How Backstreet Are You?

The end of a tour. It unleashes confusing emotions, like admitting to yourself that you like the music of the Backstreet Boys. It’s a mixture of massive sadness and also a some relief. I mean, they do have a lot of great songs like ‘Backstreets Back’, ‘Millennium’ and ‘Quit Playing Games (With My Heart) which were all backed by impressive dance routines. Oh wait, I made that comparison to talk about touring, not one of America’s Premier manufactured pop acts. Many apologies. So yes, there is a mixture of sadness and relief when you reach the end of a tour. Sadness that you won’t get to see the bands you’ve been away with as regularly, or that you can essentially live for free by existing only on rider food and alcohol. But there’s also relief that nobody got eaten by a shark or mauled by a lion on the way, and that you’ve survived yet another run without a musician’s nightmare happening: Streaker on stage whilst you’re playing.... no band can come back from that. It’s the equivalent of when Kevin left the Backstreet Boys. Oh dear, i’m doing it again. I have this condition where I equate every problem to the Backstreet Boys. It’s infectious....... like when you get one of the Backstreet Boy’s many hits in your head. Shit.

So we had reached the end of this American tour with AWOLNATION and Middle Class Rut, and those same emotions came back around again. To add a little spice to the last day though, the elements had dealt us an interesting hand by throwing snow everywhere in the area between our hotel and our final destination of Philadelphia. This same snow had caused Middle Class Rut to ditch their trailer on their way to their hotel the previous night, meaning it was unlikely they’d make the show. For a tour that had gone so smoothly (minus the part when I was tricked into filling the van with Unleaded poison) this put a weird spin on the final stretch. The snow eventually cleared up about 2 hours from Philadelphia, by this point we were already quite late anyway because we’d stopped for food and discovered a shop called Five Below, where everything is 5 dollars or less. We all spent much more than 5 dollars with our misguided view that we should buy all the sweets we can afford because they’re so cheap in there. I don’t even like sweets that much and bought 15 dollars worth. That’s obese child territory. If anyone wants some Sour Patch Kids or Junior Mints, get in touch with me. I have loads of them, enough sugar to make a child overdose. After this we also hit about 4 different traffic jams which were due to people driving home for Thanksgiving. It was unfair as we didn’t feel very thankful for the traffic.

So we ended up showing up at the venue 20 minutes before doors, and Middle Class Rut had somehow managed to make up 4 hours and get there before us. They must have been listening to the inspiring and perfectly crafted songs of the Backstreet Boys - using this musical inspiration to make their van fly and also go faster. We rushed everything inside and managed to engage in a sort of improvised soundcheck, which held doors back 20 minutes meaning we had around 5 minutes before we had to play. Perfect conditions for a good show. That was sarcasm by the way, a language tool used by unintelligent persons like myself. But the show was good. Not the best of the tour which would have been the teen movie ending, it was more like the Backstreet Boys comeback album ‘Never Gone’ - a satisfying experience, but not the pinnacle of pop songwriting that they reached on previous efforts. I put it down to Kevin Richardson’s growing alienation with the the pop world, which never really went away following the band’s hiatus after the ‘Black & Blue’ album. Sorry about that.

After the show we said goodbye to the AWOLNATION guys and headed for the tour version of the Last Supper with the Middle Class Rut collective. Unfortunately, unlike the feast in the biblical tale, the only thing open that late the night before thanksgiving was..... Dennys. Perhaps the worst restaurant in the whole wide world. I had a veggie burger thinking that to be the safe option, but there is nothing safe about Denny’s. There’s not much else to say, Denny’s makes me feel sad. We flew home the next day from the world’s emptiest airport - Thanksgiving killed aviation. We have two days off before we’re back on the road for our UK headline tour, let’s hope we all get some nutrition as Denny’s is the food equivalent of bathing in oil and drinking it all by accident. In the words of the Backstreet Boys - “Don’t Turn Out The Lights”. That might not make sense in the now, but give it a couple of minutes... still no? That’s the genius of the Backstreet Boys, they’re complex.

P.S. The Backstreet Boys is quite a homosexual name for a boy band. Just saying.

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