Preaching To The Conversed :

"You look mean in green and in red you're so pleasing
But they're so last season"

I have worn a variety of colours in my life, but I think I look best in black as demonstrated by our profile picture (at the time of writing), very thinning on a rapidly inflating lower torso.  Black never goes out of season.  But red and green do.  Generally you can only get away with this if you are Dudley Moore in that Christmas film where he's an elf.  And I think this is wrong.  Why can't Dudley Moore be a trendsetter?  WHY CAN'T I DRESS LIKE AN ELF AND NOT GET LAUGHED AT?

"And Alexa said it would be suicide"

I saw this show on T4 when I spent the night at someone's house and they woke me up and made me watch the TV at about 10am on a Sunday, and it was basically Alexa Chung telling people what to wear.  I'll tell you what to wear at 10am on a Sunday - PYJAMAS FOR FUCKS SAKE.  Thanks for letting me crash at your house, but fuck off and let me go back to sleep, at least until Hollyoaks for deaf people comes on.

"You may as well just commit suicide"

This was the impression she was giving off.  I felt like it, seriously.  I've had some dark moments in my life (see my acoustic demos page) but none more than when I'm lying in some random girl's bed watching Alexa tell me I should wear stripy yellow socks or whatever and I hate the thought of the existence of humans but I've still got a semi on because she's quite attractive.  I'm sure Channel 4 used to show horse racing?  I don't fancy horses, and they don't speak, and even if they did they wouldn't tell you what to wear, I'm sure.  They'd just tell you not to ride them and crack them mercilessly with a whip.

NB.

- She was good on Popworld
- I'm not comparing her to a horse
- Actually that was Miquita Oliver who was good on Popworld, my bad!

"Guaranteed haute corpse-ture"

'where they live hard, die young, have a good lookin' corpse every time'  Tom Waits, "Mr. Siegal" from Heartattack and Vine, Elektra, 1980

"Don't get shirty, I'm only teasing"

Shirty! Like a shirt!  But like in the sense of getting a bit worked up!  And a shirt!  It's a verse about the frivolity of fashion! HAHA!  Kill me now.

"But that shirt is tantamount to fashion treason
Apparently
You must approach fashion transparently
Am I up to speed?  I'm not sure..."

I don't have a clue about fashion.  This is a bit like Lady Gaga writing a song about music.

"The high street is your cote d'or"

For all you non-Francais speakers out there, cote d'or directly translates as "the gold coast".  I grew up in a town called Sutton in the far reaches of south London, and by all accounts, it's a pretty good high street, it's better than Tooting for instance.  But it kills me that probably a decent proportion of the people under the age of 25 who reside in Sutton have only seen this one high street.  Go to Shrewsbury or something, you'd puke.  It has cobbled streets, and the front of the KFC is beige!

"Topman your independent record store"

Apparently my song 'Forever On The Edge' got on some kind of playlist they play in Topman stores.  I don't think that needs any further comment.  I got a £5 Topman voucher once for my birthday from some distant Auntycousin.  I went in and bought a hairclip or something and got £4.50 change.  On the way out I deposited the hairclip in a bin before heading to Virgin Megastore to spend £4.49 on an old Charlatans single that probably wasn't even good but I thought it was at the time.  I put the 1p in the RNIB box.  Someone benefitted at least.  My grandad was blind.  ANYWAY ... this is a serious point.  There used to be this great little shop in Sutton called Hot Rocks (arf!) which sold loads of awesome records for £3.99 and some for even less.  I once went in there and Fat Matt the proprietor threw a Mansun T-Shirt at me.  It makes me sad that I don't expect anyone ever again ever will walk into a record shop and have a Mansun T-Shirt thrown at them with the words "You like this shit don't you?".  Maybe that's never happened to anyone apart from me anyway.  ANYWAY ... to explain the line - I may have been the only guy who got his best clothes from a CD shop, but kids don't go to CD shops these days.  They go to Topman and listen to 'Forever On The Edge' by the 4 or 5 Magicians while buying poorly made jeans for £49.99 which is "a bargain" (even though their cost price is probably like 18p).  I could have bought the entire Charlatans singles back catlogue for that (and I did - whoops!).  Conclusion : I'm a cunt, and so are you.

"You have no idea that Sonic Youth is a band"

We played a show with a band called Doll and The Kicks in Brighton who Morrissey has been saying are the "best band ever".  I won't be drawn on their musical worth, I'll let Morrissey do the talking - he knows far better than me, his band was successful - but let me tell you, they look fucking great, seriously.  The singer was wearing one of those shirts that has the front cover of Goo by Sonic Youth on it, and that kind of inspired this line.  I'm sure she knows Sonic Youth are a band, I'm not saying she doesn't, but did she buy the shirt for £5 from a cockney outside the Kentish Town Forum after sitting through them playing the whole of 'A Thousand Leaves'?  Probably not.  Good on her, that album is shit.  Goo's the masterpiece, I agree.

"You think The Ramones is a clothing brand"

My old housemate Will used to work in the Levi's shop in Churchill Square shopping centre in Brighton.  There was this dude we both kind of knew who hung around with the football team even though he didn't play football who inexplicably referred to Levi's as "Leroy's", and had a Ramones T-Shirt, but didn't realise they were a band, he just liked the design.  He also wore an Arsenal shirt a lot, but he realised they were a football team.  At least I think he did.  Maybe he just liked Emirates Airlines.

"Dress for success and then jostle for position
Yeah, I look a mess, but I'm a struggling musician"

This is my fist in the air, Bruce Springsteen kind of "beat the system" line.  BOX TICKED

"You all must look the same and thus the same you must all listen"

Kids dress the same because they don't want to stick out.  In a way I agree with this in really young kids.  When I was in year 6 I had these absolutely shoddy trainers called "Mirage" that my mum bought me from a dodgy discount store because she was a cheapskate and didn't have a great grasp of child psychology.  I winged it by telling all my classmates they were prototype Japanese Adidas Mirage trainers and they believed me because they were a) pretty gullible, and b) because I was the only kid in the class in the football team so I owned them.  There's some drawn out moral story here about hegemonic behaviour among 11 year olds, but I'll save that for another day.  The bottom line is, kids do whatever the cool kid does. Even though by the age of 14/15 you should be forming your own opinions.  But this still doesn't happen in the large part of cases as status is everything in playground politics. So if the cool kid says listen to [WAVVES]insert cool but essentially shit, fly by night current band[/WAVVES] they will all listen to that and they are cool by default.

"Preaching to the Conversed, my impossible mission"

Conversed, like people that wear Converse.  And also ironic double meaning of "conversed" as in people that have amassed an assumed superior knowledge by talking to others.  You haven't seen anything until you've seen someone earnestly attempting to play football in skinny-fit jeans and Converse All-Stars.  Please notice the photo accompanying the song on the myspace player.  Yes that is an inner sole (from none other than the Kurt Cobain signature Converse!) that reads "Punk Rock Means Freedom".  On an INNER FUCKING SOLE.  Do you think people take their shoe off and are like "check out the inner sole of my Converse guys!  Read it!  Isn't that totally rad?  Oh while it's out maybe GIVE IT A SNIFF - IT SMELLS OF CHEESE AS WELL".

"All your friends say vote green, but aren't the reds the best?"

From fashion to politics - my other favourite sticking point.  I love 18 year olds who vote for the Green party just because "they are campaigning for our future!" or other such bullshit.  This is a comic line because it's almost attributing some level of reflective thought to the youth of today, but only fleetingly because they are sure that the red party is the one you're meant to vote for, and they want to fit in.

"Well your parents contest
The red ones are in disarray"

Parents are generally more stupid than kids I find.  They are usually racist, and say all music sounds like Fleetwood Mac.  However they do often read the paper and form "opinions", and realise that the Labour party is totally fucking up right now where as kids just play Playstations and eat Doritos or whatever kids do these days - unprotected sex or whatever. 

"You'll probably vote blue anyway
That's your favourite colour"

Cutting. 

"Don't get angry I'm only joking
But what's the point in voting
When you don't know what you're voting for?"

I have never voted.  I got into a big argument in one of my politics seminars once for admitting this.  Some dude who looked like Johnny Rotten was like "MAAAN people died so that you had the right to vote" and I was like "didn't people die so I had the right to CHOOSE TO VOTE OR NOT?", actually I didn't say that, I think I just shrugged and wondered why I had got out of bed (even though this was one of my 4pm seminars on the same day as football training).  But seriously, I'd say the majority of people in the UK right now are voting for parties that don't represent them.  That's why the cocking BNP are on the rise, because they do actually represent the values of that minority of idiots.  The current state of politics in the UK is ridiculous.  I think centrism is probably the most sensible way to gain votes at the moment, so I can see why they are doing it.  But in a de-facto two-party system, who are you voting for?  Do you even know any more?  Is there even a significant difference between Labour and Conservative apart from one is RED and the other is BLUE?

"Does no-one read the paper any more?
Read the paper?!?  What could be duller?"

This is a wink towards the internet age.  It is a sad truth that the best news based thing to read is theonion.com , and that's not even real.  There is also a slight hypocrisy here - I should really read the newspaper more myself, I don't get it much at all, I tend to just watch news 24 for half an hour a day to see what's going on.  But then Jade Goody thought Norwich was on Mars or whatever.  RIP Jade.  I hope you're in heaven, which is just off the A11, about 45 minutes past Thetford Forest.

"Obama is your new Che Guevara"

I'm not gonna go all Frank Turner on you, but Obama, in the run up to his winning the US Presidency was portrayed by the media as some kind of messiah, and the talking heads waxing lyrical about his win afterward were just embarrassing.  He isn't a messiah [hadtosayit]he's a very naughty boy[/hadtosayit], he's just a normal guy.  With seemingly balanced views.  Who can string a sentence together.  This is why he is so so important right now, and I genuinely hope he becomes a great and inspirational president, as he could well do.  But I just really hope in 30 years time, fat middle class kids aren't parading round in Obama T-shirts that they bought for £19.99 from Camden Market.

"Scouting For Girls are your new Nirvana"

We've all worn a Nirvana T-shirt at some point in our lives, right?  But bands like that don't exist any more.  Scouting For Girls exist though, sadly.  I've never seen anyone in a Scouting For Girls T-Shirt though.  I think perhaps I'm contradicting my point here, but I'm not sure.  I think you know what I mean, and if you don't, then that's ok because I don't either.  I mean I do but I can't really articulate right now [NEEDS AN EDIT HERE DAN - THIS ALMOST NEGATES YOUR WHOLE ANALYSIS - Ed]

"You've written "Free Tibet" on the back of your hand"

Chris Martin has a lovely smile, but you shouldn't copy stuff he does.

"But you think that Tibet is a part of Iran"

I'm still not sure about this line, but I think it works because it's topical.  Even if you are the stupidest stupidhead in the UK, you must have seen Iran mentioned on the news (even if it was by accident) and know that they are a bunch of mental darkies that are going to kill all us lovely, virtuous white people with their weapons of mass destruction.  You probably haven't heard of Tibet, even though Chris Martin has.  Still, you have a pen, and a whole head of ideas, so knock yourself out.

"You think the Dalai Lama is the King of Japan!"

Comment on the fact that a large section of our society would probably guess "Japanese?" upon presnetation of a photo of the Dalai Lama and the question "which country is this man from?".  Maybe this is taking pseudo-cynical too far.  I haven't done any market research.  If anyone wants to come help me with some consumer-hassling in Brighton at any point let me know.  It would be a welcome relief from those try hards that guilt trip you into setting up a standing order to donate money to Cancer Research so they can fund their Easter holiday ski trip to St. Tropez anyway.

"Yes, I confess, I'm no great politician"

I did a politics degree and I only just passed.  I'd like to say this was because I became so disillusioned with politics / life that I actually felt a genuine disdain for the futility of what I was studying and lost interest, but it was probably just because I was a bit lazy, I didn't actually do my dissertation due to poor time management, and the fact that I've only ever wanted to be in a band so I focused on that rather than bothering to write essays giving a balanced view on Margaret Thatcher.

"But at least I possess a process approaching cognition"

Little known fact : Sam Clarke, erstwhile guitarist (formerly bass player) in 4 or 5 Magicians has a neuroscience degree.  You learn something new every day.  Well, some people do.

"You all must think the same and thus the same you must all listen
Preaching to the Conversed, my impossible mission"

'Think the same' this time, rather than look the same.  It's true.  People think the same as each other too.  As much as they like to think they don't.  You probably disagree, how ironic!

"If you can't beat 'em, join 'em, and I feel like I'm beaten
So take me for a Big Mac so I can taste the defeat"

This is my favourite line I have ever written.  I didn't eat McDonalds for about 6 years, not for any moral reasons, just because it tasted like shit and gave me explosive diahorrea.  But me and Graham were out in London last summer, and after stumbling totally wrecked out of a club at 5am it was the only place still open on The Strand, and so I bit the bullet, went in, slapped £5 down on the counter and just spurted out "MEAT!!".  The guy returned with two quarter pounders and took my money.  Didn't even ask me if I wanted fries.  DO YOUR JOB FELLA!  I ate them both, and the next thing I know it's 11am and I'm throwing up in Graham's toilet.  Never has the phrase "taste the defeat" seemed more appropriate to me.

"And now we are the same and the same we will listen
Preaching to the Conversed, my impossible mission"

About 12 years ago, a Tesco megastore was built at the end of our suburban street in Sutton.  As a 13 year old I was delighted - so much choice at my fingertips!  But my Dad warned me at the time "there won't be any shops in 15 years except supermarkets and they will charge whatever the fuck they like".  Shut up dad, stop being such a cynic - what corner shop would do buy one get one free Reggae Reggae Sauce?!?  What greengrocer would sell broccoli at half price ALL YEAR ROUND?!?!!?  What electrical appliance store would play Simply Red records over the PA system??!?!  Oh hang on Dixons used to do that.  And Tandy.  But anyway, good riddance I say.  You can't buy hair straighteners and condoms at a fishmongers!

But what does this all count for?  What does this song acheive?  Well nothing really apart from the fact I can listen to it at 11:35am having been awake all night after a slightly indulgent Saturday night out, in the deluded "knowledge" that I have written one of the best songs of all time.  I haven't.  It means nothing because in reality you don't fucking care, and nor do I.

Dan x

I can FINALLY announce details for the release of our debut album!

The album will be called 'Empty, Derivative Pop Songs', and is scheduled to be released on Monday October 12th through Smalltown America Records.

The tracklisting will be thus :

1. I'm In The Band
2. Forever On The Edge
3. Behind Each Others Backs
4. Out Of My Hands
5. Form An Orderly Queue
6. Your Fictitious Character
7. Is This Your Ideal Man?
8. Nice Little Earner
9. Change The Record
10. Preaching To The Conversed

All tracks are new songs, new recordings of songs, or previously unheard new mixes of songs.

The album will be preceded in September by a single, Nice Little Earner, which will be backed by two brand new songs which we are recording on June 2nd.  We are also making a video for the song with Brighton based director Matt Anstee.

To explain the delay, we had decided in Feburary to release on Smalltown America, with the release scheduled for May, but at the 11th hour Jaimie Hodgson, new music editor at the NME called me up and suggested the possibility of us releasing on a bigger label.  After strong interest from a prominent indie label, and a major imprint, it looked reasonably likely we may release on one of them, though no offer was forthcoming, and after a bit of thought I realised that Smalltown America was the ideal label for this particular release anyway.  October is the soonest we could release on their schedule, and is a good month for touring, so it has actually worked out rather well.

So yeah, a bit of a way off, but glad to finally have a release date sorted!

Dan x

PS. Talking of Jaimie Hodgson, he saw us at The Great Escape and it looks like he enjoyed it!  http://www.nme.com/blog/index.php?blog=15&title=the_great_escape_round_up_day_two&more=1&c=1&tb=1&pb=1

Before our tour started, Graham, who has been playing occasionally with the band since January 2008, and became a permanent utility member when we moved in together in Brighton this January, told me that he needs to concentrate, firstly on passing his journalism course he is doing, and when that finishes, steady employment.  So he's basically gone back to being a part time member, playing (mainly keyboard I expect!) when other commitments allow him to.

I'm delighted to announce the addition of a hand picked, head hunted new member though, in the shape of Ivan Berry.  Ivan used to be a member of hotly tipped Surrey trio The Special Relationship, but they split early summer last year.  I suppose with Gordon Brown coming to power, The Special Relationship was always in jeopardy, ahem!

So yeah Sam has been playing guitar live a bit recently, and played on a few tracks on the album, so I decided to shift him to lead guitar permanently, and look for a new bass player.  I racked my brains for someone I thought would be good and available, and remembered Ivan from when we played a show with The Special Relationship last April.  I tracked him down on facebook, and sent him a message not expecting him to be up for it, or if he was, not able to do it, but to my delight he sent a message back saying he was definitely up for it and definitely available.

When we arrived back from tour we had a rehearsal and it sounded so good we decided to throw him in at the deep end to play at The Great Escape this weekend.  So anyone coming to that, you'll be sort of witnessing our first gig!

I need some sleep, got to be up in 6 hours, then do a 3 hour rehearsal, then party til the early hours.  We have a band called Titus Andronicus staying at our house I think.  And Laura Hocking.  It's going to be a veritable hotbed of musical talent!  Bring it on!

Just a reminder we are on at 9:30pm at Above Audio on Friday as part of The Great Escape.  See you there!

Dan x

Thursday April 30th : KIDDERMINSTER The Tap House

Wake up in Louth and all have long showers - we know they will probably be the last of the tour!  Say goodbye to Liam, and head to the venue to get our stuff.  In car park I devise a new formation of packing the boot, which is the best one we have had yet.  Before we leave we all get sandwiches from Spar, and I also get some really good chips from a fish and chip shop.  We hit the long road to Kidderminster, and before long I take the opportunity to tell Sam that I'm not in Louth with him any more.

We stop for some petrol just outside Lincoln, and somewhere in between here and Nottingham we must have hit some debris in the road, as just outside Nottingham, a crazy noise from under the car happens.  At first we think it is the car next to us, then it dawns on us that it is actually us and there is something seriously wrong with the car.  It sounds like the suspension has completely collapsed, or at least the exhaust has come loose.  Luckily we are right next to the junction we need to turn off at anyway, so we turn off, crawl forward a bit, and pull off into a convenient residential side road.  To our immense relief, we have a burst tyre, and the suspension appears to be fine.  We sit by the side of the road in drizzle for 45 mins while Alex does the honours of changing the wheel :



After unloading the whole contents of the boot to get the spare wheel out, while somewhat bemused residents looked on, we then utilised the new packing system to put it all back neatly and efficiently.  We then drove to the nearest petrol station to make sure the tyre was at the right pressure (it was), and paid 50p for the privelege!  I'm sure at every place ever it is either free or 20p maximum.  Crazy :



Unfortunately we are running late so do not get to use the car wash, as demonstrated by Alex finger graffitiing the car :



We have to go all the way round the top of Birmingham to get to Kidderminster in the south, and it takes a fair old while, and when we get there we are sent on a merry dance by ShitNav which firstly takes us to the wrong address, then once we alter it to the right address, does not make it at all clear where the venue is.  We stop about 5 people to ask ... rather brilliantly the first two completely seperate people say "sorry I'm not from around here" (what the hell are you doing in Kidderminster on a rainy Thursday evening?!).  And the other two give totally unclear instructions.  We finally stop an indie looking guy (who actually comes to the gig) who points out a little side road which didn't even show up on the sat nav.  After about half an hour of aimless driving around, we're finally there.

The venue is a really cool looking pub with a bare brick effect.  The band area is a kind of odd atrium thing with a skylight and lots of hanging baskets.  Really odd, but really nice!  Also has best and most informative poster of the tour on the wall :



Meet venue manager Andy - top bloke.  Also meet support act Ian AKA The Humdrum Express, who is a solo acoustic guy with some really good lyrics.  We play and it sounds really fucking loud, but the crowd, mainly a group of thirtysomethings who don't necessarily look like your average indie-rock fans, sitting around at tables with a beer, don't seem to mind at all, and we get a really good reaction.  I somehow manage to forget the words to Your Fictitious Character, and then get a total mind-blank, so much so we have to stop the song.  Bit of a shame as we've only played it perhaps two or three times on the tour.  But I think we play every other song from the album, ending with me standing on a table swinging my guitar around my head.  I accidentally kick a bottle off the table and it smashes on the floor - rock and roll (even though I didn't mean it)!

An attractive blonde called Tara comes up and congratulates us on our performance.  Said she came down with her mum and her mum loved it as well.  I ask her if it was perhaps a bit loud "Oh no", she said, "it was great!".  Nice to hear this after all of the "you guys were a complete racket" comments we got in Louth!  She invites us to go play in Worcester some time.  I ask her if she knows Luke Leighfield as I think he's from there.  She doesn't know him.  I thought he knew everybody!

We hit the road, we're staying with Sam's cousin Sian (I swear this guy has family in every county) in Leamington Spa.  Inspired cassette choice of 'The Simpsons Sing The Blues' for the trip.  Just the right length.  You haven't lived until you're cruising through a completely deserted Bromsgrove at midnight listening to 'Do The Bartman'.

Arrive at house - from the outside looks like a nice middle-aged couple semi-detatched cul-de-sac house - inside, very much a student house with bikes everywhere, half eaten food on the table, overflowing bins etc. - our natural habitat.  Watch a few episodes of South Park, Alex spends about an hour blowing up an inflatable mattress, before he and Graham create this rather scary looking scene :



...before we fall asleep.

Friday May 1st : BIRMINGHAM Island Bar

Everyone gets woken up at about 8:00am by occupants eating breakfast, apart from me, who somehow manages to sleep through it despite leaving my earplugs in Leeds two nights before.  Wake up about 11:00 and sit about for an hour, literally just sitting about.  No idea what the other guys were doing before this to occupy their time!  Leave about 12:00ish I think, lovely day outside!  Alex had suggested earlier in the tour when asked what we should do after leaving Sheffield "lets go to the thing on the first brown road sign", and since that day, I rued the decision not to listen to him, and arriving in Wakefield three hours early instead of going to the National Museum of Coal Mining.  So I fiddled about with the SatNav and found a button saying "attractions", and the closest thing it threw up was a placed called "Newbold Comyn", which I assumed was a kind of picturesque national trust gardens or something, but actually turned out to be a leisure centre, and a golf course.  So naturally we went for 9 holes of pitch and putt :



None of us really knew how to play golf, though I had played a 9 hole par 3 round when I was about 15 (and beat my dad!), and been taken to a driving range with my mate Steve with his dad, where I sliced a lot of balls into the car park, but hit one drive about 200 yards, to his astonishment.  I think years of playing cricket meant I was good with bats (and clubs!) and balls.  Sam had the best technique by far of any of us, but this worked to his disadvantage as he kept trying to welly the ball and knocking it into bushes and over the green.  One particular shot saw the ball fly about 50 ft past the hole, and onto the fairway of the next hole, and he lost two balls in the depths of bushes :

 

In the end the scores were as follows :

Dan : 44
Graham : 47
Sam : 54
Alex : 58

Could have been worse, especially considering the fact that I think all of us missed the ball when trying to hit it on the first tee, but I don't think any of us will be turning pro any time soon.

I was really enjoying this afternoon of sports (SPORTS!) :



...and suggested we go for a game of doubles badminton in the leisure centre.  The other guys weren't up for it as they wanted to go to Cadbury World in Birmingham.  It was probably a good thing because I had trodden in poo in my trusty Hi-Tec squash shoes, and didn't wear them for the rest of the tour.

We stopped for some food at Sainsbury's and I had my weirdest meal of the tour - an Israeli cous cous and feta salad, with a whole packet of shell on prawns, and a carton of cranberry juice.  We got to Birmingham and experienced London style outer suburb traffic I thought only existed in south London.  Due to this, we arrived at Cadbury World about 4:45pm and were immensely disappointed to see that i) it was £13.50 for a guided tour, and ii) it was just about to close anyway.  Luckily we got there just before the shop closed, and the other guys all got themselves a huge bag of mis-shapes :



I still had three Wagon Wheels and a half eaten chocolate log I had stolen from my parents house pre-tour so decided against the chocolate.  I did almost buy a cream and purple cap, but I look like a weird child in baseball caps so I didn't.  We got outside and it started to rain.  We also couldn't get through to Greg from Sunset Cinema Club who was putting us up for the night so we sat in the car park eating chocolate for 15 mins.  Greg got back to us, and we drove about 5 mins to his house in Stirchley and dropped our stuff off before heading to the venue.

Unloaded outside, and then me and Sam went to park the car.  Traffic was insane, and we miss the turning to go round the back of the venue, and then take about 20 mins to travel about 200 yards to get back to the turning, and when we do, parking is suspended.  Great.  Go round a mental roundabout (seriously Birmingham city centre must be the most dangerous place to drive in the whole of the UK) where some idiot deliberately almost drives into us, more interested in beeping his horn than applying the brakes.  Totally luck out on a free parking space opposite the venue though.  It's on a steep hill and the handbrake was being a bit dodgy earlier in the tour, so once back in the venue, watch nervously out of the window to see if the car has rolled down the hill.  Suddenly hits me how tired I am, and me and Alex take the opportunity to catch forty winks.

Soundcheck doesn't sound great, but then nor does Sunset Cinema Club's, but I remember from experience it sounds a lot better with people in the room.  And duly a stack of people turn up, and everyone sounds great at the actual gig.  Idiosync play first who are a slick kind of funky nu-rave thing, then we play (feels odd being this low down a bill!) and go down a lot better than I was expecting, though EVERYONE seems to have a drink so the clapping is pretty non-existent.  Lonely Ghosts play after us, which is Tom from Help She Can't Swim's new band.  I saw them last year and they were a bit sloppy, but tonight they sound really really good, look forward to seeing them again in the future.  Have a nice chat with Tom where I was probably talking mild drunken bollocks, before Sunset Cinema Club come on and totally rock the house.  This band has to be right up there as one of the best bands in the country.  It's madness that their album didn't get a UK release (it was only released in Japan!), but you can get it over here from Norman Records - http://www.normanrecords.com/records/103562 .

Also have lengthy chat with Dom Sunset Cinema Club, and Pete from Calories who I am now getting a bit more used to talking to without being like "wow it's the guy from Distophia!" who asks me advice on cutting his own hair, and asks me questions about guitars that I have no idea about.  I'm like "I bought mine because it was yellow".  Junior from Johnny Foreigner comes down too, but misses our set because he was at work I think.  Nice to see him and girlfriend Amy again.

Me, Alex, and Graham all get really drunk, and Sam doesn't because he's driving which to be fair he's a bit pissed off about.  He has done the whole tour so hats off the the chap!  After falling over a few times and dancing like idiots for a bit, we realise Sam isn't enjoying himself so leave to get some food.  Alex suggests kebabs which is possibly the worst suggestion of the tour, but being drunk me and him both get one, and because we're drunk we persuade Sam he should get one too.  Graham isn't quite ready for kebab after recently quitting vegetarianism, so gets chips and the most pathetic looking fishcake I have ever seen, I'm surprised they had the cheek to charge us for it.

Sleep in the attic room of chez Greg Sunset Cinema Club / Junior and Kelly JoFo.  I assure the others "I will eat the rest of this kebab for breakfast!".

Saturday May 2nd : READING The Oakford Social Club

I wake up dehydrated and completely hungover, and almost puke at the thought of eating the rest of the kebab.  I really need to do a huge shit and blow my nose, but there isn't any toilet roll in the toilet.  Graham roots out three or four tissues from his bag and donates them to a worthy cause.  Run out of tissues before I can blow my nose, and end up having to blow it on a sheet of paper.

Greg and Junior wish us well for the rest of the tour, and we hit the road to Reading.  The final date of the tour!  Felt good but a bit weird to know that the next time we'd wake up we would be in our own beds.  At least that's what I thought!  After a largely traffic free, quick, uneventful trip to Reading, we arrive in the town centre and biggest SatNav fail of the tour occurs resulting in me almost smashing it / throwing it out of the window.  The venue is right next to the station, but it keeps trying to take us down a road saying "buses and taxis only : CAMERAS IN OPERATION", and the alternative route it suggests is down a road that says "PEDESTRIAN ZONE".  We drive around for nearly an hour trying to work out how the hell to get there, and when we finally do, we only manage to park round the corner from the venue resulting in the hardest load in of the tour.

The venue itself is really nice, I was for some reason expecting it to be a bit like Byker Grove, or a working men's club or something, but it's actually a swanky bar with lots of trendy twentysomethings in there.  For some reason or other we are told to get there at 3:30pm, but we don't get a soundcheck.  Bit bizarre.  Meet The Kabeedies who are polite and personable, amazing considering they had apparently been on tour for a whole month solid, and had also been told to turn up this early and not get a soundcheck either - they must have been waiting around with nothing to do for about eight hours!  Promoter Dave seems really nice though so I decide not to remonstrate, thinking it was probably the soundman who decided the no soundcheck thing.  But then he's really nice too, so I just shrug it off, and go for a quick nap in the car.  This quick nap turns into a four hour sleep on the back seat of the car in an NCP car park.  Get woken up by a call from Dave saying "where are you, you're on stage in 20 minutes!".  The others had gone out for a pizza too, I think he thought we had gone home.  We hadn't and we came back to the venue and played a pretty rocking show, despite me being half asleep.  I did manage to forget the words to new track Preaching To The Conversed, meaning we had to start it again, but apart from that a really good performance all round - a good way to wrap up the tour!

The Kabeedies are really good - well constructed songs, and great stage presence.  I'd heard a couple of songs before the show, but were even better than I expected - louder and more lively live - great fun.  Hopefully we will get to play with them again before long.  Hollie from Oxford is there with Sophia and her boyfriend Steve who I've bumped into at various gigs and festivals in the past.  Hollie buys me a drink, but also tells me I look fatter with short hair.  I explain to her that it's perhaps that I have just put on a little weight since she last saw me with long hair, but she is adamant.  Maybe she's right.  I need to get active again, and grow my hair back.  Though I'm not sure I can be bothered.  I'm surprised there aren't more slacker bands with short hair and beer bellies actually.  Maybe they are SO slacker they can't be bothered to cut their hair or eat.  I don't know.  Anyone know any fat, shaven headed slacker bands?

We get someone to take this picture :



... and before we know it, we've left Reading, and are back where we started, in my parents' driveway in Sutton in south London :



Tour over!  There were some tough bits, some disappointing bits, some dull bits, some really ill bits, but it's worth it just for the buzz of that half an hour a night of performing in new places to new people.

Post tour finances are added up and I am glad to find out we finish £23 in profit.  Good stuff considering we got paid less than I had factored in in Glasgow (due to the venue change), and only our minimum guarantee in Louth when we could have made piles more with a few more people in.  And the fact I had to pay my dad £50 for a new tyre.  I guess most bands our size and stature make a loss on touring, so it's good to be able to get round the country and not have to shell out loads, or indeed anything.

I'll leave you with a quote from Graham from about halfway through the tour :

Dan : "It's a bit like 1066, really"
Graham : *pause* "Kronenbourg?!"

This is what touring does to you.  "Never again!" says Alex just before he drives off home at 2am.  Not until we tour the album anyway.  More news on that to follow in the next few days.  Promise this time!

And hereby ends the mammoth tour diary - if you've read it all, get back to work.  Or get a life.

Love you, perhaps!

Dan x

Tuesday April 28th : MIDDLESBROUGH The Keys

After a comfortable (bed) but also uncomfortable (not being able to breathe through my nose) night's sleep, I'm woken up by a hilarious conversation in the adjacent kitchen where Sam actually utters the words "Manflu - is that an actual thing?".  Incredible.  I get up and have an amazing shower in a kind of open plan wetroom.  We need to stay with more affluent upper-middle class people on tour!  I then cook myself a quite ridiculous sandwich of about four sausages and two rashers of bacon with a fried egg.  Sam and Graham have both toast and croissants AND a moussaka between them, making me feel slightly less greedy.

We meet Angela the housekeeper and her son Mackenzie.  Angela is very nice.  Kind of the quintessential Scottish 30something woman - jolly, talks fast, red hair.  Here she is with me and Sam, and that bloody dog! :



I crack out my Matt Le Tissier skills to beat the dog at his little game of "hold the ball in my mouth then drop it, then when you try and kick it pick it up again".  Flummox him with the old swing the right foot, kick with the left trick.  When loading the car we leave the gate ajar and he bounds out into the road and almost kills a little boy simply by jumping at him, before setting his sights on an old lady.  Graham grabs him by the collar in an attempt to drag him back to the house, and actually ends up being dragged back to the house himself by the hyperactive hound.  Crazy.

We set off and pick up Alex (who was staying with his own Auntie) and promptly delved into his cassettes he had brought with him.  Unfortunately the Mortal Kombat soundtrack didn't work.  So instead we listened to what turned out to be a tape of him and his brother playing Blink 182 covers which was pretty funny, but even better was that after about 4 songs they obviously sat down to play Goldeneye with the tape still recording, so we listened to about half an hour of nonsensical early teen conversation.  Bitten by the spoken word bug, I put on my Roland Rat cassette I had found before we left.  Amazingly it was about Roland and friends pitching the idea of a new channel to the BBC called BBC 3, the comedy being in the fact that this was inherently ridiculous and would obviously never work despite the hapless Rat's best efforts.  Roland the prophet clearly foresaw the rise of Two Pints Of Lager and A Packet Of Crisps, and Freaky Eaters.

I wanted to take the scenic route across the top of England on B roads, but we were running a bit late.  Would have been great - from the map it looked like lots of little villages, big hills, and sweeping valleys.  But I'd just been called by the soundman who said he wanted us to soundcheck by 8:00pm and the SatNav said "Arrive at 7:41pm" on our current, far more direct route, so I figured we shouldn't risk it.  Probably a good thing because there was ridiculous amounts of rain on the rest of the journey and narrow, hilly roads could have spelt the end without us having ever visited the wonderful Middlesbrough!

When I say wonderful... we drove in to town in thick black cloud and drizzle with a big industrial estate on one side, and what looked like a bombed out industrial site on the other.  It was made all the more bizarre by the fact we had been going about 85mph the whole way and now we were cruising into town without another car in sight through some roadworks at 30mph even though we were still on the motorway.  That and the fact we were listening to Do It Yourself by The Seahorses, probably the most ridiculous Britpop era album recorded bar none.  The air guitar potential is unfathomable.

The rain picked up again, and we got thoroughly wet loading into the venue.  Which had a flashing stage, like the dancefloor in Saturday Night Fever.  Amazing.  Meet support band The Purnells, seem like lovely chaps - the singer reminds me of a mix between Jason Donovan and Marti Pellow (not a bad thing!).  My mum would have loved him.  Meet the soundman, who following the soundcheck announces to us "you don't sound like I expected you to - I thought it was really good on the myspace, kind of like Blur".  I'm not entirely sure what he means by this, but I think he means he doesn't like us live as much as recorded.  Meet bar manager Cat / Kat.  If I was 30, 6ft3, and was a man with a job and stuff this is exactly the sort of attractive, confident, leggy brunette I would go for.  As it is, I'm 5ft7, 25, been a student my whole life, and bum around in a band pretending to be doing something useful.  Still, I love her very much as she gives us free drinks all night and £30 to get some food on top of our way above average gig fee.  We each get a 12" pizza to ourselves :



...as well as stocking up on apples, bananas, and Lucozade. 

Elspeth, Sam's cousin from Glasgow (she couldn't come to Glasgow because of uni commitments) and friend Dani come down from Newcastle uni for the show.  Here we all are enjoying the free sodas :



Unfortunately the lights don't flash while we're playing on stage but it still looks pretty cool :



The sound is a bit trebly and sharp (mainly due to the fact the whole venue is made of either marble, concrete, perspex, or polished wood) but it is clear and crisp, and as a result we put in a fun and lively performance.   Shame there's only about 15 people there, but everyone watching seems to really enjoy it.  Quite disappointed for the venue really because they have a huge amount of staff on the night (two doormen, two soundmen, and about eight bar staff) and pay us lots of money, they must have lost loads.  Maybe they make an absolute killing at the weekends and redistribute this to try and bring a bit of quality live music to Middlesbrough during the week.  More places should be like this, I really hope it works out for them, and I hope we can go back before the end of the summer, on a day when it isn't raining non-stop!

On our way out of town we're pulled over by the police.  When I get out of the car to try and talk to the nice officer knowing Sam's knack of occasionally saying the wrong thing and telling the truth a bit too much, he shouts at me "ARE YOU ALL GONNA GET OUT?!?!?  SHALL I GET THE DOGS OUT?!?!" to which I raise my hands and get back in the car.  Me, Alex, and Graham all sit in the car slightly worried, even though we know we haven't done anything wrong, and the two bottles of beer Sam had can't possibly be over the limit.  3 mins later he comes back grinning and says "Sorry fellas, I know now yous're all decent chaps - but its a roooff area rooond here!  Yez in a band?  I'll check ya ooot!  Safe journey now".  Or something.  We all laugh and head off again.  In classic Sam style he pulls off without the lights on, but quickly rectifies the situation, assumedly before Mr Policeman notices.

We're back in Leeds tonight after failing to find anyone in Middlesbrough to put us up for the night.  We arrive back about 2:00am and Lauren is waiting up for us despite being understandably shattered.  This girl is a trooper.  We steal her bed again while she takes the sofa again.  I'm getting used to this bed!

Wednesday April 29th : LOUTH The Woodman

It makes me a bit sad to think this might be the last time I wake up to Lauren's giant Biffy Clyro poster, the calming Jesusesque face of Simon Neil to ease me into the long day ahead.  Some jokes about Alex having already gone to Louth probably happen, and I engineer two funny alterna-face photos of firstly Graham :



...and then people's princess Lauren :



It's blazing sunshine again (it has shone brightly on us in Leeds), and as it's only about mid-day, and less than 2 hours drive to Louth, we decide to head to the coast to spend an afternoon by the sea.  Cleethorpes seems a bit obvious, and Skegness is a bit far, so we plump for the closest seaside town to Louth, Mablethorpe.  The drive there is picturesque in a very dull way, Lincolnshire is a massive, flat, empty county.  Not only that, but it must be the rape capital of Britain (groan) :


 
Nearing the town, we drive down the coastal road and it looks like a standard small old-fashioned seaside resort - has a couple of car parks, some old people milling about, a small fun fair, a Haven holiday camp called Golden Sands that looks like a south-east Asian prison etc. We park the car next to a boating lake with massive novelty plastic swan pedalo boats.  Me and Graham went to school next to a park with one of these in, and we never felt the urge to go on one there either.

We then headed to the beach, where I made what could be the laziest album cover ever :



But looking through Graham's camera I think this would make a pretty funny album cover :



Though in all honesty I don't think either of them will make the cut, haha!

Walking back along the promenade following a stroll along the vast sands (to be fair it was a lovely beach!) we stop a guy who looks like Frank Black after a tanning salon accident to take a picture of us in front of a crazy graffiti painting, and it comes out rather well :



Alex attempts to buy a burger and chips but Mr. Chips is apparently closed, despite being the door being open, the sign saying open, the opening hours thing saying it was open, and there being two staff behind the counter. 

We then head into town where we see at least another five places called Mr. Chips (and even a Mrs. Chips!), and no exaggeration, probably 40 fast food take aways in total (and mainly fish and chips!), in the space of about half a square mile.  Absolutely unbelievable.  The town itself feels really weird, and looks like something out of one of those films where they evacuate kids to the country during the war.  This is probably where they film such things now.  It just looks completely 1940s.  It's like everyone is dead and we're in an episode of The X-Files.  We go into a shop selling EVERYTHING EVER but don't buy anything though I almost get a colouring in book and some crayons, and then another shop selling novelty T-Shirts (the elvis ones are actually really good) but they are only in XXL, even though everyone in this town looks malnourished and ghostly.  Despite all this, a couple of decent photo opportunites present themselves :







We are drawn back to the car like a magnet despite not really knowing where we are going, and quietly relieved we weren't eaten by the zombies, we head off to Louth.  Though not before I've taken a picture of a goose :



The twistiest (what a great word!) road ever takes us to the Historic Market Town (every fucking town is a "Historic Market Town" with a brown road sign in the north!) of Louth, and once in the town, I make my favourite joke of the tour :

Dan : "Sam I've got something really important to tell you"
Sam : "errr.... what?"
Dan : "I have just realised I'm in Louth with you"

I think the old fashioned nature of Mablethorpe must have rubbed off on my comic style.

Anyway we get there, and the venue looks fucking scary - St. George's cross flags adorn every possible orifice of this imposing edifice, and a poster outside reads "TONIGHT : 4 OR 5 MAGICIANS : NOT 2B MISSED".  So a nationalist pub with the savvy of the TXT SPK generation.  We were in trouble!

Obviously though we had been to Louth before, and knew that this was actually one of the nicest towns in the UK without a bad person in sight.  So despite the dodgy decor we knew we were gonna be alright, and when we loaded in, it looked far more appropriate for live music than the place we played last time we were in town, and we sensed a fun night ahead.  Local lads Surprise, Surprise! arrived shortly after us and were jolly fellows, the singer made me laugh when he said they were excited about playing with "a real band", his criteria for this being that the Change the Record single was on Spotify!

The soundcheck wasn't great.  Though the room looked good for music, it was low ceilinged and very narrow, and didn't suit our rather raucous loud live sound at all.  I just wanted to get out and find somewhere showing the Arsenal vs Man Utd game though so we left without any fuss.  However, I underestimated the other guys' complete lack of interest in live football.  So we ended up going to eat something at our host Liam's house instead.  To be fair Arsenal lost 1-0 and it would have pissed me off if I had sat through the whole 90 minutes of that probably as much as it would have pissed the others off that I'd made them sit through it.  So in a way it's good we didn't see it. 

After our long day at the seaside we were all pretty exhausted, but we headed back to the venue and got a couple of ales down us and perked up again.  My old mate Drew who went to school with me and Graham has come along to the show - he's in the RAF and is based at Cranwell which is less than an hour away.  We have a couple of games of pool, and a local eccentric (and a drunk one at that) called Olly challenges us to a game of doubles with another guy who he's calling Pedro, but I can't work out if that's his name, or he's just calling him that as he has a Latino moustache.  Anyway we beat them twice, then Olly realises I'm in the band, and gets a bit excited and starts telling me "I hope you're good, I paid good money for this!".

Back upstairs, the room is pretty packed full of locals of all shapes and sizes.  We blast into Change The Record, and to our surprise, a ten man moshpit erupts in the front, and half the crowd starts singing along.  Absolutely bizarre!  I start to think that this could be the best gig of all time, until about halfway through the solo when I snap a string on my guitar.  When you break a string on a Fender Mustang, the bridge loses alignment and everything goes out of tune.  So all I can do is drop my guitar and finish the song dancing about.  It also would have taken at least 5 mins to change the string due to the weird stringing system on the Mustang, so I ask the crowd if I can borrow a guitar.  Promoter Mark (awesome chap, runs an independent record store in Louth called Off The Beaten Tracks) comes up trumps, and we do a one guitar version of Molly's Lips by The Vaselines / Nirvana while I tune my guitar down half a tone to our tuning.  New guitar in hand we head straight into Out Of My Hands when the unthinkable happens - ANOTHER string breaks, near the end of the song.  I've probably only ever broken three or four strings on stage in about 170 gigs, so for two to happen in one gig is crazy.  I apologise, ask for another guitar, and singer from Surprise, Surprise! lends me his Gibson SG with ultra beefy pickups.  Say "whoa this one sounds the best yet!" which I think is a good joke, but I think the crowd are growing a bit tired of all the breakages, and the fact it takes me about 5 mins to tune this guitar.  We crack into the next song, Orderly Queue I think, and literally a statistical impossibility happens - I break a string on this guitar AS WELL.  3 strings on 3 different guitars in 3 songs.  Unbelievable.  I'd be surprised if this had happened to anyone at any gig anywhere before in history.  We get to the end of the song, and bewildered I hand the guitar back to the guy who lent it to me, and try and think of a song we could do which doesn't require all the strings.  I borrow Graham's guitar, while he uses Mark's new limited edition 5-string Les Paul, and play Forever On The Edge, and I think end with possibly the least appropriate set closer ever, Nice Little Earner, simply because the rest of the songs are impossible to play without the full compliment of strings.

What started out as potentially the most fun gig we have ever played, ended in an absolute farce.  I still can't really believe it now.  To add insult to technical injury, we are told by everyone who we speak to that it was far too loud and sounded like one massive mush of sound out the front.  So not only did we look like idiots, we sounded like them as well!  Olly hated it.  Told me I was rubbish.  He might be a drunkard nutter, but it still hurts a bit.  It's mainly just disappointment that in a town where we had 100 people whooping and shouting encore at the last show (in July 2008), when we only had three of us, and were pretty awful, we are reduced to about 40 here kind of semi-applauding and semi holding their hands over their ears when we are generally playing better than ever.  Despite this we still managed to get some shots for the mags in on the conveniently positioned and lit fire escape.

Here we have one for Rocksound / Kerrang! :



...the NME / Smash Hits! :



...Mojo / Q! :



...and finally Gay Scene! :



I'd say I hope we can go back and redeem ourselves in future but like promoter Mark says just before we part ways "I love you guys, but I hope you don't have to come back here again!".  An odd thing to say perhaps but it makes me think... even though the sentiment is wrong in the sense that we didn't have to go in the first place, or indeed go back this time, there are people that think like this!  I assure him that we do not, and I hope we can continue to play in places like Louth however successful we become, but I just hope they aren't a repeat of this unrivalled tecnhical disaster of a show!

Back at Liam's house his mum (I like Liam's mum) cooks us some odd pizza bread stuff, gives us some beer, and plays us the new U2 album.  After some fun idle banter with her, her gentleman partner, and Liam, about nothing at all in particular, we head to bed, still slightly stunned.

Dan x

Saturday April 25th : LEEDS Royal Park Cellars

Woke up and we all took it in turns to have really long showers.  Felt amazing being clean again!  Dropped equipment at our host for the evening Lauren's house, then went to the park with Claire and kicked a football about for a bit in the blazing sunshine.  Very pleasant day indeed until we got to the venue and were made to sit about for 45 mins waiting for a soundman to arrive.  Really odd venue.  Looks like a horrendous chav estate pub from the outside, but the venue itself is a really cool little basement, and the upstairs pub bit is filled with student types and respectable looking football fans.  Spurs were beating Man Utd 2-0 on the TV, which made me happy.  As an Arsenal fan, it's the only situation in which I'm happy to see Spurs winning! 

The show is a fun tribute night to great Scottish bands of the recent past.  I'm all for shows like this - they are great fun - I have put on three "There's Nothing Wrong With Covers" nights in the past 18 months at The Windmill in Brixton where bands would come along and do a split set between their own songs, and the songs of a classic alternative band, and this is in the same vein.  Tonight, we are being Aberdeen's finest, Nirvana (Aberdeen, Washington that is!) but just so we're not totally cheating, we're doing our takes on their versions of three songs by Glasweigan duo The Vaselines.

Soundman finally arrives and then proceeds to take absolutely ages to set the stage up, AND not actually plug the monitors in after all that.  He only accepts this is the case and I'm not just lying after coming to check the stage after a completely pointless 15 minute soundcheck which achieves nothing.  Tells us we have to wrap it up with me still not being able to hear anything, and the microphone still feeding back.  These stern faces probably demonstrate mine and Alex's feelings (and the fact that Sam is a genuinely scary man) :



As he was late, and a couple of the other bands (perhaps fairly enough) demand to also have a soundcheck, it over-runs by about half an hour and creates big problems later on.  Our friend (and irregularly regular 4 or 5 Magicians guest guitarist a couple of times a year) Alex Wisgard's band Abigail's Party have to cut short their set to just three songs, and then we only have about 18 minutes to set up our equipment and play as soundman has told organisers the curfew is strict (they thought otherwise from past experience) and he is going to cut the power at 11:00pm.  I would have thrown a massive strop but this would have wasted precious time, so we set up in record time and blast straight into the set, somehow stringing together six songs in 15 minutes - end with tremendous noise at end of Forever On The Edge.  I jump up on final chord, whack my head on the low ceiling and jar my neck.  Stagger about for a few seconds before volleying a cymbal stand and cymbal into the wall, Alex kicks over rest of kit ... Sam is on the floor, Graham is looking bewildered, and I bellow "FUCK OFF HOME" into the microphone, as the clock strikes 11:00pm. 

Probably the most punk rock gig we will ever play, and in a bizarre way definitely one of the most fun I have been involved in.  Still pretty pissed off though, as we didn't get to play Jesus Don't Want Me For A Sunbeam, or our impromptu version of The Proclaimers' I'm Gonna Be, which we had just worked out how to play in the beer garden, and only three of our own songs.  Also doubly annoying considering two of the bands (the ones being Primal Scream and Teenage Fanclub) played sets exceeding half an hour, and neither were particularly good.  Solo guy who did Idlewild called Model Warships was really good though - had a voice constantly on the edge of breaking up but somehow made it work - reminded me a lot of early Bright Eyes.  This Many Boyfriends featuring Lauren and Adam (and Alex again) also good stuff.  Really pleasing lo-fi dirge.   Fun show despite everything, but a pretty stressful one to say the least.  It's gigs like this I wish we had a manager to do the arsehole jobs like making sure stuff gets done properly at the shows, and telling people that some things just aren't acceptable.  Also not acceptable - Spurs capitulating and letting Man Utd score five goals in the second half to make the final score 5-2.  Useless bastards.

Leave amps and drums at venue (even though something tells may turn out to be a bad idea), and take stuff we can carry on foot back to Lauren's house down the road.  Alex is at wits end due to the peak of a cold, and the stress the gig had caused and we have the first argument of the tour (albeit one that gets immediately resolved and ends in a hug!) and he decides to go bed instead of coming out.  We consider going to a rock night at The Cockpit with Lauren and people from the gig, but Claire persuades us to go to a small house party instead.

Mega drunken fun ensues - small house party with about 10 people there consigned entirely to a kitchen, but we are armed with a big itunes library, youtube, and 20 bottles of Stella Artois between three of us.  I bust out a classic 90s dance party set and everyone is singing and dancing.  Speak to Claire's fun friends Sophie, Emma, and Fran, and her boyfriend James about various rubbish.  We try and name every Chronicles of Narnia book in order.   None of us remember A Horse And His Boy.  We have to consult Wikipedia and a lot of forehead slapping goes on.  Meet a girl called Laura with a lovely singing voice who I am convinced is an actress on the TV or something.  I have definitely seen her before somewhere.  We do a few duets.  Top 3 : Waiting For A Star To Fall (originally by Boy Meets Girl), Up Where We Belong (originally by Joe Cocker and Jennifer Warnes), and Got To Get You Into My Life (originally by The Beatles).  Also meet the bass player from Wild Beasts and congratulate him on singing to Domino and spout drunken conversational classics like "I'm chuffed for you" and "all the best with your band" amongst other nonsense.  Seemed like a nice fellow.

Stumble out completely hammered after Claire leaves and Emma (who's house it is) goes to bed, and decide to go to another party we've been told about.  Call 118118 for a taxi number which somehow ends up costing me £4 ?!!?  Then taxi gets lost because we try to pick up Adam but he is really drunk and not at his house and he is completely inable to direct us to where he is.  Then taxi goes completely the wrong way to the party, but we finally get there and it's some dude's 35th birthday and is full of people that make me feel young.  Go in and sit on the stairs for a while.  Seems pretty dead, though I do see a guy I'm convinced is Napoleon IIIrd (a cool solo musician we'd played with a couple of times) but I can't work out if I'm just really drunk and it's just a guy who isn't him so don't say hello.  Sam and Graham both fall asleep on stairs, so we decide to go back to Lauren's house.  She's back by the time we get there, and I put the TV on Sky Sports News which is showing lots of goals and I'm being drunk and loud and annoying and one of her housemates comes and shouts at us (me mainly) and I feel a bit bad.  But not too bad because I'm really drunk.  Sam and Graham join Alex (who has probably been asleep for about 5 hours already by this point) and I stay up talking to Lauren for a bit (about what I cannot remember) before she probably falls asleep listening to me talk about how I used to be an amazing footballer and scored 4 goals like Matt Le Tissier.  I head upstairs to bed (floor) too, but not before somehow managing to do a wee in a toilet with no light.

Sunday April 26th : Day off in Leeds

I wake up and it hits me that I am completely wrecked.  Not just a massive hangover (which I'm sure I must have too) but complete immune system shut down.  I feel like I can't move my head due to the pain (exacerbated by smashing it against a ceiling the night before and drinking about 10 bottles of beer on top of 4 pints of cider), I also have a sore throat, and a blocked nose, and am coughing up phlegm.  When I finally croak out "morning guys" to Graham and Sam, they tell me that Alex has gone.  I am worried for a second that he has walked out on us and gone home after him probably feeling as rough as I did now for the last three days, and following the rigours of the frantic show the previous night.  But my fears are allayed when I see he has left a note saying "Gone To Glasgow, See You Tomorrow x" written on a picture of Rab C Nesbitt.

I stumble to the bathroom and make that pathetic ill sound you make when you're really ill, do a horrendous beer shit, clean my teeth (for what it's worth!) and then return to the bedroom and collapse on the bed.  Sam and Graham want to go into Leeds town centre, but I inform them I feel like I'm about to die, so they go without me.  Spend the next 6 hours in and out of sleep on the bed staring at the clouds going past through the skylight feeling completely drained of anything.

Meanwhile, Sam and Graham are having a whale of a time :





Sam and Graham return from town about 7pm, and go to pick up the equipment from the venue at 7:30pm as arranged with the soundman the previous day.  They arrive and the door is locked and no soundman in sight.  They ask bar manager, and he gives them a curt "can't help, not my responsibility, don't think soundman is coming in until Tuesday" before walking off.  Always disappointing when people get a kick out of being a dickhead like this.  Anyway Graham calls me up and explains this, and despite still not really feeling able to move, I almost attempt to get dressed and go down to remonstrate.  However, the soundman does actually turn up (late again, haha!) and gives us our stuff, so crisis averted.

I literally do not leave the bed all day apart from one trip next door to the toilet, and at about midnight, an expedition to the kitchen to make a lemsip and cook the rest of the sausages and potato wedges I had left from the day before.  I manage to eat about a fifth of it, before feeling like I wanted to be sick despite having not eaten in about 32 hours.  Lauren comes back from work and we all have a chat about various stuff, before she leaves us to it to spend another night on the sofa (heroic work - the world needs more generosity like this!).  I spend the night not being able to breathe properly, and probably accidentally kicking Sam in the head a lot.

Monday April 27th : GLASGOW Bar Bloc

I wake up feeling a lot better (but still very much ILL), and there is a genuine level of excitement I think (if not a particularly palpable one) at heading up to Scotland.  We say our thankyous and goodbyes to Lauren and head off.  Before we hit the open road we stop at Sainsbury's and I pick up a sandwich and a newspaper, and all over the paper is Swine Flu.  I rack my brains for memories of having had close contact with any pigs or Mexicans on Saturday night, and while I can't be certain, I'm pretty sure that there was none.  Figure I probably just have a regular cold and should have bought The Guardian instead of The Sun.

Experience first major SatNav fail of the tour while trying to get out of Leeds.  There is a mental junction which it simply didn't understand, and it looked like it was trying to get us to go up the A1 via York which would have been a stupid, not to mention increcibly boring route, so I turned it off, took a deep breath and tried to direct Sam from my own instinct, fleeting glances at road signs, and a completely unhelpful road map :



Inevitably we ended up in some weird backward suburb going the wrong way, so took advantage of a petrol station with a low price per litre, and I made Sam put in £24.98 because that was the money I had in my pocket.  He got served by the hot checkout girl who took ages counting the change then made some comment like "oh it's the right money, I like that".  This made me laugh, if not him.  I calmed down a bit, turned the SatNav back on, put in Skipton as a via point, and we were away - o'er hill and dale - literally.

We passed through a selection of quaint villages and small towns, and drove around the lower end of the Yorkshire Dales, taking in fantastic scenery such as this, that is, when Graham (the primary camera operator) wasn't sleeping :



Just before Carlisle we stopped at the most awesome services ever, called Tebay.  This place is so good they even have their own website :  http://www.westmorland.com/ .  Seriously, not your average Roadchef.  They have ducks, and buildings made of wood, and stuff.  If you are ever heading North on the M6 I highly recommend this services.  I never thought a motorway service station could be picturesque, but this certainly was.  Though unfortunately Graham's camera battery had died so we could not document the duck pond, or refreshing absence of branding.

It took years (about 5 hours including two brief stoppages for wee wees) to get to Glasgow, but we finally got to where we were staying, Sam's Auntie's house in a leafy suburb called Bearsden that looked more like Cambridge than what I expected Glasgow to be like, at about 6pm.  His cousin Elspeth opened the door, and completely without warning I was almost knocked over by this :



...this being a 2 year old Labradoodle called Womble.  If you didn't know, a Labradoodle is a cross breed of dog - father being a poodle and mother being a Labrador.  It has the boundless enthusiasm of a poodle with the cumbersome body of a Labrador, and equals a massively dangerous prospect for small people like me who enjoy being able to stand up without fear of being knocked over.  Don't get me wrong, Womble is a jolly, affable dog.  Just a complete pain in the arse.  We have a cooked meal with vegetables (I was starting to forget what they tasted like!) before heading to the venue.

We find a parking space following just one of many hilarious exchanges between me and Sam in the car (seriously we're like Hyacinth and Richard from Keeping Up Appearances) where I told him to stay on the right and park the car when he found a space, but we only managed this after a shouting match following which he admitted "I didn't know you could drive on the right down a one way road!".  Some things Sam says and does you can't really explain, but that's the beauty of the chap.  I think he meant "I didn't realise it was a one way road!", but that's not what he said.  Alex is waiting outside and has a grin on his face so all is cool with him which is good to see.  Inside we're met by bar owner Crag who has kindly put us on at the last minute after our show at Cassette was cancelled due to a licensing issue.  That was our fourth show in Glasgow that had been cancelled, so it is good to finally make it!

Bloc is a cool place.  At first glance it really doesn't seem suited to live music at all, it's just a small bar filled with tables and chairs, but it worked pretty well in there.  Can't really hear a lot on stage (well, on floor in corner!), apparently it's mega loud out front, but it seems really muted and it is a rather subdued performance, from me at least.  Probably a good thing though because I'm still suffering from the cold, and if I'd have pushed my voice any more it could have screwed it up for the rest of the tour.  We get a really good crowd reaction considering we're a lot louder and a completely different style to the other band.  Bit odd playing to a room full of people sitting down, but like I say, in an odd way, it works pretty well!

A local band called Camembert also play - really nice sound - very Scottish, kind of electronic meets acoustic meets post rock, with a violin.  Seem like lovely people too, have a chat to them afterwards.  Alex's aunt and her boyfriend are there, and he buys us two rounds of drinks.  Also lovely people!

We head back to the house pretty early as everyone is tired, but the dog is definitely not tired, still running around jumping on anything that moves (and anything that doesn't).  We hit the hay before long, though not before I have read half a two week old issue of Private Eye which I found in the toilet.  Nothing like a bit of out of date political humour.  I turn the light out, and realise I cannot breathe AT ALL through my nose.  Being ill is rubbish, but I know in the morning I can have a cooked breakfast.  I dream of sausages.  And being able to breathe properly again.  And bacon.

Dan x

Tuesday April 21st : BRIGHTON Prince Albert

After a day mainly in bed and on the sofa recovering from wandering around a football pitch, the time came for our first Brighton show since January 15th.  I didn't quite know what to expect crowd wise, but kind of predictably the venue was half empty.  I love Brighton and wouldn't want to live anywhere else, but it can be intensely frustrating at times just how hard it is to get people to come to shows.  If everyone in Brighton who liked us came to a show we could sell out The Albert maybe 3 or 4 times over ... I guess there is just so much on (musically and otherwise) that people are spoilt for choice of things to do - I am convinced if we had formed somewhere with a bit less going on that we'd be in a different, more lofty position to where we are now.  More local support both from press and public.  I don't know, maybe that's not true.  But it does feel sometimes like we're being overlooked by a lot of people in our home town, where otherwise we may be appreciated a bit more!

Anyway, the show itself was actually really good - my friend Ash (from awesome label Smalltown America) came down from London and said it was even better than the London show.  In stark contrast to the previous show, the onstage sound was terrible due to a problem with the monitor where the vocals were distorting and the lead guitar had to be cut as it was buzzing.  So I basically just had a load of ride cymbal in my ear and huge fuzzy bass.  Though if it sounded good out front then I guess that's what matters!  We got a really good reaction from the 40ish people there.

First band on Seadog were really good - the main guy Mark is a really talented local musician in a couple of bands - nice to talk to him about music - he knows his stuff!  Jez from Duke Raoul / Le Band Extraordinaire came down too - had a chat with him about various musical topics - he's a good guy.  And Simon who runs Cable Club spoke to me about labels and things - he's also a good guy.  Good guys all round.  Me and Ash also spoke about the idea regional porn channels ... Pornwall, N'WhoreFuck, Humpshire, Kunt, GlasGay and EdinBugger, The Bristols Channel etc.  I think it is a commercially viable idea - the only one we have at the moment is Red Hot Essex Wives, and that's not even a funny name.

We returned to our house with about half the crowd and had a couple of drinks while listening to Bruce Springsteen and Lionel Richie (seperately, not some mega duet) on Spotify.  Whooooa wild huh?  I wish I was 18 again...

Wednesday April 22nd : The gig that never was!

We had a show scheduled in Clapham, south London for Wednesday, but a quite impossible Curb Your Enthusiasm style situation arose whereby I ended up looking like an arsehole when really I didn't do anything wrong, and I ended up offending a friend of a friend, and in turn I took offence to her taking offence and saying something offensive.  It's odd how these things come about.  To cut a long story short - this girl who we sort of know through another girl was running the London Marathon and doing a fundraiser gig, which she asked us to play and we accepted because it sounded like fun, and would have been supporting a good cause.  However quite close to the show she told us she was going to put us on, seemingly quite needlessly early, at 7:30pm, we already knew we weren't getting paid anything (totally fair enough, it's a charity show, but it still means in practical terms we would have lost money playing!) and from other information I'd gathered, we would have been (soundwise) totally out of place on the bill, and probably wouldn't have been able to bring many, if any people in to the show, so there was very little benefit to us in playing, but also little benefit to her in terms of our usefulness to raise money for her cause.  I explained all this to her, perhaps inadvisably with an additional explanation of how we'd got lots of good press and were usually playing at the top ends of bills, and I think she took this to mean that we thought we were too important to do the show, and accused us of only doing music for money, which of course if you know us, you know is absurd.  Bit of a sorry state of affairs really because you'd be hard pressed to find a more genuine band than us who just love music, and from what I remember of her she's a really nice girl - obviously anyone who is willing to run the marathon for charity has my respect and is clearly a generous person.  Just funny how these awkward situations sometimes arise and there isn't much you can do about it.  Hope she got round in a respectable time anyway!

Thursday April 23rd : SHEFFIELD The Harley

A bright and sunny early afternoon and we all met at our rendez-vous point of my parents house in Sutton in the far reaches of south London to pick up our trusty tour bus AKA my dad's 1998 Ford Mondeo Estate (pictured below). 



Alex arrived and promptly announced that he had a cold.  This turned out to pretty much kill him, then me, then Graham at different points on the tour, and reinfornce my hunch that Sam is actually not a human but a guitar playing machine who cannot become ill.

We arrived at The Harley, which I'd heard about as the Arctic Monkeys used to play there a lot, and instead of being the classic grubby back room of a pub I was expecting, it turned out to be a kind of standard student bar with no stage - reminded me a lot of the bar at Sussex uni I used to help run open mic night at.  Cool place, if you like that kind of thing.

We dropped our stuff off at Jim's house who we were staying with, and we were met by the police who were interviewing one of his friends in his living room.  Apparently she had just been beaten up by her housemate or something.  Kind of odd.  They told us to "stay off the marajuana heh heh heh" then left through the back door.  The police are weird.  Lauren (who we were to stay with in Leeds) and her friend Adam were there too.  Adam did a mile on a rowing machine, we all had a Carlsberg, and Graham and Alex lost at Tekken.  A guy called Ed who lived round the corner lent us a bass amp and a floor tom (the two things that wouldn't fit in the car!) and he told us a funny story about how after his band's last tour they threw the whole drum kit in a river, but somehow the floor tom survived.  Lucky for us!  The Swampy in me was slightly taken aback by his lack of remorse at the senseless environmental damage this would have caused, but he came to the show, and let me and Graham sleep on his futon later, and gave us toast in the morning, so I grew to like him.

The show was weird.  It was a Casiotone For The Painfully Alone aftershow party, but we were made to go on at 11:00pm because apparently the venue had a live music curfew of 11:30pm.  Predictably (as I assume his show across town didn't finish until 11:00pm at the earliest itself), nobody showed up until 11:31pm, when about 100 people flooded through the door and started having a great time.  Again, the few there seemed to genuinely enjoy it, (sound was good, and we put in a really rock and roll performance) not least these three chaps (Justin, Rich, and Si (?) maybe not Si, sorry man number 3) who me and Graham spoke to about Sheffield bands, mid-90s Charlatans records, and lower league football (again!).  Justin was really drunk and said "Yous lot were proper good" about 14 times and rubbed his face on us, before spilling a vodka and red bull on me and dropping the glass which shattered everywhere and a bit got inside Adam's shoe.  All good fun though!



We danced to Lauren and Jim's DJing until the early hours, then returned to Jim's house (and Ed's house) for much needed sleep.  I had the best dream of the tour this night, where I was married to a young Winona Ryder in this bizarre kind of period drama set on a farm, but in the future even though everyone looked a bit Victorian.  Dreams where you believe you are married to a young Winona Ryder on a farm which looks Victorian but is actually in the future are the best.  The dream gained an added twist when Ed's housemate inadvertently woke us up by switching on the kitchen radio at about 8:30am, a Radio 4 debate about whether you can "cure" homosexuality.  I think I worked this in to the dream, me and Winona feeding pigs, and curing gays.  Aaaah.

Friday April 24th : WAKEFIELD Escobar

We woke up about mid-day and sat about in Ed's kitchen talking about lots of stuff that I remember being really funny but I can't remember anything specific.  He told us an awesome story about something to do with an odd sexual encounter, perhaps with an element of age difference in a relationship.  Quite annoyed I can't remember what it was.

Anyway we head into Sheffield - I like the city centre, it's nice.  Parked in a car park on the edge of town not knowing where the main stuff was, and walked for ten minutes, like some magnetic force was attracting us, to TK Maxx.  Sam needed some new shoes and I tried in vain to get him to buy a pair of Dunlops for £12.  He doesn't like white shoes apparently.  He went next door to Schuh and bought some blue Vans for about £35.  Horses for courses and all that.  I meanwhile remained wandering round TK Maxx for a while saying "wow" lots but not actually buying anything.  We got a Subway - I got an Italian BMT, and the others all got Tuna.  Spot the slightly overweight guy!

We'd agreed to meet Lauren and Adam at Starbucks but we went to the wrong one.  Thinking about it there are probably about nine Starbucks shops in Sheffield, so we did well to get it right second time around.  Alex pointed out that a young couple who walked in had also been in TK Maxx, Subway, the other Starbucks, and had been walking behind us down the road.  They had also been in to a little record shop I had ducked into on my own.  He suggested they were spies which seemed plausible given the evidence.  I suggested he was a spy as his smoothie had "Mr. J" written on it, which sounded like a spy's name.  He then said "you got the juice?" in a spy voice which was one of the top 10 funniest things anyone said on the tour.  We proceeded to refer to him as Mr. J quite a lot from this point. 

I said "wonder how we get back to the car"? and Graham said he thought that if we walked back towards the town hall, turned left, then turned left again and walked for a bit we should find it.  I suggested, half as a joke, that the car was probably just behind Starbucks and if we walked his way we'd end up back exactly where we were 15 minutes later.  Luckily I checked the next road along, and this actually turned out to be the case.  I stuck on K by Kula Shaker (just one of our many questionable cassettes) and we set off, quite ridiculously early in hindsight, for Wakefield.

What can I say about Wakefield?  Literally nothing positive apart from the fact it has a reasonably nice looking cathedral, and you can park for free right outside the Escobar.  We rolled up about 5:30pm (venue was closed with no-one there until 7:00pm) and spent the next 90 minutes just wandering around marvelling at this horrendous town.  It's like a cultural vacuum.  Just nothing there but chainstores and bland architecture.  We looked for somewhere to eat, but the only places were the most grim looking fried chicken / kebab / pizza outlets I had ever seen.  The only normal fish and chip shop was inexplicably closed at 6pm on a friday evening.  We were hassled by 15 year old chavs who were dressed in a kind of bizarre street indie geek chic.  I got a touch respect fist to fist thing from (i'd guess about) a 6 year old boy in a leather jacket that looked like he was on his own at a bus stop.  It was definitely a boy and not a midget.  We walked past a boarded up building with a sign saying "M PEOPLE RECRUITMENT" which would have been a great photo but Graham's camera battery had run out.  We considered getting a second Subway of the day but decided to get something later in Leeds, where we were staying.  In the meantime I had a supremely nutritious dinner of two packets of mini cheddars and a wagon wheel.

We finally got in (to be fair we had been told to get there at 7:00pm so it was our own fault) and were told we couldn't soundcheck until 8:00pm due to license restrictions.  This was our faces :



When we finally got to soundcheck, after a bit of tinkering we got a good onstage sound, so knew at least we were going to have an enjoyable show as we could hear ourselves.  The first act on was an earnest but albeit completely cliched laddish singer songwriter (no offence if you're reading this, you seemed to have a level of self-deprecation at least!) with kind of "i got up and had some breakfast, then i went to work, i don't like my job but i finished work and went to the pub and had some beer" lyrics.  He brought quite a few people in, who then promptly left before Imp came on, who were pretty good, kind of like Clinic doing Pavement sort of.  They then left too I think, leaving about eight people in the room.  Bit of a downer.  Amelia and Arianne from Ultcult came along though, nice to see them again - but apparently they have split up.  A real shame that, they had a lovely sound, a kind of youthful, innocent Stereolab. 

If one good thing came out of the show it was this arty, rock and roll photograph :



Despite the drawbacks of the town, I do really like the venue though, it would be a great place to play to 80 rabid fans - hopefully we can go back in the future and play such a show!

We set off for Leeds and my old friend Claire's house.  Hadn't seen her since Truck Festival last July when she painted my face like the demon hitchhiker from The Mighty Boosh.  No face painting this time.  Just a big hug, some red wine and a floor to sleep on.

Leeds / Glasgow / Middlesbrough to come tomorrow!

Dan x

Friday April 17th : OXFORD The Wheatsheaf

I can't believe this was only 16 days ago.  Though that is quite a long time I suppose.  I don't know.  I've lost all sense of time.  It has been a looong tour.  And this is going to be a looooong tour diary!

The journey turned out to probably be the worst of the whole tour.  If there's one thing I've learnt from touring it's that under no circumstances should the M25 be gone anywhere near in between the hours of 4:30pm and 6:30pm.  But due to Sam having a dentist appointment in Brighton at 2:30pm (yes ... tooth-hurty!) this was pretty much unavoidable, and between the A3 and M40 we were stuck in virtually block traffic, and spent over an hour travelling about 15 miles.  All four of us, my heavy amp, and all our guitars, pedals, and drum breakables were crammed in to Alex's flimsy Hyundai accent, and in the stop start traffic, the engine overheated or the flux capacitor went or something and just past the M4 we had to pull over thinking the engine had blown after smoke started streaming from the bonnet.  Alex poured some magic oil in the oil thing, and we stood by the side of the motorway for ten minutes waiting for the car to cool down.  We started it up again, and the smoke had stopped, but within ten minutes of rejoining the traffic, just before the M40 junction, the car refused to go into gear and we had to stop again.  I was beginning to think we'd never get there, but Alex just shrugged and said "it's done this before, don't worry".  And sure enough, we were on our way again within ten minutes.  All gritting our teeth. 

Moral of this rather dull story : Avoid the M25 between 4:30pm and 6:30pm.  Avoid Hyundais.  Avoid the dentist.

Anyway we got there and got a parking space right outside.  Guess something had to go our way!  Loaded in and were met by a drum kit called something like "ROCK STAR BEGINNER".  Needless to say it sounded like hitting four different sized cardboard boxes, and the cymbal stands would have fallen over if you'd have blown on them.  Definitely one of those "a bad workman blames his tools" vs. "you can't polish a turd" moments.

It turned out not to matter too much, as the crowd turned out to be ... the soundman, the promoters, one of the other bands, a guy with a friend who had seen us before, my old housemate Will (in the band Motor City Shuffle - see top friends) and his mate Ben, mine and Graham's old mate from school Ian, and a guy who looked a bit like a more effeminate Iggy Pop / an off duty transvestite who strode around tutting and told me to grow my hair.

Despite the Argos drum kit, the sound was good, and everyone seemed to enjoy it (apart from Iggy).  Turned out to be a good warm up for our London show the following day, especially seeing as though we hadn't played in over two weeks and our single solitary rehearsal (i wish we could afford more!) was basically just learning one song (possible next single candidate 'Out Of My Hands').

On our way out of the venue we were hassled by an attractive local girl flyerer to go to some generic sounding club night.  I mumbled "sorry we're just about to head back to London", to which she scoffed, and upon us walking off shouted "hey London's that way!" pointing in the other direction, laughing at her great joke.  If only I had the energy to shout back "actually we're going to the kebab van first"... I think we could have bonded.

The car made it home.  Somehow.

Saturday April 18th : LONDON Notting Hill Arts Club

I've forgotten a great deal of this day, as to be honest it is more a story of gleeful triumph than funny stories or humourous moaning. 

My dad drove us up to London (in our far more reliable substitute tour van, his Ford Mondeo estate) and we rolled up at the ungodly hour of about 2:45pm.  Alex was getting the train, which was delayed, so we soundchecked with Matt from Stagecoach on drums, doing a sterling effort playing I'm In The Band (even though he didn't get the chorus quite right!), and Alex arrived as we hit the final few notes, probably thinking I'd sacked him.  I hadn't, and we then soundchecked quasi-new song Out Of My Hands with Alex restored to the drum stool, and received a full round of applause from the other bands, and the gathered few stragglers.  Which was nice!

Our show sounded great - primarily due to soundman Neil Bowerman who I am convinced is an actual magician - the onstage sound for us was fantastic, and the front of house sound for the other three bands was great as well.  It is so much more enjoyable to play when the onstage sound is good, it makes it far easier to play, and makes you play a lot better - you get more into it.  I can definitely say that simply on an enjoyment of the performance basis, this was the best 4 or 5 Magicians show I have played in to date, and the crowd seemed to really enjoy it too!

As well as us rocking the house, the other three bands were all great too.  Duke Raoul were first on, and have come on loads since we last played with them in October - sounded really good.  Favours For Sailors we now must have played around ten shows with, and were great as usual (get their six song mini-album Furious Sons - top stuff).  As were Stagecoach who went on last - they sound like a sunny day.  Someone get these guys on a festival bill!

Went for a beer with fellow GBV enthusiasts Gavin and Trevor (and their friend Simon) after the show, and talked about Sickipedia, lower league football, and the demise of the 12" vinyl album.  Gavin got me a really nice ale though I can't remember what it was called.  Said "ok just one more then" about three times.  Got home a bit drunk and went to bed after emailing Jaimie from the NME to tell him we were incredible.  Drunk internet = FAIL.

Sunday April 19th : LONDON DiS Football, Islington

Due to the amount of time I have to kill, I aimlessly post on the drownedinsound.com forum, and at the end of last year I suggested the idea of getting a monthly 11-a-side game going in London.  Someone more organised than me booked a game, and I have played with a few regulars from the board every month since December (though I missed March).

It's good fun.  I used to play to quite a high level when I was in my early teens, and have continued to play in varying forms until now, and despite being completely unfit, I'm still pretty tasty when on the ball, and this level is ideal for my rather uncommitted, lazy, Le Tissier-esque style.

In true Le Tissier style, I scored four speculative efforts, three of which definitely worthy of goal of the month contention!

GOAL 1 : Keeper with weak clearance from edge of box.  Keeper out of position.  Try to place opportunistic 40 yard effort in top right hand corner with side of right foot.  Underhit slightly.  Brushes defender's head.  Wrongfoots scrambling keeper and bounces in to an open net.

GOAL 2 : Great build up play from central midfielder and second striker.  I get slotted the ball, super first touch to round static central defender, one more touch and dipping left foot volley from edge of box over helpless keeper.  GOOOOOAAAAAAAALLLLL!

GOAL 3 : Ball bounces out for throw-in midway into opponents half.  Check position of defence and goalkeeper before throw is taken.  Throw sent down line, knocked inside to me with back to goal.  Swivel and poke blind left foot lob over startled keeper's head from 35 yards, bounces into top of net.  Mobbed by team with shouts of "genius!".  It was a good goal.

GOAL 4 : Ball bounces around a bit midway in opponents half.  Bounces to me.  I tee myself up with right knee and hit a 30 yard left footed dipping lobbed volley which curves away to the top left corner.  Keeper gets a hand to it but it still goes in.

This goal puts us 5-4 up, and the last goal especially was classic Le Tissier, but in true Southampton style, we somehow end up losing 6-5.

Fun time had, no worries.  It's the scoring four (well, three) amazing goals that counts, not the winning.

Watch Everton beat Man Utd in FA cup semi-final on penalites in pub afterwards after having second incredible ale in two days.  Again, forgotten what it was called.  Doombar?  I think it was Doombar.  It was great!

Waddle home with various muscular aches and pains.  Perfect way to start a relentless 11 date tour.  NAWWWT!

More to come in following days....!

Dan x

So we're about halfway through the tour.  I'm sitting in a nice detatched house in Glasgow sniffing back the snot and wiping my nose on my sleeve.  Been a bit of an odd tour so far, I'm not quite sure what angle to take in the obligatory post-tour tour diary, but there have been some funny moments along the way to write about.

We're just about to head off into the great unknown (Middlesbrough) and including that we have five more shows in five days.  I can only hope that my voice box doesn't explode, and I don't projectile snot into the crowd tonight.  The joys of having a cold!  I bought The Sun yesterday and it read like an episode of Brasseye.  We go away for five minutes and pigs take over the world!  I'm sure I just have manflu rather than pigflu or whatever though.

Anyway, see you in Middlesbrough, Louth, Kidderminster, Birmingham, or Reading.  Or none of those if you don't live there or are too silly to come.

Dan x

First up - the Glasgow show IS GOING AHEAD!! It is now at Bloc.

The venue we were meant to be playing at, Cassette, closed down, then the promoter who was meant to be re-arranging the show just completely flaked on us (Hard Work Promotions, sort your life out!), BUT luckily we've found another venue, Bloc, to put us on at short notice. The show is FREE ENTRY but we are asking for a £1 donation towards our travel costs. We'll have a hat on the stage!

Secondly, we have unfortunately had to pull out of the show in Clapham tomorrow (Wednesday 22nd April) due to a breakdown in communication with the organisers. As much my fault as anything really - I should have checked details earlier and then when we received them we really weren't suitable for the show, and their terms were not really feasible for us. So we are no longer playing this show.

Brighton tonight, at the Albert, 9:30, then we head off in our Ford Mondeo estate from Thursday!

See you at one of the shows, yeah?

Dan x