Here is the final installment of Larry's tour diaries...

The Cinematics Tour Diary: Day Twelve (Geldern, Germany)

Here is the second installment of Larry's account of our European adventures...

The Cinematics Tour Diary: Day Five (Antwerp, Belgium)

Scott is suffering from a pretty foul cold today. We’re fairly certain that it’s not Swine Flu. As well as being international-class chefs, back-seat rally drivers and amateur fashion-stylists, the musicians in this band all fancy themselves to be doctors-cum-pharmacists, and the combination of medicines that we’ve prescribed to him seem to have made him a little drowsy and forgetful. I’m sure that while playing Hard for Young Lovers tonight, Scott forgot some lyrics and replaced them with some intriguing references to his search for diamonds in the desert. If he has a stash of loot that he’s not sharing with us then I shall have to speak to our manager about the division of future royalty-cheques for the band.

This band and its entourage seem to have turned into a small army of walking-wounded. Between my probably-broken ankle, our Tour Manager’s certainly-broken hand (did I mention that other night that instead of punching me back he punched a wall in frustration?) and now Scott’s ghastly cold, we must resemble a posse twice our age. I dearly hope that we can all make a dramatic recovery in time for some freaky dance-moves on the floors of Berlin and beyond.

The Cinematics Tour Diary: Day Six (Nürnberg, Germany)

Quite often, if we’ve played a show and are too tired or too sensible to party afterwards, we’ll head back to the hotel and huddle around a laptop computer to watch a film. With our important Berlin show fast-approaching, Scott and Bonney lassoed me after tonight’s show and dragged me back to our hotel with the promise that we could watch a film. What we witnessed shocked us. We are all fairly liberal and open-minded, and are not very easily offended, but this film (the title rhymes with “prune oh”) was pretty close to disgusting. I think I’ll lose sleep tonight, thinking of some of those scenes.

The show tonight was very good, I thought. My personal-feeling was that the PA-system should have been louder, but I think these days music venues are so paranoid about being sued by newly-deafened young hipsters that the days of bass-notes physically moving you at a show may be gone for good. I understand there are one or two more-pressing world matters to deal with at present, but I think I’d offer my vote to almost any government that promises to once again allow young people to rock out at high-volume.

The conservative decibel-limit aside, it was another successful show. As with almost all our gigs in Europe, the venue was packed to the rafters and the audience seemed to appreciate the band’s brave new sound. This rock and roll jive is all I’ve really ever considered doing since I was aged four, when I remember dancing in the dark to Dancing in the Dark with my young mother on one gloomy afternoon in Renfrew, just outside Glasgow. It’s a shallow outlook, I’m sure, but when I’m performing these songs to people who enjoy them, I feel like Superman riding a Harley Davidson across freshly-laid palm-leaves, high on Love, heading to meet with Jesus, Rambo, Henrik Larsson and Mohammed Ali for cocktails.

The Cinematics Tour Diary: Day Seven (Berlin, Germany)

The last time we played in Berlin, a few months back, we could not come back on-stage for an encore, as some of my equipment was destroyed by the continental electrics in the venue. I have decreed that tonight no amount of exploding equipment or broken bones will stop the show. If someone wants to bring this gig to a premature end then they had better bring a gun. In fact, they had better bring two, lest the first one should jam.

The promoter has just informed us that the show is all-but sold-out in advance and that the venue will certainly be packed to capacity by the time we take the stage. Support is from another very good Glasgow band, 1990s, so it should make for a stellar night.

Earlier today, I did some recording, demoing some more songs for the third Cinematics album. The music industry can be very frustrating. We wrote the songs for Love and Terror well over a year ago now, yet only now are we on the eve of its release. Now I find myself in a position where I have written another volley of songs which the world won’t hear for another year. In this age of the information super-highway, you’d think it would be possible and advantageous to be able to write songs one week, record them the next, and then let the world hear them the week after that. I guess too many people have invested too much money in the existing system just to let some brats like us come along and just blast our music out there to anyone who wants to listen.

The Cinematics Tour Diary: Day Eight (Frankfurt, Germany)

Our recent show in Berlin was really very good indeed. The Magnet Club was packed to burst and I think we kicked out the jams for the crowd.
 

Tonight’s gig in Frankfurt turned out to be a strange one. Often shows on a Sunday, Monday or Tuesday can be quieter affairs, but tonight those fans who attended the show made it a very good night. They called us out for not one but two encores, blowing away our post-Berlin fatigue.

While I waited on the rest of the band to finish showering this morning, I sat in the in the hotel reception reading all the English-language newspapers I could find. Then I spied a treat- a Bob Dylan songbook. I thought I’d take a few moments to play some of the great man’s work on my air guitar when I spotted an anomaly. In German music, there seems to be no such thing as a “B” chord. Instead, they have the “H” chord! If I had suggested this in my music class at school then I think my old teacher would have beaten me with a timpani-mallet before throwing me out of her class. 

This afternoon I wrote a song with the chord-progression G, Hm, C and D. It’s a sure-fire hit.

A group of magazines in America asked us to write some diaries during our current European tour, to keep our transatlantic fans in the loop, so we got our boy Larry on the case. They won't be printed until next month, so here are the entries from our Dutch dates. Send complaints on a postcard to the usual address...

The Cinematics Tour Diary: Day One (Utrecht, Holland)

Last night, just as we finished our set in Utrecht, I collapsed from the stage, in some kind of accidental stage-dive. I landed on a handful of fans at the front and managed to badly damage my left-leg and sustain a semi-serious concussion. The rest of our band thought it was hilarious, but the audience members showed some concern, at least. The Chinese-whispers we heard only an hour later in the dressing-room included the news that I’d suffered an epileptic fit, I’d overdosed on imaginary drugs, I was too drunk to even stand, I’d been rushed by too-eager fans and also that someone had thrown a bottle at the stage, hitting me square on the head. All of those stories seem much more interesting than what actually happened, and part of me wishes they were all at least partly true, but in reality I think it was simply the heat from the stage-lights that caused me to pass out, and that’s all she wrote.

Back in the dressing-room, our tour manager and the owner of the venue buzzed around, arranging medical attention for me. It was our singer, Scott, who made the point that it was no small mercy that this ordeal happened then and there, while were in Britain or Europe, where medical care is available to all, according to need, and not in a part of the world where we’d have had to pay heavily without private medical insurance.

As it transpired, all I needed was a few feet of bandaging and a jar of nuclear-strength pain-killers. However, if I had tried my flying-guitarist impression in the United States, for example, then those few bitter pills may have bankrupted our whole tour.

Onwards we limp to Eindhoven and beyond. By the time we get to Berlin we’ll be dancing once again...

The Cinematics Tour Diary: Day Two (Eindhoven, Holland)

We’re sitting on the balcony outside of our hotel room, sipping a few post-show Dutch lagers. My lower left leg has turned a unique shade of purple, not commonly seen beyond the court of Louis XIV, and I can’t help thinking that I’ll pay for all the shapes I’ve cut on-stage tonight when the sober morning comes. 

Our balcony overlooks a neighbouring bar, and Adam makes the point that if we were in Glasgow right now then some passing head-banger would have taken exception to us sitting out like this and would have almost certainly thrust at least one empty beer bottle at us. I think when we move to Berlin, as we plan to do in the coming months, I’ll miss some of the passion of Glasgow. The city is not really the murderous place that the statistics suggest- most of the brutal knife-crime and gangland slayings are confined to the eastern periphery, and much of the city is now very much gentrified- but Scotland, generally, is a place that likes to figuratively shoot-down anyone who dares to raise their head out of the trenches.

There are much worse places than Glasgow- I loved the place once and then it broke my heart- yet I fear that when our album is eventually released, at long last later this month, the people in our hometown will hear the lyrics I’ve written and we’ll all be shot as traitors. 

The Cinematics Tour Diary: Day Three (Rotterdam, Holland)

Imbibing beer and vodka whilst also taking pain-killers strong enough to numb a buffalo is a perilous pursuit, yet this is exactly the tact I took last night. We can be a difficult bunch of band members to restrain at the best of times, and my own quest to find the next party is generally unrelenting on tour. Last night our long-suffering Tour Manager, Mad Mikey Mac, advised that I return to the hotel with the band, to rest my damaged leg and prepare for today’s show, but I met his guiding hand with a drunken and very clumsy punch in the chops; the poor sod. I’ve since apologised one-hundred times and have promised to name my first-born after him, regardless of gender, but the lingering guilt hangs heavy. From today I shall return to my aggressive pacifism and will bin the pain-killers.

Our drummer, Bonney, has found a new way to pass the time in the tour van and dressing-rooms today. He now sits thinking up ways of incorporating meats- usually ham – into the names of bands and musical artists. Notable efforts so far include: the Jesus HAM Mary Chain, And You Will Know Us By the Trail of HAM, The John Spenser HAM Explosion, MC HAMmer, DanHAMaHAMaakroyd and, of course, The CinHAMatics. I almost stabbed him for his blasphemy (before remembering my refound pacifism!) when he contrived “Bob DylHAM” but the best one, in my opinion, was “Schinken Stevens.” (“Shinken” is the German word for “ham”). All the members of this travelling circus found this last one beyond hilarious and nearby Rotterdammers must have wondered why these grown men were rolling around the streets in laughter for at least ten minutes. Bonney’s bellowing laughter almost derailed a passing tram.

More ham-based humour and less meat-headed violence for the rest of the tour, I say.

The Cinematics Tour Diary: Day Four (Haarlem, Holland)

The fourth day of our tour has been mercifully uneventful. Sunday shows are often a little more low-key anyway, but the absence of hospital-trips, high-street pugilism and general drunken excess has been not unwelcome.

We did, however, wake-up this morning to find our tour-bus slightly damaged in a way that I struggle to believe was accidental, and I wonder if perhaps our British registration-plates inspired a dash of midnight vandalism by another hotel patron. For all the criticism we subject Britain to, I should say, in defence of British people, that when foreign vehicles drive around in London, Manchester or Glasgow, for example, I don’t think people stop and stare contemptuously. Nor do British drivers behave without courtesy towards vehicles from Germany, Holland, Poland or France, and I struggle to imagine that it is very common for vehicles to be vandalised simply because they are not from Britain.

We find that touring on the Continent is a delight because music fans here are passionate to the extent of recklessness - certainly much more so than the fickle NME-darlings or numbed indie-snobs of Britain- and the staff in venues behave with impeccable professionalism always. However, there does seem to be just a very slight anti-British/American vibe in the streets and shops of some of these European towns. Perhaps it’s a lingering anti-Iraq war thing, or it could be a reaction to the perceived conceit of people from the English-speaking world. It could also be the case that we’re met with suspicion and hostility by non-music fans simply because we’re a rock and roll band, irrespective of nationality (and we are undeniably a band, with our skinny-jeans, winkle-picker shoes and unseasonable sunglasses - what clichés we are!) I have visions of shopkeepers stalling us with obtuse questions while their wives scurry upstairs, hiding their daughters and their brandy. 

I could be just too sensitive, and I may have imagined this whole state of affairs, but I think we should all just get along.

Larry (The Cinematics)

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