Tuesday, 28 April 2009
TOTAL THRASH
we will be mini-touring very soon. we don't usually get to go to lots of these places... well, we've never played Glasgow or Newcastle before, so please come along and see.
Tuesday, 21 April 2009
France/Germany tour - word diary
Ok, before we even left the country we had to major panics… 1) not being able to work out how to get into the van properly, and the 2) not being able to work out how to lock it. We would do stupid stuff like this for the rest of the tour. I’m surprised no one got a custard pie thrown into their face or got hit over the head with a plank of wood. But nevermind…
PARIS
It’s and early start for the first day of tour and the first dates outside of the UK we’ve played as a full band. Lonely Ghosts played in Berlin around 2 years ago as a solo show and a lot has changed since then so we are excited about getting away for a while and showing people what we can do. After worrying traffic we manage to make our ferry. Seafrance ferrys are amazingly depressing! We sit in the bar which has been frozen in time for decades and listen to music that has probably been playing there for far too long (Joe Jackson : good – Dexy’s Midnight Runners : annoying… seriously, I got them stuck in my head for hours). We see an old man throw up over himself… great, now the bar smells of sick.
We hit the road and drive on the correct side and make it to Paris in good time. All is going well until we end up being trapped in an underground car park for ages with no escape. Jim looks for an exit and I’m very worried he will be eaten by a very large guard dog at the entrance to some taxi and bus depot. Instead of letting us leave through the depot exit we are pretty much told to drive very fast down a one way road the wrong way to get out. Luckily we made it out without doing anyone any damage… it could easily have been a very short tour. This whole debacle removes Dexy’s Midnight Runners from my head though.
We make it to Fleche Dor but miss sound check, so try to find our hotel and get terribly lost… again. Tension becomes high but it’s nothing that a good meal in one of the best venues we’ve been to can’t solve (seriously this venue is great). We also discover whisky, which discover holds some magic power over us and will become fuel for the next week. Our line check is better than most soundchecks and everything sounds sweet and we all come off stage smiling.
We meet some nice people after the show, including David from Dad Records who used to release Help She Can’t Swim in France and Nikki who used to be in Kaito, old gigging partners of HSCS, now in Factory Floor, and it’s good to catch up with them both. We end up in the hotel somehow and spend an hour shaking our heads very fast and taking pictures. Yeah… rock ‘n’ roll. Great first day.
KARLSRUH
France loves toll roads. We don’t. There are so many it’s maddening and while trying to get from Paris to Karlsruh in Germany we hit a lot of them. This is a long drive and that’s about it for a very long time. After hours we end up in Germany and don’t really notice. I was hoping for a massive sign saying ‘YOU ARE NOW LEAVING FRANCE. WELCOME TO GERMANY’, but no such luck.
We are glad to get to Karlsruh and get out of the van. The area around the venue seems littered with posters with my face on and it’s a bit disconcerting. We meet Tomi who is putting tonight’s show and let’s us into the venue, Kohi. The venue is really nice, small and lofi. Also, we are told to help ourselves to drinks from the bar. We look at each other as to day ‘are they serious’ and then realise they are. Instantly this is better than the UK. Tomi feeds us an amazing dinner and we become hooked on schnitzel. Before us is Radio Burroughs who are ace, and very nice folk to boot, and their set gets us in the mood for playing… that and sitting in the van drinking whisky, if anyone saw us I’m sure it was a sad sight.
The show is really fun, if slightly shambolic. The drum kit keeps on sliding away from Jim but we hold all the songs together, it’s only between songs that it all falls apart and we turn into giggling kids. But this all makes it fun. We come off stage feeling thoroughly happy and spend the night hanging around, chatting to people and drinking lots of Wolfe beer. It’s good!
DRESDEN
By some freak on nature we wake up early and without hangovers. None of us can work out why. We have a long way to get to Dresden so try to head out early, but not before being told about the message of Jesus by two American Christian first-aid workers, being shouted at by a German man out of a window (I don’t think he liked the look of us and is a good judge), and realised that where we parked the van is the meeting place for all the local alcoholics and there are a lot of them.
The journey is a 6 hour slog down the autobahn through rain, sleet and snow. It sucks. The worst part was nearly choking on a service station schnitzel while driving… either the foods gonna kill me or the road is... but it all came out ok. We get to Dresden in one piece and then I fuck it all up by parking the van badly and somehow causing a women to get her car stuck in a hole. We then spend 15 minutes trying to get her car out of the hole. Shit. When we get her out she then goes and parks it back in the hole again, but we can’t help any more.
After that distraction we finally get into the venue, OST-POL. This one is also, very, very nice and again we have free reign on the bar. This tour will be bad for our health.
I start to think that whiskey for me is like spinach is to Popey, after a few glasses I go from super-sleepy-oh-no-we-have-to-play-a-gig to come-on-guys-let’s-play-bouncing-off-the wall. The crowd in Dresden is very nice to us and we love them for it. We do an encore and everything. Haha.
There is talk of going to a club that will play pop punk after the show, which sounds great to us, but when we try and quickly go back to the place we are staying for the night we get chronically lost and find it takes us way too long and the club ends up being the night that got away. Boo.
BERLIN – DAY 1
We are all very excited about our two days in Berlin and hit the road after a bit of aimless walking around Dresden (which seemed very nice although we had no idea where to go). Our first call when we get in to Berlin is to go and meet Julianne from Poplars and Rockks who helped book a lot of the shows on this tour. We meet her at her friend Stefan’s flat, who has very kindly agreed to put us up while we are in Berlin. We all hang out and get to know each other, we also stop by The Michelle’s rehearsal space. The Michelles are the German/Welsh/US/Ausie pop-mongers who will be supporting us on the last 3 days of the tour. They are all super nice guys and also have the most amazing rehearsal/recording studio in an abandoned building which makes us thoroughly jealous that we have to cough up over 30 quid every time we want to rehearse back home. We then spend a lot of time getting into trouble with the van; namely trying to drive into areas that won’t fit the van. One of these instances is when we nearly dismantle a massive tarpaulin cover outside of the venue we are playing at tonight, after we show up really late. They aren’t very happy with us so we sound check very late and spend about and hour trying to untangle our van from this tarpaulin, while trying to be as quiet as we can so as not to disturb the one man play going on next door (we hear a lot of shouting in German). The mood is pretty highly strung for a while, but after stupidly cheap pizza and drinks our moods begin to lighten. They get so light that we seem to play a very quick show that seems over all too soon, but is still fun, with some random German heckling thrown in for good measure. Some of us go hit some bars. On the walk home me and Luke talk about how amazing everything is here… we fear going back home.
BERLIN – DAY 2
We decide to go hit the town and look around Berlin as not all of us have been here before. Unfortunately the re-occurring theme of us trying to look around a new city and having no idea where to go or what to do is in full effect. We eat a very greasy meal in Alexanderplatz which totally kills our schnitzel addiction. The best thing we find is the spot where loads of youth sub-cultures hang out and do youth sub-culture things. We see German emo kids doing nothing, sort of nu-rave kids doing some breakdancing and group off people doing that jumping dance from the Scooter video… that’s the best!
Tonight we play at Magent. This is where I played on my own last time around and also with Help She Can’t Swim so I have good memories here and the club night is usually busy. The sound guy here is the best… the only man to tell us to be louder. The club turns out to be the aftershow club for the Killers gig that happened tonight in Berlin. The place is rammed and the crowd are amazing, people dance, I meet people who were here a few years ago when I played solo, Theresa who has now been to 3 shows in a row(!) is singing in the front… we are stoked beyond measure. This is the best show we have ever had. Fact.
We form a gang and go partying and things get messy when we realise that we have been in there for over 9 hours. Random members of the Killers are spotted leaving the club in a cab with a hoard of blondes. Jim seems to steal a bike and climb a tree. It then turns out he hasn’t stolen the bike. We fall into a photo booth. Me and Luke lose Jim and Russell who we later find in a bakery laughing at cakes, much to the distress of the baker. We bump into Stefan who talks to us about body contact. He is smooth. I collapse on the bed and fall asleep and won’t wake up… everyone else does awful things to me while a sleep, but I think that I still maintained my dignity more than they did.
BREMEN
After the last night getting up is a hideous struggle and even though Bremen isn’t very far away we end up being super later to the venue, which is a boat! We realise you can’t put the address for a boat into a GPS so we end up driving along the river side trying to find it. It’s actually a really nice venue and the people there are very nice and give us a massive amount of food which pretty much saves us; we are still really knackered from the night before and struggle to stay awake for a while.
The show is super quiet. Bremen on a Sunday is obviously not a big show day, but us and the Michells play, and though it strange playing on an empty boat it is still good to play, instead of moaping around. We head to the promoter Pam’s house and crash out big time. The tour had been so good that there had to be a day that wouldn’t go that great… but even on this day everyone we met was super nice to us and we all go to sleep feeling good, if very tiered.
HAMBURG
It is the last day of the tour which is a sad thing. But we feel rested and Pam makes us an amazing breakfast and we start to feel like humans again. We have to leave early as Pam has to go to work so we decide to head strait to Hamburg. We blast out of Bremen while playing Bruce Springsteen very load with the windows down. We get funny looks off many old ladies. Hamburg is not far away and as soon as we get there we realise we have no idea what to do with the masses of time we have before load in. We spend hours driving/walking/sitting around with no sense of purpose or direction. We find a really crumby street that reminds us of London Road in Brighton, we find the district with all the sleaze but are too sleazed out by it to look, we find the nice part of town but by then just can’t be bothered with looking around… and there are still hours to go before loading in. We find the venue and sit outside in the van for ages until we discover that this is not the venue… it’s the old venue and they have moved to a new location a few miles away. Why we had the old address I do not know, but we all have a fit, especially when we find that the real venue seems to be in a really nice place. Argh!
Hafenklang is a really nice venue and we are again given amazing food. Sorry for mentioning food so much but as anyone who tours in the UK will know, it’s very rare to get given anything so this is amazing for us. We are all in a really good mood and determined to make the end date of tour a really good one. We worry about no one being there on a Monday but people show up and the crowd are really nice and the show is full of good vibes. We made it to the last show and scored 6 out of 7 for great shows. We chat to The Michelles and nice people Hamburg and hang out in the Hafenklang bar playing table tennis until we are told that we are too drunk/shit to play. We head out into town and wonder past a Burger King where many prostitutes try and talk to us, so we run away and find a nice bar to spend the night. Vibes are really good… there is talk of parachute jumping, falling out of bunk beds and Russ wins the tour.
The next day is sad as we have to say goodbye to The Michelles, Germany and tour as we drive across several countries to get back home. While we wait for our ferry eating tinned hotdogs in brine in the van and Luke attempts to eat a pot noodle with a pen we wonder where it has all gone so wrong so quickly!
Thanks to everyone who was a part of the tour. We are all really grateful and hope to come back soon.
x
PARIS
It’s and early start for the first day of tour and the first dates outside of the UK we’ve played as a full band. Lonely Ghosts played in Berlin around 2 years ago as a solo show and a lot has changed since then so we are excited about getting away for a while and showing people what we can do. After worrying traffic we manage to make our ferry. Seafrance ferrys are amazingly depressing! We sit in the bar which has been frozen in time for decades and listen to music that has probably been playing there for far too long (Joe Jackson : good – Dexy’s Midnight Runners : annoying… seriously, I got them stuck in my head for hours). We see an old man throw up over himself… great, now the bar smells of sick.
We hit the road and drive on the correct side and make it to Paris in good time. All is going well until we end up being trapped in an underground car park for ages with no escape. Jim looks for an exit and I’m very worried he will be eaten by a very large guard dog at the entrance to some taxi and bus depot. Instead of letting us leave through the depot exit we are pretty much told to drive very fast down a one way road the wrong way to get out. Luckily we made it out without doing anyone any damage… it could easily have been a very short tour. This whole debacle removes Dexy’s Midnight Runners from my head though.
We make it to Fleche Dor but miss sound check, so try to find our hotel and get terribly lost… again. Tension becomes high but it’s nothing that a good meal in one of the best venues we’ve been to can’t solve (seriously this venue is great). We also discover whisky, which discover holds some magic power over us and will become fuel for the next week. Our line check is better than most soundchecks and everything sounds sweet and we all come off stage smiling.
We meet some nice people after the show, including David from Dad Records who used to release Help She Can’t Swim in France and Nikki who used to be in Kaito, old gigging partners of HSCS, now in Factory Floor, and it’s good to catch up with them both. We end up in the hotel somehow and spend an hour shaking our heads very fast and taking pictures. Yeah… rock ‘n’ roll. Great first day.
KARLSRUH
France loves toll roads. We don’t. There are so many it’s maddening and while trying to get from Paris to Karlsruh in Germany we hit a lot of them. This is a long drive and that’s about it for a very long time. After hours we end up in Germany and don’t really notice. I was hoping for a massive sign saying ‘YOU ARE NOW LEAVING FRANCE. WELCOME TO GERMANY’, but no such luck.
We are glad to get to Karlsruh and get out of the van. The area around the venue seems littered with posters with my face on and it’s a bit disconcerting. We meet Tomi who is putting tonight’s show and let’s us into the venue, Kohi. The venue is really nice, small and lofi. Also, we are told to help ourselves to drinks from the bar. We look at each other as to day ‘are they serious’ and then realise they are. Instantly this is better than the UK. Tomi feeds us an amazing dinner and we become hooked on schnitzel. Before us is Radio Burroughs who are ace, and very nice folk to boot, and their set gets us in the mood for playing… that and sitting in the van drinking whisky, if anyone saw us I’m sure it was a sad sight.
The show is really fun, if slightly shambolic. The drum kit keeps on sliding away from Jim but we hold all the songs together, it’s only between songs that it all falls apart and we turn into giggling kids. But this all makes it fun. We come off stage feeling thoroughly happy and spend the night hanging around, chatting to people and drinking lots of Wolfe beer. It’s good!
DRESDEN
By some freak on nature we wake up early and without hangovers. None of us can work out why. We have a long way to get to Dresden so try to head out early, but not before being told about the message of Jesus by two American Christian first-aid workers, being shouted at by a German man out of a window (I don’t think he liked the look of us and is a good judge), and realised that where we parked the van is the meeting place for all the local alcoholics and there are a lot of them.
The journey is a 6 hour slog down the autobahn through rain, sleet and snow. It sucks. The worst part was nearly choking on a service station schnitzel while driving… either the foods gonna kill me or the road is... but it all came out ok. We get to Dresden in one piece and then I fuck it all up by parking the van badly and somehow causing a women to get her car stuck in a hole. We then spend 15 minutes trying to get her car out of the hole. Shit. When we get her out she then goes and parks it back in the hole again, but we can’t help any more.
After that distraction we finally get into the venue, OST-POL. This one is also, very, very nice and again we have free reign on the bar. This tour will be bad for our health.
I start to think that whiskey for me is like spinach is to Popey, after a few glasses I go from super-sleepy-oh-no-we-have-to-play-a-gig to come-on-guys-let’s-play-bouncing-off-the wall. The crowd in Dresden is very nice to us and we love them for it. We do an encore and everything. Haha.
There is talk of going to a club that will play pop punk after the show, which sounds great to us, but when we try and quickly go back to the place we are staying for the night we get chronically lost and find it takes us way too long and the club ends up being the night that got away. Boo.
BERLIN – DAY 1
We are all very excited about our two days in Berlin and hit the road after a bit of aimless walking around Dresden (which seemed very nice although we had no idea where to go). Our first call when we get in to Berlin is to go and meet Julianne from Poplars and Rockks who helped book a lot of the shows on this tour. We meet her at her friend Stefan’s flat, who has very kindly agreed to put us up while we are in Berlin. We all hang out and get to know each other, we also stop by The Michelle’s rehearsal space. The Michelles are the German/Welsh/US/Ausie pop-mongers who will be supporting us on the last 3 days of the tour. They are all super nice guys and also have the most amazing rehearsal/recording studio in an abandoned building which makes us thoroughly jealous that we have to cough up over 30 quid every time we want to rehearse back home. We then spend a lot of time getting into trouble with the van; namely trying to drive into areas that won’t fit the van. One of these instances is when we nearly dismantle a massive tarpaulin cover outside of the venue we are playing at tonight, after we show up really late. They aren’t very happy with us so we sound check very late and spend about and hour trying to untangle our van from this tarpaulin, while trying to be as quiet as we can so as not to disturb the one man play going on next door (we hear a lot of shouting in German). The mood is pretty highly strung for a while, but after stupidly cheap pizza and drinks our moods begin to lighten. They get so light that we seem to play a very quick show that seems over all too soon, but is still fun, with some random German heckling thrown in for good measure. Some of us go hit some bars. On the walk home me and Luke talk about how amazing everything is here… we fear going back home.
BERLIN – DAY 2
We decide to go hit the town and look around Berlin as not all of us have been here before. Unfortunately the re-occurring theme of us trying to look around a new city and having no idea where to go or what to do is in full effect. We eat a very greasy meal in Alexanderplatz which totally kills our schnitzel addiction. The best thing we find is the spot where loads of youth sub-cultures hang out and do youth sub-culture things. We see German emo kids doing nothing, sort of nu-rave kids doing some breakdancing and group off people doing that jumping dance from the Scooter video… that’s the best!
Tonight we play at Magent. This is where I played on my own last time around and also with Help She Can’t Swim so I have good memories here and the club night is usually busy. The sound guy here is the best… the only man to tell us to be louder. The club turns out to be the aftershow club for the Killers gig that happened tonight in Berlin. The place is rammed and the crowd are amazing, people dance, I meet people who were here a few years ago when I played solo, Theresa who has now been to 3 shows in a row(!) is singing in the front… we are stoked beyond measure. This is the best show we have ever had. Fact.
We form a gang and go partying and things get messy when we realise that we have been in there for over 9 hours. Random members of the Killers are spotted leaving the club in a cab with a hoard of blondes. Jim seems to steal a bike and climb a tree. It then turns out he hasn’t stolen the bike. We fall into a photo booth. Me and Luke lose Jim and Russell who we later find in a bakery laughing at cakes, much to the distress of the baker. We bump into Stefan who talks to us about body contact. He is smooth. I collapse on the bed and fall asleep and won’t wake up… everyone else does awful things to me while a sleep, but I think that I still maintained my dignity more than they did.
BREMEN
After the last night getting up is a hideous struggle and even though Bremen isn’t very far away we end up being super later to the venue, which is a boat! We realise you can’t put the address for a boat into a GPS so we end up driving along the river side trying to find it. It’s actually a really nice venue and the people there are very nice and give us a massive amount of food which pretty much saves us; we are still really knackered from the night before and struggle to stay awake for a while.
The show is super quiet. Bremen on a Sunday is obviously not a big show day, but us and the Michells play, and though it strange playing on an empty boat it is still good to play, instead of moaping around. We head to the promoter Pam’s house and crash out big time. The tour had been so good that there had to be a day that wouldn’t go that great… but even on this day everyone we met was super nice to us and we all go to sleep feeling good, if very tiered.
HAMBURG
It is the last day of the tour which is a sad thing. But we feel rested and Pam makes us an amazing breakfast and we start to feel like humans again. We have to leave early as Pam has to go to work so we decide to head strait to Hamburg. We blast out of Bremen while playing Bruce Springsteen very load with the windows down. We get funny looks off many old ladies. Hamburg is not far away and as soon as we get there we realise we have no idea what to do with the masses of time we have before load in. We spend hours driving/walking/sitting around with no sense of purpose or direction. We find a really crumby street that reminds us of London Road in Brighton, we find the district with all the sleaze but are too sleazed out by it to look, we find the nice part of town but by then just can’t be bothered with looking around… and there are still hours to go before loading in. We find the venue and sit outside in the van for ages until we discover that this is not the venue… it’s the old venue and they have moved to a new location a few miles away. Why we had the old address I do not know, but we all have a fit, especially when we find that the real venue seems to be in a really nice place. Argh!
Hafenklang is a really nice venue and we are again given amazing food. Sorry for mentioning food so much but as anyone who tours in the UK will know, it’s very rare to get given anything so this is amazing for us. We are all in a really good mood and determined to make the end date of tour a really good one. We worry about no one being there on a Monday but people show up and the crowd are really nice and the show is full of good vibes. We made it to the last show and scored 6 out of 7 for great shows. We chat to The Michelles and nice people Hamburg and hang out in the Hafenklang bar playing table tennis until we are told that we are too drunk/shit to play. We head out into town and wonder past a Burger King where many prostitutes try and talk to us, so we run away and find a nice bar to spend the night. Vibes are really good… there is talk of parachute jumping, falling out of bunk beds and Russ wins the tour.
The next day is sad as we have to say goodbye to The Michelles, Germany and tour as we drive across several countries to get back home. While we wait for our ferry eating tinned hotdogs in brine in the van and Luke attempts to eat a pot noodle with a pen we wonder where it has all gone so wrong so quickly!
Thanks to everyone who was a part of the tour. We are all really grateful and hope to come back soon.
x
Monday, 20 April 2009
France/Germany tour - photo diary
russ wobble face pt. 1
the moment we realised we had crossed into germany
getting comfy
product placement
YEAH!
ice road truckin'
our ride
where the hell are we?
boys in dresden
MEAT!
MEEEEAT!!!!
would you buy a sandwich from this kid?
russ wobble face pt. 2
do the scooter dance!!
Magnet
russ wobble face pt. 3
The Michelles
PARTY!
the morning after
heading home
hotdogs on the way home... sad
part 1...
hey people, this is a new blog 'cause i need more things to do instead of doing something else... expect things to be written about here.
We are playing a show in London tomorrow. please come down...
I also put together this blogcast for Smalltown America Records. Check it out, there is good music on it. Go here:
http://www.smalltownamerica.co.uk/news.php/258/Public+Service+Blogcast+Episode+33
current reading:
Maus
recent reading:
Jimmy Corrigan the Smartest Kid on Earth
amazing artwork!
recent/current listening:
High Places - High Places
Deerhunter - Microcastle
Handsome Furs - Face Control
recent watching:
Terminator 2: Judgement Day on the TV (hello childhood flashbacks!)
We are playing a show in London tomorrow. please come down...
I also put together this blogcast for Smalltown America Records. Check it out, there is good music on it. Go here:
http://www.smalltownamerica.co.uk/news.php/258/Public+Service+Blogcast+Episode+33
current reading:
Maus
recent reading:
Jimmy Corrigan the Smartest Kid on Earth
amazing artwork!
recent/current listening:
High Places - High Places
Deerhunter - Microcastle
Handsome Furs - Face Control
recent watching:
Terminator 2: Judgement Day on the TV (hello childhood flashbacks!)
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