Travel Day
London, England - Austin, Texas
We are on an aeroplane overflowing with the brightest lights of the British music industry. If anything were to happen the inconsequences would be devastating.
Day Off, Austin
Howryall doon tedey ahmngo'hed n freshn yr caaafeee. Alll raht, yall havagud deynar.
We're in Austin. It's not my habit to complete my diarising on days off, but since I never actually write it at the time, it doesn't matter. Does it.
Aqualung has never had a record deal in the USA. America was left out of the original deal for reasons too interesting to go into, and so our appearance at the South by Southwest music festival (AKA SXSW) is being funded by Matt as a speculative-to-accumulative venture. For this reason we are travelling as light as possible and staying at the Best Value Inn.
In a parallel universe known as the Past, Matt and I came to the festival as part of an unpopular group called RUTH. We stayed in Austin for a week at the Holiday Inn on I35 ate every day at the nearby cajun diner called Dixies who tried to kill us with their sweet pancakes, hot tea and eggs over easy. It was a great adventure, and by the time we came home we were 1. extremely fat and 2. convinced that RUTH's future lay somewhere other than with the Artist Record Company, to whom we were signed.
When we got home we left ARC and met a manager called Phil Nelson and signed a deal with Mercury Records, who suggested we change our name. We thought if we were going to change our name, we might as well pretend that we were a different band altogether, so we concocted a stupid story about how my brother Matt (who was some kind of fragile musical monk) had come to see my band (that he wasn't in) play at SXSW, but before the gig we got into a fight with a Texan band who punched our singer and made him disappear in a puff of fiction. And who should step up to save the gig with his electrifying vocal performance, but Matt Hales, who had previously only been interested in plagal cadences? Who would have guessed at the powerhouse talent hidden within this studious young man? It was very Clark Kent (and even a little Klark Kent).
Like I said, it was a stupid story. It was more trouble than it was worth and my friend Ian has never forgiven us for writing him into it, but it means that SXSW has a crucial place in our history. That was four years ago. And what do we find when we get to Austin? The Holiday Inn on I35 has become the Best Value Inn and Dixies has become Jack's Backyard, but otherwise everything is exactly the same...
Fox 7 News / Brush Square (5th and Neches) / Fox & Hound (4th and Guadelupe), South by Southwest, Austin, Texas, USA
It's gig day; it's sunny; we have a rubbish rental car and some rented equipment, a guitar and a pedal steel; we've travelled five thousand miles to be here; whaddaya say, let's boogie!
It's lucky my body doesn't know what time it is, because we have to get up at 5am to go to FOX7 News, which is a local cable news station. We're playing a song and some 'bumps' into the ad breaks. "We'll cue you and you just jam for ten seconds and we'll fade you out," says Darren the sound guy, not understanding the kind of band we are. We don't jam. So we play two chords and everybody claps.
It's kind of weird to see US TV people close up. It looks like they're still on TV when you're standing next to them. The older, Des-faced, natural-gravity-but-hint-of-subversive-humour anchorman comes over to do an interview and then we perform Strange & Beautiful (there are no albums out in the States, but S&B has been used on a succession of teen-angst shows, so that was the natural choice). I'm playing the pedal steel, which is something of an affectation on a young Englishman in Texas, but I'm hoping they find it charming, like when a reckless young lioncub tries to take down an elephant.
There's time left at the end of the show so they ask us to play them out. The only other song I play pedal steel on is Just for a moment, which is the least appropriate theme tune in TV News history. We get cut off with cheerful studio applause just after the line 'My heart was broken in two'.
South by Southwest has more in common with the Edinburgh festival than Glastonbury. There's no big stage, but thousands of little bars that do live music, centred around 6th Street. During the festival there are five bands on every night in every venue. There are tour buses everywhere, and geeky guys from bands with angular haircuts and cute chicks from bands with nose studs, and then thousands of British music industry types who know your manager called Phil Nelson, and you can't go for two minutes without hearing guitar solos and introducing yourself. It has a holiday camp/Disneyland feel to it, and it's great.
Throughout the day we've met a few people who reveal that they've travelled for 15 hours or thousands of miles to come and see us. That is an amazing thing.
Another great thing about the festival is that there are a thousand bands here you played with once, so you never know who you'll bump into. The Veils have come to see our set, and it's nice to see them again and reminisce about mooning each other on the M6. Then we head off to see Clearlake, but fail because they are on the same bill as Franz Ferdinand, and there is a queue of boys in tank tops around the block. This is what it's like to be Happening. We head back to our stage to watch Athlete and then gratefully struggle into our rubbish rental car and get lost on the way home.
Travel Day
Austin, Texas - London, England
Happy birthday to my mum. Yes, on tour again.
I'm 33,000 feet up in the air where I have no business being. The inflight entertainment must be good because random people keep laughing.
I've spotted a few items in SkyMall magazine that you might be interested in:
Pop-up Hot Dog Cooker ($49.95)
It's like a toaster that does buns, but also provides a vaginal aperture in which you can warm hot dogs
Rotating Flag Bracket Set ($49.99)
"Fly our flag proudly! It'll stay tangle-free in this rotating bracket!"
Saxxy (TM) Synthesizer Kazoo for Saxophone-Tuba-Clarinet ($29.95)
"If you can hum, you can play the sax, tuba or clarinet - with Saxxy the synthesizer kazoo!"
Life-size WWI Propeller ($139.95)
Elegant Rosewood Harps To Play or Display (from $179.95)
Wow, Monster Basketball! ($499.00) see below
There are a lot of adverts for plastic surgery in American in-flight magazines. Which reminds me - we watched an outrageous TV show the other night called 'Extreme Makeovers!', which is like one of those makeover shows where people get new outfits and haircuts, but with the twist that the lucky participants get loads of surgery! "Are these really my teeth?!!" they go; "I'm so delighted with my new nose!"; "I can't believe the pounds that frontal lobotomy took off!!!"; "Now I look like a game show host!!! My husband/wife/boss will sleep with me again!!!".
Ah... taking the piss out of Americans. It's so cheap and easy. And convenient. I should be above it. I guess it's Little Brother Syndrome. Here's an excerpt from a conversation I overheard while weeing in a urinal full of ice at the Iron Cactus:
Man A The food there is awful, man
Man B Yeah?
Man A They have good Indian food, but that's it
Man B I heard they have boiled pizza there
Man A Boiled pizza? How does that work?
Man B How did that tiny little country rule the world for like, five centuries?
Man A Naval power, man
Man B Well, they're a bunch of limey cocksuckers if you ask me
This morning I saw the back of Willy Nelson's head. That's not something you see every day.
Day off, London
Far away, in Austin, my favourite band Lilys are playing on 6th Street.