In October 2007 we went on a 9 day trip around the UK with and without our buddies Meet Me In St Louis. Fun times were had! Photographs were taken! A tour blog was made! This is it! I, Dan Reeves, will show you in words (too many) and pictures (maybe not enough) what I (and in some cases we) experienced...


DAY 1: LUTON



"LUTON ROCK CIIIITY!" That's what I cried as I got off the train from Brighton. DKT (Tom Drakett) and Ben (Ben Woodhouse) were meeting me here as they were traveling from Exeter so I had to fly solo to the venue. "Take me to the George II my good man." I said. He didn't like that, turned out the venue was about 500 yards away. 1o minutes in Luton and the locals already think I'm a twat! Sweet.

Time was passed folding T-shirts, drinking booze and chatting with the St Louis guys. I had my first meal of the tour. A grease burger! It tasted like they'd deep fried the whole plate. Good times! Our buddy Nick turned up with the amazing screen printed tour posters he'd printed for us. Ben and Tom turned up. We got showed to our rooms above the venue (no shit!) by the awesome promoter John. Things were looking pretty good.

4 Or 5 Magicians played and were pretty rad in a slacker indie kinda style. Next up was Ice, Sea, Dead People who I thoroughly enjoyed! Noisy and rocking and loud. Kinda like Liars I thought. We played, melted a few faces, Category 2 Hurricane I think. Meet Me In St Louis rocked hard! The people of Luton did not understand us musicians. Who cares, let's party!

A dude called Tyler gave us a mix CD. It had Andrew WK on it. John took us to a club. We danced to heavy metal and drum 'n' bass. We drank too much. We met Jim from I.R. Tiger, he was a daper gent! A dude who worked in the toilet gave us a real heart felt rendition of 'I Believe I Can Fly' by R. Kelly! We went back to our room where Lewis and Oli from MMISL made us listen to Toto on their mobile phones until 4AM. Shit was banging.


DAY 2: OXFORD



HEAVY hangovers and eating chips in Luton high Street. Good morning! Luton ate our dust pretty early and we hit the road to Oxford. We strolled around by the river and drank coffees. We were pretty dead a day in to the tour, first night partying was obviously an amateur's mistake.

Ady at Vacuous Pop had cooked up a treat of a bill for the Oxford show. First up were Load.Click.Shoot!, our fellow South West art-rockers. They were real good and Ady has just snapped up them for a 7" on his label so look out for that! Meet Me In St Louis SLAYED. This Town Needs Guns headlined and I have to say they blew me away. Absolutely amazing band. If you are in to anything Kinsella related then you really have to hear them. TREATS!

We stayed at This Town Needs Guns' house. We were looked after. We had tea. I took batteries out of a clock 'cos I couldn't sleep. Our new sleeping bags had anti-beef filters and they really worked well.


DAY 3: LEEDS



We were playing at an all-dayer in Leeds where we were on at like 3pm and MMISL were on at something like 5am in the morning so we had a LOOOOOOOOOOOONG day. We played a good set though and I think we melted at least 50% of the half-asleep people who were there's faces off so it was all good! Playing a rock show in the middle of the day is really weird as all the normal stuff that comes with night: like bats / vampires / werewolves etc, are not awake so you just gotta bring that kinda dark doom yourself. We did okay!

Our friend Adam 'Howard Leather' Nodwell was there and he guided us to his house by running in front of us whilst we sang the theme tune from Terminator 2 and chased him in our car. We then piled all our stuff up in his living room so that when his housemates came home they wouldn't actually be able to do ANYTHING in their own house. What a bunch of assholes!

We sat in a red room at the venue for about 6 days and watched about 12 million bands in one day. It was like a mini ATP kind of festival, really good but we were very tired.

Highlights of Brainwash festival (in the order they happened) included:

* This Town Needs Guns (being amazing again)
* Paul Marshall
* We Versus Death
* Meet Me In St Louis (melting off at least 75% of the audiences face / Category 1 Hurricane)
* Andy Abbot from Massive Heron wondering about saying (shouting, REALLY loud) some classic one liners like "This is the best thing I've ever seen, he's like Flea!" about Lewis from MMISL, and "Is he still fucking playing!?!?" about Adem who was actually kinda like watching paint dry after we'd been at the festival all day and night.
* Adam Nodwell going in to a pizza place to get the number for home delivery, then calling them from outside, ordering and then asking them to deliver to his house which was about 100 yards away. Legend!


DAY 4: GLASGOW



Eggs in the morning courtesy of Adam. Thankyou! Leeds is nice. And big. Walked around and went to some shops. Checked out HL's cup of tea tattoo. Probably the best tattoo I've ever seen and it looks awesome with a cheap red cardigan. Off to Glasgow!

The venue (13th Note) is REALLY NICE. We're on a poster with (ENG) after our name and that makes us all excited. Didn't get to see much of Glasgow but what I SAW WITH MY EYES I liked. The promoters were really cool and looked after us well, dude didn't know the way to his own house though so we got kinda lost but then got to his and had a banquet of Doritos! Living the dream!

We missed Grozny but everybody said that they slayed, caught the end of Household and they were awesome. Really noisy and mean sounding. It was their last show though. Bummer. The crowds thinned out for us and MMISL but we had fun none the less.

Back to the promoter's (we got lost again!) flat for par-tay action. Punk rock is ace for meeting cool people and it always astounds me to find such nice people in every city we go to that are willing to put us on, put us up, and generally are willing to treat us like friends even though they don't know us. Cry Parrot promotions (and all that sail in her) of Glasgow are ace people! Thanks guys! We slept about 10 people in one room, it was man-jig central. One Glaswegian activated his special jack-hammer-snore-system about 5 minutes after going to sleep. Dude was LOUD!


DAY 5: EDINBURGH



Edinburgh is NICE. Very nice. Loads of great photo opportunities that we took. Mainly us looking like dicks in front of magnificent buildings. Dorks on tour roll in to town. It got voted best city in the UK and I guess I haven't been anywhere else on our fair isle that looks better. Well done Edinburgh.

Gav from I Fly Spitfires cooked us an amazing curry. Shit was gooooood. Ben helped, well done Ben. Back to the venue. Dead Boy Robotics were really cool. Kind of like The Mae Shi and Crystal Castles mixed in to a dirty electro mess. I approved. Loads of females at the show which was really good to see 'cos so many places you go to are just full of dudes. When you get a show that has a good gender ratio it makes the whole thing feel not so much like a man-rock-love-in. There was also a great ratio of berets to heads in Edinburgh.

Cryoverbillionaires went down really well and brought some stadium size emo-rock to a really small venue. Awooga! We played and it felt awesome, great crowd / great venue / great promoters and we played a genuine Category 1 Hurricane. I dived off the side of the step-height stage in a proper horizontal superman style and managed to wedge my guitar head in a drum stool. It was amazing. Meet Me In St Louis were incredible that night. Those dudes can PLAY.

We went back to Gav's flat (via a pub - getting drunk) and got more drunk and watched Commando. There was also a Shwarzenneger versus Willis argument that was pretty hilarious. It got filmed I think so maybe it'll turn up on here soon! I think Arnie won judging by the quotes that kept flowing for the rest of the tour. "It's not a tumour!"


DAY 6: MIDDLESBROUGH



Driving to Middlesbrough we went through some amazing scenery and stopped to take pictures in the middle of some highland roads. Art first, safety second kids.

Middlesbruv is the worst city in the UK as voted by doughy-faced Kirsty and stocky man-dude Phil of Channel 4's Location, Location, Location. Well, we had a good time so it can't be that bad and we're Southern snobs. The venue was tiny (good thing) and Henry the promoter looked after us with a fine selection of dips, apple pies and one Wispa.

Ankles were up first and were really great! Mainly instrumental with 2 bass players, a drummer and best of all a PERCUSSION RACK. How can that be bad!?!?! The place was rammed full of about 50 people and it sounded incredible in that room when we played (I hope it sounded good to those who were watching!!!). I went in to the toilets whilst we were playing attempting to live an Oxes style dream. The dream was 50% achieved I think. There was a guy shouting and dancing like a complete lunatic right next to me which was ace. He even started freestyle-freaking-out-dancing right in his girlfriend's face and she just blankly looked at him like he did it all the time. We landed a Category 1 Hurricane. Probably the best show of the tour. We even sparked a debate about Middlebrough's shit reputation and got P.A. high-jacked mid set by a pro-brough rally. That's right we bring the hot topics to the brunch, baby.

Pellethead were up next and were awesome. Four gnarly 40-ish dudes playing no wave and being totally weird but not in a knowing way. I told them I really liked them and the guy was like "no you don't." that kinda bummed me out but it also added to their appeal for me. Weird!

Meet Me In St Louis played an absolute blinder and there was even some between-song banter. 6 days of hanging around with us shit-talkers had obviously had some effect on them! Loads of people started quoting Arnie. I shouted "I knew deeeeeeez men!", nobody shouted "I'll be back".

Outside the venue we all hugged and told each other how much we loved them. We then all tried to sing the theme from Terminator 2 with a bunch of us doing the drums and the others the synth line. We must have looked like a bunch of pricks. Luckily there was no chavalanche around to beat us up so we escaped a beating even though we were in a well rough town (just ask Kirsty and Phil). We went our separate ways and thanked Henry for being a legend. We stayed at his friend's house and it was really clean.


DAY 7: DAY OFF

DEPRESSING DAY OFF. We drove around looking for a Travel Lodge type establishment that would let 3 adults stay in a room. Nowhere does! We eventually found one near Leeds that we snuck in to. Take that the man! We ate in Pizza Hut. It felt dirty. That place is so LOUD! It's like eating in a Saturday morning kids TV program. We got half-cut in our room and went to sleep. Russell Brand is actually really funny when talking about punching old women in the hump.


DAY 8: COVENTRY



When you go to a city and the first thing you see is somebody getting knocked out you start to worry a bit! Dude went down like a lump of wood with one punch. It was pretty scary at 4PM on a Friday afternoon. I guess they start drinking early in Coventry. The weekend starts here! Luckily there was some awesome architecture and sound installation at the cathedral to take our minds off of the violence. We really are a bunch of arty-farty weaklings!

Matthew and company at Falling Forward Promotions were lovely, we got fed and the venue is really nice. We played first and it was pretty good, I think we were still a bit bummed out from our depressing day off but we pulled through and played like we were sticking our collective middle finger up at the crowd. Sometimes shows just feel like that you know? Like the crowd is the enemy. Anyway it was cool and people seemed to dig it. You gotta treat 'em mean to keep 'em keen.

Montana were dressed up in black metal and Amy Winehouse costumes, it was kinda weird but good. Rolo Tomassi brought their crazy jazzy-tech-metal to the table and the crowd ate it up. There's loads of bands who use Microkorg keyboards now (us being one of them) and Rolo Tomassi are one of the few that actually use it as an integral part of their sound. It was pretty rad. I'm throwing mine away! Not really. The sound man was a real cool guy. I talked to him about Shellac.

Back to Matt's for toast and tea and talking shit. Thanks Matt! "Neeeeeurgggggggggh!"


DAY 9: LONDON



Capital city!!! We hung out in Camden with Robin Silas Christian who is probably the nicest man in the world. He brought us some great coffee. Thanks! There was one coffee which was £6 and you needed a note from your doctor to order it. What the fuck?!? We then went to the British Museum where we saw Stephen Hawkins cruising about it was awesome! We also payed about £18 in parking for a few hours which WAS NOT AWESOME.

The show was a blur of friends, family and awesome bands. It was our first ever headline show in London and we have to thank A Badge Of Friendship for taking a risk on us. It payed off and the show was awesome. Cinemechanica were added last minute and were incredible. Geordi Le Force, Jesus Knives and They Died Too Young were also all rad and by the time we played we were tired, half-drunk and real nervous but it was so good! Having all our friends there was incredible and it was probably one of the best and most fun shows we have ever played. It was a huge pulsating Category 1 Hurricane. Sincere thanks to all our buddies and family who came out, we love you.

We went off in different directions at the end of the night. Tour over, mission accomplished. Peace out bros. Thanks to everybody who helped, bought stuff, clapped, cheered, shouted, spoke, drank, snored, swore, ate, punched, and laughed with us. It was awesome. See you next time.

Dan x x x