hours that we had, so we were legally bound to sit tight at the festival for at least twelve hours. It so happened that Biffy Clyro were in a similar situation with their tour-bus driver (though for slightly less insane reasons). So there we were, two happy but totally drained bands, old friends reunited by an enforced sojourn in a backstage with nothing to do but drink Jägermeister and beer. I cannot tell you how extreme the carnage got that night. Literally, I can’t tell you. I blacked out after about half an hour in a room with the Scots. The final journey back to the UK was pretty awful as a result.
SHOW # 879
2000trees Festival, Withington, near Cheltenham, UK, 16 July 2010
In the midst of the madness that summer – China, Israel, Wembley, Tennessee (for the Bonnaroo Festival, where I broke more strings than I didn’t and basically did a spoken-word set), Ireland, Glastonbury, Finland and more – there was a lovely moment of respite. I’ve already written about the time I played at the first 2000trees Festival back in 2008 and what a great experience it was. That summer festival organiser James Scarlett asked me to return to play again, but this time for me and the band to headline the main stage. This was the first time I’d ever been asked to headline a festival, but it was one I felt extremely comfortable at, so it was a great fit. James also let me help pick the bill for the show, so I had a lot of friends on site.
I spent the rain-tinged afternoon wandering around the site and ended up guesting on perhaps one too many sets. Still, it was great to play with Emily Barker and Chris T-T, to beatbox for Beans On Toast and so on. The evening rolled around, the machine creaked into gear and we had a fantastic set, just over an hour of sing-alongs, dancing and joy. I remember coming offstage and feeling like I was at home; but also like I had, perhaps, graduated in some way to a higher level. I felt comfortable headlining the show. This feeling was immediately followed by a fear that I was becoming too big for my boots, losing my grip on reality. But in the end I think it’s possible to strike a balance. It would be disingenuous to constantly shrink like a violet away from the obvious fact of my success. But I hope I can handle it in a way that remains true to the personality and character that I started out with. In the end it’s not for me to judge, but on this occasion, as ‘The Ballad of Me and My Friends’, a song written to be played in empty bars, rang out over a few thousand people in a field, I felt like I was getting something right.
SHOW # 886
Calgary Folk Music Festival, Calgary, Canada, 25 July 2010
I’ve written about Ian Dury giving the world his unholy trinity – sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll. Obviously, his tongue was firmly in his cheek, but a lot of people have taken it more seriously and that end of the industry I work in has always made me feel a little uncomfortable. The thing that really gets me is the exclusivity, the clique; the idea that there is a secret club, a rarified caste of models and musicians, who are allowed not only to enjoy these devious pleasures, but also to avoid any consequences of their actions while doing so. It’s a huge cultural façade that simply disguises bad manners as far as I can see and I don’t want to be part of that cliché.
Having said all of that, you can take the three elements individually and find good things to say about them – I like rock ’n’ roll music, I’ve had fun taking drugs in my time and who doesn’t like getting laid? On a few occasions in my life I’ve had a party that captures all of these things in a beautifully crazy way, without damaging or hurting or excluding anyone, and I’ve lived to tell a happy tale afterwards. One is the Calgary Folk Music Festival in 2010.
Not long after 2000trees, I got on a plane to Calgary. I’d been through once before on the tour with Gaslight Anthem in 2009. On that occasion I’d played my regular set, then at the merch table I’d met a guy called Jey who said he’d come to see me and had missed my show. After a bit of negotiating, we cleared a space in a bar downstairs from the main venue and I played a fun second set for Jey and his friends, among whom I soon counted myself. The Canadian Folk Music Festival scene is well-established and can be a lot of fun, but it’s usually quite expensive, quite serious and involves quite a lot of chins getting stroked. When I’d announced this weekend of shows (you generally have one main set and a bunch of workshops over the weekend), Jey had got in touch. He didn’t have the money to get to the festival, and anyhow I was the only act he wanted to catch, so he asked if I’d be up for a house show. Of course, I said yes.
I met up with Casey in the airport after a long flight. We were doing the weekend as a duo, him working as sound guy and tour manager and general partner in crime. You get well looked after at the folk festivals and we were pleased to check into a pretty nice hotel in the centre of the city. We had the first evening off to acclimatize, which was spent in the predictable battle against jet lag, sat at the bar drinking beers and trying to pretend we weren’t feeling tired. I woke up early the next morning and spent a few hours wandering around the city waiting for Casey to join the living. Eventually we headed over to the festival and got set up for the show. Everything went smoothly – I played a forty-five-minute solo set to a polite and appreciative audience, perhaps swinging my song choices more in the traditional direction. It was a beautiful summer’s evening in Canada and all was well with the world.
Once we were done with the main set, I hung out and said hello to a few people for a while, leaving Casey to contact Jey and figure out the second half of our evening. We got the address, jumped in a taxi and headed into the oncoming night and the suburbs. The party was due to happen, for reasons that now escape me, at a friend of Jey’s house. We arrived in good time, said hello to old friends and new and settled in to wait a while for the full contingent of the audience to show up. Beers and jokes were cracked in equal measure.
After a time, and before I’d played my set, Jey nervously told me that someone had provided some weed for me and Casey. I’ve never been much of a weed smoker, so while I was grateful, I was also a little confused as I hadn’t asked for the supplies to be provided. After some enquiries I worked out that the locals were a little nervous about having an itinerant English musician and his tour manager showing up and weren’t sure whether we’d be totally satisfied with just beer and whisky. I laughed heartily, gave Jey a hug, told him to chill out and declined the weed. I was then asked if I wanted to get hold of anything else; something stronger perhaps. I hesitated, considering the matter, but in the end decided to just let it lie and let the evening take its natural course.
The guitar came out and I ended up playing for a good couple of hours. I have a soft spot for shows like this – conversational, collaborative, unplanned, nothing so crass as a set list, just making it up as I go. There were probably forty people there, some of I’d met the year before, some were new to me. I slightly got the impression that Jey had invited all of his female friends, perhaps for the same reason that he’d provided the weed. Regardless, it was a lot of fun and eventually I decided to put the guitar away and just enjoy the party, to stop trying to be the focus of attention and let things take their course.
And take their course they certainly did. By the end of my set I was a few beers and a few more whiskies down, as was Casey. My memory gets a little hazy around now, but at some point someone else arrived with some different party supplies; it turns out my hesitation in the kitchen had been liberally interpreted. Since it had arrived, it seemed rude not to get involved, so I set about sharing the wealth with the assembled company. Everything sped up, everyone got loose and, well, let’s just say it was a wild evening for everyone involved. Once dawn rolled around, the surviving partygoers were laid up in the garden, damp with the dew and I was strumming soft country songs on my guitar and wondering if we’d ever get to sleep.
A cab eventually arrived and took Casey and I back to the hotel for a few hours’ recuperation before I was due back at the festival for some workshop shows. The site felt grey and grimy to my exhausted eyes and part of me longed to be back playing another house show or, better yet, sleeping.
Once the dust settled on this episode I was able to look back and laugh pretty hard. Jey is a great guy, we are friends to this day, and I still gently rib him about his party nerves. We certainly did tick off all three of Ian Dury’s boxes. The Californian and the Englishman taught some Calgary kids how to enjoy themselves that night.
SHOW # 904
Area 4 Festival, Lüdinghausen, Germany, 21 August 2010
I spent the rest of the summer of 2010 on aeroplanes, or so it seems to me. After Calgary I flew back to the UK for a couple of days to attend the Kerrang! Awards, where I was given a gong for my ‘spirit of independence’, which was nice. Almost immediately I was back over the Atlantic playing a festival in Minneapolis (where I met Koo Koo Kanga Roo, one of my favourite live bands), before heading to Montreal for the Osheaga Festival. I spent a magical evening there swapping war stories with my old Revival comrade Tim Barry on the edge of a lake as the sun went down. Next up was a short run of headline shows on the East Coast with the band. We were also accompanied by the wonderful singer William Elliott Whitmore, who opened the shows with heart and character unlike any I’d seen before or since. These shows were, at least in theory, a warm-up (and financial crutch) for an appearance at the Lollapalooza festival in Chicago – a show at midday in the rain that was witnessed by approximately fifty people.
Tarrant, Ben, Matt and Nigel headed home and I went off to visit my older sister in Colorado. I also found the time to meet up with Jon Snodgrass and write and record an album in twenty-four hours, which was later released as Buddies. I also snuck in a show at Jon’s bar in Fort Collins, Surfside 7, before dragging my weary bones over to Ottawa for another folk-festival weekend with Casey. Once that was done I gratefully settled into a cramped economy seat for my final journey across the pond that summer. We were due to do a short run of festivals around Europe before finishing up at Reading and Leeds, our fourth appearance in a row.
It had been an exhausting summer. The number of shows on my calendar was not significantly higher than it had been in previous years, but the geographical range had increased exponentially and the promotional schedule was keeping pace. I was also a year older, predictably enough, and it was all beginning to take something of a toll on my constitution. I had yet to learn fully about taking care of myself on the road with that kind of schedule – eating better, drinking less and getting early nights. So there were days when my mood and my voice could be a little off.
Area 4 is a perfectly pleasant, mid-level rock festival in northwestern Germany. We had a slot in the middle of the bill on the Saturday, all standard-issue stuff. But I was a little out of sorts on the day – my voice was strained and scratchy and I was generally not in the best of moods. The show went OK – we had forty minutes or so, as I remember. Festival changeovers between bands can be brutally short, which often means that the onstage sound isn’t particularly clear; that in turn can lead to singers blowing their voices out as they strain to be heard. Towards the end of our set I was increasingly frustrated by not being able to hear myself (despite the best efforts of Johnny, our monitor engineer) and by the fact that I was starting to sound more like a honking angry goose than a professional singer.
As we kicked into ‘Photosynthesis’, our reliable set closer for many years, I was looking forward to the show being over so I could retire to my bunk and just sleep off the fatigue, the sore throat, the bad mood. Ben ripped out his solo on his electric mandolin and we then brought everything right down, as usual, for me to introduce the band to the crowd. As I did so, I noticed that people in the crowd were starting to sit down on the floor. It was just a few at first, but by the time I’d got round everyone and called out Nigel’s name, almost the entire audience was seated. I had no idea what was going on, but the first thought that entered my tired brain was that this was some kind of protest. The next band were due onstage in about fifteen minutes and I thought that maybe their fans had arrived early, en masse, and were encouraging us to hurry up and fuck off. That didn’t exactly do wonders for my mood and my usually effervescent speech about community that preceded the final denouement of the song and the set was noticeably colder that day.
In the event, when Nigel brought the drums back in and we kicked into the finale, the whole crowd jumped as one on to their feet and started dancing like people possessed. I was so surprised by this spontaneous, self-organized piece of crowd participation that I pretty much totally forgot the words to the last section of the song. No matter. They were screaming them back at me. It turns out that the whole thing was a display of enthusiasm and loyalty, performed in an inimitable German style. I stumbled down the ramp after the gig, sweating hard in the summer heat, hoarse, confused but ultimately bowled over by the warmth of the reception we had been afforded. Since then the whole ‘sit down jump up’ thing has become almost standard issue during that song at my shows; I’ve taught the technique to many a crowd across the world. But it will forever remain a German innovation. Danke schön!
SHOW # 921
Meskalina, Poznań, Poland, 3 October 2010
The summer finished off with the Reading and Leeds festivals again, as was becoming customary. We played to a huge crowd on the second stage and my feelings of establishment as an artist came on apace, though not without their attendant doubts, as per usual. That triumphant weekend was followed by a quick early-autumn trip back to the USA for some showcase solo shows with Casey and a small (and slightly weird) festival in the bustling metropolis of DeKalb, Illinois, where I was lucky enough to catch up with the guys and gal from Murder By Death.
On my return, the band and I headed into the studio in north London with Tristan Ivemy, the friend with whom I’d recorded early demos and who had mixed Love Ire & Song. Ideas for the next full album were slowly coalescing, but I had the idea of doing an EP first. This was partly to mirror the Campfire Punkrock EP back in the early days and partly to give me, the band and Tristan a trial run at working together. We hammered out five songs in a short period of time, including my new song written in China, ‘I Still Believe’. I left them to be mixed and set off for Germany for a run of solo shows.
Over there, things were bubbling nicely. Graham, Barbs, Sarah and I headed out in a people carrier, which had just enough room to carry all of us, the equipment (such as it was – a pair of acoustic guitars) and the merchandise. It felt liberating to be cruising the autobahns in something other than a van or a bus and we made good time between the gigs. The run was set up around a festival in Hamburg on the Reeperbahn (the famously debauched red-light district where the Beatles cut their teeth), after which we were set to swing south and then east, catching some fairly obscure towns, before ending up in Berlin.
The run was great. Travelling in a smaller group with less technical baggage usually feels more like a holiday than the full-production, full-crew, full-band runs that I was starting to get used to. Hamburg was fun. In Trier we had a welcome return to the ExHaus – a venue I’d played with Polar Bear Club on the Gaslight tour more than a year before – a weird, gutted, old building that’s now covered in graffiti and run by punks, but gives the impression that it was once used for something grander, more imperial. In Karlsruhe I tried out a new song I’d been working on about my hometown, Winchester, called ‘Wessex Boy’. It had originally had a totally different musical arrangement that hadn’t been working out for me. A chance stumble on a simple but catchy descending melody turned it around. It was a strange place to try out a song about a small city in southern England, but it went over well and I even got people singing along with the end section. A promising sign.
Erfurt was a different experience. This was one of my first shows in the former East Germany and the ravages of half a century of economic madness are still clearly visible in the landscape, architecture and the looks on people’s faces. The show was a weird one – maybe 100 people in an upstairs bar. A group of cantankerous English guys were kind of ruining things for everyone by being aggressive drunks, picking fights and pawing at the local women. I was geared up for a confrontation, but discovered after the show that they’d just returned from Afghanistan, where their unit had sustained an almost unbearably high casualty rate. That gave me some pause for thought and some sympathy, so in the end I left them be.
The Berlin show was at a fancy, plush venue called Roter Salon, where I played to a room that was full, but half-stocked by industry types, which never makes for the best of atmospheres. After we were done, Sarah and Graham loaded the car and prepared to head back west and home. Meanwhile Barbs and I had some post-show drinks before heading to a hotel near the train station, our faces turned to the east.
I’d played in Berlin a handful of times prior to this show and at each one I had met, in the post-show throng of signing and photographs, a guy called Maciej. Maciej is from Poznań in Poland and had travelled by train west across the border on each occasion to catch the gig. I’d always been amazed by his dedication and willingness to travel. I studied Central and Eastern European history at university and had attempted to maintain an amateur interest in the subject, yet had never been to Poland. So I was intrigued. After discussing this a few times, both in person and on email, Maciej had offered to put together a show for me in his town, at the local music bar Meskalina. It had worked out that, if only Barbs and I were to travel, we could take the train after the Berlin show, play the bar, stay the night and fly back to England the following morning.
The early-morning train journey was blighted by hangovers and bad weather. I was also filled with a sense of foreboding. The history of the movement of people, trains, arms and more across that part of the world is long and depressing. The level of economic development seemed to drop with each passing mile as well, the roads getting narrower and falling into a state of disrepair, with abandoned vehicles and machinery by the side of the tracks.
When we arrived in Poznań we were met by Maciej and his girlfriend Natalie. Almost immediately my earlier reservations about Poland melted away; I actually felt a little bad about them. The centre of the city is beautiful and has been completely restored to its former glories after the destruction of the war. Everyone we met was helpful, friendly and enthusiastic and, dare I say it, there was a positive, almost entrepreneurial spirit to the country. We walked down to the bar and met Benek, the mad proprietor, whose excitement for the show was in direct negative correlation with his ability to speak comprehensible English (not that it stopped him from trying). We checked into a hotel, had a wander around to see the sights, attempted to learn a few words of Polish and ate some local food.
The show was a delight and gave me an everlasting love for this small city in Poland. There was a great crowd in, appreciative, attentive and not shy of getting involved. I was, as ever, concerned about the language barrier, but, as ever, I shouldn’t have been. My ragged attempts to speak Polish were greeted with friendly laughter (really, it’s the fucking hardest language to speak I know of), but people sang along with the songs and by the end of the show people were literally dancing on the tables and the bar. Benek got insanely drunk on vodka and a variety of other spirits I couldn’t identify, even when he was making me take shots with him onstage. After the gig I had to speak to him about payment for the show. He took me into a small cupboard and cried with happiness and appreciation (at least I think he did, like I say, his English wasn’t great) while pushing handfuls of euros and Polish currency into my pockets and down my shirt. A generous man.
Barbs and I did not get enough sleep that night. Why would you? When you’re in a bar in Poland surrounded by friendly locals plying you with booze? The journey to the airport and the flight home was a painful blur, but a well-earned one.
SHOW # 956
Jannus Landing, St Petersburg, FL, USA, 12 November 2010
My second major stint on the road in the USA with the full band took place in the second half of 2010 in the fall, to use the American term – mostly opening for Social Distortion. That was something I was pretty excited about – White Light, White Heat, White Trash was one of the first punk albums I ever bought. Apparently frontman Mike Ness’s son turned him on to my stuff and he became a fan. He then discovered we were on the same record label (Epitaph) and offered me the tour.
The Flogging Molly run earlier in the year had been pretty tough on all of us, so this time around we wanted a slightly more comfortable mode of transport. We ended up with a vehicle called the Bandwagon – essentially a box truck converted into a semi-tour bus. It had a handful of bunks, a small lounge and even a little shower at the back, which didn’t see much use on account of the small size of the attached water tank. We had Casey with us, as ever, but we also had our friend Craig Jenkins, from Santa Barbara’s Velvet Jones club, onboard as a driver and extra pair of hands. All this was easier, logistically, than the previous American run, but it was still pretty rough and ready. In particular, the suspension on the Bandwagon left a lot to be desired and there were many nights where sleep was impossible, bouncing around in our bunks in the back of the truck.
The run opened with a slot at the Austin City Limits Festival in Texas. We had a mid-afternoon slot and played a slightly jet-lagged set to a medium-sized and appreciative crowd. From there we tore across the inescapable void that is West Texas, heading for Albuquerque, New Mexico. We arrived the night before our show and some of us may have got a little worse for wear in the local bars. The show the next night – a headline fill-show-cum-warm-up – was at a bar appropriately called Low Spirits. The turnout was minuscule and my voice was a train wreck. Not perhaps my fondest memory from the road.
The next day we drove to Salt Lake City to meet up with Social Distortion and begin the tour proper. The venue we were playing was a bizarre emporium that looked like the Brighton Dome – all faux-oriental towers – situated in the middle of the desert, by the end of the actual Great Salt Lake. We spent the early afternoon wading ankle deep out into the mirrored emptiness of the water, where I felt like I could have walked out and touched the horizon itself – a completely surreal and unforgettable experience.
Back at the venue, we met up with Social Distortion and their crew and with the guys in Lucero, who were the main support for the tour (we had the first-on slot). This motley bunch comprised some of my closest road friends and are people to whom I owe a great debt of gratitude. Social D were welcoming – Mike is a touch off in his own world, but Brent, David, Jonny and Danny couldn’t have been friendlier. I was a big fan of Lucero and of course I knew Ben and Todd already from the Revival tours. They and their tour manager, Jimmy Perlman, quickly became partners in mischief.
We were prepared to be the young, hungry unknowns on the tour, without much in the way of a sound check and that’s how it was, running the show by the seat of our pants. I was on the merch booth again for this tour, so my days were a frenzy of activity – counting in shirts, restringing guitars (we had no techs), setting up for the gig, checking, scoffing down some food, selling from when the doors opened, rushing to the stage to play for half an hour, then running back to the merch to sell shirts to surprised Americans for the rest of the night, sinking friendly whiskies, before finishing up with a count out, an argument with the in-house merch guy about how much you owe the house in commission followed by a well-deserved crash-out in the Bandwagon.
Playing as a support act, and one almost totally unknown at that, is something that The Sleeping Souls and I have become pretty good at over the years and this tour is probably the one, more than any other, where we honed our skill. It was immensely satisfying, heading out every night in front of Social D’s notoriously ‘difficult’ crowd – ageing punks, for the most part, not overly interested in discovering new bands – and smashing expectations, walking off soaked in sweat and applause. We made a lot of new fans on this run and the fact that I sold most of them a shirt or a CD afterwards cemented their new-found loyalty.
From Salt Lake City (where I played another impromptu carpark show for some folks who’d travelled far to see my set but had missed it), we headed east through the mountains, stopping in Denver for a few nights, where I saw my sister and played a sideshow at Illegal Pete’s, a Mexican restaurant run by punk friends. From there we went through Kansas City, up to Minneapolis and the legendary First Avenue venue and through Chicago, where I had an altercation with some of Social D’s rather more skinhead fans, who seemed to take exception to English accents and acoustic guitars. Thankfully it didn’t turn into a fight at the merch table after our set, though I was nervous for the rest of the evening. In Detroit I got shitfaced with the Flogging Molly guys, delaying our border crossing into Canada and pissing Casey off no end (sorry man). In Toronto we played a triumphant headline set at the Horseshoe Tavern – one of my favourite shows ever. Some nights everything comes together and suddenly you’re in the eye of a punk-rock storm – bodies flying, music exploding, sweat dripping from the walls, the atmosphere tangibly life-affirming. The next night we rejoined the main tour.
Heading back into the USA, we ground through the miles on the East Coast, filling in off days with headline shows. We made our first stop at the famous 9:30 club in DC, where we met the legendary head of security Josh Burdette for the first time; we played Philly, Boston, Atlantic City and New York; Casey and I flew south and back again for a manic twenty-four hours and three shows at The Fest in Gainesville, Florida; and we played an awesome headline show at Asbury Lanes, a place fast starting to feel like home. Social D had to cancel in Baltimore, so Lucero and I ended up playing a free show to a thinned-out but grateful crowd. As we headed south through Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee and Georgia, the tour really started to tire us out. In the end, with fill shows and impromptu extra gigs, I played forty-five times in just north of six weeks. At one point I did sixteen days in a row without a break.
The warm weather in the South buoyed everyone’s spirits. The show in St Petersburg, Florida was at an outside spot called Jannus Landing. It was blissful to wander around in shorts and T-shirts during the day and play in the cool evening air. We ended up with a little more time to sound check that day, so while Nigel and Casey were running through the drums, I was mucking around with some country-style riff ideas on my guitar quietly in the corner of the stage. Suddenly everything pulled into focus and I found myself playing that rarest of things – a riff that is distinct, characterful and unique, but which also sounds old, timeless, maybe even obvious. I kept at it and the whole song just unfolded into my lap in the space of about twenty minutes. I even started getting words for it, right there. I’m not a superstitious or religious person, but I really felt like I was channelling something that shouldn’t be interrupted. By the time sound check was done, I had about 75 per cent of a song called ‘If Ever I Stray’ completed.
It felt slightly incongruous to be writing songs about England while charging around a different continent, but in some ways being away gave me time to think about home. Every night, the five of us were the only English people in a crowded room. It highlights the cultural and national differences between you; not in a chauvinistic or hateful way at all, I just find it curious to see how something as vague as national identity can affect your individual character. All of these thoughts were coming together at around this time in new material that felt stronger and more coherent than the previous batch. I have a lot of affection for Poetry of the Deed, but in retrospect it was an album made in a hurry by a band who were still finding their feet as a collective. This time around my writing was stronger and more focused and we had gelled as a musical unit after months of punishing road. It was an exciting time.
The Florida run went smoothly enough, even if Brian from Lucero, a vegan, did get a tattoo of a strip of bacon done late one night. In Orlando I did the first of many in-store performances at Park Ave CDs, a great record store and good friends. We crossed the South again to hit Texas, feeling like we’d lapped ourselves. In Dallas I met Oliver Peck, the tattooist, for the first time and got some work done on my leg in a dingy backstage room. On our second drive through West Texas in as many months, we stopped off at Jim Ward’s studio in El Paso and demoed about fifteen new songs in one day, as the next album continued to take shape.
Finally we made it to Arizona for the last shows of the run. Once again we had a crazily tight turnaround between tours, so we were jumping off a few days early in order to prepare for the UK leg. After a wild night in Tempe, complete with a second show in a bar with Lucero’s brass section backing me up, we boarded a long flight home.
SHOW # 972
Guildhall, Southampton, UK, 7 December 2010
Our next run around the UK was another step up. As I’ve mentioned, the London venue is often a good watermark for the size of the tour; this time around we were booked to play Brixton Academy, another fabled spot to cross off my bucket list. When we booked the tour, Joanna had been openly laughed at by her boss. In the event we sold the room out. I guess I was still flying under the radar at this point, working from word of mouth and the support of a few rogue DJs and journalists. I like to think her boss was pleasantly surprised.
We were breaking in some new songs on this run, in preparation for our time in the studio, which was booked for January. In particular we had started playing ‘Glory Hallelujah’, a controversial song to say the least. I’d written the chorus a while back and had casually played it to Jay Beans on the back of a bus some time. He immediately announced that the song had to be finished, that the statement in question was too strong to be left on the scrapheap; so I dutifully complied. In the event I spent a really long time working through the words, trying to make sure that the tone was right. I grew up in a religious household – my grandfather was a priest and if I’m honest, subconsciously I may have delayed finishing the song until his passing – and I’m not really interested in castigating the beliefs of others. I merely wanted to state mine for the record and to do so in a joyous fashion. Of course the song still raised some hackles here and there – even with a lengthy justification appended as an introduction – and I received some heated emails on the subject. But I felt strongly that I had a right to state my case and have continued to do so to this day.
There were a few new things in the works for this tour. One small difference was this was the first time as a band that we started wearing the white stage shirts that we keep to this day (not the same actual shirts of course, that’d be disgusting). We sweat so hard onstage that having a separate set of clothes makes hygienic sense; once I’d got used to that, it was easier to overcome my initial reluctance to have any kind of official ‘stage wear’. After a brief stint of wearing checked plaid shirts we settled on the white ones. I think it gives us a visual impact and coherence onstage that subtly adds to the show. I also can’t think of anything better so we’re sticking with them until I do.
The other difference for this tour was that it was the first we did without Barbs on our crew. This episode remains pretty much the hardest, most heartbreaking thing I’ve had to do on tour. We’d been having a few issues with some technical and professional things for a while and it had eventually ended up in a situation where there was a lot of hostility between various people in the touring party as a result. We reached a point where the only way to move forwards was for us to part ways. Barbs was (and is) one of my best friends. The decision was made while we were in the USA with Social Distortion. I took an afternoon to go for a long walk and called Barbs to let him know he wouldn’t be on the next UK run with us. It was a horrible thing to have to do, Barbs was understandably upset and it took us many years to patch our friendship up. I felt awful about the whole thing and once the deed was done I walked through the streets of New York on my own for a long time, desperately double-checking with myself that I’d done the right thing. When I finally got back to the bus, I was touched to see that the boys in the band had bought me a present (a book of Siegfried Sassoon poetry) to cheer me up. Even writing this stuff down is making me feel sad. Jimmy Pearlman, Lucero’s tour manager, consoled me by saying that every band that rises above a certain level has to make a call like this at some point, a choice between friendship and professionalism, but that knowledge didn’t (and doesn’t) seem like much of a balm against the pain of the separation.
So it was that we were travelling without Barbs. In his place we had the wonderful Dougie Murphy, a delightful Scouse lad who has been on my crew here and there for years, and Dave Samwell, who we borrowed from The Wombats’ crew. Also aboard was Jamie Stuart, the other member of Dive Dive, who were opening the shows, meaning that Ben, Tarrant and Nigel were on double duty for this run. It felt good to give those guys the time on stage. I’m often gripped by a feeling of embarrassment around Jamie as I slightly stole the rest of his band off him!
The middle slot on the tour was occupied by the one and only Mr Ed Harcourt. These days Ed’s a multitalented singer and songwriter, and I was excited to have him on the tour with us and riding on our bus. He’s an ebullient, larger-than-life character who kept us all entertained.
The first show of the tour was booked to be in Aberdeen, but in the event a massive snowfall meant that the bus and the equipment truck were unable to make the drive up there and we had to postpone the show. That was a demoralizing start to the tour, so after the show in Glasgow, which became the first stop, we headed out into the snow-covered streets to drink the night away. After the gig I offered Ed a shot of Jameson whisky, my drink of choice; he said no, on the grounds that he couldn’t drink whisky, it did bad things to him. I told him to man up and he agreed to one small one. The night then rapidly took a turn for the demented. We were drinking quietly in a small venue-cum-bar that I’d played before, Nice N Sleazy, when Ed swept the table clear of glassware, smashing everything on the floor, declaring loudly, ‘You people are all cunts!’ He then charged into the night, bit Tarrant on the chest (a difficult thing to do, Tarrant is very skinny) and threw himself down the tour-bus stairs. I guess I shouldn’t have given him whisky.
One of the later stops on the tour was at the Southampton Guildhall. I was excited for this show because I used to go there as a kid to see bigger touring bands and daydream about one day taking the stage myself. I’d opened up for the Levellers there in 2008 but this was my first headline slot. As the day drew near, the winter weather had started to affect my health and I was coming down with a nasty cold. The show the night before in Cambridge had seen me struggle through the high notes by the skin of my larynx. In the morning in Southampton, I knew in my gut that I wasn’t really in shape for the gig. Cancelling any gig for health reasons is almost indescribably painful for me; it makes me feel like a useless sack of shit, an albatross around the necks of my band, my crew and the disappointed punters, a dog who should be taken out back and put out of its misery. Added to this was the fact that we were at the Guildhall. I really didn’t want to cancel, but in sound check I sounded like a dying giraffe. After some discussion we decided to detune our instruments a little to help me with the high notes and soldier on.
I spent the evening mainlining hot honey and lemon, Throat Coat tea, Vocalzone throat pastilles and anything else that might possibly help my poor battered throat through the night. My mum was on hand to offer sympathy and tutting, but nothing really helped. In the event, the show went OK – the thrill of being in front of a sell-out crowd on that stage, plus said crowd’s enthusiasm and help in the singing department, meant that I struggled on to the finish line. Once we were done, I stumbled offstage and pretty much straight into my mum’s car. She took me home for some rest and recuperation and we postponed the following day’s show in Exeter, which made me feel shitty, though there was no question that it had to be done.
Two days’ bed rest and maternal care did wonders for me and we picked up in Leicester before finishing triumphantly at Brixton.
I promised Ed I’d never make him drink whisky again.
SHOWS # 988 # 989
Trof, Manchester, UK, 4 March 2011
By this stage in my career, as far as the UK was concerned, my regular tour shows had decisively moved up above the toilet-circuit level, into theatres and other larger rooms. In some ways that was great, a reflection of hard work paying off, of success. In others it was a shame, to leave behind the rooms I know so well, where I cut my teeth. I was increasingly playing rooms that Million Dead had never been anywhere near, unless as a support act. At the end of the day, my choice of venue to play is governed by one factor above all others – trying to make sure that everyone who wants to come to the show is able to get in. I don’t like the idea of my shows being exclusive, panic-driven affairs, where people have to be in the know somehow to get into the gig. I was never in the know when I was younger and I feel like I’d be excluding people like me from the shows. So if a lot of people want to come to the show, we’ll play a bigger place. Even so, it was sad to think that the days of Barflys and bunker squats might be behind me (unless everything goes really badly at some point in the future).
We spent January in the Church Studios in north London. The record was tracked in twelve days, which was less time than we’d actually allowed. Everything went smoothly, working with Tristan Ivemy again was a blast and there were no major musical arguments, confrontations or conundrums. The record just kind of fell into place, which was great. Towards the end of the session, I was panicking about the album’s title. My friend Ben Morse, who’d shot a few videos for me in the past and has gone on to become my official documentarian, was chatting through some ideas with me over a beer in the studio kitchen one evening. The album had a definite English theme to it, underpinned by a sense of mortality. Ben was a drama teacher at the time and a man well-versed in English literature. He mentioned a Shakespeare quote that I was unfamiliar with and everything pulled sharply into focus – England Keep My Bones.
After recording the album we fulfilled our obligations in Aberdeen and Exeter, filling in the yawning gap between the two cities with extra shows, taking our friends Jim Lockey & the Solemn Sun along for the ride. After that there was a gap in the official tour schedule to allow time for promotional work to prepare for the release of the new record, which was scheduled for the start of June. In the midst of all this I got a fortuitous email from a lady named Laura Scott.
Laura was a name and a face I knew from shows – an acquaintance, shall we say, rather than a friend. She told me a story about how a friend of hers called Spencer had recently lost his battle with blood cancer and that she was keen to raise money for some relevant charities as a way of commemorating her friend. She titled her email ‘A long shot’. I guess it was, but for whatever reason it caught my imagination. Among other things, this was a way for me to play in a small room again. My stipulations about trying not to make things exclusive felt satisfyingly overruled, when both charity and the last-minute nature of the show were taken into account. We agreed that I’d drop some hints about the show on Twitter and only announce it properly a few hours before. All things considered, it was shaping up to be an exciting and worthwhile evening.
I took the train up to Manchester by myself and wandered in the direction of the venue. Laura had secured a tiny place called Trof in Fallowfield, a student area. I’d been tweeting various hints as to the location of the show and word had started to spread. By the time I showed up, there were already a handful of people waiting around. I’d been rumbled. I did a quick sound check in the tiny upstairs room – I’d say you could squeeze maybe 100 people in there, at a push – and stepped outside to find some food.
By the time I actually officially announced the show, there was already a queue down the street and when I got back from eating it had got properly out of hand. There were clearly way too many people to get into the show standing outside. I had a quick chat with Laura and the people running Trof. We decided to split the evening into two, in order that everyone could come to the show and we’d raise more money for charity. The gig room had a small balcony that overlooked the street and the ever-growing line. I stood on the balcony and announced the new idea, feeling a little bit like a tinpot dictator. Everyone seemed to agree that it was a good idea and the evening got underway.
The shows were a total blast in the end. I played old songs, new songs, songs from the as-yet-unreleased album and pretty much anything anyone in the crowd wanted to hear – as long as they were prepared to throw some extra cash in the bucket for the privilege. After playing for an hour or so, we shuffled everyone out of the room and brought in the fresh blood, trying to make sure that no one sneakily hid and stayed for both. By the end of the second set I was exhausted, drenched in sweat and my throat was pretty ragged. But it felt great to be that close to the crowd again, that involved. It reminded me of some things I’d forgotten about stagecraft; switching up the size and types of venue that I play helps a lot with that. In the end I did another secret show the following day in Leeds at Bar Santiagio. Across the three gigs we raised over £2,000 for the charity Lymphoma Research. It felt like a good way to spend my downtime.
SHOW # 1000
Strummerville Spring Sessions, London, UK, 21 April 2011
After a short break to gather my breath before the coming onslaught, the ground campaign to prepare the world for England Keep My Bones began in earnest. More so than ever before, this was to be an international release, so predictably my schedule was hectic. After a quick pit stop for a benefit at White Rabbit down in Plymouth (a great little venue that was threatened with closure at the time; alas it has since gone) and a video shoot in Bristol for new single ‘Peggy Sang the Blues’, I headed for Germany for some press days and shows.
German press schedules are legendary for their intensity. I was set up in the wonderful Ramones Museum in Berlin, a great punk-rock hangout in the city run by my friend Flo. I had two solid days of interviews – more than fifteen each day – followed by a gig each night at White Trash, a cool punk-rock venue with a restaurant and tattoo parlour attached. Being interviewed that much in such a short space of time is a surreal experience. Your head starts to spin by the end of it and it’s very rough on the voice, but you also get a chance to work out, in detail, what you think about the art that you’re promoting and your station in life. So in a weird way it can actually be educational, as you iron out the kinks in your philosophy.
After great shows in Berlin, I headed to Cologne for another similar day of blathering, plus a show at Blue Shell. A few hours’ kip later I was boarding a plane from Cologne Airport to fly (via several other places) to Sydney, Australia. I was happy to be heading back Down Under, this time for some headline shows of my own (albeit playing solo). However, the strains of a twenty-four-hour flight and a ten-hour time-zone change on the back of the schedule of the last few days meant that I was feeling like a total alien by the time I arrived. I remember taking a cab through the deserted dawn streets, at once so familiar and yet weird in their Australian character, and wondering where on earth I had landed. It was many hours before the city awoke and I sat on my hotel balcony drinking coffee and wondering if I should be sleepy or not.
I had five shows booked in the big cities – Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide and Perth. Before that, I had a pair of press days in the first two cities, with yet more talking through the new record and the motivations behind it. It was reassuring to find that most of the journalists I was talking to seemed to be enthusiastic about the new material. After three records, it’s easy to feel that you’re Wile E. Coyote, suspended in midair, the solid cliff far behind, waiting for reality to kick in and the fall to begin. It was nice, a relief even, to hear that the general consensus was that my fourth record might be my best to date.
The press days went OK, despite my propensity for falling asleep at weird times. The shows were busy or sold out and great fun. In Melbourne I made a return to the Arthouse and did a sold-out show. It was one of the last shows there, as the building had been condemned, which felt like an honour. I also had the totally gobsmacking surprise of meeting Dennis and David from Refused in the dressing room shortly before my set (they were on tour with another band of theirs). The Refused reunion hadn’t yet happened; when I was drunk I told them both to get to it, so I’ll take some credit for it (haha).
After the Arthouse show there was a free day in the diary before my return to the UK, which Chris from Blue Murder (who promotes my Australian tours) had been planning to fill with a second Melbourne show. This, however, presented a problem. It had come to my attention that I was coming up to my 1,000th show. I’d always kept a show list, a slightly OCD tic of mine, but one I’m glad I’ve kept up with as it’s helped me remember where I’ve been (and to write this book!). At first I hadn’t thought much about the numbers rolling over – it seemed slightly trivial to me – but after a time I changed my mind and decided it was something worth commemorating.
So I booked a gig with my friends at Strummerville, a great organization that runs some shows at Glastonbury and in London and tries to help disadvantaged kids get musical instruments. They’d been keen to do a London show with me for a while and after I suggested a date for my 1,000th show, everything had been arranged. Unfortunately, this meant that I really had to watch how many gigs I was doing in the run-up to the big rollover. When Chris suggested a second night at the Arthouse, probably the last ever show on that hallowed ground, I had to sadly decline as it would have thrown the numbers out. He was initially slightly incredulous but in the end came to understand my reasoning.
My journey home, after bidding Australia a fond farewell, was pretty nightmarish. I left Perth and flew to Sydney, from Sydney to Kuala Lumpur, from Kuala Lumpur to Munich and from Munich to London (the German dogleg was necessary because it’s where I’d started my Australian adventure from). By the time I arrived at City Airport, more than thirty hours later, I was so confused that I thought the guy at baggage claim asking for an autograph was trying to rob me.
I arrived in the morning and had the rest of that day to recover. Thankfully I hadn’t been in Australia long enough to adjust to the time zones fully, so I felt weirdly more in sync with the world than I had for the previous week. The following day was another press day in the UK and then there was the Strummerville show. They’d sorted an underground car park in Shoreditch, east London, for the occasion. We had two different stages and a bunch of tickets sold. I arrived for sound check and was immediately glad to be in the company of Trish and Jamie, the two main operators at Strummerville at the time. They had drafted in some help to promote the show from Dave Danger and Jay (Beans On Toast) and in the end the event turned into something of a Nambucca reunion, bringing together a bunch of people who hadn’t all been in the same room at the same time since before the fire. It made the evening even more special.
What to say about playing 1,000 shows? Reading back through the list that I keep (which is now, at the time of writing, closer to 2,000), it seems surreal, confusing even, to scroll down, thinking of the number of times I’ve introduced myself to a room mostly full of strangers. I lose the ability to process the information after a while and have to take a step back. But at the same time, this has been my adulthood, it’s where I’ve been and what I’ve done. I’m not claiming to have achieved much in this life, my calling isn’t nearly as important as most, but I can look at that list with some degree of pride. This is my trade, my craft, I set out to do it, however cautiously at first, and I did it. That night, as I sang ‘The Road’, after one line in particular – ‘The nights, a thousand nights I’ve played’ – I paused for breath and effect, and the crowd cheered, before I sang the next line – ‘A thousand more to go … before I take a breath and steel myself for the next one thousand shows’.
I’m not someone who is often comfortable in my own skin, but there and then, with the crowd and my old friends around me, singing my exhausted throat raw in a run-down car park in London, I felt like I was in the right place.
After the show was done I managed to rein in my party spirit, because the following day I had to take a train south, back to the Hampshire hills, to see my mum getting remarried. I figured that showing up hungover and sleep deprived wouldn’t be the best look. Actually, while at White Trash in Berlin, I had my first finger tattoos done (an alpha and omega on my pinkies) and that probably wasn’t a good look for my mum’s wedding either. Thankfully I think Mum was too wrapped up in the day to notice them.
After that I got on a plane heading for Toronto, for a solo, promotional North American run. When I got to the hotel and met up with Jimmy Perlman (who was tour managing this run), the exhaustion of the insane schedule hit me pretty hard – England, Germany, Australia, England, Canada. I was twenty-nine then and could just about hack it; I doubt I could now.
After a cheeky extra show in a punk-rock art gallery the night before my official appearance in town, Jimmy and I sat in my hotel room, overlooking the city, and he hand-poked a new piece of ink on my chest: 1001. It seemed to me that commemorating the show after the milestone made more sense. Making 1,000 shows was great, but it wasn’t the end of anything. I wanted to mark the start of the next phase.
SHOW # 1028
St George’s, Bristol, UK, 24 May 2011
The campaign to promote England Keep My Bones continued to gather pace like a runaway train, yet the record was still some way from being released to the world at large. Looking back through the tour and promotional schedule they had me on, it’s exhausting just to read. But I was fired up and hungry and younger than I am now and while I was often tired, I was never sick of the road, always keen to get up in the morning, wash the sleep and hangover from my eyes and get back into the van or car or bus or plane.
Jimmy Perlman and I flitted across the North American landmass, doing fly-in dates, picking up cars at the airport and driving to faceless hotels for long days of interviews and longer nights of packed rooms, sing-alongs and whisky. We played a parking-lot festival in New Jersey, nearly got into a fight with an interviewer in Chicago (there’s a limit to my patience with people who set out to be rude), had our (well, my) hearts broken by pretty girls in San Francisco and finished up with a crazy night in Craig’s bar in Santa Barbara, Velvet Jones. I then bade Jimmy a fond farewell and headed back to England for the pre-album release tour.
The album was set to be unveiled at the start of June. In the run-up to the big day, Joanna had put together a pretty far-reaching UK tour. For this run I’d opted to go back to playing solo, something I hadn’t done on my home turf for some time. It felt like a cool way to introduce people to the new material and just a nice change-up from what had become the usual set. I was also very happy to have two great friends along for the ride. Firstly, there was Franz Nicolay. Franz used to play for The Hold Steady (one of my very favourite bands) but now does his own unique brand of punk-rock-vaudevillian songwriting. As well as being a nice guy, he’s a great songwriter and performer and a fount of knowledge on everything to do with the history of entertainment. Ben Marwood was also on the bill, a guy from Reading who I’d known since 2006 or so. Completing the bus line-up were Sarah (on merch), Graham (on sound and tour managing) and Ben and Nigel from the band (stage teching and generally hanging out).
The route took in twenty-three towns and cities up and down the UK. We started in Stockton and finished in Winchester, hitting some pretty obscure towns in between. It was great to play in some slightly different rooms. There are places that can take a solo acoustic show that couldn’t handle a full rock band with drum kit sonically. We played the library in Lancaster, a warehouse in Chester, a festival in Norfolk, a record store in Brighton and no less than three churches.
St George’s Church in the Clifton area of Bristol is a beautiful Greek Revival-style building that has recently been renovated to accommodate live shows by jazz, classical and folk artists. It was slightly bizarre to see the usual ragtag collection of people who come to my shows filtering in through the tiny box office – punk kids, indie kids, folk enthusiasts, older people and a whole lot of just normal, unclassifiable souls. It was a seated show and the acoustics in the room were pretty much perfect. Most of the shows on this run had a special feel to them, but I remember this one in particular for having a near magical atmosphere. Ben and Franz had great sets, which I watched from the wings. The sound in the room spiralled into the high ceiling before falling gently back on to the rapt audience, watching in pin-drop silence. When my turn to play came around I felt gripped by a sense of wonder and had one of those rare shows where every song courses through me like it did when I first came up with the whisperings of an idea.
At the end of the show, I finished with ‘The Ballad of Me and My Friends’. As was customary at the time I told the crowd that they had to carry the vocal as I was ditching the microphone. It’s a trick that closes proceedings with a communal feel, but in the surroundings of an old church it took on a particularly intense vibe. After a few lines, the crowd started to rise to their feet to sing and the voices in chorus filled the room. I looked behind me to check my guitar lead would take the strain and then started to walk out over the pews until I was stood in the middle of the room. I love it when shows become something more than a lecture delivered from a stage to an audience, when they are more a dialogue than a monologue, when the performer’s identity gets subsumed and becomes unimportant. At that moment I wasn’t playing a show for those people, I was leading them in song.
SHOW # 1075
JK Zomaar, Itterbeek, Belgium, 20 August 2011
England Keep My Bones was finally released on 6 June. I was already ankle-deep in another mad festival summer, so on the day itself I found myself flying in from Germany – where we’d just played the Rock im Park and Rock am Ring festivals – for a quick launch-party set at the Barfly in Camden. It was a relief to finally have the damn thing out there. People seemed to be getting into the new songs, the reviews were generally positive and life was good. On top of all that, Ben, Nigel, Matt, Tarrant and I had finally solved an old problem – what to call the band. After much discussion over the years and many rejected suggestions (The 1970s, The 161 Band, The Contraband, Lazerchild …) we finally all agreed on a name. Taken from the lyrics to ‘I Am Disappeared’, a song from the new album, the band was officially christened The Sleeping Souls.
My summer was arranged around a series of shows opening for our old touring buddies Social Distortion. They had invited me and the boys to join them in France, the Netherlands, Denmark and Germany, where they were playing a series of multiple nights in Berlin and Hamburg. It was nice to see them again, this time on my side of the Atlantic. In between those stops I was rushing around playing various European festivals and headline shows. I returned to Poznań, this time with the band, though we did have to leave Johnny, our monitor engineer, in the parked, unpowered bus in a German lay-by for eighteen hours as there weren’t enough seats in the Polish van (which we had to take to the show as the bus was not licensed to drive on Polish roads). We hung out with Converge in Switzerland and incongruously headlined a stage amid the mud and metallers at the Download Festival, Donington Park. We played with an Austrian band in Graz who had a person with dwarfism in a spacesuit dancing for them. Graham drank himself to pieces afterwards, perhaps to cope with the insanity of it all. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a man so broken.
We played a four-night stand in Hamburg with Social D, which was an interesting experience. A tour is usually defined by leaving, being spirited away in the night and finding yourself in a new town, the wreckage of the previous evening a distant smudge in the rear-view mirror. Returning to the venue you played the night before often feels like coming back to the scene of a crime. On the other hand, it was great to be able to spend some time in the city, to see more of Hamburg than just the bars on the Reeperbahn. I lost myself in an antiques flea market for most of a day, walked around old churches and practised my pidgin German. On the last night of the stand I was drinking with Brent from Social D and talking about songs, when I had the idea for a punk-rock song with a vaudevillian opening, a song about dancing …
Back in England we headlined Blissfields Festival near Winchester, a homecoming of sorts, though I confess to losing my temper with the house sound guys – my monitor mix onstage so terrible that even Johnny couldn’t save it. I felt pretty bad about it afterwards. We made our first visit to the island of Guernsey, which was a little surreal, like a British fifties time warp, and to Croatia, which was blissful, sunning ourselves in a beach resort on the Dalmatian coast. Next up was a triumphant return to Fonofest in Latvia and then a festival in Italy where the local punks offered to swap a pizza for our massive (and very expensive) stage backdrop. Another highlight was the Cambridge Folk Festival, which was a delightful contrast to Download and where I successfully fooled some of the local purists into thinking that ‘English Curse’ was a traditional song. We played a last-minute show at the Newcastle Academy after the festival we had been supposed to play at got cancelled – I think the locals appreciated the effort – and we made our first appearance on the main stages at the Reading and Leeds festivals, thereby fulfilling a childhood dream born at Reading 1995 when I saw Beck play that very same stage and slot.
I’m rushing through talking about a lot of these shows, which in a way feels appropriate. The pace of our live schedule, especially in the summer, had reached a feverish pitch. We were a well-oiled touring machine – me and the band, Graham and Johnny, Shaun Moore on lights, various guitar techs (though in the end we settled on Cahir from Fighting With Wire, who works with us to this day). We were used to living in buses, eating in catering tents, doing laundry when we could, sleeping in bunks, spending our mornings trying to find everything in the chaos of festival backstages. It’s a strange existence, a weird bubble. You run into a lot of the same faces over the festival months; geography almost melts away as the circus rolls on from field to field, country to country.
In the midst of it all, though, we’re still doing things the way we started out, trying our best to play rock ’n’ roll shows, to bring a room of strangers together and lift the weight of the world for a few hazy hours. Occasionally a show will give you a stark reminder of that. Towards the end of the summer we were due to play at Pukkelpop in Belgium. We’d had a few days’ rest at home, so were feeling refreshed as we rolled out on the bus the night before our appearance. We crossed over on the ferry from Dover to Calais, drove into Belgium and parked up in yet another faceless Euro coach stop. As we tucked into a few beers to soften the evening, word started to filter through that there had been some kind of incident at the festival. Through the confused chatter on the internet a picture gradually emerged – a freak storm had hit the festival site, a stage had collapsed and people had been hurt. We then heard that the festival was cancelled and that five people had died.
It was terrible news, every musician and music fan’s nightmare. We sat dejectedly in the car park and talked about how lucky we were not to have been there ourselves. We were due to be at the Lowlands festival in the neighbouring Netherlands the day after Pukkelpop, so we started thinking about when we would head over in that direction. As we were sitting there, I received an email from some Belgian punks. They’d been at the festival, they knew people who had been hurt or killed, but they still wanted the show to go on – would I be interested in a last-minute show the following day?
It was a heavy decision to take – I wanted to be absolutely sure that it didn’t in any way come across like I was profiting from disaster. But the people I talked to online were unanimous. A show would be a fitting tribute; it would be what the departed would have wanted. So it was that a venue was found – a small punk bar, JK Zomaar, in a suburb of Brussels, not far from where we were parked up – and a free show was put together. Word spread and come the evening I took a cab across town, with a few of the band and crew in tow, to a small but packed-out room. Everyone seemed grateful that I’d decided to play, but I was still cautious to be considerate of the emotions that were running high.
It was a special evening. There was a weird energy in the air that thankfully turned into something positive. There were plenty of people who knew my stuff, but also a fair few who didn’t, who’d just come down to be with other people and commemorate. I played, we sang, we all drank to the dead and I felt humbled to be part of this makeshift ceremony with strangers in a foreign country. It reminded me of the soul of what I do, and of how, from time to time, it can be important.
SHOW # 1130
Theatre of Living Arts, Philadelphia, PA, USA, 4 November 2011
After the release of the album in June, preceded by months of promotional work and followed by a heavy summer of festivals, it was time to get on the road and tour England Keep My Bones properly around the world. I’d reached the stage where I could realistically look at a schedule and call it a World Tour with capital letters. In some ways it was daunting, in other ways exciting, but I think the main thing for me was that we were finally able to have one of those tour shirts with the cities listed on the back in small writing and it made for one hell of an impressive list.
I started out with a handful of low-key but fun solo shows in the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland, topped off with The Sleeping Souls joining me for Dublin and Belfast. We then boarded a plane for the USA and Canada, where we had forty-two shows scheduled, taking in pretty much every corner of the continent. We had a proper tour bus this time around, which made life considerably easier. We also had two awesome support acts, who were riding with us, making the vehicle one big party bus. Andrew Jackson Jihad are a folk-punk band from Arizona who I had long loved, and for this run we had Sean and Ben coming out to play as a duo. The other act, who would play first, was Into It. Over It. – also known as Evan, an emo-influenced folk singer. It made for a great and varied bill and most of the shows were sold out.
The tour was topped and tailed with performances at The Bowery Ballroom in New York, which made for an interesting dynamic. Over the course of a tour, set lists and songs evolve slowly, shifting around each night as you figure out better ways to run songs together, better opening and closing numbers, better ways of engaging the crowd with different tricks. By the time we got to the second show at The Bowery, just over a month after the first, we put on a completely different show. That was gratifying, as I often worry about repeating myself when playing night after night. It was good to see that we had grown and changed in the interim.
We tore down the East Coast, playing sweaty shows to lively crowds; on one infamous occasion we were so hot and drenched after the show in South Carolina that we lined up against the fence out the back of the venue to be hosed down by Casey, as the venue didn’t have a shower. We swung through Florida and then back up through Texas, into Oklahoma for the first time, and to Kansas City, where we won the pub quiz taking place at the venue between sound check and the show. We crossed over into the West, unfortunately having to lose the Albuquerque show due to my voice being shot, although we did meet Jerry Only from the Misfits in a car park there who sweetly tried to give me some medicine from a plastic shopping bag to make me feel better. Onwards we went, into California, where we played live on Jimmy Kimmel before tearing east to Pomona, arriving at the venue three minutes before we were due on stage.
From there we headed north, up the West Coast and into Canada, making the long drive across the north-western prairies through Alberta. I was constantly amazed at the number of people coming out to the shows, people who knew the words to all the songs. As much as I’d done a bunch of work playing in those parts of the world before, they still seemed (and seem) impossibly remote to me, so having the locals onside was a constant source of wonder. In Winnipeg I got to hang out with John K. Samson from The Weakerthans and indeed covered ‘One Great City!’, his ode to his hometown, with John looking on approvingly from the wings.
Dipping back into the USA, I finally got to play a show in Minneapolis’s legendary Triple Rock Social Club, before heading on to Milwaukee, Chicago and Detroit. Around this time, due to the troubles I was having with my voice, I finally tried out in-ear monitors. This essentially means that instead of relying on the speakers on the front of the stage, which can be pretty fucking awful in some venues, especially on a tour of this size, you get a wireless feed to a pair of high-end headphones. It can initially be a little discomforting, as it kind of removes you from the room, but once you get used to it, it’s a musician’s dream, as you can hear everything you’re doing much more clearly and thus just play better. The extra control meant I didn’t have to strain so much and so it saved my voice on this run. I continue to use them religiously to this day.
Back up to Canada, we played Toronto and then into Quebec, where I got to practise some of my French. Finally we headed south into the USA for the last few days on the upper East Coast, returning to our starting point. After the second Bowery show we had one more stop, in Philadelphia, at the Theatre of Living Arts (or TLA). Coincidentally, this was also the largest show on the tour and it was sold out. It was a fitting end – we seamlessly burned through a well-oiled set list and brought the packed-out house down. There was the usual end-of-tour mixture of sadness and elation, goodbyes and excitement about going home. Dave Hause came out to the show to hang out and ended up getting so wasted that he lost his car. But other than that, we finished the show, packed up and sat quietly in the front lounge of the bus, slightly dazed by what we had just achieved. The Sleeping Souls and I were now a bona fide successful touring act in North America; that’s not something that’s easy to achieve or that many people can say. It was a good feeling.
SHOW # 1131
AIM Awards, London, UK, 10 November 2011
After the punishing North American run, we had a few days off before heading to Europe to continue the world tour. During this downtime I attended the Association of Independent Music Awards (AIM) in London, both to receive an award and to play a song or two. It was a brand-new venture, their first year and it seemed like a cool way to spend an evening.
Awards and the associated ceremonies are a weird one for me. On the one hand, it’s very flattering to be nominated or indeed to win, to be recognized by some (at least theoretically) higher power. There’s a strong feeling of validation. On the other hand, as a kid I was never much enamoured with stuff like the BRIT Awards or the NMEs – the bands that won were usually ones I didn’t like – so such accolades can feel like a mixed blessing. The pompous pageantry of the ceremonies themselves can be a little cloying – I’m not really one for dressing up for an evening. On this occasion though it seemed like it would be fun, partly because it was a new venture (and being centred on independent music, one that I could fully get behind) and partly because I’d been asked to play, not just to show up in a tux. Matt, Nigel and I put together a couple of trio versions of some songs and brushed our hair a little (well, not Nige) in preparation.
I’d been told in advance that I was winning the award for Hardest Working Artist. Again, I have mixed feelings about this. The methodology of measuring something as abstract as that is necessarily pretty obscure and subjective. I know a lot of bands that work as hard as I do who have yet to win a trophy recognizing their efforts. And also, the work that I do is vocational – I love touring and playing guitar. Most of my friends work hard at jobs they hate, or at the most tolerate because they need the money. No one gives them any awards. Nevertheless, it was pretty cool to have all those years slogging away on the road recognized in some sort of official category.
Nigel, Matt and I played a song or two and I wandered awkwardly towards the podium to accept the award at the appointed hour. I had a short speech prepared saying thanks to the powers that be, but more importantly to Charlie, Joanna and The Sleeping Souls for being as much a part of the achievement as I was. Afterwards I posed for some official photos and returned to our table to get thoroughly and deservedly pissed.
Unfortunately, there was a surprise in the works. I had also been nominated for Best Live Act, but had assumed that I wasn’t going to win it; after all, I’d been warned in advance about the other title and no one had said anything about this one. As it was, when that category rolled around, I had to be tapped on the shoulder and alerted to the fact that I had won again. This was slightly problematic as I was pretty soused by this point in the evening and had already said everything I had to say to the assembled company. I also felt even more strongly that this was an award for me and The Sleeping Souls, who were not officially namecheckeded. Charlie looked a little apprehensive as I stumbled back up on to the stage. Personally, I have very little memory of my second oration, but I’m reliably informed that what it lacked in coherence, it made up for in entertainment value. I guess I’m not cut out for the glitz and glamour of such occasions.
SHOW # 1162
Karlstorbahnhof, Heidelberg, Germany, 20 December 2011
After the brief pit stop, the tour resumed with a vengeance, this time through Europe and the UK, with Xtra Mile label mates The Xcerts (on the mainland) and Against Me! and Emily Barker (on home turf) in tow. We opened with a quick sally into the Netherlands and Germany, before traipsing over to Bournemouth to prepare for the UK leg of the tour.
By this point in time, my UK shows had become a full production affair. We had our own lights and PA system, mixing desks and other equipment rolling with us in a large truck. We even had our own catering, courtesy of the lovely Dylan Barnes, who still tours with me keeping me fed to this day. Having that many people around for a tour gets a little daunting after a while. Some members of the crew are people I don’t know beforehand and often never see because their working hours are the inverse of mine. Nevertheless, it’s great to have a family feel to the crew and I’m happy that we still have Cahir, Shaun, Graham, Tré and others on the team. For this run we actually booked out the first venue – the Bournemouth Academy – for a couple of days before the first show so that we could set up all the gear and check everything worked properly, run the set a few times, tweak the light show, that kind of thing. It felt immensely luxuriant to be able to play music with a full show and crew for a couple of days and then spend a quiet evening in a hotel nearby. Certainly it was a big change from playing the Portman Hotel to thirty people back in 2006.
Against Me! are a long-standing favourite band of mine, so it was fantastic to have them aboard. Unfortunately they had to pull the show in Newport as Tom (now Laura Jane) was having voice trouble, but fortuitously, Franz Nicolay happened to be in town and happily jumped on the bill. The rest of the UK shows went smoothly enough. We discovered that Emily’s four petite folk-singing ladies could happily outdrink the Florida punks. We had a nasty run-in with some of the house security at the Manchester Apollo – an unpleasant throwback to the problems of venue security that I thought had been consigned to the dustbin of history. It all got sorted in the end though and the show itself was great. Hammersmith Apollo was a real moment of triumph – a huge and legendary venue, sold out to the rafters. The last time I’d been there had been to see Neil Young, so the stage felt like hallowed ground.
Leaving London behind, we returned to Germany for some solid touring. Germany was fast becoming my second-best country to play, in terms of the size of the shows. In Cologne we drew 2,000 people and the rest of the shows were comparably huge and packed. We made it out further east than before, hitting Rostock and Dresden. We made a return to Poland and this time managed to bring the whole crew (including Johnny) with us, getting as far as Warsaw. After that show we had a mad drive down to Ravenna in Italy, a mammoth 930-mile journey through five countries that took us about twenty-four hours. The cabin fever and boredom on the bus was intense, so I ended up scripting and filming a very silly short called Murder on the Tour Bus Express to pass the time. I’m pretty sure it’s still on the internet somewhere.
The end of the tour took us through Austria and Switzerland. Everywhere we went on this run we caught up with old friends but also made new ones at the shows. Joanna and I have always tried to be loyal to the promoters that we use for my shows and it was great to see Silvio Huber in Austria, Martin Schrader in Switzerland and Silke Westera and Alex Kranz in Germany, all people who’d put me on in tiny bars as an act of faith in previous years; but this time around we got to enjoy the sight of a thousand people or more streaming through the doors. There was one sad event on the run, which was that Sarah, merch girl extraordinaire since the very early days, let me know that she was hanging up her touring shoes once we were done with this tour. It made total sense for her, but I know that the band, the crew and I all still miss her unique, crazy personality.
We wrapped up the tour, and indeed the year, in a frosty Heidelberg on 20 December. We were all so toured out by this point that the details of the show itself are a little hazy for me – not because of alcohol, but because of exhaustion. I do remember that we played a new song that night, one that had been coming together piecemeal over the tour. It was a song about dancing, which had started brewing in my brain in Hamburg, tentatively entitled ‘Four Simple Words’. The crowd loved it. Heidelberg is a beautiful medieval city with a hint of the fairy tale about it and standing outside signing autographs in the cold winter air, with the wooded hills and the castle towering above me, I felt totally surreal, unmoored, a little disconnected from everything, but excited to be going home for Christmas. The year 2011 had been mammoth, but events in 2012 were shaping up to be even more momentous.
SHOW # 1174
Thee Parkside, San Francisco, CA, USA, 8 February 2012
I spent the festive period catching up with my family and friends, reminding my nearest and dearest what I actually look like. It was a much-needed break as the new year was already shaping up to be a big one. The main thing on the horizon was the fact that, at the start of the US run in 2011, we had announced and put on sale a show at Wembley Arena – my first arena headline show. Whatever else was going on in the months leading up to 13 April, there was a Wembley-shaped shadow hanging over pretty much everything else that I, The Sleeping Souls and my crew got up to.
We kicked off the year with some more support-slot shows in the USA. We had some shows lined up opening for Boston Celtic punk legends the Dropkick Murphys, but we were kicking off with another run with our old friends Social Distortion. This time around we’d be out west, in a part of the country we hadn’t covered the last time we played with them stateside, back in 2010. The tour included a few pretty obscure stops in Nevada, New Mexico and Arizona and many obscure stops in California, Social D’s home state. California is a state that is overshadowed by its two most famous cities, Los Angeles and San Francisco, but there’s actually a whole lot more to it – some pretty weird, suburban, out-of-the-way places – as we were about to find out.
The tour started in Vegas and we flew into that city of sin a day or two early in order to acclimatize and get over our jet lag. Staying up late is usually the key to beating the time zones, but you can take it too far. Casey and I spent a wild evening drinking whisky and losing money at Blackjack, before gently dismantling half the furniture in our hotel room. This led to a hurried and scurried exit the following morning as we headed over to the venue for the usual first-day chaos and nerves.
I was down to sell my own merch on this run again; it’s something I enjoyed doing a lot for those US support runs. It saves money on an extra crew member, of course, but it’s also a kind of statement of ideological intent, to come straight off the stage and get back to slinging shirts, meeting people at the show. It demonstrates that you’re not too self-involved to say hello and to get your hands dirty. These days it’s not something that’s really practicable for me to do, given the size of the shows I usually play now, and in retrospect I marvel at the amount of energy I had, running straight from the backstage to the merch table; but it was a lot of fun at the time.
The first day, from a merch perspective, is always a pain, because you get a ton of boxes shipped in from the merch company, which all have to be opened, counted and organized into new boxes, leaving the bulk in the trailer and only taking into the venue what you need for that night’s show. I remember Casey and I sat on the floor in the corridor outside the main gig room, sweating and complaining about our hangovers, hurriedly counting shirts. Some young kids in identikit ‘punk-rock’ outfits (Clash T-shirts, wallet chains, dinky bondage trousers, spiked hair) wandered over to try and listen to Social D’s sound check through the closed door. When they saw the two of us, lowly crew members toiling away, they gave us a flashed glance of contempt. I was sorely tempted to leap to my feet and explain that this, right here, was much more the substance of rock ’n’ roll dreams made real than the clichés of limos, jets, groupies and louche, pampered comfort. In the end I decided to leave their preconceptions intact for another year or two – or maybe I was just too hanging to do anything about it.
The shows with Social D were fun, but perhaps not as momentous as the previous occasion that we had shared the American road with them. I’m not sure if that’s because, after three tours with them and with the best will in the world, we were a little over opening for them, or if it’s down to the fact that the crowds in some of these towns were a little more, shall we say, set in their ways. The average Social D fans of Chico, Modesto, Oakland and Albuquerque were a little colder towards us, I think, than some of the folks we’d met back in 2010. In Modesto, we even had a problem with some racist idiots shouting abuse at Matt (who has Pakistani heritage) while we were onstage. Social D’s frontman Mike Ness, of course, gave them short shrift and had them thrown out of the show. Afterwards they tried to bum a smoke off Matt in the alleyway out the back of the venue. Not the sharpest knives in the drawer.
We had some fill shows here and there on Social D’s days off – we nipped up to Eugene, Oregon, for a weird but cool bar show and we played in San Luis Obispo, California, where I twisted my ankle getting off the bus and then made the genius decision to go walk up a big hill, by the end of which I was pretty much incapable of standing up and had to do the show on a bar-stool, much to the hilarity of The Souls. In Pomona we were down for a two-night stand but my voice totally gave up on me thanks to a nasty tour cold and we had to cancel the second show. That was a little awkward, as Charlie and I had just finished negotiating a new songwriting publishing deal with BMG Chrysalis. They’d flown out to sign the deal and celebrate by catching a show, which now wasn’t happening. Thankfully Ben and Hugo from BMG were confident enough in their judgement to go ahead anyway.
In the middle of the run we had a mishap in Reno, Nevada, a city that I had never been to before. As we were rolling through the mountains to the city, Greg Walker, our indefatigable tour-bus driver, told us that something in the bus was shot and needed fixing – we’d be up on blocks as soon as we arrived. Fortunately, we had a two-night stand booked in town, followed by a day off, so there was time enough for us to hole up at a hotel while the bus got taken care of. We arrived at the venue, parked up and started loading in and setting up our equipment as Social D geared up for a sound check.
Half an hour later, word came through that both shows had been pulled because Mike was feeling under the weather. I know better than anyone how shitty it is when you feel ill on tour, especially as a singer, so my intention here is not to impugn Mike at all. That said though, the situation looked pretty calamitous for us. We were on low fees for the tour and were plugging holes in the budget with merch income. Now that the shows weren’t happening, not only would we not get paid but we’d also not sell anything. The tour budget was holed below the waterline. For headliners, this is an easier situation because you’re generally in the black anyway and are likely to have pretty comprehensive cancellation insurance. Not so the lowly openers. And to top it all, I live to play, that’s why we were there, thousands of miles from home. It was a pretty bad situation.
Naturally, my first instinct was to try to put together some last-minute make-up shows to plug the hole in the diary (and the budget). For reasons I can’t quite remember now, Reno itself seemed to be a no-go, but I took a quick look at a map and saw that we were in the general vicinity of some cities I knew in Northern California. Casey is from that part of the world originally, so he was also keenly on the scent of possible gigs. After some frantic phone calls, we had ourselves two shows – one at the Blue Lamp in Sacramento (where I’d played on the Revival Tour three years earlier) and one at Thee Parkside in San Francisco, a city that we’d sadly noticed was not on the original tour schedule. Unfortunately, the bus was still fucked, so both shows would have to be solo – Casey and I put the band up in a hilariously cheap motel, rented a car and set off through the mountains.
Our departure time turned out to be fortunate. As we drove it started snowing and by the time we rolled out into California, Reno was pretty much snowed in. I felt bad leaving The Souls there, but there was nothing to be done about it. The Sacramento show was a lot of fun, with a reasonably large crowd showing up (for a last-minute gig on a weeknight). The next day we drove to San Francisco. The show was set up by the wonderful Audra, who runs Thee Parkside, a classic little punk-rock dive bar. During the day we got news from Greg that the bus had been fixed and the band made it over in time to turn it into a full-band affair. Many locals showed up, including Fat Mike from NOFX, who had become a good friend by this point. NOFX had even started covering ‘Glory Hallelujah’ in their set, so for this show he came up and sang the song with us in his own inimitable style.
It was a life-affirming night, a sold-out show on the other side of the world, with friends and peers in tow. We just about managed to plug the hole in the tour budget and get the show back on the road.
I’ve still never played a show in Reno.
SHOW # 1207
Tsongas Center, Lowell, MA, USA, 17 March 2012
We said goodbye to Social D, their crew and the west and hunkered down for a mammoth cross-country drive. In a few days we made it from California to Columbus, Ohio, stopping off for a show in St. Louis, Missouri. After my sickness in Pomona the journey felt oddly cleansing. There’s something about the American road that is different from the UK and Europe. It feels fresher, more open. When we drove from Poland to Italy I felt trapped, claustrophobic and dirty when I arrived. On this run the huge drive gave me time to regroup. I remember sitting by the window watching the faceless states roll by and feeling peaceful.
For the next leg of the tour, we were set to open for the Dropkick Murphys, a band I knew by reputation, of course, but who we hadn’t crossed paths with before. We had some experience of the American Celtic punk thing, but this time we were going to end up in and around Boston itself on St Patrick’s Day – a daunting prospect for some lily-livered Englishmen.
I’m happy to report that of all the bands I’ve had the privilege to open for on the road over the years, the Dropkicks are probably my favourite. It’s not just that they’re excellent at what they do – we all know that – it’s also that the guys in the band and, in particular, their crew, constitute some of the nicest, soundest, most reliable folk I know. From the very first show with these guys – in Indianapolis, as it goes – we became really close and have remained so ever since. The tour took us through Minneapolis, then down to Texas, across the South to Florida and then up the East Coast towards New England. All this was familiar territory for me now and we played many venues we’d visited before, but we were still picking up steam and new friends as we went.
I made a brief, utterly manic solo trip (with Casey and Greg Nolan, a photographer buddy from the Nambucca days who was with us on this run, documenting the chaos) down to Austin, Texas, for the annual chaos of SXSW, during which I managed to lose my passport (complete with US work visa) in the back of the seat in front of me on the plane. In my defence, I was exhausted after a New York show the night before and I’d only had a couple of hours’ sleep at most. I reported the loss immediately, but the turnaround time of US domestic flight schedules is such that I never saw it again. This presented something of a problem; not just getting out of the country and home at the end of the tour, but also getting from Austin back to Boston for the last shows with the Dropkicks. In the end I successfully identified myself at the airport using the SXSW official programme and my credit card. The woman rolled her eyes but eventually let me through, which was a relief.
Being proud Boston Irish boys, the Dropkick Murphys traditionally celebrate St Patrick’s Day in their hometown with some raucous shows, usually a string of headline dates at the House Of Blues, a 2,800-capacity room across from Fenway Park. This year that had extended to a run of four shows (we were down to play the last two), followed by a two-shows-in-one-day extravaganza on St Paddy’s Day itself at the Tsongas Center in nearby Lowell. Funnily enough, I’d actually played that cavernous, 12,000-capacity ice-hockey rink with The Offspring back in 2009. This time around I was down to play a solo set at the matinee show and then we would resume our usual full-band set for the evening’s performance.
I knew it was going to be a long day, not least because I was still selling my own merch on this run. Given the size of the venue, the Dropkicks merch team had several stands with extra people drafted in to help out. I was still working on my own at the one table, plus I had to play the two shows. But I like a challenge, so I prepared for the ordeal by … getting very drunk in Boston the night before. I spent the morning of the seventeenth lugging in all the remaining merch boxes from the trailer, sweating hard alcohol and feeling a little daunted.
As is usually the case with these situations, before my set I had a trickle of traffic at my table, mostly curious people asking when ‘that Frank Turner guy’ was going to be on, interspersed with a few folk who already knew who I was, who would ask for photos, thus confusing the hell out of the first group of people, who thought I was the merch guy. After a few hours I headed down to the stage, leaving Ben from The Sleeping Souls to tend shop while I played a solo set. I had got used to playing full band and the switch-up to playing alone can be disconcerting, particularly in the context of being the support act, so I think that first set was a little uncertain. But after I was done I hiked back up to my merch spot and sold a ton of shirts and records, making new friends and laughing with some of the people who’d come past earlier, wondering who I was.
When the Dropkicks had finished their first set, it was time to empty out the venue and then start the whole rigmarole over again. That took a while and in the end the time I had to relax, eat some food and count my merch takings and my remaining shirts was precariously short. In no time at all the gates were open again and another horde of Murphys fans were streaming into the venue. There were a few repeat customers, but it was mostly a fresh set of punters and the whole ‘Who the hell is that?’ dance started over again.
For the second time, I tore downstairs to get my tired arse onstage, this time with the welcome backup of The Souls. We had a storming set. Playing out in an arena like that, even as the opener, felt like welcome practice for the upcoming Wembley stop. Drenched in sweat and throwing on a clean shirt, I made the final return journey up the stairs to the merch table. Fatigue was definitely setting in by this point, which was combined with the typical St Paddy’s fare of endless shots of Jameson whisky. When the show was over, the Dropkick’s efficient team managed to get through all their customers within half an hour of the music ending. On my side of the aisle, however, there was a huge queue of people still waiting to pick up some swag and maybe get a photo. I was at my post, with help from The Souls, for a good hour after that, endlessly slinging shirts, collecting cash, posing for photos and signing records. By the time the line was finally done, ushered away by the weary and slightly irritated security team, I was totally and utterly beat. I genuinely don’t think I’ve ever worked that hard on any other day of my life – which maybe is telling of my soft, middle-class upbringing, but whatever; I felt exhausted, empty and elated.
When the onslaught finally ended, Ben came over to ask if I was OK and, in a Pavlovian physical gesture, I threw my arm over his shoulder and span round for the photo op that my tired brain assumed was coming. He punched me in the ribs and laughed, calling me an idiot. We’d sold pretty much every scrap of cloth and every record that we had with us. A good day.
SHOW # 1214
Rockhal, Esch-sur-Alzette, Luxembourg, 4 April 2012
On returning, once again, from the USA, we had a ten-day gap in the touring diary. This was time for last-minute promotional and preparatory work for the Wembley show and also for a breather after a pretty fierce start to the year. Graham and my crew were in overdrive working on putting together our first ever arena headline show and I was busy chatting to all and sundry in the press about the upcoming gig. We were doing pretty well on ticket sales, edging ever closer to the sold-out finish line. I took a few days off to disappear up country, but have to admit that I was still checking daily sales updates like a demented stockbroker.
After many interviews and a few rehearsals, we headed over to the Continent for just over a week of shows that were acting as a kind of warm-up run for the big day. We took Emily Barker and The Red Clay Halo girls (Anna, Gill and Jo) with us, partly because they’re great, but also because I had planned on incorporating them and their extra instrumentation into parts of my set at the Wembley show. At these shows we were running the set list that we planned to play at the big show in order to see if it worked properly and then to get comfortable with it.
I remember this run as being a little weird, a little tense. In some ways I felt bad because so much of my attention was focused on the big event that perhaps I wasn’t giving the European crowds we were playing to their full due. We were also playing some pretty off-the-map places – this run, including Wembley, constituted the final push for the England Keep My Bones world tour, in a way. As well as playing through the set, I was working on new songs and The Souls and I were running them in sound check. I was, arguably, a little distracted.
The penultimate show of the run was my first ever show in Luxembourg, at what seemed to be about the only venue in the tiny city-state, Rockhal, an imposing warehouse-like place. Though we’d never actually played there before, the promoters, Joanna and I all thought that the fact that I had toured extensively around it meant that the show made sense and the turnout would be good. Alas, we were mistaken. The room holds over 1,000 people when it’s full, but we arrived on the day to discover that we had sold just under 100 tickets.
The promoters and the people running the venue had that typical mixture of apology and accusation in their eyes that every band knows well from a situation like this. They did a reasonable job of making the room look and feel smaller, bringing in curtains to rope off some of the cavernous emptiness. There was also the requisite assertion-cum-prayer that there might be ‘a good walk-up’. In the event I seem to remember us just about making it into triple digits. As I’ve said, I always try to live by the Henry Rollins maxim, that you give your best regardless of the number of people in front of you and The Souls and I certainly threw ourselves into the show, giving it our all and thinking of the big day looming in the diary. But in all honesty, it was a surreal and slightly disheartening appearance, to see our sounds and our gestures floating aimlessly into the rafters in front of the small and not overly enthusiastic assembly. I’m not sure it helped my simmering nerves much.
SHOW # 1216
Wembley Arena, London, UK, 13 April 2012
Wembley. The word rings out in English, British and international culture. For most people the first association is football, not something I’ve ever been a fan of. But there’s more to it than that; it’s also part of the rock ’n’ roll world. Live Aid in 1985 is the most famous and obvious example, though for me personally it’s beaten by Queen’s utterly sublime headline show there from the following year. If you include the arena as well as the stadium, the list of bands that have triumphed and made their mark in north-west London is endless, but no less daunting for it.
Booking an arena headline show was a strange experience for me. It made logical and professional sense after we had sold out Hammersmith Apollo a few months in advance. That hall holds 5,000 people, so the next step up is to either go to Alexandra Palace in the north of the city or to go to Wembley Arena, both of which hold around 12,000 people. When given the choice, I unhesitatingly chose the latter, partly because of its cultural resonance and partly because we had played the stadium there with Green Day in 2010, a show that had been something of a turning point in my career.
Nevertheless, it was a weird one. I realized that I had never actually been to an arena show before playing one. We had done a few opening slots here and there in larger rooms, so it wasn’t totally virgin territory, but growing up I used to go see bands at the Astoria, or Brixton at a push. It’s not necessarily elitism – it’s just that the bands I liked played those venues. I’d never really thought about how a show works in a room that size, with that much distance between the stage and the last member of the audience; about how the sound reverberates around the room, about how little gestures, nods and winks would get lost in the cavernous space.
So it was with some trepidation that I had given Charlie and Joanna the OK to book the room and to announce the show and get it on sale back in October 2011. I was worried not just about how the show itself would be received, but also how the announcement would go down. My career was reaching that tipping point where, regardless of what you do, a certain demographic is going to start rejecting you. Being polite about it, I guess I can see that some people only enjoy music in a certain underground context; I suppose you can imagine what the less polite response would be. But I felt confident in myself that I had got where I was without compromising my principles, so I was comfortable about it.
In the event, most people seemed to take the announcement and the show itself in the spirit it was intended – as something inherently slightly ridiculous, because I was still an independent artist, working hard and with people still coming to hear about me mostly through word of mouth and yet here I was, here we were, in a room that is usually reserved for mammoth rock acts or hyped-up pop ‘artists’. There was a slightly anarchic vibe to the show, the idea that we’d somehow stolen the keys to the staff-room at school.
The logistical side of the show was a huge consideration in itself. Graham, leading my production crew, had a massive task ahead of him. Even though it was only the one show, a mere two hours on stage, there was a world of technical hassle to get into, new hoops to jump through, staging and PA to hire, backstage to organize, all that kind of thing. The people at the arena were helpful, friendly and mindful of the fact that we were beginners in this world. But it was still a ton of work and I remain eternally in awe of Graham, Tré, Joanna and the rest of the crew for putting it together. At one point I wanted to have a kind of all-day show, with bands starting in the afternoon; however, that proved totally impracticable, as the cost of opening the venue earlier increased astronomically by the hour. I was determined to keep the ticket price down (£20), so that was not an option. I also spent some time looking at trying to do a pop-up solo section of the set at the back of the room, but that too turned into a logistical nightmare, so to save Graham’s sanity we dropped that as well.
Planning the set was something I also spent a crazy amount of time and mental energy on. Initially, I had it in my head that, for the new context, we needed a totally new show, a different approach. But it quickly became apparent that that would have been a grave error. The whole reason I got to the point of being able to play that stage was that I got up and did what I do, with The Sleeping Souls – honest rock ’n’ roll shows. To have changed it then would have been a betrayal of sorts, I think. In the end I settled on including some extra instrumentation – The Red Clay Halo girls – and a few other little tricks. But for the most part, it was to be a regular show.
Once we got back from Europe, final preparation for the big day began in earnest. We had a rehearsal room in London booked for a couple of days to run the set a few more times just to check that everything was in place. Billy Bragg came over to rehearse a couple of songs as well. I’d been amazed when he had happily agreed to be the main support for the show, but knowing him better now it’s typical Bill. He’s not one for airs and graces and he’s an avid supporter of younger musicians. I am but one of many lucky people who have benefited from his advice and kindness. The rest of the bill for the show was made up by the excellent Dan le Sac Vs Scroobius Pip, an electro-spoken-word duo from London that I love, and Beans On Toast. Jay was the only person I could imagine opening the show. It was partly a way of saying thanks to him for all his friendship and advice over the years and partly a way of getting the crowd to relax about the arena environment. Jay doing what he does always breaks the ice.
The presence of two special people added the icing to the Wembley cake for me. Firstly, we had Greg Nolan. He’d been riding with us for the past six months, documenting life on the road and the chaos of the build-up to the big show. Now that we were finally there, Greg was in his element and I’m glad he was along for the ride – I think the film he made, The Road to Wembley, is fantastic. Secondly, we had Josh Burdette. Josh, as previously mentioned, ran security at Washington DC’s legendary punk club, 9:30. We had become friends over the years and he’d expressed an interest in visiting London (he’d never been before) and catching the show. After some discussion with Graham, I found a way to run him through the budget as my ‘personal security’. Now obviously I don’t actually need a security guard, but it was an efficient and fun way to get Josh over.
The day before the show itself, I was in Camden Town running some errands (making some presents for The Sleeping Souls – little Wembley trophies, since you ask). I happened to run into my old friend Lil. Lil runs Household Name Records, the hardcore label that ran the UK scene when I first started going to punk shows in the late 1990s. He’d helped school me in the workings of the underground and we had remained friends. During times when many of the people I knew from that DIY scene were declaring me a sell-out because of my success, he had remained stubbornly loyal, appreciating all the hard work I had put in. I asked him if he was coming to the show the following day. As it happened, he didn’t know about it. I immediately called Tré and arranged for him and his wife, Kath, to have the best seats in the house. It felt good to know he’d be there.
The big day finally lumbered over the horizon. There’s a hotel in the Wembley complex that usually hosts the artists and footballers passing through. We had rooms booked for everyone, so I actually woke up next door to the arena. I knew it was going to be a nerve-racking day, so I had set myself a task to keep myself busy. I was planning to make a companion piece for Greg’s film, to be entitled Beans on Toast’s Road to Wembley. In practice this meant that Josh and I went over to Camden to drag Jay out of bed and get him ready for the big day. The resulting cinematic masterpiece is about ten minutes long, but it’s a lot of fun and it kept me out of the way of my crew, who had a lot to get through and didn’t need me hovering on the sidelines.
I did manage, however, to get a bit of hovering in when Josh, Jay and I made it back to the venue. The first of my production crew (run, I should mention, by the great Nitelites company, who I continue to work with today) had loaded in at 8 a.m. By the early afternoon the stage, lights and PA were starting to come together. Tré was busy running around finalizing the titanic guest list, Charlie and Joanna were generally supervising things, The Sleeping Souls were wandering in and out with their significant others, nervously tapping feet and gazing open-mouthed around the echoing enormity of the room. I started asking pointless questions of everyone, trying to occupy my mind – exactly the thing I’d been trying to avoid. Josh walked over and pretty much hoisted me out of the building back to the hotel, where he unceremoniously dumped me in the hot tub and ordered me to relax.
People had been gathering around the front doors of the venue since first thing in the morning. In fact, I’d caught wind (on social media and through Greg) of people travelling from all around the world to catch the show. In the afternoon, Joanna triumphantly announced the news we had all been waiting for – the show was sold out. Once the doors opened at around 6 p.m., a tidal wave of people swarmed into the room and filled out the barrier. From then on, time seemed to speed up and the day went by in a blur. Jay was sublime, leading the crowd in Mexican waves, group smiles, playing his new song ‘Hello Wembley’ for the occasion, overrunning his set and finishing up by crowd surfing all the way to the back door. Dan and Scroob got the room bouncing, but I had to bow out of my side-of-stage vantage point to start preparing for my set. That meant I also missed most of Billy’s turn, which was a great shame, but needs must and I’m told he brought the house down.
The warren of backstage rooms was filled with old friends, family, people I work with, crew and band members. There was a spark of excitement and nervous tension in the air. Gradually, the crowd in my dressing room thinned down to just me and The Souls. We changed into our white shirts, warmed up arms, wrists and voices, stretched our nervous bodies out and tried to just relax and remember that – on many levels – this was just another show.
Finally showtime rolled around. As had become customary, everyone high-fived everyone else in the wings over the rumble of 12,000 people on the other side of the curtain. When the intro tape – the horn arrangement from the recording of ‘Eulogy’ – kicked in as the lights dimmed, a tidal wave of a roar rose up, deafening us all even through our snug in-ear monitors. Adrenalin surged and before I knew it we were skipping across the stage to take up our instruments and our positions. The sea of humanity in front of me was something difficult to take in, but the faces I could see were all smiling and cheering. And so the show began.
The actual gig itself slipped by in what felt like minutes. In fact, I actually don’t have a very clear memory of all of it, though of course I have watched the footage back (filmed by Jack Lilley, a guy I met as a university film student, who now has his own production company, Sea Legs Productions, who were documenting the occasion). There were some obvious highlights, of course. I’d arranged to have Josh go fetch my mum from her seat in the guest area and bring her to the side of the stage in preparation for ‘Dan’s Song’. I’d got into the habit of pulling an audience member out of the crowd and teaching them to play harmonica for this song, but that didn’t seem like the right call for Wembley. I’d racked my brains trying to think of musician friends to come out and do the turn, but in the end the only person who could fill the role was my mother. She was not aware that this was about to happen, but, with forty years of primary-school teaching under her belt, she rose to the occasion without missing a beat. She was amazing and was briefly trending on Twitter afterwards. I later had to explain to her what Twitter is.
Having Emily, Gill, Jo and Anna onstage for the middle section of the set was a delight and the fact that everyone sang every song back at us (with the exception of new song ‘Four Simple Words’, which got everyone dancing instead) made the show all the easier to get through. By the time The Souls and I reassembled side-stage in the brief breather between the main set and the encore, after finishing with a Queen cover (‘Somebody to Love’), we were drenched in sweat, exhausted and happy. I wandered over to my tattooist friend Matt Hunt, who had his works set up behind the stage, to get the date of the show added to my existing Wembley tattoo, before heading back to the limelight.
The final part of the set started with Billy and I playing a Dylan cover, ‘The Times They Are A-Changin’’. We’d spent a fair amount of time trying to choose the right song to play together, but in the end there was no escaping old Bob. We did an OK job, though for the record Bill is the one who got the verses in the wrong order! After that, I announced that I was going to play ‘The Ballad of Me and My Friends’ for the last time. Nigel had suggested the idea and at the time it made sense – a fitting place to put a song about being the underdog to rest. Actually, I’ve since realized that this was perhaps a little hasty; at the time I guess I was just bored of always playing the song right at the end of every show. These days it makes an occasional appearance on special occasions.
Finally, The Souls and the ladies rejoined me for a rousing rendition of ‘Photosynthesis’, complete with a long (perhaps overly so) speech in which I tried to sum up the occasion. I’d been thinking about what I was going to say and the key line for me was that it wasn’t me headlining Wembley, it was all of us – the community of people who had supported me, come to the shows, bought records and shirts and continued to believe in me and my music. On the final chord of the song, the tongue-in-cheek confetti cannons we had hidden at the side of the stage blasted the assembled company with a snowstorm of pink paper and I finally had a moment to stand at the lip of the stage, look around and take the whole thing in. It’s a moment I won’t forget.
After the show, there was a torrent of well-wishing, some glass award-like statuettes from the venue and a framed poster from Will Blake at SJM, the man who had promoted the show. We had a couple of afterparty rooms set up for our guests and I wandered in to say hello to friends and family. Quickly, though, it all became a bit much. The aftershow had been thoroughly infiltrated by people I didn’t really know and standing around having photos taken and being patted on the back felt artificial and inappropriate. Isabel was with me and after half an hour or so we bowed out and went over to the hotel where the guys in my band and crew were having a more private drink at the bar. That was much more the atmosphere I was looking for, so we settled in and drank until dawn.