“The brakes are jammed!” exclaimed the driver as we tried to pull out of the driveway. This was not a good start to the day. It was 6:30 am and the guy I’d hired to drive us to Heathrow was having a crisis of confidence in operating my parents’ van. I had visions of us tentatively jolting our way round the M25, only getting to Heathrow in time to miss our flight. He got the hang of it eventually though, it just required a certain lightness of touch, and after picking up Tom and Alex we were on our way.
The flight was pleasant enough although as It was a day flight certain efforts had to be taken to curtail the onset of boredom. I’d picked up a free copy of the outrageously pompous Guitar Aficionado magazine at Heathrow. Jimmy Page was on the cover but it turned out that the article inside was mainly just about the clothes he was wearing in the shoot and how effortlessly stylish he is. The rest of the magazine was sort of like guitar porn. In flight movies were thin on the ground and low on quality but a Jim Carey comedy did have a scene or two filmed at LA’s Spaceland venue; our final show of the tour. I took that as a good omen.
Several hours later we touched down at Raleigh Durham International Airport, North Carolina where Eamon was waiting for us after taking an earlier flight down from New York. It was warm and there was still a scent of summer in the air. The plan was to meet up with the Fat-Cat bus the next day at Local 506 in Chapel Hill, but until then we had a night off in a hotel to enjoy. After a few drinks in the hotel bar we went to a barbecue restaurant and ordered copious amounts of alcohol and meat. Jet-lag ensued and back at the hotel my waking day was done.
The next day started about 6 hours later with a jolt. 3:30 am and I was wide awake. Attempts to get back to sleep were futile so I read the paper and watched TV until the sun came up. After a shower and a few cups of coffee we checked out and made our way to the venue. Unfortunately we arrived there about an hour before the bus did so we had to wait in the baking sun with all our luggage and instruments piled up on the pavement. This attracted a fair bit of attention from local passers by. The usual ”are you guys a band?” leading to “are you British?” and so on. But judging from our conversations Chapel Hill seemed like a nice little town.
The bus pulled up a little later and we made ourselves acquainted with our new touring companions. The Twilight Sad and We Were Promised Jetpacks had both spent the last couple of weeks supporting Frightened Rabbit at shows on the west coast and in the south. Frightened Rabbit had now gone home and we were joining the tour to take the middle billing with The Twilight Sad (who I’ll now refer to as Sados) headlining from now on. There were a lot of names to learn, Sados and Jetpacks had nine between them and then there was the tour manager Esteban, sound engineer Steven and driver Terry. We picked our bunks and got familiar with our new home for the next 10 days. I picked a top bunk, pretty much because I thought it’d be easier for me to get in to because of my height. I'd later regret this choice though. It was particularly difficult to get up there when drunk and rocking from side to side. Lying there I realised how tired I was, but I was also hungry and seeing as we had time to kill we went and got some lunch.
The show that night was almost a blow out. It didn’t take long for our sound engineer Steven to realise that the sound system was in a serious state of disrepair. “It worked fine last night”, said the thoroughly rude in house engineer who was more interested in throwing his (considerable) weight around and maintaining some sense of authority than actually being helpful. Sados were getting impatient while people fiddled around trying to make things work, and understandably so. It seemed remarkable that a venue that hosts bands from all over the world on a regular basis can’t keep their PA to a working order. Eventually stuff started to work and Sados wearily got on with their sound check. Such progress was short lived however as half way through a song the drum monitor squealed violently forcing drummer Mark Divine to storm off the stage and out of the venue in disgust. The rest of them weren't far behind either.
Things seemed to smooth over a little eventually but our sound check wasn’t much better; the problems that had been supposedly rectified earlier on soon re-emerged but to be honest we were so jet-lagged that just getting through the show was going to be a result. Jetpacks took to the stage and started their set but everything was oddly quiet and the vocals weren’t coming through at all. Looking round I noticed that instead of being behind the desk with the master faders up, the fat sound man was at the bar eating a pizza, blissfully unaware that the first act had gone on. What a prick!
Our time to take the stage eventually came and I didn't exactly have my gig head on. I'd been abstaining from the alcohol throughout the afternoon in order to combat the lag. This wasn't a notion shared by my fellow bandmates however, who all seemed totally rat arsed, especially Eamon who, as we took the stage, was trying to convince our new sound guy Steven to do a shot of Jaegermeister with him. I'd only met Steven several hours ago but I was pretty sure that, as testament to his obvious professionalism, he was not the drinking type. The set got going, it sounded strange, it felt strange. Mistakes were made and confused glances darted across the stage. At one point Eamon must have decided that the audience were due an explanation as to why we were so loose. "We're all jet-lagged" he said. This was hilarious of course because while Alex, Tom and myself were indeed jet-lagged, Eamon was just plain drunk and was trying to get away with somehow tagging along with the excuse that the rest of us had. At this point I decided to spend the next two songs stood behind my bass amp, not because I was trying to escape the shambolic debacle of our gig but more because i couldn't hear the drums and it sounded better from behind my bass amp. This got me back in the mood and the rest of the show was enjoyable.
The Twilight Sad were up next and I was looking forward to seeing them properly having only caught a fraction of their show at the Fat-Cat night in Brighton earlier in the year. But it seemed their luck was going from bad to worse. Halfway through the second song the drum monitor went again then the entire PA went down. Mark Divine stormed out of the building again and all was looking bleak. Several discussions took place between the venue owner, sound guy, our tour manager Esteban and singer James. From the little I heard it just seemed that the sound guy was still stirring shit, calling people unprofessional and generally being defensive. Amazingly the crowd stuck around and their patience was rewarded when about 20 minutes later the PA was re-set and the band went back on stage to finish where they had left off.
Afterwards we stood about drinking, chatting and generally getting to know each other better. It was a surreal start to the tour. We'd only met all these people properly a few hours ago and we'd already seen them go through some testing times. Load out took about 5 minutes, one advantage of having 15 men on a bus, then we sat on the bus drinking, eating Pizza and trying to forget about the awful gig we had all just had before the bus set off for the journey northwards. At about 3am I realised I had been awake for 24 hours and thought it best to ascend into the lofty confines of my bunk.
The flight was pleasant enough although as It was a day flight certain efforts had to be taken to curtail the onset of boredom. I’d picked up a free copy of the outrageously pompous Guitar Aficionado magazine at Heathrow. Jimmy Page was on the cover but it turned out that the article inside was mainly just about the clothes he was wearing in the shoot and how effortlessly stylish he is. The rest of the magazine was sort of like guitar porn. In flight movies were thin on the ground and low on quality but a Jim Carey comedy did have a scene or two filmed at LA’s Spaceland venue; our final show of the tour. I took that as a good omen.
Several hours later we touched down at Raleigh Durham International Airport, North Carolina where Eamon was waiting for us after taking an earlier flight down from New York. It was warm and there was still a scent of summer in the air. The plan was to meet up with the Fat-Cat bus the next day at Local 506 in Chapel Hill, but until then we had a night off in a hotel to enjoy. After a few drinks in the hotel bar we went to a barbecue restaurant and ordered copious amounts of alcohol and meat. Jet-lag ensued and back at the hotel my waking day was done.
The next day started about 6 hours later with a jolt. 3:30 am and I was wide awake. Attempts to get back to sleep were futile so I read the paper and watched TV until the sun came up. After a shower and a few cups of coffee we checked out and made our way to the venue. Unfortunately we arrived there about an hour before the bus did so we had to wait in the baking sun with all our luggage and instruments piled up on the pavement. This attracted a fair bit of attention from local passers by. The usual ”are you guys a band?” leading to “are you British?” and so on. But judging from our conversations Chapel Hill seemed like a nice little town.
The bus pulled up a little later and we made ourselves acquainted with our new touring companions. The Twilight Sad and We Were Promised Jetpacks had both spent the last couple of weeks supporting Frightened Rabbit at shows on the west coast and in the south. Frightened Rabbit had now gone home and we were joining the tour to take the middle billing with The Twilight Sad (who I’ll now refer to as Sados) headlining from now on. There were a lot of names to learn, Sados and Jetpacks had nine between them and then there was the tour manager Esteban, sound engineer Steven and driver Terry. We picked our bunks and got familiar with our new home for the next 10 days. I picked a top bunk, pretty much because I thought it’d be easier for me to get in to because of my height. I'd later regret this choice though. It was particularly difficult to get up there when drunk and rocking from side to side. Lying there I realised how tired I was, but I was also hungry and seeing as we had time to kill we went and got some lunch.
The show that night was almost a blow out. It didn’t take long for our sound engineer Steven to realise that the sound system was in a serious state of disrepair. “It worked fine last night”, said the thoroughly rude in house engineer who was more interested in throwing his (considerable) weight around and maintaining some sense of authority than actually being helpful. Sados were getting impatient while people fiddled around trying to make things work, and understandably so. It seemed remarkable that a venue that hosts bands from all over the world on a regular basis can’t keep their PA to a working order. Eventually stuff started to work and Sados wearily got on with their sound check. Such progress was short lived however as half way through a song the drum monitor squealed violently forcing drummer Mark Divine to storm off the stage and out of the venue in disgust. The rest of them weren't far behind either.
Things seemed to smooth over a little eventually but our sound check wasn’t much better; the problems that had been supposedly rectified earlier on soon re-emerged but to be honest we were so jet-lagged that just getting through the show was going to be a result. Jetpacks took to the stage and started their set but everything was oddly quiet and the vocals weren’t coming through at all. Looking round I noticed that instead of being behind the desk with the master faders up, the fat sound man was at the bar eating a pizza, blissfully unaware that the first act had gone on. What a prick!
Our time to take the stage eventually came and I didn't exactly have my gig head on. I'd been abstaining from the alcohol throughout the afternoon in order to combat the lag. This wasn't a notion shared by my fellow bandmates however, who all seemed totally rat arsed, especially Eamon who, as we took the stage, was trying to convince our new sound guy Steven to do a shot of Jaegermeister with him. I'd only met Steven several hours ago but I was pretty sure that, as testament to his obvious professionalism, he was not the drinking type. The set got going, it sounded strange, it felt strange. Mistakes were made and confused glances darted across the stage. At one point Eamon must have decided that the audience were due an explanation as to why we were so loose. "We're all jet-lagged" he said. This was hilarious of course because while Alex, Tom and myself were indeed jet-lagged, Eamon was just plain drunk and was trying to get away with somehow tagging along with the excuse that the rest of us had. At this point I decided to spend the next two songs stood behind my bass amp, not because I was trying to escape the shambolic debacle of our gig but more because i couldn't hear the drums and it sounded better from behind my bass amp. This got me back in the mood and the rest of the show was enjoyable.
The Twilight Sad were up next and I was looking forward to seeing them properly having only caught a fraction of their show at the Fat-Cat night in Brighton earlier in the year. But it seemed their luck was going from bad to worse. Halfway through the second song the drum monitor went again then the entire PA went down. Mark Divine stormed out of the building again and all was looking bleak. Several discussions took place between the venue owner, sound guy, our tour manager Esteban and singer James. From the little I heard it just seemed that the sound guy was still stirring shit, calling people unprofessional and generally being defensive. Amazingly the crowd stuck around and their patience was rewarded when about 20 minutes later the PA was re-set and the band went back on stage to finish where they had left off.
Afterwards we stood about drinking, chatting and generally getting to know each other better. It was a surreal start to the tour. We'd only met all these people properly a few hours ago and we'd already seen them go through some testing times. Load out took about 5 minutes, one advantage of having 15 men on a bus, then we sat on the bus drinking, eating Pizza and trying to forget about the awful gig we had all just had before the bus set off for the journey northwards. At about 3am I realised I had been awake for 24 hours and thought it best to ascend into the lofty confines of my bunk.
