Aeroplanes and Grog.

It was back to the US of A, armed with only our wits and over $23,000,000 in forged notes. About enough to buy our own mansion on wheels, which is of course man’s ultimate dream. It narrowly beat ‘pizza tester’, but most modern mansions come fitted with their own ‘pizza cave’ anyway so you get the best of both worlds. Unfortunately I managed to lose $22,999,950 as I walked past a drain just outside Heathrow airport. I don’t know how it happened, especially because they were all one dollar bills. But they just kept falling in the drain one after the other. I’d try to save one and ten more would slip down, this went one for about an hour until I finally figured out how to stop it was by moving away from the drain. By this point I only had 50 dollars left, barely enough to buy even an old rubbish mansion. Definitely not one with wheels and a pizza cave. I thought about trying to pry the drain open to rescue a couple of million, but I remember being told as a child that alligators live in sewers and I know that those guys can really do you some damage. So the money was gone, but I still had my good looks - so not all was lost. Unfortunately, as I walked through the revolving doors into the terminal building an untamed cheetah had managed to escape from it’s masters shackles and decimated my face beyond recognition. A bad start to the trip.

After stitching up my wounds with some spare shoelaces we checked in and waited around until we could board our first flight to Toronto. In the waiting lounge, myself and Barry saw a boy who had the build of an adult but shrunk down. He couldn’t have been any older than 6. It was truly disturbing. On the plane I watched Moneyball and Contagion. Moneyball was very good, Brad Pitt was on fine form - at one point he throws a big drinks cooler over, very exciting. Contagion was ok, but they seemed to have asked the actors and actresses not to act, especially if something terrible had just happened. Matt Damon loses his wife and step-son and takes the news as if someone has just told him that they won’t be able to play squash with him that weekend. What I learned from the movie is that when a pig eats a bat’s poo - bad things happen. Our flight got into Toronto slightly late, meaning it was the usual Home Alone style rush to re-check all our gear through customs so we could make our flight to Cleveland, Ohio. We made it, but we nearly lost our sound guy Paul ‘Breach of the Peesh’ Hepburn in the process. He was nearly on the end of a customs probing - the bad kind (is there a good kind?). The plane to Cleveland was possibly made from cardboard and housed around 20 people - we feared all our gear would cause the plane to just break in two as it tried to take off. Thankfully that didn’t happen, but there was some pretty hairy jet lag on the way down. Sam thought it was the end for him and declared that he stole all his songwriting ideas from Justin Bieber just before the plane defied the odds and landed safely. His secret was out though, and we’d lost all respect for him. A bad start to the trip for Sam too.

But we were safely in Cleveland. After a jet lag busting sleep we arose and headed to the Ohio Broadcasting Centre (Cleveland Branch) to film an acoustic session for Alternative Press. On arrival we were attacked by around 1000 students who filmed us from every angle possible and stole every inch of our souls. I definitely over exaggerated there, I think there were 4 people with cameras. But I was creating drama, did it grab your attention? You’re golly gosh darned right it did. Because I play drums and am incapable of playing things lightly because of my huge muscles, I just got to watch as the other guys got emotional with acoustic guitars. Everyone there must have thought I was really cool and had just refused to take part because i’m so RAWK. If only they knew the truth.... that I cried when Tom Hanks loses his inanimate volleyball pal Wilson in the classic (and maybe slightly dull) movie Castaway. That movie taught me that being a castaway would be quite boring, but it also taught me that it is possible to have emotional attachments to sporting goods - something i’d lost sleep over for some time.

Next stop, The Grog Shop - an unfortunately named venue where the first gig would take place. Don’t worry, it’s not a shop that actually sells Grog - nobody would want to buy that. Unless it was the spit of someone famous like Jason Statham or Eddie Murphy. We’re supporting You Me At Six and The Swellers on this run, it’s a joint headline affair for the two of them so when we got into the venue both bands had brought full backline. And so had we. And so had the local opener. It looked like our own little musical instrument conference was taking place inside. This proved difficult as the stage itself had just enough room for one backline. So the first show proved to be a stressful one, we played badly and we were all so close to the front of the stage that it looked like we were offering the crowd a fight. And we’d never do that, we’re scared of bleeding our own blood. Afterwards we went for food with two of the guys from our label, and Sam’s Dad and his partner Karen, who had driven down from Toronto to join the first show fun. Jimmy from our label got those tiny burgers that they call ‘sliders’, i’m still trying to figure our what makes them so appealing. They just look like burgers but much smaller - they have in a sense made a much worse version of the original design. This only crossed my mind briefly though, as I was enjoying my first root beer of the trip. I’ve never tried heroin, but I imagine if you liquified it and carbonated it then it would taste like root beer. If anyone can confirm this to be true then I will become a junkie tomorrow. It’ll be worth it.

Sweeeeeet sweeeeeet root beer.

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