This rehearsal was the only thing
that made the tour possible
Travelling to Sheffield
I took the opportunity to go home for a few brief hours today. There's nothing finer after a long absence than having a shit in your own bed and a sleep in your own toilet.
This rehearsal was the only thing
that made the tour possible
Leadmill, Sheffield
Hello Engerland. We're back. Did you miss us? At last, a regular supply of decent teabags - none of your Lipton's Yellow Label evilness. We have two new characters to add to our narrative today, Dom the "Lighting Designer". He will be spending much of the next few weeks up a ladder. And Kerry Frampton, the "Bass Player" who is also, I'm sorry to have to say, "My Girlfriend". But don't worry, I'm not the type who has to go on about it all the time, about how my heart has opened up like a flower and so on. She's just the lady bassman on the tour. That's all there is to it.
Some of you will now be concerned, going "how have they done without a bass player until now? Those poor Europeans". Don't worry your pretty head. Hitherto, you see, the bass parts have been performed by Dan's left hand a-playing a synth bass similar to that which appears on the aqualung album. Kerry is coming to add her own unique bass and double bass talents and also to sing even higher than me, thereby giving us a sonic palette wide enough to perform the album in a full, nourishing, satisfying way. You should come along and check it out. It's also worth checking out what Dan is doing with his left hand now that it is redundant.
True to form, as with the Playhouse, the December tour and the Scala, I have developed a giant spot on the end of my nose... scarlet... bulging... tender, draws the eye etc etc. I won't go into it - I'd hate to bore you with graphic details of my ailments.
We've left the protected seclusion of the big venue and the beautiful PA and we're on our own in gigland, a place which is more accustomed to sweat and volume than our intricate, quiet stuff. But it is great to be playing to people who have paid money and come out for no other reason than to see you. They are intricate and quiet people. You should come along and check them out.
Afterwards they have a club night playing hits from the early nineties to people who were children then. Goddamn I'm old.
Outside the gig there is a man selling BOOTLEG AQUALUNG T SHIRTS from a blanket on the street, with the tour dates on the back. How excellent is that?
Met University, Leeds
I didn't do anything except write My Tour Diary today. Unless I am careful this is going to start a horrible feedback loop where I start to write out stuff I've already written. It would make it easier, though.
The gig is full of children. When did I get so old?
Filming Re:covered, London
Hello. We've been called back to London by our sinister overlords to film the television show called Re:covered in which popular groups perform their current 'hit' and a cover version of a song that's important to them. We're doing If I fall and God only knows by the Beach Boys, which we haven't played very much. Luckily we get to play it two thousand times (a couple too few, it turns out).
It's a lovely sunny day, we're by the river and the record company is paying for drinks. If it weren't for the grotesque carbuncle on my nose, everything would be perfect. Kerry gets her go in Makeup at the same time as Dermot O'Leary, which makes her tour. The nice makeup ladies fix my face for me without vomiting into their hands. True professionals.
When the moment comes to perform, I'm suddenly struck by nerves. It's when you start thinking about which chords to play next, because you're on television and you want to get it right, that you suddenly forget how to play at all. You just have to turn off your targeting computer and use the force. TV shows are funny. There's a little audience who are trained to give you warm and excitable applause after a count of three, time after time after time. We should employ a guy in giant headphones to manage the audience at gigs.
We make it through the tracks. The audience applaud with professional enthusiasm. I guess we'll find out how it sounded later.
Hop and Grape (is that what it's still called? The Academy 25?), Manchester
"Saturday night/ I feel the air is getting hot/ Pretty baby" as Whigfield used to say. And perhaps still does in some last-days-of-the-career retro tour of Butlins's, such as the one we are booked for immediately after this.
"Oh Manchester" as Morrissey used to say, and looking at it, I know what he means.
The day begins with getting papers and breakfast at the Gemini Cafe just down the road from the University, which is known to Deliver in the world of sausage, eggs and bacon. Naturally breakfast happens at about half past three on account of last night's bar tab, but it's very nice all the same. I am feeling good about tonight because we've played in Manchester a few times before with great success.
The stage is very small and requires some imagination to fit everything on. Since we returned to the UK we've set the stage out differently so that Matt is in the middle and my keyboard is sideways on, which allows me to mug foolishly at the rest of the band while I'm playing it. For some reason this makes me feel like I'm a professional musician, except tonight it has to be the other way round so I have my back to the band, which they all seem happy about. I mug foolishly at Roberto instead.
The room is beautifully rammed and there is a real sense of occasion. After yesterday's success we introduce God only knows into the set. It's a rare moment of spine-tingleage as the crowd starts to sing along. It's one of those nights where everything clicks, and despite the odd dodgy note and technical hitch we come off covered in glory, even though I hit my head on the mirrorball as I leave the stage.
"It's just rock'n'roll" as Liam used to say.
Vicar St, Dublin
Dublin, land of my.... er. The venue is (relatively) obscenely luxurious (if frighteningly large) and bags of croissants and danishes await us among the leather sofas and sweeeet sweeet showers. It's like being in gig heaven.
MVB, Kerry and I wander down to Trinity College to have a look around. It's as if nothing had changed since the days of Joyce and Beckett (rain lashed streets the nights cool dark my bicycle bucking beneath me squeak squeak wheels on cobble salt on my lips her white face through smeared glass the tram rattling up George Street the urgent tick of my heart a clock striking midnight sweat speckled drunk on the steps below Kelly's Bar her eyes like the moon standing up on the pedals faster faster now breath steaming eyes streaming unsure alone among the dead eyed tenements rain lashed). Matt VB chooses to take a picture of a college rugby game in front of its only spectator, seemingly for comic effect. He's a man who has been busy with his camera over the last few weeks.
Dom is very happy because the stage is wide and tall, and he can create soothing submarine washes and epic starscapes. We are happy because the mirrorball is well out of the way.
The gig is very warm and civilised, especially when MVB and Dan bring us on lovely cups of tea in the middle (served in exclusive aqualung mugs). I think we'll keep that bit in.
This is how nice it looks before
the audience comes and ruins it
The Waterfront, Belfast
Commander George Bush Jr is in town today (he's on at the Palladium), but there is not much evidence of him as we wander the town in search of small, belted bags (I could explain but you wouldn't thank me). We do see an extremely small pro-War march cross the bridge (we know it's pro-war because their Union Jacks and Stars and Stripes are not on fire).
The gig is in a small studio theatre and the sound is excellent to the point of forensic. The audience is attentive to the point of mesmerised. The slightest error is apparent to all, but we avoid this by making enormous errors instead. On the whole, though, it handles very smoothly. The mugs are flying off the merchandising stand thanks to our onstage endorsement. We should do something with our aqualung carriage clocks. They could do with a lift.
Academy 2 (formerly "The Stanley Theatre" - guess it just didn't sound gig-y enough), Liverpool
We've been here before. The dressing room is deep in the bowels of the earth and is superheated to 158 degrees. They provide you with a single fan which pushes the heat around the room. It's like being in a tumble drier. The graffiti in the toilets is especially filthy here. It's almost worth forming a band and getting a gig here just so that you can see it.
The routine has changed completely now that we are headlining; we can get in the venues earlier and the crew has a lot more to do. This means there is a lot less tourism and a lot more sitting around in dressing rooms getting on each others' nerves. It does present a bit of a problem for the man writing about it, though. Guess I'll just have to exaggerate even more. I say "Guess I'll just..." a lot, don't I?
It feels like we are settling into our five-piece stride now. It's a real pleasure to play a long set, which is something I have rarely done in my gigging career (the only time you get to play for more than an hour other than your own headlining tour is when you have for some reason been booked to play in a pub that normally does tribute bands, and the promoter goes "all right lads, you can set up in the corner, you'll play from 8.30 till 10 then you'll play the second half from 11 till 1. You can sleep on the floor in the cloakroom if you like. I will wake you in the morning with the fire alarm for a joke. Ha ha hahaha. Why are you crying?"). It gives you enough time to realise what the hell you're doing.
Day off, Nottingham
Rescue Rooms, Nottingham
We had a day off yesterday. In Nottingham. We stayed in a hotel in a bed that didn't travel round continents with a trailer attached to it. I bought two pairs of shoes, which was pretty cool. I've had a bit of trouble buying shoes lately. They are normally my favourite things, but the last few I've bought haven't really worked out. I mean, they were all right, but they were the type of shoes that look nicer on the shelf in the shoe shop than on your feet the next day. I stopped going to nightclubs for a similar reason. Roberto, Dom and Matt also found shoe-love in Nottingham. It seems like aeons since we had a proper day off, and touring wears heavily on the sole.
The venue features a lovely little bar where you can sit on little cushion-cubes and chat with your friends and some drunk old men while fresh-faced young ladies prepare you vegetarian food and you can leaf through the collection of lps they have on nearby shelves. We all agreed that if we lived in Nottingham this would be the kind of place we'd like to hang out at (apart from then we'd have to hang out with each other). If we lived in Nottingham we would also have different shoes for every day of the year.
The gig reminds me a little of Florence, in that the audience is louder than we are. Steve (who has now taken over selling our mugs and carriage clocks in between journeys) takes the opportunity to flatten some hecklers with his "there are people here who are trying to listen to the band, and if you don't want to, you should FUCK RIGHT OFF" routine. He has honed his scary man image protecting his bus while it sits outside nitespots all over the world. I wasn't aware of this, but apparently there is a great deal of tour bus piracy on the roads, and he constantly has to be wary of Bus Pirates pulling up alongside him bearing the Jolly Rodger bumper sticker, casting over the grappling irons, boarding through the roof hatches and selling the bands into slavery. This is what happened to the original line-up of Bucks Fizz. Steve has a small arsenal of muskets and says he keeps a cannon in his trousers, but as far as I'm aware he hasn't used it yet.
Shepherd's Bush Empire, London
Here it is then, the biggest date on the tour, and the biggest headlining gig of Matt's career (and in fact for all of us). It is pretty exciting, what with the big AQUALUNG on the marquee and everything. It's amazing how small it looks when there's no one there. I've played here a few times in a supporting capacity, and it looks very big when it's busy. Very big.
We had a bit of a problem with my Rhodes keyboard last night so I take a little trip to Denmark Street to buy some new sustain pedals. While I'm there I decide to buy myself a "midi pedalboard" with which to "remotely control" my "guitar effects processor". It is big and silver and faintly masturbatory, and helps me to feel like a professional musician all the more (my current pedalboard is made from the eating part of a baby's highchair). It also means that I have to try and understand how the fuck to make it work in time for the gig. Experience has shown that you should never ever use a new piece of equipment on the day you buy it, especially if it's the biggest gig of your career. But I laugh in the face of experience. Ha ha ha.
We have taken delivery of an empty grand piano case for the show, which Matt is going to put his keyboard in. This is showbusiness, see, which is all about surface, effect, style, illusion, lying. It's a big stage - we have to fill it with something.
It's weird, the effect of stress on the brain. I didn't feel that nervous, but when I got onstage (to the sound of what seemed to be a small jet taking off) small holes kept appearing in my mind where there would normally be instructions about what to do with my hands and voice. It was like an out-of-body experience where you get a really shit view.
Part of the problem is the way I have set up my "midi pedalboard" allows me to turn off my guitar by moving a little pedal a few nanometres too far, so I have to spend the gig carefully balancing the pedal at just the right angle, which is quite hard to do with your foot, especially while you are berating yourself for using a new piece of equipment on the day you buy it.
However, the incredible sound of 1400 attractive, discerning music fans shouting hooray all together even if you are playing like a mule with its hooves up its arse gradually makes me forget my troubles and the last quarter of the gig is as good as I dreamed it might be. (A few weeks ago Matt had a Shepherd's Bush Empire dream that went like this: during the day of Matt's appearance at Shepherd's Bush Empire, there is a problem the computer which means that he has to go home to get something (all gig anxiety dreams include some element of ludicrous technical difficulty. I had one where I had to play in the wings because I could only plug my amp in in the dressing room and I didn't have a long enough lead to reach the stage). By the time he returns, the venue is full, but Tony is packing up the stage, saying no, the gig can't go on. The audience start to leave sadly until the promoter comes on saying he knows Turin Brakes, and they've agreed to do the show instead. The audience goes wild. Matt leaves the Empire to see them taking 'AQUALUNG' down and putting up 'TURIN BRAKES' instead. So it was a lot better than Matt dreamed it would be). Finally the rock-opera style River Song makes some kind of sense. This was what we were imagining when we first started playing it for our own amusement in rehearsals (rather than, say, a small fringe theatre in Belfast). After taking our final bow, we stand in with Roberto and Paul in the wings and watch Matt singing Nowhere at his fake grand piano with a sea of happy faces lifted towards him.
Afterwards there was the disconcerting experience of the aftershow party, where all of a sudden you find yourself and all of your friends in a bar and you remember that you have a life outside of the big silver bus. I guess I'll have to get back to it quite soon. A funny thought.
Dom is extremely touched because he got his first ever round of applause for a lighting cue, when he first turned on the beautiful blue starry backdrop as we went into the middle eight of Good times. I heard the applause but I didn't know what it was for. I just figured my arse was showing again.
Gardner Arts Centre, Brighton
I was struck this evening by the number of people in the audience wearing glasses. Actually, with the seats and everything it's like Guess Who? - earrings; beards; blue eyes; brown eyes; grey hair; artificial limbs etc.
What I look like when I'm
writing my diary
The Junction, Cambridge
Disaster! Somehow, nobody knows how or why, in the middle of the soundcheck, Kerry's double bass lurched out of its stand and smashed its own neck off with an extraordinary crashing and breaking and snapping sound. Kerry has had that bass since she was twelve. She was devastated. Its body looked very small and strange without its neck. But then, so would mine.
Paul leaps into tour-managing action and by the end of the evening a replacement bass has arrived and the courier has taken the bass corpse away for bass burial. Unfortunately it doesn't come in time for the gig, so Kerry has to do a lot of gig just singing and mooching about trying to look busy. The audience were very sympathetic when they heard the story. Perhaps they will forgive us for the bassless show. They seemed pretty happy, though. Kerry was also happy to hear that Southampton are through to the FA Cup final. Her brother was featured in the Southampton Evening Echo for doing a lap of St Mary's after the first goal.
Matt's throat is a bit ragged. Hope he's not coming down with something.
Day off in Newcastle
Dom wins the bowling. He has Technique.
Northumbria University, Newcastle
Went to see Confessions of a Dangerous Mind this morning. It's very good, especially the work of Robin Asquith, incandescent as the psychotic lead.
There's no doubt about it, Matt has Got A Cold. It is inevitable, what with all this close-quarters living with unhealthy folk, and he's done very well to last till the last week. Today it's the sore throat. You can hear the singing sticking to the inside of his throat as it comes out. The show will go on though, even if he has to whisper into the mic like Hannah out of S Club.
In many ways tonight is the best of the tour. The band felt relaxed but sharp, I played well and the audience were full of life but very attentive. So well done, Newcastle. You are tonight's winners, even if your curry houses shut ridiculously early.
Liquid Rooms, Edinburgh
Blimey - it's a beautiful sunny spring day and Edinburgh is looking fine enough to marry. We wander about in search of the Scottish Pancake house we went to once but discover it has been turned into a Garfunkels. All good things eventually get turned into a Garfunkels.
The dressing room is a little shed outside in a little yard where they like to dump old promotional items like inflatable Southern Comfort bottles. The walls are attractively lined with zebra-print fun fur which suits us perfectly. Matt's cold is progressing happily from his throat to his nose. He can still sing, though. He just needs a lot of tissues.
Edinburgh are nearly as nice as Newcastle. The bus is staying outside the venue tonight, which gives us an insight into the state of mind of late-night Edinburgh drinkers at closing time. It's better than sleeping could ever hope to be.
QMU, Glasgow
Encores. A strange convention. It all makes sense when the audience is screaming and banging on the floor, but what do you do when you go off and the applause dies down and all is silence? Do they think it's over? Perhaps they've had enough? In Newcastle Matt rushed to the back of the hall to shout "More!" to get them all started, by which time Tony had started playing the leaving music. It's a dangerous business. Tonight was even more diffident. At least they cheered when they realised we'd come back on. We must have stunned them into submission.
Wulfrun Hall, Wolverhampton
Every morning I wake up to the sound of someone's change falling out of their pockets onto the floor.
Only two more to go. A kind of end-of-term mania has set in. Wulfrun Hall is pretty massive and a little bit rock - perfect for us.
A problem had developed with Dan's phone. One of the buttons was not working properly and causing him enormous distress. All through Europe we would encounter him tightening into a ball of rage, and we would say to him "get a new phone Dan" (we were saying this to a lot of people. MVB's, for example, will only remain charged for 20 minutes at a time. He has spent much of the tour in phone boxes. It takes me back to 1997 when phones were new, exciting and the size of two litre bottles of milk), and Dan would say "yeah, I'll get one when we get back. I'm due a Free Upgrade." So we got back and did he get one? Well, he did, best beloved, eventually he did, only a couple of days ago, one with a little joystick and a multitude of tiresome games within its tiny brain. Dan, being a musician as well as a pub-goer, wasted no time in programming the opening bars of Good times gonna come into it as a ringtone to the amusement of all. And that is how the gig came to begin tonight with a short pantomime in which Matt arrived onstage, called Dan's phone, which played the opening bars of Good times, whereupon the band came in in all its mighty glory. That kind of set the tone for the evening.
Wolverhampton were up for a stupid time, and so were we. Phil the Manager, who was visiting, was proud to point out afterwards that a band whose album lasts only 42 minutes had managed to play for one hour forty-five. We acheived this feat of longevity by getting into a lengthy set of requests during the first encore. It started innocently enough with an unpleasant synthesis of Stairway to heaven, Somewhere over the rainbow and Sloop John B. After this the audience figured out that we couldn't resist a Beach Boys cover and we ended up doing ragged versions of California girls and Good vibrations, after which Tony rang Matt on his phone to suggest that we get on with it. It was the perfect evening, rendered sublime when we returned to the bus to discover that Matt had left easter eggs on everyone's pillows*.
*I can't prevent myself from saying that this is not a euphemism.
Phoenix Theatre, Exeter
It's the last day. The last day to roll dishevelled out of my bunk and greet my dishevelled colleagues, each one perfecting their thousand-acre stares in the upstairs lounge. The last day to stumble toxic-mouthed into a venue and cause awful suffering in the toilet; the last day to stridgil the gum out of my eyes beneath the micturation of a backstage shower which has never known love; to wrap my empinkened body in veteran venue towels of indeterminate (due to a lifetime of boilwashes) or indigestible (to deter would-be towel-thieves) colours; to rattle the tea cup against my teeth as I suck down the blessed hot tea, surrounded by mirrors surrounded by lights, seeing out of the corner of my eye an infinite number of parallel Bens sucking down blessed hot tea... It's also the last day of my unintended Lenten vow to abstain from all fresh vegetables, coherent conversation and toenail-clipping, so it's not all bad.
Exeter is the English Tilburg. There's nothing but cafes. The people must all go and work their shifts in cafes and then relax by going to the next door cafe for coffee and a muffin before going back to work in a cafe serving next doors' cafe staff coffee and muffins. Apart from that place where I bought a new bag. People have to have bags, after all.
The Phoenix is a nice little Arts Centre, Gallery (and Cafe). To get to it you have to cross a lake of fire. It has a very small stage and for some reason this means that we have to lay the stage out the opposite way round than normal, which is actually profoundly disconcerting once you get playing.
[TECHNICAL NOTE FOR ALL "ROCK" MUSICIANS PLAYING IN THEATRES THAT AREN'T NORMALLY GIGS: The auditorium you are performing in may be using an Induction Loop for the benefit of hearing-impaired patrons. Hearing impairment will not be an issue for such patrons tonight, as you have bought along a 20k rig to make you nice and loud, but the induction loop will be an issue for you because if it is left on, it will turn every loudspeaker in the room into a microphone. This causes not only feedback, but recursive feedback, which will transport you into a whole new dimension of misery. Bear this in mind before you start taking your amps apart.]
Here are some things I meant to say at various different points along the way, but forgot:
"Tonight I was going to try wearing my corduroy shirt with my corduroy trousers, but while I was sitting down before the gig I suffered "corduroy lockup" and my arms had to be pried from my legs with a crowbar."
"Matt has an interesting way of starting one line with a line from somewhere else in the song and then switching halfway through, to whit: "Just for a moment, my luuurld was full of pain", "I get throught the day, with you by my side" and "Is it wietter never to spove than to raise your veart having to stop"."
"As I stand by the stage listening to Matt's solo performance of Nowhere to close the show, I find myself unable to stop mentally changing the words as follows: Verse one, line one, "So, is it over?" becomes "Toad, is it over?" (this is what my small friend Tilly honestly believes the words to be) and verse two, line one, "Hands, let me hold you" becomes "Hans, let me hold you", which I think adds a little spice to to the whole affair."
Tonight there is champagne instead of tea. Matt lacks the necessary grip to spray it over the audience, so that honour falls to Matt VB. The audience seem fairly willing to indulge us as our glasses empty and our playing deteriorates, even though they are required to clap and wooo people they don't know and can't see during the "shout-outs to my crew" section. At least we don't present Matt with a bouquet of flowers and demand that he makes a speech like it's the last night of a school play. They are spared that.
Afterwards we share a collective sense of dismay, and then share some drinks with Grand Drive to thank them for their support (ho ho ho - they were the support band, see). Inevitably it is anticlimactic to end your 41 days and nights in the wilderness in a small arts theatre in Exeter (I don't know if you've ever been to www.auntieclimax.com. It's a blast). But endings are usually anticlimactic, aren't they?
This is the longest I've ever been away from home, the furthest I've ever travelled, and the most people I have ever played to. It's been excellent.
All that remains is for me to thank Roberto, Dom and Tony for their photos, and express my gratitude for the fine company, amusing exploits and inhuman tolerance of the band and crew. I only wish they had been slightly more entertaining, and then I wouldn't have been forced to talk so much shit. But, as Matt VB likes to say, "as my mum likes to say, "if you've got it, flaunt it"".