The Great Ship Sail Debate of 2012.

I think I shot my proverbial literary load with my last post which basically told you everything you would ever need to know if you found yourself in the peninsula of San Francisco. Honestly, read it - I think you’ll find it’s all contained in there. It’s like a free copy of the Lonely Planet without all the stuff about plants and birds that they try to fool you with as an ‘enjoyable’ activity to do whilst on holiday. Honestly, I know the guys that write those books, and they laugh in a really sinister way when they start writing the bits about the birds and the plants. Trust me. So, because I was so thorough it hasn’t left me with much to write about the actual show we played here. But because i’m so eager to please and I need the friends, i’ll endeavor to write about it so you will one day pronounce me as your king and bring me expensive gifts which I shall accept and then sell on for a profit via an online auction site.

After our time off in the city we reached show day and realised that we still hadn’t been up to the Golden Gate Bridge - if we didn’t do that then we’d be hunted down by the local authorities and forced to walk across it, or murdered if we refused to and hung off the edge of the bridge to warn other travellers to not be so callous. Rather than go through that whole rigmarole, none of us particularly wanted to end our lives being dangled off a big red bridge, we travelled up there before we had to load in and went to see what all the fuss was about. It was certainly red and impressive, I liked the Golden Gate Bridge. We were going to walk across it, but there was some debate about how long it would take. Barry thought it would take 15 minutes and Ross thought it would take 2 hours. This was quite the discrepancy. In the end we didn’t cross it and went to Chipotle instead. Chipotle is like crossing a bridge in a way - a really tasty bridge made of rice, beans and guacamole wrapped up in a tortilla. When you get to the other side of the Chipotle bridge you feel fulfilled and you didn’t need to spend that much money. The Golden Gate Bridge is free to walk across, but I don’t know if it would have tasted as good in the process. I realise that is very depressing that we went to a chain Mexican restaurant instead of crossing possibly the most famous bridge in the world.

There was some more debate after lunch when Barry and Ross couldn’t decide if one of the tall ships stationed at one of the piers had sails on it or not. Barry thought they’d been taken off, whilst Ross thought they were just really tightly bound around the mast. I was on the fence, a classic Kneale point of view. It started to get slightly heated so we decided we’d just walk down to the ship and settle this argument before someone got killed. But the pier was closing so we couldn’t get close enough to definitively know the answer! In one last attempt to solve this potentially hazardous conundrum I asked a man who looked like he worked on the pier wether the ship had all it’s sails or not. His answer was as follows - “Some of them are on there, some have been taken off”. This was possibly the worst end to a conundrum that i’ve ever been involved in. Ross and Barry both left feeling unsatisfied with the outcome, and I had come across like a fool in front of a seaman. We left for the venue feeling strangely defeated.

Luckily, the gig more than perked up our deflated egos. We were playing a club night called Pop Scene at a venue called Rickshaw Stop, which looked like it was in the heart of the Governmental and Arts section of the city. I could be completely wrong, but there were two art galleries really close to the venue, and a building that looked like the White House that seemed perfect for Government officials to hatch schemes within. Pop Scene is a pretty famous club night I think, apparently Elton John came to it once and bought everyone there a car. That didn’t actually happen, but Elton John is rich. The show was pretty good, with club night shows there are definitely going to be people who don’t want to listen to a live band, but I was surprised by how many people were engaged by our set. There was a massive projection screen behind us, perhaps they were looking at that. Wait a second, I should be bigging us up... Everyone there had come to see us and everyone left the club the second we finished playing. Highly embarrassing for the DJ.

We drove after the gig and bumped into Elton John at a truck stop. He offered to buy us all some snacks but we declined because we weren’t sure if we could trust him. He had on platform boots and a sequined suit jacket with nothing on underneath it. No underwear or trousers either.

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I left my mind in San Francisco.

Upon reaching San Francisco we discovered we actually had a full three days off before the show there. Well, we realised this before we got there obviously - we don’t plan tours on a day to day basis. If we booked shows to take place the same day we booked them then it would greatly effect people’s chances of knowing we were playing near them. That’s just common sense. This was technically the first proper time off we’d had since we left home in January, every other day off since then had been spent either travelling or in the studio writing our next batch of world beating jazz-synth songs. This was very exciting, three free days in a city famed for it’s love of homosexuals and bridges. Our hotel was right on Fisherman’s Wharf, so we were in a prime position for some hardcore tourist action. We quickly found out that Fisherman’s Wharf seemed to be like America’s version of Blackpool.

There was many souvenir t-shirt shops and the kind of crazy people that only appear where tourists are plentiful. I think the constant influx of holiday makers in the area, mixed with crack cocaine and the West Coast sun, had created a special kind of crazy person. Refined crazy. There was a man who hides behind a bush all day and jumps out at people. If you get a fright he asks for a dollar. There was another man playing violin, but instead of playing notes he was just scratching the bow across the strings and shouting noises. And there was a man who had painted himself fully gold who asked me where I got my hoody from. When I told him I bought it from a website he looked very confused. He must have been crazy from before the internet got popular. It depressed me, I’m always intrigued at how a persons life can twist to the point where they end up living on the streets painted gold. Then I realised that perhaps i’m only a couple of notches away from cutting two holes in my underwear, wearing them as a really bad superhero mask and chasing children along the street then asking their parents for money. For the record, I didn’t see that scenario actually happen. Although it is quite worrying that it was the first thing that came into my head. It’s just interesting what turns your life could take I guess. Count yourself lucky if you have a fully intact conscious mind.

But San Francisco definitely wasn’t just t-shirt shops and gold people - we did some things that weren’t depressing too. Here is my rundown, complete with insightful information directly from my brain:

• We went to Alcatraz on a boat and walked about what was once America’s most notorious prison. Now it seems to be a haven for seagulls. Walking around the cells and hearing about some of the escape attempts was really enjoyable, and made me definitely not want to go to jail. You have to shower with other men and those other men were quite possibly murderers. And if they’re capable of taking someone’s life, just imagine what they’d be willing to do to someone with the charisma and sculpted good looks of myself if we were both in a shower situation. It doesn’t bare thinking about.

• We got to see our first ever NBA game, the Golden State Warriors versus the Memphis Grizzlies at the Oracle Arena. I’ve been quite a big basketball fan for the last couple of years, but nothing prepared me for the assault on the senses that is American sports entertainment. It kind of feels like the team owners are worried that everyone will leave if they don’t fill every time-out or period break with things like men doing back flips off of trampolines to make a dunk or cheerleaders humping the ground to a hi-energy song. My favorite part of the entertainment was probably when they got two people from the crowd to spin round at centre court 10 times and then attempt to score a lay-up shot. I swear one of the guys got so dizzy that his legs may never work again. He just kept falling over until he got removed from the court. We all became die-hard Warriors fans that night, even though they did lose quite badly and a woman behind us started punching a man in the face after he tried to stop her son from choking by patting him on the back because she was too busy talking to her friend to notice. She was quite possibly the worst human being i’ve ever been in contact with. NBA 4 LIFE.

• My friend Chris and his wife Mara flew up to from Los Angeles to show me an authentic version of San Francisco. He went to University here after he abandoned Glasgow like a cowardly ship captain. We walked around the financial district and decided that everyone in a suit ends up looking the same. We took pretty much every single form of transport San Francisco has to offer and managed to spend only $2 in the process. We tried to go to a famous ice cream shop but it had burned down in a fire so we watched some dogs in a nearby park instead and decided that all dogs are brilliant. We went for food that night at a place called ‘Chow’ and I decided that I might open a restaurant in Glasgow called ‘Chow by Craig’ and just rip off the menu. We even went to Walgreens to buy a water, for a real authentic American experience.

• And Chris showed me some touristy shit too, it would have been illegal not too. We rode the cable car and marveled at how it would probably be faster to walk. We went to see the sea lions at Pier 39 and wondered why they choose to stay there when the sea itself looked much more interesting (my theory is that they’re being blackmailed by a high up government figure who has some dirt on some bad deeds one of the top brass sea lions got upto after a night on the tequila - all i’ll say is that it involves a nymphomaniac dolphin and a lot of cocaine).... But best of all we went to a place called the Museé Mechanique, or Mechanical Museum for people who aren’t French or pretentious. It was right on one of the piers and was basically a warehouse filled with hundreds of old arcade machines from across the decades, going right back to the turn of the 20th century. It’s amazing how some of the games from around a hundred years ago are still as enjoyable to this day, completely without the need for state of the art graphics or sound. That said, some haven’t aged well at all - one of the machines I put 25 cents into featured a puppet who just spun a music box for 30 seconds while playing a very basic tune. Another one featured a little man pretending to saw a piece of wood. That’s it. If this still counted as entertainment these days then I think a lot more people would turn to crime.

There you have it, consider that my definitive run down of what to do in San Francisco. Follow it closely and I promise that you’ll leave feeling that slightest bit closer to me. And that is every man and woman on this harsh planet’s dream, is it not?

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Bad accents and man of the match scenery.

After Bend we had another long day of travel to San Francisco. It dragged but I did finish Less Than Zero by Brett Easton Ellis and came to the conclusion that American Psycho is pretty much the same book as Less Than Zero with the immorality amped up a couple of hundred notches. And they switch Los Angeles for New York. I enjoyed reading it anyway. I also watched a movie called Fracture which stars Ryan Gosling and Anthony Hopkins. Ryan Gosling is a Californian lawyer with a weird Southern accent and Anthony Hopkins is a successful Structural Aviation Engineer who has lots of money and a dodgy Irish accent. He kills his wife in the first scene and then Ryan Gosling (whose character name is Willie. Honestly) is assigned to prosecute him. I won’t give anything else away, but it was pretty good. Apart from the accents. It still confuses me when it’s written for an actor to put an accent on when it’s not particularly necessary? Ryan Gosling’s Southern accent had no bearing on the story, and it also wasn’t touched upon why Anthony Hopkins was talking like he’d been working in a field In Ireland picking potatoes for 50 years, when he was clearly a very successful engineer. He even had his own aviation company. Watch it anyway, i’d give it three and a half Craig Stars out of five. A formidable score.

Couldn’t fault the scenery on the journey at all though. If it was a footballer i’d say it played about a 9.5 for the 90 minutes. Except the 90 minutes was stretched out for 10 hours. Which is even more impressive if you think about it. Go on, think about it. I’ve got time to wait. Thought about it? Do you agree with me? Good, I thought you would.

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Bend over.

One of the most confusing aspects of touring in the United States of Ammmmmmmmmerica, especially on the West Coast, is how much the climate changes when you travel across it. In the last week we went from full February sunshine in California to the cold and wet surroundings of Washington. Washington actually appears to have the exact same weather as Scotland, it’s like our climate twin - and they all like flannel in Seattle (stereotype), which quite often looks like tartan? I have a theory that Washington and Scotland used to be the one place, until the two most powerful people of the land (Mr. Walt Shington and Mr. Scott Land) had a big fall out and Scott moved him and all his friends to a much smaller piece of land on a much smaller island across the Atlantic ocean. But he took all the tartan kilts with him, leaving Walt with only the flannel shirts. But, in an unexplainable event - the weather also joined Scott and his friends in this new land (he’d later call it Scotland, after himself obviously). In my head this sounds like it could have happened. Even though history shows that it definitely didn’t. But what does history know? It’s just a load of old people wearing robes using words that aren’t relevant anymore.

Enough of my narrow minded views on factual history, we’d now travelled from Washington to Oregon and the weather had changed once again. On the drive from Eugene to Bend (yes, that is the name of a real place) we hit perhaps the most snow i’ve ever seen. I’ve heard people talking about 6 feet of snow falling before but I thought it was just a figure of speech - like when people say that smoking causes cancer. But, sure enough, on this drive the snow was piled up on the side of the road and was taller than most men. Apart from basketball players, they would have been taller than this snow. Did you know that all snow fall throughout the world is measured using the ‘Shaq Scale’, a device that can accurately measure how many inches of snow have fallen in one place? Whenever snow falls in any place, the local meteorology office sends someone out with a life size cut out of Shaquille O’Neal to place in the snow to figure out just how much of the white stuff has fallen. If it reaches the top of his socks it’s one foot of snow, if it reaches his knees it’s two feet, if it reaches the top of his shorts - four feet. And so on. There has never been a snow fall taller than Shaquille O’Neal. I’d say this particular snow fall we were driving through would have reached Shaq’s nipples. This would have made Shaq very cold, but it did make the scenery breathtaking. It almost looked like it could have been a painting. Perhaps it was a painting? We were going too fast to find out. If it was a painting it would have to have been a very big one. It probably wasn’t a painting.

We arrived in Bend and headed to a radio station called 92/9FM for a live session. We had planned to make this a full band acoustic affair but little by little we kept pulling things back until I was playing only an egg shaker. And then that was taken off of me. Sam ended up playing two songs on his own, and then Barry played cello on one other track. Unfortunately Sam and Barry played two completely different versions of the same song so it ended up sounding like a sort of deranged jazz version. It ended with Barry going into a lead cello part, then realising Sam was playing another version, and stopping. I’d like to say we got away with it, but we definitely didn’t. There was a really suave looking guy who worked at the radio station who looked like Troy McLure from The Simpsons in human form. He looked like he may have slept with over 1 million women. I was fascinated by him. Onwards to the venue. which was called The Sound Garden Studio. Was it named after the grunge band? I’m not sure, there wasn’t any evidence that it was - but at one point I think I may have seen Chris Cornell lurking in a bush outside writing some lyrics and smoking a cigarette. The venue was cool and the owner seemed nice, but it transpired that he had the most insane hobby in the world: Shooting things from a remote controlled cannon.

That’s right, he had a mobile cannon that some high school students had designed that he liked to fire into an area behind the venue that seemed to not be that deserted. To demonstrate to us how good this cannon was he took a full can of an unnamed energy drink, loaded it up and made us watch as it seemed to fly for miles at a terrifying velocity into the distance. If anyone was killed by the projectile then I think we’re accomplices because we didn’t stop him and I definitely did laugh as it flew threw the air. I checked the paper the next day and there is was no headlines like “Area Man Taken Out By Flying Can” or “Red Bull Gives You Concussion” so at the moment I think we’re in the clear. This incident kind of set the tone for the evening and after this many other strange things happened...

1. There was a woman in the crowd who had managed to make a fill outfit from one rainbow coloured jumper.
2. One of the guys from PK tried to kick off the wall during their set and his leg just went right through it, leaving a perfect impression of his foot.
3. During our set a man punched a woman in the face and burst her nose open.
4. Then a man came onstage and offered whoever did it a fight.
5. Then he launched a full beer that skimmed my head.
6. At least he hadn’t fired it from that cannon.

The gig had been tainted by these events, which was a shame because it was shaping up to be a memorable show. It’s the first time we’ve played in America where it’s felt like there’s a genuine excitement for our band. Some people expressed that excitement by punching the opposite sex in the face, that was the problem. That’s a very bad way of expressing yourself.

I didn't take any photos again because my camera appears to have the battery life of a small, deformed ant.

Sorry Eugene.

If your name is Eugene, please excuse this paragraph - i’m going to make fun of your name a bit. If it’s any consolation, my initials are ‘CEK’, which kind of sounds like something a bird would do on a man’s head. I used to type that in if I got a high score at an arcade game (every time then), until the other players started laughing at my initials. After that I just put CK, and people would ask if I was Calvin Klein and I would say yes. And they would believe me. Good story. Anyway, if your name is Eugene* then I feel bad for you. To me, Eugene is the kind of person that would get an erection in the showers at school during gym, or wet themselves past the age of 12. I don’t know why I think this, I just do. I think you’ll all find that I am 100% correct in this assumption. If your name is Eugene and either of these things happened to you during your High School years then I apologize for bringing up some painful memories. If your name is Eugene and neither of these things happened to you then i’d like you to think back and see if you’ve maybe suppressed them over the years. Did you? I thought you did, sorry Eugene. I’ll tell you a heartwarming story though - if you did pee yourself or get a shower erection (or both at once - that would be extra disturbing) then you can still be a success in life. I went to school with a guy whose second name was Noble, so he got called ‘No Balls’ for 6 years... he went onto commit online property fraud and made over £100,000. Something to aim for.

As usual, i’ve just committed some literary gold.... as the next city we were playing was Eugene in Oregon. Look at what I did!!! A whole paragraph dedicated to making fun of the name Eugene, just to create a link between where we were currently situated. I really am operating on another level. I imagine this is what F. Scott Fitzgerald felt like when he was writing The Great Gatsby. Except what i’m doing is more impressive because there is much more pollution in the air these days effecting my brain power. Did F. Scott Fitzgerald ever visit Eugene in Oregon? I’m not sure if he did - but it’s entirely plausible that he may have. Perhaps to visit a pen pal at the University or Oregon? Regardless, we were definitely visiting Eugene as we were contracted to do so. We are many things but we are not in the business of failing to honour contracts - that’s the domain of South American footballers and law firms that advertise on place mats inside strip clubs. Although i’ve basically talked in an obscure way about a place called Eugene for around 500 words now, the venue we were playing was actually in a place called Springfield - which is right beside Eugene. So why do I keep talking about Eugene!? I’m not sure, that’s where I thought the gig was until I wrote that last sentence and realised again that it wasn’t. Did you know that there’s a town called Springfield in every state? Little factoid for you.

We were playing a venue called Goodfellas Lounge (which was technically in Springfield), a place that sounded like it might be a bit scary. And lo and behold... It was! From the outside it looked like the kind of bar that someone in debt to the mob would go missing from and never be heard from again. And when we walked inside I swear that classic movie cliché happened where the music seemed to stop and everyone at the bar looked round and weighed us up. Then a dustball rolled across the bar floor between us... Only joking, that didn’t actually happen. Instead, an old drunk person did an awkward forward roll in front of us to simulate a dustball. The owner of the bar soon alleviated our fears by informing us that people would probably start on us, but he would try his best to stop them. Oh wait, nope - that made the place a little bit more terrifying. We started soundcheck and after two kick drum hits a woman at the bar starting shouting abuse at me. I don’t know what she was saying, but I think it was something to do with disrupting the quaint Parisian atmosphere of the bar. We managed to survive soundcheck without being glassed, in actual fact a man came up and listened as we ran a song and then said it was a ‘good little number’. He did seem very drunk, but it was much better than him killing us all with a hunting rifle, which was my first thought as he approached. He just had that ‘unprovoked hunting rifle massacre’ look to him, which is a very precise look.

We decided that this was definitely one of those shows that would be made slightly easier if we tried to drink as much alcohol as we could in a very short period of time before we went on. So, ourselves and PK drank rounds of whisky, rounds of Jello Shots, even rounds of Smoothie Shots (Goodfellas Lounge are innovating with those bad boys) to distort our perception slightly and make it less painful if anyone at the bar came on stage and punched one of us in the face. But our fears were greatly over exaggerated, as nobody came on stage and punched us. Or shot us with a hunting rifle. Or glassed us. Or even shouted derogatory statements about Irish people, upon mistaking our Scottish accents. We had greatly mis-judged the patrons of Goodfellas Lounge, and that made us no better than Macaulay Culkin in Home Alone when he thinks the old man with the shovel is dangerous. Or in Home Alone 2 when he’s scared of the bird lady. Basically, we’d gone into the gig with the same attitude as a 6 year old boy playing a character in a movie. Shame on us. The gig turned out to be very fun, although I think we all thought we were playing the gig of our lives because we were all a bit smashed. Afterwards a man invited us to his ranch close to the venue but we said no as we didn’t know him quite well enough yet and it seemed like the start of the plot to a horror movie.

We left Eugene having learned two valuable lessons...

1. Don’t be distrusting of anyone who spends their whole day drinking in a dark bar. 98% of them don’t want to kill you with a knife and then steal your wallet.
2. Never drink shots of whisky in an American bar. They free pour, meaning you get about half a bottle of whisky per shot. This makes you instantly drunk and fools you into thinking that you can play music much better than you are actually able too.

* This does not include Eugene Kelly from The Vaselines, who is a Eugene anomaly and immune to the embarrassing follies experienced by most Eugene’s.

No photos today because I am lazzzzzzzzzzzzzy.

Fanless in Seattle.

Seattle, Washington. The film Sleepless in Seattle was set here - i’ve not seen it but I believe it’s a documentary about sleep depravation set in the city. From reading about it briefly online I can see that it features veteran star of documentaries, Mr. Tom Hanks. This must have been filmed before his final documentary Philadelphia, which details the final months of his life after he contracts AIDS and makes friends with Denzil Washington and Antonio Banderas. Tom Hanks is definitely the most famous star of documentaries there ever was - imagine what other documentaries he could have been in if his life hadn’t been cut short by AIDS? Seattle is also where music was saved from an epidemic of spandex and hairspray in the late 80s when a string of bands from the city or nearby finally managed to make people see that spandex should never be worn by any man ever, and that anyone that chooses to wear such revealing apparel should not be trusted. Bands like Nirvana and Sonic Youth managed to breakthrough and show the world how ridiculous hair metal bands really were, and they did it in some really nice flannel shirts. So there’s two things i’ve taught you about Seattle, I am such a great guy. It’s ok, you don’t need to thank me. Or give me expensive gifts. Your silence says it all... that’s real respect.

But if you do want to leave me expensive gifts, my address is 123 Cool Street, Cool Town, The Land of Cool. I don’t have a post code, that’s so 1980s. Anyway, back to some hardcore words work...

Seattle has also had a huge influence on my life growing up, and not just because Frasier was set here and I just to watch it with my parents and pretend I understood the high brow jokes. It was when I first heard Nirvana that I had the feeling that I could maybe try music as a career. Before that i’d really wanted to be a bike courier because they looked really cool. I had no balance and i’m terrible on a bike, so I was probably sub-consciously looking for another option when I first heard Smells Like Teen Spirit and figured that I probably wouldn’t need as much balance to take up an instrument. I was too young to hear Nirvana when they were actually around (I was 8 when Kurt Cobain died), but when I did finally hear them around the age of 14 it sounded like nothing i’d ever heard before - it sounded so raw and powerful. Before this moment I quite liked Backstreet Boys and Shaggy. I gave up my dreams of delivering things on a bike through Glasgow and decided that I now wanted to be in a band. Seattle has always felt like this mystical place to me since then, and I always imagined that everyone who lived there was in a band. When we first played there a couple of years ago I discovered that most people who live there don’t actually play in bands and I was quite disappointed - but it made sense for economical reasons that some people would have to get real jobs and not get to wear flannel all the time. Just at the weekend. Not everyone in Seattle wore flannel either, another thing i’d hoped would be true. Despite these letdowns, I was so excited to be back there a couple of days ago.

The last time we were here we only got to spend half a day in the city so we really didn’t see much, this time we had a WHOLE day off before the show so we did what all tourists must do and climbed the Space Needle and surveyed our surroundings. As we expected, things looked much smaller from high up. The view from the top of the needle (we weren’t on the actual point of the needle of course, that would be incredibly dangerous and you’d need excellent balance to not fall off) wasn’t as impressive as say, The Empire State Building, but it did show us how varied Seattle’s landscape is. From one direction there’s the concrete and glass metropolis of Downtown, but 90º to your right you see the vast waters of Lake Union and then in the distance, Mt. Rainier. Swivel round 90º again and you see 1000s of residential houses placed on sloping hills. Reading that back, it looks like i’m trying to get a job for a travel magazine. Which I am. Please get in touch if you work for a travel magazine - as you can see from this paragraph I would be an exciting edition to your payroll. I’d describe my travel writing as ‘dangerous and sexy’, consider that my CV. What else did we do in Seattle? We walked about Downtown for hours and discovered that Seattle has over 8 rug shops - none of them have a rug under $500 though. That is Daylight Ruggery. Ha ha, I made myself laugh. I also went to a Nirvana exhibition the morning of the show at an amazing museum called the EMP (www.empmuseum.org/). It was one of the greatest experiences of my life, probably because I am mega sad for Nirvana, but also because it was just so great. I was in there for 3 hours and wish I could have stayed longer. If you find yourself in Seattle anytime before the 22nd of April 2013 when the exhibition finishes, then you must go or I will find you and batter you. And I have a 66.6% win rate in the three fights i’ve been in.

The gig itself was also a bit of a grunge dream, we were playing a venue called Chop Suey where Pearl Jam filmed a series of acoustic videos when they released the album Riot Act. This was massive news for me, but absolutely mind-numbingly boring for everyone else. “But guys, they were sitting right there on that stage! Eddie Vedder was playing his guitar right there with a shaved head looking like a really cool Dad. Right there! RIGHT THERE! ” - For some reason this emotional outburst had no effect on the rest of the boys. Even after I drew them a sketch of Pearl Jam on the stage, complete with annotations, they still didn’t seem to bother. Even after I made full scale models of all the members of Pearl Jam and staged my own a cappella version of the songs they performed, they still didn’t care. Maybe they were just playing it cool - nobody could have been unaffected by my vocal performances. But, tonight was also special as it was technically our first headline gig in the United States. There may have only been about 40 people in the room... but it’s a start. The gig was really fun, and nobody was killed by any flying shrapnel from the stage or by choking on an ice cube. First headline US show - no deaths. Brilliant.

I ended my second trip to Seattle by going to the International House of Pancakes and sitting in silence as a man across from me made weird noises and shouted at people. Yet another thing in the list of reasons why nobody should ever go to International House Of Pancakes. There’s angry men and the food tastes like sadness.

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Walnut Creek to Seattle - A pervert's view.

After the show in Walnut Creek we travelled all the way up to Seattle, a long day of travel that brought us all much closer together - I think we created a bond that's stronger than brothers, between the 7 of us.

That's nonsense - we don't bond because that's what weak people do. We're all still as suspicious of each other as we were when we started playing together. It's this distrust that has served us well over the years - like the way the mafia works.

I did have a good day though, I finished a book called A Wild Sheep Chase by Haruki Murakami and started another called Less Than Zero by Brett Easton Ellis. The Murakami book is about a man who is trying to find a sheep who has the power to rule the world by inhabiting a human's body. Honestly, it's really good. Less Than Zero looks like it will be quite like American Psycho but without all the murdering of prostitutes n' that.

Here are some pictures I took - I have realised recently that 90% of the photos I take are from the window of a van. I'm kind of like a scenery pervert, working from behind tinted windows.

I get really aroused by hills.

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