I spent a week on a bus with a crew of rapping puppeteers who have hit it big in France. A Chinese-Vietnamese-German Rastaman, a Brazilian-American white gangsta rapper, a Scottish-German electro-hip-hop poet, a knife juggler moonlighting as a tour manager, my longtime friend and collaborator Adam, and a German puppet-rap mastermind were my companions on this leg of my adventures.

I arrived in Paris, dragging my heavy bag of gear, merch and necessities to Adam and his girlfriend Anne’s pad, in an overwhelmingly Tamil neighbourhood which also happened to house the Hell’s Angels’ French headquarters. The next day I took a train to Reims for the start of the Puppetmastaz tour.

The next three days are a bit of a blur. Partly because the small French towns (Reims, Annecy and Meylan, none of which I’d ever heard of before the tour) blend into each other in my memory—nice rivers, cool old architecture and impeccable state-sponsored arts centres where the gigs took place—but mostly because of the touring lifestyle, involving tour bus living and copious consumption of alcohol.

For anyone who’s never been on a tour bus, I have to say it’s one of the least glamourous aspects of the rock lifestyle. Picture a bus with 10 compartments, about the shape and size of a coffin (a comparison which much to my dismay occurred to me on the first night onboard), stacked on top of each other and back to back, with a hallway barely wide enough to fit one person in between. Now imagine eight dudes (and a couple of courageous chicks) living there for several weeks in a row.

The Puppetmastaz are huge in France, and treated accordingly, with catering tables adorned in fancy cheese, sausage, champagne, whiskey and beer. All of which was a challenge to my efforts to live healthily, a challenge which I miserably failed to meet, although I enjoyed myself while doing so.

I have to say that the French, for all their legendary snobbery and rudeness (a stereotype which was affirmed a few times on this tour), paradoxically have a gift for hospitality and treating artists with the utmost respect. In Reims, the director of the arts centre picked me up from the train station. In Annecy, when I had an equipment problem, the director personally drove me to a music store to replace the problematic part. And then there’s the getting fed like royalty.

As for the shows themselves, the first few were done solo for logistical/financial reasons (there being only one bed available on the Puppetmastaz tour bus). I find it difficult to do solo shows these days as it feels like retreading old material and routines, but I try to give it my all. As I recall the first show in Reims was so-so, Annecy was pretty decent, and Meylan was awesome.

The next show was in Montpellier, where we had a day off and Ad and I took a day trip to swim in the Medeterranean and have our Canadian accents ridiculed by an obnoxious, musclebound drunk (who made up for it somewhat by buying us many rounds of drinks). The Montpellier show was crazy. A small but very vocal minority of the audience just hated me, and made their disdain known in no uncertain terms. The rest of the audience seemed to dig it though, so I played it up wrestling-villain style.

The next day, we arrived in Paris for the biggest show of the tour. Stacey flew in and joined me to present the 2009 WP experience as it should be seen. Unfortunately, we went on at a ridiculously early hour, as the audience was still trickling in. But we soldiered on, and those who were there seemed to enjoy it.

The next and last show (for us) was at a festival in the quaint little city of Rouen. Aside from the novelty of having both performance space and backstage zone be in circus tents, there wasn’t much notable about this gig. The Puppetmastaz and their crew were great, and it was really cool seeing their show night after night, with the added bonus of consistenly sold-out and insanely excited crowds.