Further to his entertainingly preposterous attempts to destroy the music industry, yannis recently attempted to destroy not just syntax, but sign, signifier, and synapses everywhere. actually, if you were wondering, the flock of question marks came as a result of a strange computer glitch that neither of us understand. i like it, though. it reads like trans-atlantic communications used to, you know, back in the day when the world was still round. stop-dash-stop, only more self-doubting.
"brackets? i'll give you brackets!"
in less than a week we're flying back to london from new york. the jet-lag is one thing, and the pressures of playing a huge bbc festival after no sleep is another, but the fear that we'll be flying into a city that isn't so much a newly fascist city-state than one big gilded joke of a newspaper column made rotten flesh--by which i mean it's probably going to smell a bit worse--is i would say the biggest of all. boris "picaninny" johnson, we salute you--sort of like we'd salute any smug self-satisfied old-etonian holding a statute-book to our head. congratulations, and good luck with the olympics.
at least when california elected a clown as governor they elected one who'd made his name as a muscle-man. boris appears to have been elected simply because he has blond hair.
selling out, one show at a time
anyway, the bbc festival.
the big fucking weekend as it's known colloquially. this is going to be strange for us as we've never played anything quite so... mm, how do you say, big? right, yes. but it's good to play outside of your comfort zone, i think. i mean, i guess. we're so far outside our comfort zone right now we're basically floating dead in sorry solitary space, but, you know, hopefully the show will be okay. anyone going to show is probably only going to see madonna, anyway, aren't they? let's not kid ourselves. i think in fact the only reason we're flying half way around the world and then to japan the next day is to see madonna. at least that's how i'm justifying it to myself. i don't even like madonna, but i had to find some justification. although i suppose madonna is one of those people who renders "liking" or "not liking" more or less redundant in the face of her all-pervasive cultural conquest. it's like "liking" or "not liking" pre-sliced bread. so what, basically. there's this thing called pre-sliced bread, and a lot of people eat it. some even enjoy it. wow, thought for the day.
so the festival is in mote park, which is in maidstone, which is nearish to where i grew up. when i was young i used to play rounders in that park. i wish i could say i used to miss classes and smoke there, but i was a good christian, and my only sin was sitting down and picking daisies while pretending to field. sounds romantic, doesn't it? yeah, i made it sound that way. it's called revisionism.
a potted history
because we haven't updated our myspace in an age, there's now too much to say. too much to say, and too little time.
but because both our tour manager and jimmy have digital cameras, along with that peculiar but admirable drive to photograph everything, we can say a lot through a few colourful pictures. thank you technology, and thank you the western eye.
i'm going to have to do this in two parts, though, as it takes ages, and because my laptop hardly has any power left.
so this is north america. most of our time spent here has been driving and sleeping in pretty decent hotel rooms. we haven't seen much of the cities, and we haven't met all that many people. touring north america is famously difficult, though. and on reflection we've had an easy time of it. if we were touring before we were signed then it would be a total ball-ache. massive drives, small shows, overwhelming cynicism. we're only suffering from two of those three, and, really, what's a bit of hard work between friends.
our last european show was in dublin. it was a great show--really, really fun. we stayed out a bit too late, though, most of us getting to bed at five in the morning. and after one hour of sleep, after eight hours of drinking, this was how some of us decided to queue for the flight to new york.
yannis only turned up about twenty minutes before the flight was due to leave, having no real idea where he'd been or was supposed to be going.
and this is what we were queuing for: an air-conditioned coffin. thanks aer lingus, unfortunately the only airline that flies transatlantic from dublin. i'm pretty sure we're never using them again after they charged us 1,200 euros for excess baggage on the previous flight from brussels.
our super-macho tour van. nice, eh? sure.
bands, as i think is common knowledge, are not popular with highway police. we've been lucky so far, as we haven't been pulled over. we don't do drugs, either (i mean, you know, the bad ones), so we're not much of a target. we also, thanks to our super-wise tour manager nick, carry this stickers, to get us through awkward situations on the interstates.
little do they know that our troops are different to their troops. big up the basra boys, innit.
washington dc, when we got there, turned out to be rather more left-wing than i'd imagined.
no, i don't understand either.
by the time we played this show, our second of the tour after the almost-hilariously-shambolic ("ahaha" etc.) philadelphia show, we'd establshed that this tour was going to be defined by technical problems. my keyboard wasn't working, for what i initially thought was voltage-conversion problems but has since transpired to be some weird circuit fault, the guitars kept breaking, and electric shocks ("oh"...) were putting yannis within an inch of his life almost every show. it could have been worse, i guess, somehow. like if one us lost our legs, or suddenly without any warning aged forty years and lost our youth.
thank god for small mercies, right?
small mercies
fortunately people have been coming to the shows--lots of people to some of them. and these people were patient and welcoming like people we've never played to before. thanks a lot... people. we really appreciate it.
this was the end of our fifteen-hour drive to chicago, through the beautiful pennsylvanian and not-so-beautiful ohio countryside--and what an end! 
the drive was pretty fun, i guess. we slept a bit, got back ache, argued a bit, gave up reading the books we'd optimistically picked up at various airports, and listened to a lot of david cross stand-up. we also experienced that most famous of american exports: godawful fast food. i ate something like six consecutive burgers, not, i'd like to add, out of choice. some of them were even vegetarian, if like most fast-food places in america you consider chicken to be a vegetarian option.
vegetarian options
of course america isn't the worst offender here.
when in italy, which i'll come to in later, our properly-vegetarian soundman had to deal with what was fundamentally just a plate of cheese for a meal. it was nice cheese, you know, sort and tasty--but it was also just cheese. at least in america they don't even try.
moons over my hammy
perkin's may have been the worst, somewhere in rural pennsylvania. i ordered the "captain's catch", naively expecting something that not only tasted like it had come from the sea, but might have, you know, been caught or indeed cooked by someone who had earned the title of "captain". but, no. whoever put this on a plate--let's call him "first mate"--had managed to make cod, clam, and shrimp not only taste exactly the same as each other, but somehow all taste of nothing more than sunflower oil. my mum taught me to always eat all of my dinner, if only out of politeness--but, perkin's, you would have made even her put down the cutlery.
ihop, the international house of pancakes (about as international as the "world series"), was the best. the poster at the front entrance advertised an omelette, apparently wrapped around the contents of a compost bin, with the line "it's breakfast, but with lunch inside." good one. when i go for breakfast, i'm usually happy with just breakfast, regardless how much time i want to save. i don't even know what we had here. feeling close to vomiting up my stomach, i asked for a pancake just with some fresh fruit. i got some sliced banana, generously, but topped with maybe a half-litre of squirty sweetened cream.
is cream a fruit? really? are cows fruit? is grass fruit? am i a fruit?!
and the other thing about fruit, which i think a lot of these places actually pride themselves on, is the way it's consistently served with cooked breakfast. want some eggs, any style? want crispy bacon and unlimited sausage "links"? want some fucking strawberries on top? sure, why not. anything to make me shit myself two hours later.
i hope i don't sound ungrateful. i love america, i really do. everyone knows that fast food on the road wherever you go is appalling. it's just as bad in england--only we know what we're getting there, and so we avoid it. we're learning to avoid it here. unfortunately we don't know where to go to get good food. we know our way around new york to some extent, but put us in, say, detroit, and we start panicking and end up in the hard rock cafe, being served orange macaronic cheese by some pervert in cufflinks.
in case you were thinking it was only me reacting to the the food this way, and perhaps everyone else in the band is a bit more relaxed and lighthearted about it--well, no, they're not. this was walter's response to finding out that we were eating yet another burger for dinner.
poor guy.
this is all-american mitch cheney, previously of sweep the leg johnny, currently of sick room records and hey!tonal.
he's been helping us on tour. mostly by scoring pot for yannis. this was in the largest truck stop in the world, in, i think, iowa, or... somewhere around there. that jacket (oh god) was for sale next to those knives (oh GOD), and, no, i don't know what is more offensive.
after our show in chicago we drove to a city called rock island in illinois where we met up with daytrotter to record a session. their studio was filled with all sorts of awesome weird gear, a small amount of which you can see here.
so we had a great time, despite suffering from a collective hangover the likes of which i personally have never experienced before. losing several hours of my life and being found wandering the streets at 2 or 3 or 4 or 5 am or whatever it was is not my idea of fun. but this session was. we recorded a few different versions of some songs that sounded pretty decent, and some totally new rambling thing with the help of mitch. hopefully it'll be online soon.
after this, we played in minneapolis, which was fun (where i had some "beer cheese soup with popcorn"--is anyone familiar with this? totally bizarre), madison, which i can't remember anything about for the life of me, and... detroit, rock city.
we were told that detroit is pretty rough, and maybe it is, but what i noticed more than anything about it was how empty the centre was.
someone had spent a lot of money making it look slick and modern, but there was no-one there. everything was empty. it was kind of troubling, but not in a way that i can really partake in. being troubled as a day-tripping tourist is no kind of trouble, really, is it.
this is niagara falls, by night, lit up by huge multi-coloured flood lights.
we drove there on the way to toronto from detroit a few days ago. our show in buffalo was cancelled, so we had to find something to do. the falls are, surprisingly, completely breath-taking.
you take my breath away
we've all seen superman 2, yes, and we all know that they'e big. we've also all seen the honeymoon suites with the fires you can switch on with a cord and that you can fall into if you're not extra careful, even when you have all sorts o amazo super-powers. but what you might not have seen is just how many of these honeymoon hotels there are. around the falls there is literally an entire city dedicated to tourism. huge, brilliantly lit skyscrapers, fairgrounds, casinos, and of course car parks.
it'd be too easy to be disgusted by it, and to despair at the full horrific expanse of the american dream, and to quote genesis 2:28 with regret while clutching your head in your hands. i actually think it's kind of amazing. maybe one day soon someone will engineer a series of flumes that wind in and out of the falls, and by harnessing, say, the entire energy output of the sun, will manage to heat the entire body of water, turning it into a fun-for-all-the-family swimming pool, with maybe a jacuzzi and a sauna and perhaps a couple of diving boards. i can't wait.
now we're in canada. it's great, i think. my battery is almost totally dead now, so... yeah.
RED SOX PUGIE
pre-order it here
xx edwin.
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