Tour Diary pt. 2

So we found ourselves in Bath. This seemed to vex Thom so he decided to work through his frustration with a ‘JAIL SUX’ tattoo across his stomach. We recorded a video but the tattooist kept stopping to talk to us about Flight of the Conchords (which he heartily reccomends) so it is more a video of Thom lying topless while we talk about Flight of the Conchords. With fresh ink itching it’s way into some of our flesh we began to load into the subterranean Moles Club. It is actually under the ground and you have to dash across the road with amps and stuff and traffic bearing down on you. We found the drivers of Bath quite unforgiving. Opening the night in Bath was our old friend My Name is Ian, whose name is Ian and who is also in a band called Melancholy Moose Society who we played with in Weymouth. He is as charming onstage as he is off it, which is very charming indeed. The gig was a high energy affair with someone anonymous releasing ballons at the end of the set, which we took great delight in bursting with our darts of beat.

All of a sudden it was Halloween and we were in Derby. We had a best-costume competition with Apples, with the winner being the person with the best costume. Christian dressed as Richie Tenembaum from the Royal Tenembaums, Rory dressed as a dead Gondolier from Venice, Charlie dressed as a dead Harry Potter but on spring break in Hogsmeade, Thom dressed as a blushing bride but with blood on the crotch of his wedding dress, Ali dressed as himself but dead and Oli dressed as himself but wearing a suit and dead. Daniel contented himself with writing ‘NOT A COSTUME’ on his face. Apples joined us onstage at the end of our set for a blow through the Cramps’ Teenage Werewolf and shit became really raucous. Any pretence of a costume competition soon evaporated like the alcohol we were drinking from our pores and we soon found ourselves up to our necks in dancing bodies on the dancefloor. Charlie’s broomstick disintegrated from too much hitting.

As the old saying goes ‘A very long drive to Southampton is the best cure for literally anything,’ and we found ourselves nodding our heads sagely in agreement with these wise words as we flopped out of the van to high-five Apples on the pavement. Waiting for us in the dressing room was Tommy Cooper’s favourite type of head ornament; a fez. Ecstatic at this discovery we all took turns wearing it and doing spoon-jar gags, much to the dismay of Oli our long suffering tour manager.

When we strut on into Manchester in our four-wheeled vanmobile we normally listen to something from the city’s musical history, like the Joy Divisions or Smith or something. This time round we listened to Jayou from the city’s musical future, because not only only is he really, really good but we were to be teaming up with him after the show to put some people through their dancing paces. The dressing room was actually a cavern beneath the venue, and the promoter seemed distraught that someone had gone in and stolen only our rider ham. After playing and then listening the hell out of Jayou we stepped nice and light all over Manchester; variously the night involved Jayou taking over another DJ’s set at the Roadhouse and killing the music to shout ‘when I say who got with your mum last night, you say Jayou!’, someone sleeping in a pile of broken glass, a hot tub that was so high you needed to climb a ladder to get into it and a tram ride back from Salford.

On to Stoke then and it was so fucking cold there that we discussed using our friends Apples as human blankets and were only half joking. Luckily there were cups of tea waiting for us when we arrived at the Sugarmill so the crisis was averted.

A day off in London saw us doing some talk about album artwork and what it should look like and then a photoshoot and interview for Q magazine, which will be available in shops at the start of December.

We’d played at the Birmingham Academy a few times before, but no one told us that it had moved and is in a completely different building now. Eventually we moseyed on inside it and said a cheery ‘hallo!’ to Brimingham in our usual style.

After a dream-like weekend spent in Suffolk it was Monday 9th November and the release of Hung Up, our debut single on A&M. We were playing Cargo and rigged up a projector projecting onto the backdrop a loop of us standing still against a wall, when the real us walked onstage, the projected us left and then when the real us left the projected us came back again. It was a super turnout and lightning fun was had by all. It was good to see a lot of old friends there including Jamie James Medina the incredible photographer, who everyone should go and check the hell out of. The afterparty was at the Cafe El Paso and we opened our DJ set with our standard DJ set opener ‘Crocodile Rock’, by England’s famous Elton John, we closed with our standard closer, Diplo’s remix of Twist and Shout. Our good friend Josh from Hush House and Ben ‘Scumbag’ Peel kindly moved us away from the decks and mixer when we had become too refreshed to proplerly conduct proceedings and showed us how real DJs operate. After El Paso closed we bowled outside and then someone shouted ‘everyone follow me!’ and we all followed and went to another bar until eventually it was time to go hotelwards and think about what we had done.

On the drive down to Bristol, Thom shot us all a knowing smile and announced;

‘Look what I’ve been saving for just the right town boys!’ and unveiled a firework called something like ‘The Flaming Susan’. ‘And this,’ he paused, ‘is just the right town.’

‘Why Bristol?’ we shouted, as one.

‘Well, because of the stone beach that is there, think how spectacular it will be shooting off this firework on the beach, with all the piers and that.’

‘There’s no stone beach in Bristol!’ we belllowed,

‘But in Sugar Rush they’re forever going to a stone beach to talk through their issues and such,’ he reasoned.

‘Sugar Rush is set in Brighton, not Bristol!’ we delighted in the punchline to a joke that was fast becoming weary.

Unfortunately there was no Brighton date on the tour, so Thom is still waiting to send the Flaming Susan heavenward, and it sits in the back of our van, nestled between petrol canisters. Bristol saw Pedro, the bassist/saxophonist of the glorious Apples, celebrating his birthday, and us egging him on to greater levels of Dyonisiac frenzy. We eventually settled at an unknown club with some dubstep with some terrible, terrible rapping over it and then it was bedtime.

We returned to London, not satisfied with our single gig on Monday, we elected to try for two gigs, one an instore at Pure Groove in Clerkenwell at seven o’ clock, and the other in aid of Fashion Targets Breast Cancer at Proud Galleries in Camden at eight thirty. This all went swimmingly except that during the drive between Clerkenwell and Camden a beer was spilled in the over-capacity van while two people were trying to change strings. At Proud Galleries we were introduced onstage by the lovely Pearl Lowe, whose husband Danny Goffey taught us proper pinballing technique after the show while dispensing noble aphorisms on life and music. Enlightened, we moved from side to side to Sophie Ellis-Bextor, and sang until our hearts burst along to ‘Murder on the Dancefloor’. On the way back to the hotel a cab driver said he remembered watching Ipswich beat Port Vale 1-0 in the 1978 FA Cup Final, him being such an enormous Port Vale fan and all. We didn’t say anything at the time so as to avoid ejection from his taxi, but he was lying through his teeth, it was definitely Arsenal in that final, not Port Vale. I have no idea why he thought it might be cool to say that but I am glad the truth finally come out.

Northampton was wetter than we had ever seen her before. The home of Church’s and Tricker’s lay under a thick coat of water as we made our way into its southern underbelly. We always love playing at the Roadmenders however so the rain simply trickled off the back of our heads as we held them high, marching in and staying until the clubnight afterwards, where Three Seeds in Paris played some good time/bad time blues ‘n’ roll. During this clubnight we saw some foul racism directed at three bouncers by one guy, who was swiftly dealt with, and dealt with swiftly. Charlie had someone come up to him to say ‘Hey! You look like Elvis Costello!’ This seemingly innocuous statement soon led to an argument, and then a heated argument and then a punch aimed really hard at Charlie’s arm, which was weird.

The Escobar in Wakefield has one of the most impressive liquor shelves that we have seen on our travels (38 kinds of rum), and we quickly engaged the owner in boozy conversation. He is expanding to Leeds soon and promised us a shelf fully six metres in width, displaying spirits from the quotidian likes of Jack Daniels to exotic syrups from deep in the foothills of the Andes that have yet to be named. On the long drive home from Wakefield we watched Step-Brothers for the fourth time on tour. It has become difficult to hear the actual words over the deafening sound of dry lips scraping as we mouth along to each and every line.

And so to the final date of the Hung Up tour, in Norwich. A teary reunion with some of our oldest friends, the Kabeedies, had to wait as we frantically loaded in, running three hours as late due to a BBC session earlier that day at Maida Vale. After a rushed soundcheck we finally got those hugs from the Kabeedies we had been so looking forward to. Our old buddies were in fine form, twitching and jerking their way through their new album ‘Rumpus’. Our new buddies, Apples were on song too, and closed on an instrumental which sparked the first stage invasion of the night, with Blighters in attendance rushing them. Playing a gig in East Anglia again felt just like coming home, and great things happened that night, Kabeedies and Apples joined us for a final encore and a farewell to a beautiful thing.