Craig Ernest Kneale

Please don't steal our things Chicago.

2012-01-28T06:36:00.000-08:00

We had driven a couple of hours after the first show in Cleveland, so we woke up in a place called Perrysburg, Ohio. We also went to sleep in a hotel there before we woke up - we didn’t simply wake up on the ground dazed and confused in Perrysburg. That would have been a bad start to the day. Is it just me or does Perrysburg look weird written down? It looks to me like it should be two words. Maybe it is, can you let me know citizens of Perrysburg? Thanks. I went for a run through Perrysburg before we had to leave, on my travels I saw a Masonic Lodge, A neighbourhood for families with children with impaired hearing, and also a street called Elm Street. I can’t be sure, but as I ran past it i’m sure I saw a guy with a hook nose and a big hat brandishing a massive blade in the middle of the road. Can’t be sure though, and I was running quite fast because The Nightmare On Elm Street really scared me. As we left we went to a supermarket called Mejiers and I bought Ritz crackers, raisins and two bananas. And an orange. And that was the end of our Perrysburg adventure. If I was to make a sign for Perrysburg it would read as so: ‘PERRYSBURG - A PLACE FOR NEW EXPERIENCES’. I managed to write Perrysburg nine times in this paragraph. Might aswell round up to the magic ten...... Perrysburg.

Onwards to Chicago, Illinois. The Windy City. Although when we got in it was more just the cold city. The centre of Chicago has many more gigantic buildings than I remember it having, but then again my main memory of the place before we came here a couple of years ago was that it’s where the Biker Mice From Mars live. I’ve yet to meet those guys, I assume they probably keep a low profile until crime gets out of hand then they hand out some two-wheeled rodent justice. We were playing at a venue called Beat Kitchen - it served food, and had a venue in it, do you see what they’ve done there? This place was obviously owned by a seriously clever business person - they’d got their product across perfectly in just two words. Once we arrived I headed to a music shop called Andy’s Music just along from the venue to pick up some stuff and found perhaps the worlds biggest selection of harps and gongs inside - it was like the most exclusive instrument club ever. It’s customers had to be enchanted fairies or progressive rock drummers from the 1970s. The fairy scene and the vintage progressive rock scene are still big business in these parts i’ve been reliably informed. This guy Andy is obviously just cashing on this, another astute entrepreneur. I’d learned quickly that Chicago is where the business elite clearly dwell.

It was another case of ‘too much gear, not enough stage’ - I have a feeling this is going to be the general vibe of the tour. All our gear was actually in the crowd until we went on, that’s not one of my usual massive over exaggerations either - it was actually just chilling in the corner of the room waiting to be stolen by one of Chicago’s famous music venue pick pockets. Rumour has it that their pockets are deep enough to fit a whole drum kit. I kept a close eye on anyone with a trench coat in case they tried anything. To further add to our woes, Sam managed to show up 15 minutes late for our stage time - quite impressive when you think about it. Sam has been late for practice maybe 1000 times in the past, but being late for a gig when you were in the same venue a couple of hours before? You have to tip your cap to that. It turns out he’d been quite ill, although when I pressed his stomach it didn’t make him vomit... I was suspicious. It did mean we had to sit at the side of the stage for those 15 minutes with the crowd looking at us, wondering why the support band were just waiting about? We probably looked really cool. We did get to play three songs in the end, i’m not sure if that’s a victory or a defeat. I think we successfully managed to confuse everyone in the room, we’ll take that as a victory for science.

We drove 4 hours after the show to Lansing, Michigan. Why did we do that? It’s none of your business, maybe we all have friends there and wanted to visit them late at night? Or maybe Lansing has a great 24 hour supermarket that we wanted to go and by some grapes at? Grapes do taste better between midnight and 4 in the morning - that’s just fact. But we got to our hotel around 3 in the morning to discover the rooms had been set to the arctic setting, a group of young eskimos scuttled by us as we entered the room. So we made that rookie mistake that you never learn from by cranking the heating up in the room so we all woke up at 5 in the morning with no fluids left in our body. I think we’ve made this mistake in excess of 1000 times now. That is also an exaggeration but isn’t at the same time. That doesn’t make sense but then neither does the success of the band Nickelback. Some things just can’t be explained, they...... just....... are.

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Aeroplanes and Grog.

2012-01-27T08:47:00.001-08:00

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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The Rain Police.

2012-01-26T07:50:00.000-08:00

I’ve always wondered why the world doesn’t all sink underwater when it rains for more than 2 days in a row. Where does all that water go? It feels like it hasn’t stopped raining since we got to Europe yet the water level hasn’t reached above toe height. I think i’ve figured out what’s going on though, listen up.... What is obviously happening is that during the night an elite government ‘aqua taskforce’ are deployed to any city where it’s raining, or has been raining, and collects the rainfall in special bottomless cups. They have that kind of technology you know, they just choose to keep it from the public because if it become available then people would take these cups to Subway, fill them up at the drink fountain and have free Coca Cola FOREVER. If this happened the whole economic infrastructure would collapse. Coca Cola equates to 100% of the worlds income after all. But where does the water go once these secret aqua agents have collected it all? They go up in tiny aeroplanes and redeploy them into the dry clouds that are out of rain. Obviously. And that is what happens to rain, that ‘evaporation’ story they like to spin to school children is about as believable as the Smurfs. Although they are real, bad example.

So we had arrived in Cologne and it was very wet. So wet in fact, that I stayed on the bus til load in and just stared out the window like a child that had been grounded. It wasn’t a particularly inspiring view, all I could see was a grey building. And rain. And at brief points, old people walking by. If i’m honest, it was maybe the most un-productive start to any day i’ve ever had. And I once stayed in all day and ate white chocolate in my room when I was younger. That sounds sexual, but it wasn’t. Quite the opposite. So I don’t have much to report until we loaded into Blue Shell, where we’d played last May and struggled to fit on its tiny stage. It’s a cool venue though, it looks like a mixture between a diner and an American ‘gas’ station. How could those places ever co-inhabit you ask? Come to Blue Shell and see for yourself, they’ve managed it - I don’t want to spoil the surprise. It also kind of looks like a venue, but only slightly. We had to ditch Ross’ bass cab to fit everything on the stage, so he became a sort of ‘bass sorcerer’ for the night. Summoning bass sounds without the need for speakers. I thought about calling him Gandolf the Bass, but was worried he might hit me with that mystical bass. Perhaps it would have turned me into a Treble Clef, and I would be purely theoretical and invisible.

Before we played we were taken to a nice Indian restaurant for dinner. Nothing happened, it was just nice. Oh, I did cover my whole body in Naan bread and dive into a big bowl of Jalfrezi, but this is what I like to do after every Indian meal to relax. After eating all the bread off my own body (about the same carbohydrates as if you were to eat all the potatoes in a farmer’s pocket at once) and then showering I was ready to play. I watched the band that had supported us for the German shows, Zen Zebra, really great band and a lovely bunch of guys. One of them looks identical to Ross, which was weird and confusing. It was also his birthday the day of the Berlin show, and Ross has a birthday in March and he likes Berlin. Co-incidence!? Well, no - those things aren’t related.... yet somehow they are. Or are they? I’m not sure, and now i’ve made myself feel a little ill. Perhaps it was all that Naan bread. There was a lot of it. The show went well, I believe it was sold out and everyone was making loud noises after every song. And it didn’t seem like the noises someone would make when they’re in pain. It was a happy sound, ‘cheering’ I believe they call it. And they were also hitting the palms together aswell, and as far as I could see it wasn’t because they were trying to crush a fly who had entered the room. A reliable source informs we this is called ‘clapping’ and is a polite way of showing your appreciation towards something or someone. By combining the factors of ‘cheering’ and ‘clapping’ over a prolonged duration (the length of the set), I have come to the conclusion that the gig was good.

Afterwards it was all hands on deck as we were heading back to the UK to fly to America the following afternoon. There was no deck to place our hands on so we instead packed up the gear and loaded it into the trailer instead. We said our farewells to the Zen Zebra chaps and headed back to Calais to catch the ferry. I decided it would be best to try and sleep now and then stay up on the flight the next day. Unfortunately this was foiled by port customs who wanted to search the bus for Naan bread after huge amounts had gone missing from a restaurant in Cologne. After managing to disguise the last of my Naan stash as my duvet they let us through but my sleep had been foiled, from this point forth I would be a zombie until we reached the land of doughnuts and racial profiling. A negative end to the story, but all the best stories are. Think of 1984 by George Orwell or The Snowman by Ramond Briggs. And that was the end of our European tour, very short - but then so is my attention span.

Auf weidersein Pet. I used to think that was about a famous German animal.

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Berlin Bad Bed Day.

2012-01-25T07:14:00.000-08:00

Do you know what the worst thing in the world is? Nope, not being made to do a sexy dance for Michael Douglas whilst he prods you with intricately carved wooden canes he’s collected from exotic countries over the years. And no, the worst thing in the world is not to be mauled by a lion and then left in the middle of the desert to be finished off by vultures and snakes. Nope, the worst thing in the world is much more terrifying.... WAKING UP FACING THE OPPOSITE DIRECTION YOU THOUGHT YOU WOULD BE FACING. We’ve all been there, and this phenomenon can seriously fuck up your day. For example, say you went to sleep facing your favourite soft toy Mr. Snuggles. You wake up after a nice dream expecting your plush pal to be looking at you as your eyes start to open... but he’s not. In his place is a completely different side of the room and some weird man called Francois staring back at you. How did your whole world flip round whilst you were asleep!? Who is Francois and how did he get into your house!? And why is he tying you up with strawberry laces!? SEE!? Terrifying.

This very thing happened to me when I woke up in Berlin. I went to sleep facing my phone (as I always do incase the secret service sends me a covert message during the night) and had a nice dream about myself and Tom Cruise meeting at a party in Glasgow and then him showing me his motorbike collection and convincing me that Scientology is really quite logical when you think about it. So I woke up hoping to either have a message giving me details of how to break into the Russian embassy armed with only a trench coat and a top hat, or a message to come round to Tom’s for a delicious meal (Katie’s making placenta for dinner). But my eyes opened and my phone wasn’t there! And neither was the exciting article about Michael Jackson’s Thriller that I was reading in PRS magazine before I dove into some slumber! In their place was a strange red curtain that I knew I recognized... that’s right, it was the curtain i’d closed over before I turned around to be educated that ‘Thriller’ was originally called ‘Midnight Man’, a much more sinister title. Going on Michaels troubles later in life, things could have turned out much worse for him if he’d stuck to that title. So I must have turned around in my sleep... BUT HOW!? It was too late, my day was fucked. The whole equilibrium of my being was now the opposite way it should have been.

I tried to regain some sort of stability in my life by going a walk around Berlin with Barry and Sam ‘Pam Johnson’ Thompson but the elements were conspiring to mess up my mojo even more. The minute we left the bus we were hit by a sort of horizontal rain/snow. It came at you like snow but exploded into it’s more basic form of water when it belted off your face. Real nice. After decoding Berlin’s S-Bahn train system we managed to get to Alexander-Platz, which we’ve been to many times before but somehow felt compelled to go again and look at the big TV tower which we stared up at for a while before deciding yet again not to pay the money to actually go up it. “10 Euros for a view!? You mad?” Nope, we’ll just stare up at it for a while in the cold whilst getting blasted by snow/rain instead. Smart. After this enthralling experience we made our way back to the bus just before hypothermia hit us in mid stride. Just in time for load in. Hoooooo-ray. I promise you I was still having a good time, i’m just fighting the demons that appear when you wake up the wrong way. A losing battle as you can see.

We were playing the Comet Club, which we’d played before the first time we headlined in Berlin. The only time we’ve headlined in Berlin. There was roughly 30 people there that night, 10% of which was made up by the craziest three dancing girls you ever did see. It was like nobody had told them that grunge was over, they were lost in the music. They did essentially save what was a very awkward show to be fair. Or did they make it more awkward? It’s hard to say. All I remember was that there were dancing girls and not many other people. Would tonight be any better!? My usual effervescent self would like to say yes, but this new wrong side of the bed guy had a more negative approach. He thought there would only be one person there, and that person would have a gun and would systematically pick us off at certain points during the gig. I’m sure there are worse ways to die, but being shot at in an empty room in Berlin has got to be up there in the most traumatic category.

But this didn’t happen! The gig was amazing, the room was nearly full and the people there seemed really passionate about our band. If there was a guy with a gun there his shots must have been blocked by the good vibe. There were a couple of moments where Barry’s guitar sounded like there was a small mouse trapped inside it because he put on the wrong effect, and Sam had to start Time For You To Stand Up no less than three times, but it was all in good fun. I also rattled my finger off the snare at one point and it is now the size of a large cactus, but it’s fine - i’ll either get it cut off it continues to swell, or use it to point at people from many miles away. It’s just a finger, i’ve got loads of them anyway. We didn’t hang around long after the show, we had a big drive to Cologne and I had to devise some straps to keep my facing the way I want to when I goto to sleep.

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Big Pimpin' in Lil' Hamburg.

2012-01-23T19:15:00.000-08:00

Onwards to Hamburg, officially the seediest place in the world after Amsterdam, which is where we were the previous day. Our plan is just to play exclusively in areas where brothels are within spitting distance (does that count as a pun?), eventually giving up music and just becoming pimps. The touring thing is just to save enough money so we can all get matching pimp canes. We want the ones with the diamond snake heads on the top - and they don’t come cheap. They cost around 1 billion pounds, plus you have to execute a few of the weaker hookers so the official ‘Pimp Cane Vendor’ will complete the transaction. Pimpin’ Ain’t Easy, as they say. But who are ‘they’? The pimps I assume. What most people don’t hear is that the full statement is actually “Pimpin’ ain’t easy, but you do get to wear a full orange suit with matching top hat and have legitimate gold teeth”. Isn’t that what all men dream of when they’re growing up on the mean streets of their hamlet? And that is why we were in Hamburg. To secure more pimp funds.

I actually really like Hamburg, which is surprising as my very first experience of it’s streets were when we were supporting The Subways a few years ago and I stepped out the van to see a bearded man urinating in the middle of the street whilst a mother and child walked past him, dodging the stream. This was at 1 in the afternoon. Things did improve from that point forward, but that bearded exhibitionist still haunts my dreams. He was just so..... hairy. We’ve been back here a couple of times since then and the bearded man has seemingly secured a toilet to do his thang. Either that or the mother that was unfortunate enough to have walked past him at that moment in time went back and killed him when we’d left for exposing her impressionable child to a human fountain at head height. Our other experiences of Hamburg have included Ross doing an accidental backflip off of a chair and our last visit involved us playing after being up for over 40 hours.... It wasn’t a vintage performance. It’s hard to be vintage when your snare drum suddenly seems like it’d made a nice pillow for a little nap nap. But overall, Hamburg has been very good to us.

....I realise all the things I mentioned there are bad (unless you enjoy watching bearded men urinate you sicko), but that was just to build dramatic tension. It’s what we in the business call a ‘writing tool’. Which is also what the other guys in the band call me when I write these missives.

We were headlining the Molotow again, which we did last May to critical acclaim. “Those guys are pretty shit and the room was empty, good beer though!” and “Why does the drummer have a moustache? Is he from the past!? Cool!” were just some of the touching things said about our performance. How do you build from that? We weren’t sure, perhaps we could all kiss onstage to shock and arouse people - that worked for Madonna and Britney Spears. Surely it would work for us too. We practiced kissing in the dressing room before soundcheck but it was a bit weird because Sam kept staring at whoever he was kissing and putting them off their stride. We scrapped the idea and decided to let the songs do the talking. Shit. May seems a long time ago and i’d forgotten that the back of the stage is in an alcove, which is where the drums sit under. Because I play drums like i’m doing an impression of a man being set on fire it meant that every time I swung my arms my sticks hit off the roof. It puts me off my stride brothers! The other chaps didn’t understand my dilemma, so I put it in posh golfing terms because they are posh toffs. “Imagine at the top of your golf swing was an imaginary wall that meant that your swing was disrupted at the optimum point where you gather the most momentum?”. AHHHHHHHHHHHHHH, they all treated me like i’d lost my arms at war after that.

Despite the fact that I was being taught the hard way that having swingy arms is dangerous, the gig itself was great. The room was pretty much packed and the vibe was ‘happening’. Sam even decided to just make up his own setlist as he went along and we just had to guess what was coming. What a maverick. By the end of the show I think I may have permanently damaged the structural integrity of the roof above me, but as long as the place didn’t collapse before we left I was ok with that. Complete Architectural destruction is even more rock and roll than urinating in front of a mother and child. We had a drink in the bar afterwards where I had my first experience of Vodka Apple Schorle - vodka with fizzy apple juice. It was nice except you couldn’t taste the vodka which either means i’d been short changed or this was an example of an assassin drink where you have a few and think you’re fine and then wake up hanging off a bridge with no clothes on and a live monkey strapped to your head. Ross had a mishit with his choice of Vodka and Club Matte, a Hamburg soft drink which has a peculiar taste at the best of times, especially when you add vodka to it. Unlucky Ross, your renegade attitude has foiled you this time.

And then it was time to get back on the bus and leave this haven of prostitutes, low ceilings and vodka mixed with anything. And we left with a little bit more money in the pimp fund. Not bad. Not bad.

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Clog To The Face.

2012-01-21T13:53:00.000-08:00

I’ve said this many times before, but I really am going to try and write something on this page every day from this day onwards. That means starting today. This is for many reasons, the main one being so they can make a book about me based on the ramblings found at this URL when I inevitably die in a few years when I finally bite off more than I can chew. That isn’t a metaphor, my vocation in life is chewing on things - one day i’m bound to choke on a big piece of rubber. The other reason is that it looks like i’m really deep and thoughtful when I write these ‘thought snapshots’ (a pretentious term for blog I just created), and it is a fact that man’s real goal in life is to be respected by his fellow man. Little do these fellow men know that when I look up longingly from my laptop, seemingly to divine a word from the sky that will perfectly fit the mood i’m trying to create, the word i’m most likely trying to imagine will be ‘boobs’. So from this day forth you can expect a lot more from me, starting with the first date of a short European tour we’ve just embarked upon. Are you excited!? NO!? Well get out then, the door is open. Oh, it’s locked? That’s right, i’ve locked you in. You can’t leave. Sit down and listen prisoner...

Armed with only a toothbrush and a months supply of bullets, I boarded the bus in Glasgow feeling extremely stupid as we were taking a bus to Europe for 4 gigs in tiny venues. We do have to keep up this aura of sellouts though, so were also wearing gold suits and had brought our pet leopards along for the trip too. Our thinking was that the human mortalities inflicted by these wild animals will be far outweighed by how cool we’ll look as we roam the streets with them on leashes, whilst we kick it in our 24k gold threads. The gold suits proved uncomfortable after 5 minutes on the road though so we took them off and put on our velour lounging tracksuits. Much better. We would be traveling for approximately 20 hours to get to the first show in Amsterdam so we stocked up on goods from a reputable supermarket chain and made use of the hi-tech microwave appliance on the bus. Unfortunately, the powerful microwave radiation couldn’t infuse my meal of Quorn Balls and Spaghetti with any sort of noticeable flavour. As a side note, Quorn Balls is a great name to give a vegetarian to make fun of them. Please don’t use it against me though, don’t bite the hand that feeds.

After an afternoon Siesta and an attempt to read all the magazines that i’d accumulated over the past 2 years (managed about half a magazine), we arrived at Dover and after a textbook crossing we found ourselves in Calais. When I think about the fact that I was in one place in the morning and now I was in another place it makes my head hurt so I watched 127 Hours to take my mind off it and vowed never to let a rock fall on my arm for as long as I live. Then I slept. When I awoke we were in Amsterdam and it was light. I imagine many people have experienced that last sentence. Myself, Barry, Sam and Sam ‘Pam Johnson’ Thomson went for a walk around and decided that Amsterdam is much less like a drug dealer’s wet dream during the day - it’s very nice. We got lost trying to find Anne Frank’s house, so we decided to turn back as we are rubbish at reading maps. If only the Gestapo had done that aswell...

We were playing a venue called The Sugar Factory which is directly across from The Melkweg where we’d supported bands a couple of times in the past. Seminal DC band Scream were playing there that night - I thought about asking them “Do youze know Dave Grohl?” but decided that they definitely would because he used to play drums for them. The Sugar Factory staff seemed to be made up predominantly of English people, which made me question if we were actually in Amsterdam. After some persuading I conceded that we were definitely in Holland when a man in clogs kicked me in the face. As usual, mainland Europe puts most other territories to shame in how they treat bands, even tiny bands like ours. Our dressing room had a rider that Prince would have deemed ‘excessive’, and there was enough alcohol to satisfy a freighter of Scottish youths. I focused on the little caramel waffle things though, that’s my poison. As far as I know, you can’t overdose on caramel. Following on the food theme, I had something called Boboti from catering which was lovely apart from the mental American chef who kept touching me and asking if I was enjoying it. The fact that I was enjoying it made her hug me more.

Anyhooooo, the gig itself was ok as first shows of the year go. Sam’s guitar didn’t work for the first song which wasn’t ideal, hopefully the crowd thought it was a sort of protest against Freedom of Speech or Anti-Piracy laws. It went smoother from then on in, only 3 audience members were mauled by our leopards and I only forgot to play drums on 6 six songs. MASSIVE SUCCESS. Afterwards I celebrated with another caramel waffle thing (what are they actually called?) then I got back on the bus and read another pointless magazine. I should just throw them all away as most of the information contained within them is now irrelevant - but I am determined to soak up their useless knowledge. I resisted the urge to take to Amsterdam’s streets before bus call to source one of their special cookies as last time I had one it made me stare at a wall for about 3 hours. I don’t believe that’s the desired effect.

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Brawlin' In Leeds.

2011-12-17T07:13:00.001-08:00

The 7th of December 2011 was a special day for us. Nope, it wasn’t because it was the 1,734th day that I had successfully managed to brush my teeth without crying. And nooooooo, it wasn’t the anniversary of my illegal marriage to my third cousin Bruno (that’s the 10th of October in case you were wondering.... next year it’s our Silver Fake Wedding Anniversary. A milestone of lies). And ha ha ha, no! It’s not the day that Barry finally admitted he was actually Keanu Reeves. He’s still masquerading as ‘Barry McKenna’, even though everyone around him knows who he really is. You can’t look that much like someone and not actually be them. Plus, i’ve seen Barry answer to the name Ted ‘Theodore’ Logan on numerous occasions and he can do that thing where he mimics a guitar solo with his hands but you can actually here it. Only Keanu Reeves and the other not so famous actor from Bill & Ted can do that. See? SAME GUY.

Nope, it was a special day for us because our first ever magazine cover hit the shelves. They didn’t literally ‘hit the shelves’, they were placed professionally and neatly on the shelves by an elite team of newsagents and supermarket stock employees. The magazine in question was Kerrang! and it was a surreal experience seeing our own faces staring back at us from the magazine rack. I say staring back at us, we’re all kind of doing weird scrunched up smiles on the cover - like a tiny man was inside our respective slacks squeezing our testicles but demanding we don’t scream. Just smile. I stood by the copies for a couple of hours with one hand pointing at the magazine and the other pointing at my face but I didn’t get recognized. Barry on the other hand didn’t have to point at anything and there was a queue of people asking him to sign their copies of the The Matrix Trilogy and Speed. Someone once told me I looked like Tom Cruise but not one person wanted their copy of Top Gun signed. I’d even bought 10 copies of the seminal fighter jet movie (the only fighter jet movie?) with me incase people wanted a free copy signed. But there were no takers, those un-claimed copies will now take centre stage in my house as some makeshift stairs that lead to the top of my television. So they haven’t been bought in vain.

I should say that this whole event was taking place in Leeds, where we were playing that night. And what better place to celebrate your first magazine cover than Leeds? They have nice shops, nice people and, most importantly, a Bar Burrito - the second best Mexican food chain in the UK. So it was there we headed at lunchtime for a celebratory Mexican bundle o’ joy. I’d rank that particular burrito at about a 7.1 on the taste scale, not the best, but certainly not the worst. It was like the Everton FC of the mexican culinary world. We were playing The Cockpit, where we had played many times before - but never in the big boy room. That was where we were playing that night, and we’d sold that bitch out. Take that Leeds, selling out all over your city. Well, in mid-sized venues. The Cockpit is situated right below a train station, therefor all sorts of weird and wonderful things happen onstage to electrical instruments. Mainly it just kind of makes this noise ‘KRRRRRRRRRRIIIIGGGGHHHHRRKDPOFEJJDPJPODOJPEJKDNFOIDHF’. Very melodic. I fixed this by asking all the trains very kindly to take the night off, giving all the railway staff £30 each to go out and have a nice time and also convincing everyone who hoped to get a train home that night how nice walking in the winter time is. They all bought it.

The show itself started amazing, the whole room kicked off. In a good way. This quickly descended into a full on brawl within 30 minutes though, which is never that nice. Unless you are at WWE Royal Rumble and the brawl is happening inside the ring. If that didn’t happen you’d probably ask for your money back. But there was an actual non-fake wrestling fight taking place in the crowd, which we’ve never really experienced at one of our shows before. I dealt with it by punching each person in the crowd on the nose once so everyone felt like they’d got there monies worth, and also felt equally hard done by. After this the show resumed as normal and it was pretty great, and not a railway noise was to be heard. One of the best of the tour i'd say. A tricky disco load out after the show, as The Cockpit has club nights every night of the year and they always seem to be rammed. Apparently every night is a party in Leeds. If Paris Hilton wanted to move to the UK forever she should move to Leeds and rent a flat beside The Cockpit.

And that is all I have to say. I hope you leave feeling satisfied and also inspired. That’s all I ask.

NO PHOTOS. Here is Keanu Reeves looking exactly like Barry....

Bread Pains

2011-12-13T15:36:00.000-08:00

I’ve been eating an awful lot of bread this tour. It’s becoming quite the issue. I’m averaging at least a quarter of a baguette a day. Sometimes even a half - that’s more than a Frenchman. And don’t be fooled by the moustache and the onion necklace I like to sport, i’m not French. The moustache is a joke that’s gone badly wrong and the onions are just a great fashion accessory. Trust me, onions are going to be hot in 2012. Well, for many people they will literally be hot as they’re a key ingredient in many cooking recipes. But I mean it in the fashion term ‘hot’, you may have heard Paris Hilton use the word in this way before. Can you be addicted to bread? If you can then I may be at junkie stage, the point of no return. I try to combat it by removing most of the dough from the baguette, leaving just a crusty tube. I then offer the dough to one of the other guys as I don’t want to get a name as a waster of yeast. I have had some very strange looks as I shuffle around the room offering a lump of dough to anyone present. Although there is always someone that’s willing to take that lump? I won’t name them, but this possibly makes them even more of a pathetic bread addict than myself. A man willing to accept such a gift has a serious problem. You could say they have a ‘Yeast Infection’!? I’m sorry, that’s disgusting.

Anyway, after driving to Wrexham after our day off I awoke with an unsurprising urge to eat a baguette. On said day off in Manchester myself and Spider essentially had a date, albeit one that ended with no urge to kiss each other. We went for some Mexican food in the morning, bought some clothes, went to the cinema then went for another meal at night. It was maybe the best day off ever, if you don’t think so then you’re wrong - you weren’t there and don’t know how good it was. Anyway, my lust for bread had reached a violent level and I beat up a small child before heading into the venue to seek out a baguette. It took me a minute, but I sourced the rider and there they were... two French sticks, beckoning me in. I ripped off what equated to maybe 5/16ths of a loaf and decided what I would garnish it with once I removed its doughy insides. Being a vegetarian this didn’t equate to much, most of my sandwiches this tour have consisted of just lettuce and hummus. Occasionally it’ll also have cherry tomatoes and spinach leaves too - like a posh barbarian. On this day in Wrexham I had an exquisite Red Pepper & Sweet Chili Hummus, it really did set the taste of the bread off. After this my hunger was quenched and I had stopped hallucinating and seeing everyone around me as just loafs of bread with feet. And then it was back to bizniz as usual...

So we were in Wrexham, where we were playing a venue called Central Station. Why was it called that? Because it used to part of the railway system OBVIOUSLY. This was made apparent by the fact there were the skeletons of all the deceased train conductors of Wrexham’s locomotive past strewn across the floor of the venue. Only kidding! That would be horrific. It did used to be where the train station in Wrexham was situated though, that was no lie. I wonder why they moved it? In my head it must be something sinister, like a wolf ate a whole class of schoolchildren whilst they waited idly on the platform one day. If someone could confirm this it’d be much appreciated. Thanks. This was the smallest date of the tour, which could be explained by the fact that many people don’t seem to know that Wrexham exists. Don’t believe me? Ask the person beside you what Wrexham is and there’s a 90% chance they’ll think it’s a type of ham made by a man called W. Rex. Seriously. But Wrexham is a real place. It’s in Wales, but only just. And it was indeed where we were playing. At Central Station. Which is so called because it used to be where the train station was located. Keeping up? Didn’t think so.

Today’s showers were located at a hotel which was maybe a 10 minute drive from the venue - 10 minutes longer than I like to travel for showering. Someone from the venue drove us there after soundcheck and it dawned on us after 5 minutes that this man could actually be kidnapping us so he could hold us to ransom for £100. I don’t have that kind of money. But he was an honest man, and the hotel was real and we did get showered in it. Separately of course, we don’t believe in dual showering - it’s just wrong. Good shower today, it was a disabled room so it had a walk in shower - the epitome of easy cleansing - you just walk right in. Unless your in a wheelchair of course, which is that bathroom’s original function. But everyone can enjoy a walk in shower. If I was made King my first rule would be to make walk-in showers mandatory in every bathroom in the UK. My subjects would thank me down the line.

Back at the venue we played the gig, which you may remember is the main reason we were here. It turns out that Wrexhamites can make a lot of noise. ‘T’was a great show’ you could say if you were from Victorian England. And not a single band member died on stage, a massive result. You know the drill by now, after the show we sat about and remembered the innocent times when we used to build hay bail castles in the fields as summer turned to autumn... Oh wait, that’s not our history, that’s the memories of the cast of Little House On The Prairie. Sometimes I confuse my own life for theirs. Ok, let’s wind this up - it was back in the bus for a heroic border crossing back into England for the following days show in Leeds. The end.

My camera is sick. Here is a picture of a Wrexham having a good time...

Elbow. Great Band. Bad namers of beers.

2011-12-10T10:20:00.000-08:00

Manchester. The home of Elbow. The band, not the body part. The anatomical elbow may well have it’s history rooted in this city’s streets, but that seems very unlikely. For that to happen you’d have to think of the human body as a collection of parts that were found over the years and then put together like one of those 3D jigsaws. (As a sidenote, I love a 3D jigsaw. It combines my two favourite things: puzzles AND three dimensions). Perhaps eyeballs were first discovered in Cairo? And knees first washed up on the shores of California many moons ago? Shin bones would definitely have been discovered in Bruge, it seems like their kind of thing. See!? It sounds ridiculous. The band Elbow are definitely not ridiculous. They are possibly my favourite UK band of all time, and i’ll fight you if you don’t believe me. I don’t think you’ll hear a more honest and down to earth band around at the moment - and they even have their own beer. Do you have your own beer? I don’t think you do. If you do have your own beer, then good for you. You have something in common with Elbow, and that is always a good thing. Their beer is called ‘build a rocket boys!’ though, which would be quite annoying to ask for at a bar. If I were them I would have named it ‘Elbow Beer’. SImple and to the point. Although, people may think it’s an alcoholic beverage distilled from the joint in someone’s arm. Hhhhmmm.

But yes, we were in Manchester! But not to visit Elbow, they’re much too cool to mix with some Scottish hoodlums like us. What we need is our own beer so we’ll have something to talk to them about. It was a rather miserable day in Manchester, in word i’d describe the weather as ‘rain, with a dash of rain’. That’s six words I know, I struggle to simplify things. We were playing at the Club Academy, which was another step up for us in venue size, but 5 steps down for us in actual steps as it was in the basement of the Academy building. When you’re loading into the Academy you quite often see rats which you only usually ever see in dark alleyways in the movies. This leads me to believe that Manchester Academy is in fact a film set and all the gigs that take place are actually episodes of a reality TV show. Just like The Truman Show with Jim Carrey. If anyone can debunk or confirm this audacious claim of mine then come forward now. Otherwise it must be true. Luckily, and expectedly, it wasn’t raining inside the venue so once we’d loaded in it wasn’t so miserable. The Club Academy is quite a weird room, it’s big but the ceiling is low and there’s about 4 massive pillars in key viewing areas. I would definitely put it in the category of ‘a room that isn’t meant to be a venue, but has become one to maximize profit’. My favourite kind of venue because it is purely money driven. And I am like the Scottish Gordon Gekko without the sex addiction. Oh wait, that was Michael Douglas that had that, not his Wall Street character/alter ego.

After soundcheck myself and Sam did the most enjoyable interview we’re probably ever likely to do called the White Board Project, where you answer questions by drawing on a board using no words. Unfortunately for me I am quite pathetic at drawing but I did manage to draw quite a good gun at one point. It was good in the sense that if I were to ask someone what the object was there was a 60% they may think it’s a gun. It also seems that when I try to draw myself now I naturally sketch what looks like a vey bad caricature of Mr. Miyagi. Very confusing. Especially because I can see it happening as I draw it, but I can’t seem to stop it. To be fair, it would be good to be Mr. Miyagi - I would be able to catch flies in my hand and also be able to teach unruly kids how to do fly kicks and wax windows. Not a bad life really. After this sketchy interview (HA HA! Do you get it?), I hit the shower to cleanse my body and mind. A long time ago I spoke about my love for the Manchester Club Academy showers, I would say they are without doubt the finest showers in all of Britain. It had been a long time since i’d used them, so I was interested to see if they’d be as good as I remember them being. I walked in to the shower arena and turned the lever all the way round... and aqua heaven did commence. It’s the perfect balance between power and heat, like the shower has been engineered by Ferrari. But then, DISASTER. The shower was too powerful for it’s own good and wasn’t draining fast enough. The shower water that was rightfully mine was escaping through the shower door and into the dressing room! This resulted in some serious points off for the previously flawless water haven, when one man’s shower disrupts another man’s dressing man there are consequences. Poor show shower, poor show...

The show itself was good. There was no drum riser so I could only see the front row which usually consists of the bat-shit crazy people and that strangest of fan who stands at the front but seems to feel no emotion from the gig. So it’s always makes the gig quite strange for me because I either think that the crowd is having the greatest experience of their lives or the worst. So I think we can meet in the middle and say the show was good. That’s me at my diplomatic best. Afterwards our friend Andy Kelham came to say hello to us, he is very tall and handsome. He helped us eat our rider too, without him much of it would have gone to waste. He is like a food good samaritan. A ‘FOOD SAMARITAN’ you could say!? Do you see what I did!?

PULITZER WORTHY.

Guess what? No photos. Here's a photo of Manchester Ship Canal. Ross loves the Manchester Ship Canal...

The Coca Cola Christmas advert has been on. Call the police, it's Christmas.

2011-12-09T09:52:00.000-08:00

I’ve come to the conclusion this year that I am actually a psychopath when it comes to Christmas. I’m weirdly into it. I don’t mean it’s weird that I like Christmas, everyone likes Christmas apart from racists and reindeer, I mean that I go really weirdly over the top with my love for it. I have rituals and shit. Here’s just a selection of them:

From the 25th of November I only wear Christmas boxers, of which I have numerous pairs. Each with a different but excellent festive design on them.
From the 1st of December I scrub my iPhone music and then load it with only Christmas albums and songs. I have on estimate spent over £150 on Christmas albums, which is around £147 too many. My favourite one at the moment is Bob Dylan’s ‘Christmas In The Heart’, it’s brilliant. It features traditional Christmas songs with Bob Dylan singing on them, what more could you want?
I need to watch my 5 favourite Christmas movies before Christmas day or I believe my whole Christmas vibe will be ruined. These are, in no order: Home Alone; Home Alone 2: Lost In New York; It’s A Wonderful Life; Elf; and Die Hard.
The first time each year that I see the Coca Cola Christmas advert on television I have to tell everyone I know about it. Even some people I don’t.

See!? Absolute serial killer material. There’s actually many more but i’m scared I might get a visit from the police if I talk about Christmas much longer. Imagine what would happen to me in prison!? I’d be the human equivalent of a Fabergé egg in there, what with my perfectly structured cheek bones and winning smile. But yeah, Christmas is alright I guess...

It was with the sounds of The Beach Boy’s seminal festive album ‘Christmas With The Beach Boys’ playing in my ears that I awoke in Nottingham for the next date of the FREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE-ZE Tour. The first thing I did after awaking of course was to open my advent calendar and receive the small chocolate inside. Today’s inspiring note underneath the thin cardboard door read ‘Have you written your letter to Santa yet?’. The answer was of course, and I mailed it to him personally at his holiday home address in Malibu. I then opened the various digital advent calendars I have on my phone, then I played that day’s Angry Birds Seasons festive level. Once I completed it (three stars were achieved of course) I was informed that I would have to wait 20 hours and 14 minutes for the next level to be unlocked. I was willing to wait that long in the name of Christmas. I didn’t actually wait for that length of time of course, there was things to be dealt with in Nottingham. Mainly playing a gig, which at that moment paled in significance compared to the euphoria I was experiencing from being one Angry Bird level closer to Christmas. But I put all things festive on the back burner, in the name of music. That’s right, I like music more than Santa Claus. That may not have become apparent as I like to make fun of music most of the time. It’s a defense mechanism. A psychiatrist would probably say I do this to cope with painful memories of hearing ‘Hot Legs’ by Rod Stewart as a young boy, much too young to be entertaining Stewart’s notions about a woman with hot legs. I heartily disagree though, even with my young, feeble mind I saw through the track and was more shocked in how he managed to stretch out the final chorus of the song for approximately 400 bars. Honestly, check it out - it feels like it will never end.

We were playing at The Rescue Rooms which i’m not sure how it got it’s name. There was over 1000 rescued orphans living in an underground community beneath the stage, but I think that was just a coincidence. What was definitely apparent was the fact that it was a massive improvement on the Rock City basement where we have played tooooo many times before. There isn’t really a stage as such and it kind of feels like you’ve been told to set up at the side of the bar in the corner of the room. It does not make for a good gig. The Rescue Rooms had a proper stage and was only slightly than Rock City Basement. I wonder why we couldn’t have played here all those times before. You could say that The Rescue Rooms ‘rescued’ us from the Rock City Basement! Eh? Yeah? Do you get it!? It’s ok if you don’t, it was quite highbrow. But we had moved up in venue size and had also recorded our first sell out gig in Nottingham. Hurrah. I think this may be partly due to the fact that Rock City Basement scares people away because you can’t see anything unless you’re in the front row. Or standing on the bar. Which you’re not allowed to do.

The gig turned out to be a screamer. After the misfire that was our Shredz performance in Birmingham, this is what we needed. The place was packed and the crowd were really up for it, plus we played like we had spent at least a couple of hours learning our instruments beforehand. A great night indeed. Afterwards there was plans to go out but The Rescue Rooms was full of people that looked like they’d robbed JLS’s wardrobe and the club night next door seemed to consist exclusively of old people wearing young people’s clothing, but dancing to old people’s music. It freaked me out. All that was left was to get back on the bus and wind down with the soothing sounds of South Park’s 1999 yuletide anthem-fest ‘Mr. Hankey’s Christmas Classics’. It features the winter standards ‘Merry Fucking Christmas’, ‘Christmas Time In Hell’ and of course ‘Swiss Colony Beef Log’. Something for all the family.

No photos again. Here's a picture of the actual Sheriff of Nottingham...

Got those sell out moves like ABBA.

2011-12-08T04:06:00.000-08:00

People of the internet. I feel like we’re all the best of friends now and I would love to have you all round for a Craig Ernest Kneale specialty meal of pre-made tortellini in a pre-made jar of Tomato & Basil sauce (maybe some herbs on top for garnish) but I don’t know if I have enough seats at my house and i’d hate for some of you to have to stand. But I feel like we know each other well enough now that I can confess something... we’ve been on a tour bus since we got back to the UK. Yep, that’s right - we sold out even more than ABBA did. It’s a little known fact that ABBA started out as a shoe-gaze indie guitar band from Manchester (The name stands for Awaiting Bright Beautiful Anarchy) before they started wearing matching white jumpsuits and masqueraded as Swedish pop tarts. Honestly, look it up on Google! Oh, there’s nothing about it on Google!? That’s because ABBA are more powerful than the government - they control the internet. They’re probably manipulating what i’m writing right now without me realising - making me write things like us taking a tour bus or something silly like that. Oh wait...

So yep, old faithful Orange Van is resting in Glasgow as I type this from my bunk. It feels wrong not sitting in my seat in that seasoned road beast, the seat that faces the opposite way to the direction the vehicle was going. I shed a tear as I think of the chronic motion sickness that accompanied any journey over 2 hours. To be fair, we’ve spent four and a half years in a van - which is obviously not a literal amount of time but we’ve spent an infinitely longer amount of time in a van than we have onstage. That’s quite a scary thought. Imagine someone told you that you have to spend on average of 5 hours in a van a day, traveling backwards? Ok, it sounds fun in theory, but in practice it makes you hate that orange van more than the guy that kidnapped you when you were a child and made you dress up as goldilocks and do the Macarena for him. But somehow, there’s a massive guilt that’s spread over me since we got in this bus at the start of the tour - it feels like we’re cheating on Orange Van and I miss her. It must be Stockholm Syndrome, the circumstance when you start to feel empathy for you captor. Very much like when I started to enjoy donning that Goldilocks costume and getting warmed up to perform everyone’s favourite Spanish dance song. Anyway, let’s move on from this confession. The Orange Van isn’t dead yet, she’s just taking a winter break.

The next show was in Birmingham, where we had a day off beforehand. Myself and Spider got up earlier than necessary on that day and went to the cinema very early to see 50/50, a comedy about cancer. That’s right, a comedy about cancer. For the record, the cinema in Birmingham is approximately £1.50 cheaper than Glasgow. I’m moving to Birmingham. The accent is funnier and and the cinema cheaper. We also perused it’s German Christmas market and came to the conclusion that all German Christmas markets consist of an endless line of three different types of stalls: German sausage stalls, scented candle stalls and always one Haribo stall. Just this repeated over the course of 100 stalls. Germany has got the UK city centre markets sown up with their repetitive goods. That said though, whenever you see a Christmas market you are, by law and instinct, required to look around it. Try and just walk past one without looking it - it’s impossible. I saw a wee guy in Birmingham get shot by the police because he refused to look into one of the many candle stalls. Honestly.

The following day came eventually as this is how the concept of time works. At first it got closer in seconds, then minutes, then hours from the point I began counting until it was Friday and it was show day in Birmingham. Time is really weird when you start to really think about it. I won’t discuss it any further here as i’m worried that it may cause my brain to implode and this exquisite piece of writing will never see the light of day. Well, whoever eventually finds me lying here in front of my laptop with an imploded head will see what’s written on the screen and it will probably eventually get used as my emotional epitaph. Unless my laptop battery has ran out by then, in which case this will have been typed out in vain. So we will discuss the intricacies of time no longer. You may know that we have self prescribed our band as having a curse in Birmingham, due in part to the fact that we never seem to have good shows here. I think this may be mainly due to the fact that we always play badly here, which isn’t really a curse as much as us being sloppy. This looked like it might change though as the show was another sell out. That’s right, we’re selling out all over the place this tour. It’s like when P. Diddy comes to town except we’ve got much less money and bitches.

I got to watch all of Dinosaur Pile-Up’s set before we played, they absolutely ripped it and the crowd seemed really up for it. The curse looked to be broken, so much so that some people were break dancing in the dressing room just before we went out - It was... regrettable. We got on the stage... and it happened again. This time something happened with Barry’s guitar that meant he had to stop playing during the first song in a part where it really is integral that his guitar is there. The resulting sound can only be described as a Shredz moment. If you don’t know what Shredz is then look it up on YouTube, pick any video and it’ll sound kind of like what our opening number sounded like in Birmingham. Only worse as it isn’t a video made my an American with a talent for manipulating live music videos to make bands look bad. We did that without his help. I think somehow we got away with it though, and the rest of the set was then spent trying to claw back to try and convince people that we aren’t actually imposter’s who were trying to sabotage the gig. I think we just about managed it. The crowd were amazing though, one of the best reactions we’ve ever had - I think that’s what kept us going. The curse of Birmingham had struck again however and we left with our tails between our legs. By tails I don’t mean penises. They’re always between our legs, but aren’t really long enough to be considered as a tail. We retreated onto the tour bus to cry into our gold pillows....

It seems that my camera will remain in it's pouch this run, here's a picture of the first result in Google when you type in 'Birmingham Magician'. Loot at him entertaining that crowd...

Slashed by a Jellyfish.

2011-12-07T12:37:00.000-08:00

Brighton is by the sea. Seaside towns always have a slightly different feel to places that are not beside the sea. They’re more relaxed and move at a bit of a slower pace. I think this is because the residents are in constant fear of being eaten by a sea mammal so act very relaxed so they don’t anger any creatures of the aquatic. Can you blame them? If there’s anything I learned from Jaws it’s that badly animated fake sharks can eat a man whole. And they don’t seem to need a reason for doing it either - they just like it. If I was a badly animated fake shark I would probably be a bit angry that I wasn’t around nowadays with the advances in CG animation, but I wouldn’t alleviate this bitterness by eating a fully grown man. That’s just greedy and unnecessary. So yeah, imagine being in your house in Brighton one night and a whale kicks your door in holding a knife!? It would be absolutely terrifying.

For this reason alone, i’m glad I don’t live in Brighton. But it is where we were playing next! Vintage opening paragraph, it’s set this whole piece up gloriously. In the words of me, “Give me a Pulitzer”. We’ve only played Brighton once before, for reasons that are vague and non-existent. It just played out that way. When we did it was September 2008, it was our very first headline tour and we played a venue called the Engine Rooms which is now closed down. That engine finally gave out it seems. On that night there was approximately 30 people in the room which we saw as a massive achievement as people had to leave their houses at night to get to the venue, most likely in constant fear of being lynched be a crab or sea urchin hiding down an alley. Also, a few nights before that show we played to zero people in Northampton so this felt like our Wembley. I can’t remember much about the show, only that two members of the audience were attacked on their way home by a guy with 8 tentacled arms. They couldn’t see his face though, he had a balaclava on and didn’t seem to have any human features? The case goes unsolved to this very day, the only lead the police have was a trail of slime leading back to the sea...

This time we were playing a venue called The Haunt which had a silhouette of an angular ghost on the front door. Do you see the connection!? I could tell this place was going to have much more luck than Engine Rooms, they had their whole name and front door artwork nailed down. Exquisite work. Didn’t see any ghosts inside though, very disappointing. I was hoping that Casper was going to be a stagehand or at least see Patrick Swayze working behind the bar.... For the record, that is in reference to the fact he was in the movie Ghost where he played a ghost and not the fact that he is now a real ghost because he is dead. I would never diss the Swayze in that way. Anyway, there were no ghosts - GET OVER IT. The weather in Brighton could be described with one word: WIND. Crazy winds, the kind that they use in movies when a ship is going through a storm. Except we weren’t on a ship and there was no rain, just wind. It was so strong that I actually got blown all the way back to London during load in and had to get a taxi from there to get me back to the venue. It was pure expensive and the taxi driver didn’t believe me when I told him what happened, he just kept calling me an ‘Irish Cockney Liar’. This made no sense but I didn’t correct him because he was from London and probably knew how to cut my face off in one swift movement using his cab keys.

This time there were 10 times as many people as the last time we played in Brighton, which was mental as we hadn’t been there in over three years. Obviously news of how legendary that Engine Rooms show was must have spread along the pier, or perhaps the police have started a crackdown on all the sea creature attacks that have plagued the coast for centuries. I did sea a pamphlet issued by Brighton & Hove Police that showed all their most wanted criminals - not a human face among them, just weird looking creatures with tiny eyes. Oh wait, those were humans - someone has reliably informed me that this is what happens to your face when you turn to crime and substitute food for drugs. The show went well, the crowd were a little reserved at first, possibly because that fear of being attacked by a shark never fully goes away. By the end of our set I think we’d won them over though, and maybe, just maybe, we’d given them the courage to stand up to that shark next time it approaches them as they walk home. This would be false courage of course, a human is no match for a shark unless you’re Richard Dreyfuss or Roy Schneider and you have a pressurized oxogen tank at hand. Oh, and you also have to be in a Hollywood movie for this to happen too. Sorry.

And that was the story of Brighton and the gig. Thank you.

Noooo photos again. Here's a picture of what comes up in Google if you type in 'Ghost' and Brighton'...

Classic Albums: The Smurfs Go Pop.

2011-12-06T08:34:00.000-08:00

We’ve been to London many times in our 4 and a half year career as a band. Many of these visits, especially the ones in the early days, were mostly terrible. We’d drive all the way from Glasgow in our old van Black Beauty (because it was black y’see?) and visit various facets of the music industry who would tell you lies to your face with a smile whilst shiny gold discs sat on the wall behind them. I think those gold discs had hypnotic qualities because we’d take it all in and think ‘Yes, this person is the king of the music industry! Next stop, the gold limo shop to buy our fleet of limos.’ We quickly realised that these trips were almost totally pointless, and also made us dislike music a little bit. As a fan of music since I got ‘The Smurfs Go Pop’ on cassette tape as a young boy, this was a disappointing reality. I assumed that the record industry was full of happy Smurfs & Smurfettes, deciding in tiny offices what songs to cover in shrill Smurf voices on the next compilation. When I found out there was no Smurfs and in there place were quite a lot of people with pound signs instead of eyes. And guess where we were playing next? LONDON. Yeeeeeah!

I should say that since then we have managed to find a group of people who actually seem to like music and still care about it. They still have human eyes aswell, which is much nicer than looking at a pound sign which is nice and curvaceous at first but only has one look which is this: £££. Anyway, the first thing we saw in London as we stepped onto it’s streets was a dog poo. It was like a metaphor for all those early visits. Tonight we were playing at the Islington Academy, which is in Islington, which is London. The show was sold out which felt like a massive achievement for us as it’s taken us a long time to win people over down here - I think they perhaps thought that Sam’s accent was some sort of regional joke for the first few years. We’d played the Islington Academy before, I think around February 2008, but it was supporting The Spill Canvas in the bar Academy. Which is a bar that they like to pretend is a venue too. I remember we had to come onto stage via a tiny door which was maybe tall enough for a Smurf to get through (look - bringing the Smurf chat back again, i’m always tying the story together, always thinking). It looked like we were coming out as guests on a children’s television show. This is not the image we were hoping to convey that night.

This time we were playing in the big boy room, where I also have a memory of playing the Twin Atlantic classic tour game ‘Bouncy Ball’ on the dance floor of that room before that fateful night with The Spill Canvas. ‘Bouncy Ball’ basically involved us bouncing many bouncy balls at each other. As you can imagine, it was the pinnacle of fun. The game started when we tried to buy a bouncy ball at a service station one night and the lid fell off the machine, giving us access to UNLIMITED bouncy balls. Well, there was a limit as the machine was not made of magic, eventually they would have ran out - but when does a man need more than 50 bouncy balls in his life? I wish someone had convinced us to take more that night, as we managed to lose every bouncy ball over the course of the next few months. And with that... the dream died. So there were some pained memories when I first walked back into the room. So many good bouncy balls... one even had a toy dog inside it. I loved that toy dog.

The emotional rubber sphere pain I was feeling was quelled by the fact that there was a Chilango literally a bouncy ball’s throw away from the venue. Chilango, for those who haven’t been enlightened, is a Mexican food establishment who specialize in explosive taste. One bite of their vegetarian burrito and any problem you’re experiencing in your life will magically go away - even if it’s a really big problem like you’re in love with your pet cat or you’ve ran over a child. Honestly, try one - the rice and beans are coated with a secret ingredient that I like to call ‘good vibes’. This tortilla wrapped bundle of joy set us up nicely for the gig, and a memorable one it was. We’ve had our fair share of bad headline shows in London too, two that come immediately to mind were our very first one when Sam tried to jump on my kit and missed and just smashed right through them, and the first time we headlined the Barfly when half the PA didn’t work. We don’t sound very good in mono. But tonight felt triumphant, the atmosphere in the room was amazing and it’s the first time a show in London has felt like we’re playing in Scotland. It felt good. The PA worked and Sam didn’t try to kamikaze through the drums either. Both were key factors in the show being a success I feel.

I’ve noticed that this whole entry has a bit of a nostalgia feel about it? I must be getting old. If I start to forget things, this blog will be a great way to remember how much of a great guy I am. Looks, intellect, brawn. This blog shows I have it all. And I tie all those perfect attributes together with the greatest character trait of all... Modesty.

I have neglected my camera yet again, please accept this picture of an old man smoking a cigarette as way of an apology....

Welsh Rarebits

2011-12-02T04:56:00.000-08:00

So, our American tour was over and we got home with just about enough time to wash our socks and say hello to our nearest and dearest before we were back out in the UK on our last headline tour of the year, and our coldest to date. Ross had, from nowhere, come up with the genius idea of calling the run of shows ‘The FREE-ZE Tour’. Because we have an album called ‘Free’ innit? And the tour would take place in winter, which is usually very cold - ‘freezing’ you might say. Get it? Don’t worry if you don’t get it, I had to have it run by me many times before I understood it. Once I did though, I didn’t stop laughing for a full week because the pun was so brilliant. I had to actually go into hospital because I couldn’t get food to digest as I kept laughing it up. The doctor told me to leave as I kept laughing in his face as he tried to diagnose me. “But, don’t you get the pun!?” I screamed as I was carried out the door by two burly security guards. That doctor will eventually click on why it’s so funny and when he does come laughing to me about it i’ll have no sympathy for him. Or any other puns. I’ll maybe just throw some grapes down his throat so he can feel my pain as they come straight back up as he laughs away in pain.

I won’t actually do that, i’m not a violent person. And I really like grapes so I wouldn’t be just throwing them wantonly towards people’s mouths. A mouth is a small target and i’ve got rubbish aim. If I miss and the grape hits the ground it’s game over. You can’t eat a ground grape - that’s how you get the black plague.

We actually had a day and a half at home but this was spent relearning all the songs that we hadn’t played since our last headline tour which ended at the start of June. Within a week of not playing a song we pretty much have to relearn it, it’s quite magical to behold. But not the good magical. These practices went rather badly because a) One of the pedals on Barry’s comedy sized pedal board broke which meant all his magic powers were gone and we had to wait for it to be fixed so he could be the delay/loop wizard we all know and love. And b) we had rashly decided to attempt to do our own monitors this tour after watching Middle Class Rut do it. Our tour manager Andy ‘Daddy’ Dunlop would be manning them at the shows in case anything drastically went wrong, but I was worried that if I asked for the bass guitar up during the gig he would come over and lift Ross off the ground. Only joking Andy, I know that you wouldn’t do that. Ross would attack you. And he’s got some crazy fighting moves. So we only managed to run the set once which didn’t go horribly, but it was definitely not vintage. And everyone knows that vintage is the pedestal that all bands wish to reach.

We left Glasgow that night and using some of the scientific processes used in physics to propel ourselves and our transport in a forward motion we arrived the following morning in Cardiff for the first date. We were playing at the University, which meant there would maybe be some people who would be interested in the rules of physics. The venue was actually called CF10, which I think may have been part of the University Union’s post code. GENIUS MAN. The dressing room area was behind the Union bookshop and we shared the staff bathroom, which was also where the shower was located (a bathroom being a common place to find a shower in my experience). While I was taking a shower a member of the bookshop staff came into the bathroom to do the other bodily function that isn’t a urination and it was one of the most unsettling moments of my life. Having a thin shower wall being the only thing that separates you from watching a man/woman/beast exorcising some food from their body is perhaps more mentally scarring than watching someone get stabbed. Or being stabbed yourself. Why could they not just wait 5 minutes? Have they no shame? I hope these questions can be answered for me one day. Otherwise I fear I will never sleep again.

We have Dinosaur Pile-Up and Arcane Roots out with us this tour which is very exciting, we’re big fans of both bands so it’s very nice to get to watch bands you admire every night. I did just that before we played and got the impression that the venue may be roughly as warm as the sun. The gig was sold out which was amazing, but it would have been nice if the crowd could have all worn ice-cube suits like i’d specified and supplied at the entrance. Not one person had taken me up on my offer/demand. So when we headed out to play the wave of heat hit is immediately and it was unpleasant, like waking up with an animal in your bed that you’ve never seen before. The heat coupled with the fact we were kind of learning the set as we played meant it was a bit of a slog, but I think we got away with it. The crowd were great, but that is what we’ve come to expect from Cardiff crowds - warm, good time people. I thought about getting another shower after the gig to replenish all the fluids from my body that were now in a neat puddle around the drums, but I was so worried that another toilet showdown might take place that I decided it would be much nicer just to die of dehydration instead.

The end.

I didn't take any photos today so here's a picture of a Welsh Terrier...

How Backstreet Are You?

2011-11-29T12:07:00.001-08:00

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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Santa Claus: The Festive Master Criminal

2011-11-28T12:35:00.000-08:00

Winter is just better isn’t it? Well, in my opinion it is. And you should also think this way too. There’s more clothing options, your skin doesn’t burn when you go outside (this doesn’t necessarily apply to Scotland) and your house gets visited during the night by an old man bearing presents. Don’t worry, he’s not a criminal. I know, he wears red velvet, has a beard, hangs about with reindeer and he’s always asking children if they’re ‘naughty or nice’.........

.....Wait, perhaps the police should look into this guy’s background? He could be the world’s most successful criminal mastermind, a pedophile masquerading as a toy maker. Plus, i’ve seen Elf and those elves in the workshop were making counterfeit Etch-A-Sketches. It’s time to lift the lid on this operation - it’s gone on too long and there’s too many chimneys getting damaged in the process. The man has an insatiable appetite for cookies. If he does visit every house in one night he’s probably eating over 4 billion cookies. How he’s still alive is a miracle. My guess is he stays in shape by molesting the elves (he’s probably mistaking them for children). I love Winter but I love justice more - get this festive deviant behind bars.

As if I have to even mention it now, that was another seamless transition as i’m writing this right at the start of the season known as WINTER. Pulitzer judges, how much longer do I have to prove to you that i’m good for a prize!? Just read that first section back and then post that prize to me, come on. Anyway... it’s winter and we were heading to Vermont. Why? To play a gig of course. You know how this works by now, I basically embellish things for about 1000 words a day, and then describe the gig for about 50 of these words to mask the fact that being on tour mainly involves traveling places or looking at videos of people falling over on YouTube. Or videos of funny dogs, I love watching videos of funny dogs. A friend told me that Vermont is very famous for it’s apple juice? Perhaps some of the day would be spent drinking apple juice.

To be more accurate, we were playing in South Burlington, Vermont. We’ve never been there before, or Vermont either. So this would be a new experience, like being attacked by a bear. I was confident this visit to a new state would be much more enjoyable than that though. On the way there perhaps the funniest thing i’ve ever seen/heard happened when Barry shouted for Ross in a petrol station even though Ross was right beside him. Right, that doesn’t sound funny at all now but I assure you it was comedy gold when it happened. You had to be there right!? ROSSSSSSSSS!!!! Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha! Brilliant. We were playing at a venue called Higher Ground, which as far as I could tell was on a relatively flat plain. Another falsely named venue. The room itself was within regulations: There was a stage, there was ground where humans could view from and there was a sound system for those same humans to have an aural listening experience, mixed by the three touring sound engineers of the respective bands.

Our show was actually pretty terrible, perhaps the worst of the tour. I think the man on monitors may have been wearing boxing gloves as any adjustment he made on the monitor board resulted in whatever instrument you’d ask for either being turned up to brain melting level or pulled out completely - or perhaps his board consisted of just on and off switches? I hate to blame sound on how we play, but that kind of set a precedent for the show. I did also play like my limbs were made of string, it was definitely a joint effort between sound and general bad musicianship. Afterwards I tried to console myself with the fact that this is perhaps the only venue in America that provides catering, but the vegetarian option consisted of tofu (the world’s most tasteless object) in a curry that seemed to be missing the vital ingredient of any flavour. I am complaining too much, it was just one of those days. We’ll just have to make the last show in Philadelphia count even more.

And I didn’t even get any apple juice either.

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I'm bringing back my old words.

2011-11-24T08:40:00.000-08:00

‘Cawwwfeeee’.

This is how people from New York City say the word coffee. Kind of sounds like a parrot asking for a coffee. When I was very young I had my own word for coffee too because I was still learning to speak and decided that I would break the basic rules of language by making up my own versions of words. So, coffee became ‘Foggee’ (Fogg-ee). I had my own word for cupboard too. Wait for it... ‘Buggard’ (Bugg-ard). As I was so young I didn’t actually ever write the words down so i’m using my partially functioning adult brain to produce correct spellings for these creations, the pronunciations are in brackets for fans of that kind of thing. There were more original words but they have been lost in the ether of time. I am thinking of bringing these alternatives back so I can resurrect my renegade child-self. Somewhere along the line this rebellious young boy started to use the boring ‘conventional’ words for objects, and that is a sad thing. If New Yorkers can use a bird sound at the beginning of the ‘conventional’ word for the popular hot beverage, then why can’t I change it to sound like the mist that settles on a cold autumn day? Now, get me a Foggee or i’ll smack your head off that Buggard.

(Note: That last sentence was written purely for effect. I’m not a violent man and i’m actually not much of a coffee fan. I’ll take a water if it’s not too much inconvenience? If you’re busy i’ll grab it myself. Cheers.)

So, it was off to New York City for the next date of what the papers are now calling the ‘Craig Ernest Kneale Vintage Times Tour 2k11’. Do you see the link from the first paragraph now? In case you’ve missed it I very craftily made reference to the way many a native New Yorker would pronounce the word for coffee, and now i’m talking about being in New York City! It’s ok if you did miss it, we are dealing with some very advanced creative writing here - Pulitzer prize grade quality you could say. New York City is of course the best city in the world, officially. There is no actual official record of this, but everyone knows it and Robert De Niro AND David Bowie both live here. They are both masters of their craft and therefor must live in the best place in the world. Plus, where else in the world can you get mugged, get offered tickets for a comedy show by a drug dealer AND see a cowboy in pants playing a guitar all in the one day? I rest my case. Actually, i’ve never seen that singing cowboy guy - is he still alive? I’m assuming he may have died of either a) hypothermia or b) embarrassment.

We were actually in New York for two a couple of days before the show but most of it was spent doing press stuff and introducing ourselves to people who have much more money than we do. Press stuff does not literally mean pressing stuff, like buttons or clothes. Although that could have been good. The highlight was definitely going back to visit a man called Eddie who is possibly a millionaire and interviews bands from his apartment which is in the sky because it’s about 40 floors above the ground. I swear that there were planes at the same level at us - I looked into one and the pilot gave me a nod and a thumbs up as if to say “Good work on being so high up in the air but not in a plane”. That didn’t actually happen but if it did it would have been entirely justified. The other highlight was going to the Natural History Museum for an interview and seeing a real piece of the moon and touch a real dinosaur skull. The moon was much less cheese like and glow-y than it looks in the sky, and the dinosaur skull kind of felt like the fingerprints of one million greasy tourists. Which is just what I expected a dinosaur skull to feel like. I also saw a cavewoman set of boobs and a caveman child (cave boy!?) with a weird penis. They weren’t cutting about the museum of course, they were merely cast models to recreate a bygone era. And era where breasts hung out and private parts looked weird.

When the show itself came around we were all slightly drained but excited to play after 3 days off, which feels like forever when you’re in the rhythm of a tour. We were playing Webster Hall, which is the first place we played the first time we were in New York just over 2 years ago. This time we were playing the big room though as AWOLNATION are becoming big business here. The main room was great, another old theatre style place. America has a knack of preserving these theaters, they should get some sort of International award for it. I’d present it of course because I just made it up. My co-presenter would be Carlos Tevez because he is no stranger to theatrics - ha ha! Get it? Theater-ics. GENIUS CRAIG, GENIUS. The show went great, one of the best of the tour - and as usual nobody died on stage. Always a massive bonus. My good friend Chris from back home was at the show because he now lives in New York like an official American. I didn’t recognise him at first because he didn’t have on his regulation spectacles, his pink Duff trainers or the emo haircut that he sported 5 years ago when he still lived in Glasgow. This was a poor reason for not recognising him as I have seen him many times without glasses and he hasn’t had that haircut for 5 years and nobody wears the same trainers for that amount of time. Unless they are indestructible titanium trainers which would be very heavy and unfashionable.

And that was the story of New York City, a romantic tale with a happy ending.

GET ME A FOGGEE YA BUGGARD.

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Phantom Sport Limbs.

2011-11-22T16:23:00.000-08:00

What would be worse: To be born with a rugby ball for a head or to have hockey stick arms? This is the kind of sporting goods nightmare that keeps me up for hours at night. Here’s another one: Would it be worse to have golf tees for hair or boxing gloves for hands? This second query is obvious, It would be much worse to have boxing glove hands. It would be near impossible to handle an umbrella or pour skittles into your hand effectively. Also, golf tee hair would be trendy and new age. They could bring out a range of hair products in conjunction with wood varnish companies. It would harold a new age of hair care, the possibilities are endless. But usually, the questions that present themselves are much harder to answer as most people would rather have the normal human body parts than have to substitute something away for sporting equipment. It is maybe man’s greatest fear... to have snooker cues for legs. And not the fold away versions, the solid kind so you would either have to stand up or lie flat down. No in between. Does anyone else have these nightmares? No? Me neither. I only wrote this because I could think of nothing to say. That’s Pulitzer Prize winning honesty.

The next stop on our magical mystery tour (it was no mystery, we all knew where we were going) was Rochester, New York. That’s different than the New York from ‘Home Alone 2: Lost In New York’ and ‘Home Alone 6: Lost In New York Again With No Filming Budget’. That’s New York City, where all the magic in the world happens. Rochester is in upstate New York - where murders happen. I don’t actually know that, i’d just heard that upstate New York was scary. But then Glasgow is meant to be scary too, and I walk about that place like i’m king of the jungle. Literally. I wear a t-shirt that says ‘King of the Jungle 2k11’ and a collection of exotic animals follow me everywhere. It’s really quite something. My only other experience of upstate New York was when we played Buffalo last year and me and Ross went looking for food late at night and every corner looked like where a potential rape attack could take place at any moment. It didn’t happen obviously, or if it did the attacker was very quick and I don’t remember it.

When we got into Rochester my fear of it being scary was overtaken by the very real sensation that it was fecking cooooooooold. It was hat and gloves weather, of that there was no question. Unfortunately I only had fingerless gloves with me, which are about as useful as shoes made from smoke. I say this like I was outside for ages, it was only about 30 seconds and my fingers warmed up within about 1 minute of going inside. But still, it was an emotionally damaging experience - sometimes I still get a chill in my fingertips and it brings memories of that icy 30 seconds flooding back... terrifying. The venue was called Water Street Music Hall, which had half of it’s name right. It was definitely a hall for music but the street outside was not made of, or filled with, water. Misleading, we’d packed scuba gear and traded all of our instruments for waterproof versions at much cost and effort. In spite of this, I liked the venue - it had character. This is another way of saying it was old. But it’s the same thing.

The show went well but the crowd seemed too into it if that could ever be a bad thing? It kind of felt liked canned applause, as if the people in the crowd weren’t actually there. This is the only time I will probably ever be confused about people clapping. The show was put on by a radio station so before AWOLNATION (honestly, it’s illegal to put in lowercase) played they did an introduction that descended into pantomime call and response stuff from the radio guys and the crowd. Strange. Things got much worse when they started playing, myself and Barry witnessed a girl get fingerbanged on the balcony by a man who had perhaps 4 litres of whiskey. And an old woman standing beside us took her top off whilst a man who was perhaps in his 70s jumped up and down beside her. I feared for his health. It was an experience i’m not sure i’ll ever recover from. In the space of 30 minutes I witnessed things I thought i’d never have to see. A traumatic night, and Rochester had fulfilled it’s legacy of being scary. But not because of murderers.

I’ll leave you with this: Imagine having cricket balls. By this I mean testicles that looked like the spheres used for the gentleman’s sport. Not the genitalia of the insect, that would just be silly.

P.S. The day after this show we had to go to Cleveland, Ohio for press, which is where the Rock & Roll Hall Of Fame is situated. This will probably be the only time we ever legitimately get to put ‘Rock & Roll’ into the Sat Nav. It was as much of a thrill as you would imagine it would be.

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Diesel Disaster.

2011-11-19T05:44:00.000-08:00

Before the show in Pittsburgh we had a van disaster. And i’m ashamed to say that it was perhaps my fault. I know, sometimes even the great ones show signs of being human. I say it was perhaps my fault, i’ll let you decide my level of guilt - let’s stage our own version of Judge Judy where everyone is the Judge and I am both the witness and the accused. Let me paint the scene: It was directly after the previous show in Kentucky and we’d stopped beside our hotel to fuel up (nothing completes a good gig more than a bit o’ fueling), which also happened to be the only station that had the Ultra Low Sulfur Highway Diesel Fuel (or just Diesel as non Americans call it) that we required. Our fuel card didn’t work at the pump so Andy went inside to pay the non-futuristic way using the attendant, who lit up the green pump and I went for it - fueled my heart out. It was a textbook fuel up, one of my best. There wasn’t even any drips when I put the pump back in it’s holster (easy now), and it had filled up quicker than I thought so we got to claim back a whole 7 DOLLARS. It was a memorable moment. Once we pulled out of the garage though the van started to start acting a little strange? It was kind of acting like it was a kangaroo, and not a piece of engineering. As we got close to the hotel it gave up on us completely... and then it hit us. “Craig, did you fill it with Diesel?”, “Of course” was my retort. “Are you sure?”, “As sure as I know i’m devilishly handsome” was my hilarious reply. It turns out I may not be as devilishly handsome as I thought, as I had filled up the van with some grade A unleaded petroleum.

.... So my defense is as follows - when a pump is green it usually means diesel and when someone lights that same pump up it’s impossible not to follow the shiny light. I am merely a vessel that follows the instructions lain out in front of me. I’ll entrust you, the world, to come to a fair and right decision. My only question is this: If you saw something light up in front of you, would you too not also pick it up and pour loads of it into your van without checking what it says? I think we all know what the answer would be, and it rhymes with BES.

Luckily we had a day off after this ‘mistake’ so we spent it at the hotel whilst the van got it’s own version of a colonic irrigation. I think it worked out much more expensive than a human version of this procedure though, and it came back smelling like mechanics. But true disaster had been averted, and we set off for Pittsburgh the following morning. Fast forward 5 hours, and we there in the heart of Pittsburgh - the magic of travelling. That was like time travel for anyone reading this, you got to miss out the boring part in the middle. We’d played Pittsburgh before but it must have been on the outskirts as we drove through a vast metropolis just before we reached the venue. The venue itself was part of the Pittsburgh Steelers stadium (I think they may be some sort of thief outfit, and they keep all their swag in this massive stadium?) and was called Stage AE. Guess what the AE stood for? American Eagle Outfitters. Preppy to the maximum. Everyone inside had cardigans over their shoulders and were wearing boat shoes. Not really. The place looked brand new though, which also made it seem slightly soulless. The stage was one of those corner of the room vibes, and was roughly the size of a small child if it were to lay flat on the ground.

The show was good fun though, Sam had two beers before the show so was wrecked and this made him inhabit the body of Axl Rose when Guns N’ Roses were playing stadiums in the glory days. He was screaming something about rock and roll that the American crowd seemed to understand much more than his Scottish band mates who were audibly closer to him. He ended the gig by getting naked and diving into the crowd. Not really. Afterwards we went to a ‘Scottish’ themed bar called The Tilted Kilt which it seems may have been opened by someone who has never been to Scotland and perhaps and has confused Scotland with ‘America’ or ‘England’. Cue a very American looking menu and pictures of Sid & Nancy on the wall, aswell as a Union Jack? The most Scottish thing about the place was maybe the fact that the waitresses were wearing tartan mini-skirts or that there were something called Irish Nachos on the menu (which were just normal nachos, and Ireland is also not in Scotland). To top it off, their attempt at a Scottish flag outside appeared to be a Jamaican flag with a horse on it. It felt like I was back home but actually further away than ever before.

I got back to catch the end of AWOLNATION’s set, where a stage invasion took place. There was a girl on the stage who was dancing, but her dance moves consisted of what appeared to be her shagging the air, for the rest of the set. Barry confirmed to me that she’d been doing this the whole gig. Crazy times. I also met a woman backstage just as we were leaving who’d been at the venue the whole day and asked me what I was doing in the venue. When I told her and asked her the same question she said she did whatever she wanted. When I asked if she worked at the venue she said no. Stage AE, there may be a crazy lady that lives in your venue. She had a MacBook Pro and iPhone so she is clearly powerful - APPROACH WITH CAUTION.

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The invention of the world's most economical gun.

2011-11-18T06:45:00.000-08:00

Kentucky. Is that where Kentucky Fried Chicken comes from? It would make sense that it would. I don’t eat there and am therefor unsure of it’s history although I would imagine the majority of it’s patrons haven’t investigated it’s origins either. The ‘History of Fast Food’ seems a very niche Mastermind topic. What does Kentucky fried mean anyway? Is it different from normal frying? Perhaps there’s a special Kentucky frying pan they use, made from the foundations the state was built on. Or perhaps they have to recite a special frying rhyme to seal in that original flavaaaaa. Or does it mean that the chicken is fried in Kentucky then shipped over? This would be mental but would not surprise me. Perhaps it means nothing, all I know is that I will never eat there. I don’t care how powerful this ‘Colonel’ chap is, I just don’t trust him. I think it’s his little beard and glasses. Why am I bringing up an establishment and it’s origins when I have no interest in it!? Because we were playing in Kentucky. SEAMLESS. Give me that Pulitzer, i’m ready for it.

The journey from Michigan to Kentucky was smooth, we didn’t pass through any time zones (I like to call them time warps so it feels like we’re in the future) and we even had time to stop at an American equivalent of Pound Land. Except not everything was a pound and it was called Dollar Tree. Not everything was a dollar either, and there were no trees, fake or real, inside. I overlooked this blatant false advertising and got a packet of sugar free coconut cookie for 99c. They tasted exactly how a normal coconut cookie would taste like, except all the flavour had been extracted from it, leaving just a tasteless mass of crumbs behind. Mmmmmmmmmm! Don’t go to Dollar Tree, only disappoint awaits. We crossed into Ohio before we got to Kentucky, the state line between the two is actually midway across the Mississippi river (or the Ohio river, it’s one of the two). There’s a bridge obviously, we didn’t have to wade through it. There is something quite exciting about crossing state lines, I think it’s because I imagine myself to be a fugitive and crossing a state line means i’m free. I don’t know why I think that, because i’m not a fugitive. And you have to cross into another country to escape that countries federal law. I just like it ok? And crossing a state line on a bridge is the holy grail of state crossing.

(Here’s a side note... What state laws to people abide to if they’re on the Mississippi river at the stretch where it becomes the border of Ohio and Kentucky? Because you know that some states still have crazy laws like it’s illegal to burn a child with a cigarette on a Tuesday? Or how you can’t be over 6 feet tall in December? Or how it’s illegal to own a weasel and a hawk if you also like disco music? People on that river aren’t going to know if they’re allowed to do those things or not, as they’re straddling both states. This should be rectified. Thank you.)

The exact area we were playing was Newport, Kentucky which is misleading because as far as I could see it was no longer new or still a port. They should change the name to Not-a-Port, Kentucky. Then it would be true. The venue we were playing was called The Southgate House, and it actually used to be a big house. The guy that invented the Tommy Gun was born here, the most violent of all the guns. When you absolutely need to kill everyone in the room, and also be smoking a cigar at the same time. Without this guy there would have been no gangsters, as everyone knows that gangsters were born when two Tommy Guns made love and gave birth to the Godfather. Back then he was called the Godbaby. True story. The place still resembles a house at the front, it just has a big venue in it aswell now. If only Mr. Tommy Gun had a venue to play in when he was around, perhaps he wouldn’t have created such a destructive toy to play with. In my head, he successfully engineered the gun as a small boy, and was mass manufacturing them by the time he turned 10.

The show was definitely the quietest of the tour so far, but the people that were there were in good spirits. We had a great show, and nobody fired Tommy Gun rounds at us at any point. I was expecting the crowd to be dressed like gangsters and molls, but obviously times have moved on. Disappointing. Just as we finished a massive storm hit, causing our tour manager to claim that we should get all our stuff out now as the roof was about to collapse. This proved to be off the mark, as the roof didn’t cave in. Not even a little bit. But everyone had their Tommy Guns ready to shoot at the rain if it tried to get in. Afterwards we crossed over into Cincinnati to get food but everywhere apparently closes at 9pm there on a Monday. DISASTER. Even Bootsy Collin’s place was closed - I assumed Bootsy’s place would be open all night, and he’d be there belting out life changing funk bass lines as you tucked into Bootsy’s signature Spaghetti Alfredo (Secret ingredient: Funk). NOPE. We eventually found a place called Newport Pizza directly beside the venue and went quite overboard with our gratitude in them being open. It wasn’t like they’d stayed open for us, they just didn’t close at 9. I think they actually probably thought about closing early just to get these scary men with thick weird accents out of their shop. To be fair, if I was from Kentucky and three guys came in out of the rain shouting “ARRRRRR UUZZZZZZZZZZZ STILLL OOPPPPPPEENNN?” i’d definitely close early too.

Didn’t see a single Kentucky Fried Chicken when I was here either, so I still don’t know what that name means.

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The perks of owning a great hotel.

2011-11-17T07:25:00.001-08:00

A hotel treat awaited us after the show in Milwaukee, in the shape of a Hyatt. A Hyatt is like the Ferrari of hotels, apart from it doesn’t look best in red and it isn’t from Italy. And it won’t break down after it’s done 100 miles. Although, If you own one it will definitely increase your chances with da ladiez though. And if you book into one you are essentially living there for the night aren’t you? Therefor, for the duration of our stay, we owned a Hyatt. Our stay was only 8 hours unfortunately, as we were back on the road the next morning. But that didn’t mean we didn’t take advantage of the perks a Hyatt owner can enjoy, the main one being a cereal bowl that had corners. That’s right - CORNERS, all the bowls were actually like cubes that flared out - completely breaking the conventions of the classic ‘bowl’. Just one of the many innovations you’d find in a Hyatt. But I could only admire these abstract breakfast receptacle’s for perhaps 30-40 minutes maximum in the morning as it was time to move onto Lansing, Michigan. And thus our time as Hyatt owners was over once more.

Lansing is the capital of Michigan, in the southern part of the state; population 119,128. First settled in 1847, it expanded rapidly after the establishment of the automobile industry there in 1887. I stole that directly from the dictionary on my laptop, instantly making me look like i’ve done my research. So it looks like this place is the capital of Michigan then? And it’s foundations were built through the automobile industry? Both good facts to know if you ever consider visiting here. I would suggest not visiting on a Sunday though, that’s when we were there and everything was shut. Well not everything, I was exaggerating for literary effect. The venue we were playing was open obviously, as was Jimmy Johns, the best sandwich shops in the world. But that was about it. There was a huge government building at the end of the street beside the venue that looked like the House of Congress, perhaps that was where the decision to close everything on a Sunday was. I considered going up and lobbying at the gate to have more things opened on a Sunday, but they would probably be closed too. And also I don’t live here, giving me zero lobbying power.

The venue was called The Loft, but it wasn’t like the loft in my house at home. For one you could stand up in it, and there also wasn’t loads of unwanted crap hidden up there either. It was a strange venue though, you climbed this big set of stairs to get up to it where it lead into what looked like a school corridor. You opened a door at the end of that corridor and it lead into the venue. It was like the wardrobe from Narnia except it opened into a venue and didn’t lead to Narnia. I just read those last few sentences back and it was pretty uninteresting. My apologies, i’ll leave them in though so you can see into the mind of a tortured and bland artiste like myself. The show went really well, good reception and I managed to resist the urge to make an impassioned speech about a Sunday revolution in Lansing. It was definitely for the best. The good reaction we received may have been partly down to the fact that this was definitely the drunkest crowd of the tour. There were casualties all over the place. And whatever they were drinking it was making many of these attendees lose all power to their legs. It was like watching someone who’s just been hit by a tranquilizer dart when their limbs start to give up on them. And on a Sunday!? The day of rest!? Yet more evidence for the need of a Sunday shop opening revolution in Lansing. Everyone had turned to booze. All of the 119,128 populace.

I feel I should mention that we did goto Jimmy Johns after the show. Not just because it was the only place to go, but also because it is the greatest sandwich shop in the world. I got the vegetarian with hot peppers - it’s like an explosion going off in your mouth but instead of dying you just get lots of nice tastes. The way to remember how good Jimmy Johns is at making sandwiches is by reciting this very simple rhyme that I have just penned “Subway? No way. Jimmy Johns? It’s ON.” Feel free to use this as your own rhyme - I like to think of myself as a Lord Byron for the sandwich generation. If he were around today I feel he’d be writing similar works that examine an English man’s love of wholemeal crusts, or emotional verses about how cheese triangles should be placed on a baguette. In the words of Byron himself: “Give me a Hovis loaf or i’ll cut your head off you peasant”. Touching words.

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Travels with myself, Dahmer and Clinton.

2011-11-16T06:37:00.000-08:00

Have you ever woken up in the middle of the night and were sure that you were actually the professional actor and part time secret agent Daniel Craig (a.k.a James Bond)? I’m sure it probably has. It happened to me the other night, and it was very real. I woke up in our hotel and wasn’t quite sure if I was the actor or his character alter ego, so I kind of landed in limbo between the two... Daniel Craig 007: Licensed to act. I went down to reception and asked for a Martini on the rocks where I was told that this wasn’t a bar, plus it was 3 in the morning. This caused me to think that the receptionist was obviously a spy and I tried to immobilize him with my gadget pen that has a taser hidden in it but as I wasn’t actually James Bond I was actually just waving an ordinary biro pen in this man’s face. I mistook his bemused expression as being starstruck so I gave him my autograph. As I passed the personalised message back to him all he could say was “But you’re not Daniel Craig? And my name isn’t ‘Receptionist’?”. This was a big enough jolt to bring me back to normality and I apologised profusely and headed back to bed. What was worse was that I had also chosen to re-enact that scene from Casino Royale that da ladiezzz love when he comes out the sea in speedos. I don’t even know where those speedos came from. They were just on me.

After that highly embarrassing (and entirely fabricated) nocturnal identity crisis it was time to head to the home of cheese, Wisconsin, for a show in Milwaukee. They actually call Wisconsin ‘The Cheese State’, possibly the worst tag line for a city ever. I’ve been told that people wear cheese hats here, celebrating the state’s dairy heritage. If I ever see someone wearing a cheese hat in the flesh then I am almost certain that I will never stop laughing. Are they hats in the shape of the classic cartoon depiction of a wedge of cheese with holes in it? Or is it an actual block of cheese that’s been sculpted into the shape of a baseball cap or top hat? I need to know, my life depends on it. We were heading there, so hopefully i’d find the answers I craved. I can tell you right now that I did not, people there are cagey about all things cheese. I guess they don’t want to give away their secrets and lose out on the cheese crown to some other less cheese-worthy state? That was a cheesy paragraph. HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA!!!!!! Did you like my joke!? Instant classic.

We arrived in Milwaukee early for an interview by an Irish man named Mickey for a Scottish newspaper, who was accompanied by our regional press person Warren who lives in London. But is Irish. Hope you kept up with that. We went to a diner with them called Miss Katie’s, where Bill Clinton AND Michelle Obama have eaten before. Not together though, they’re not having an inter-presidential affair as far as I know. Perhaps Bill mentioned to Barack that this place was good and he in turn mentioned it to Michelle. That is a possible scenario of how they both ended up here. But why did Bill come here in the first place? That will be a mystery forever. Henry Winkler from Happy Days had also been to the diner, again on a separate occasion from Bill Clinton and Michelle Obama. This diner was obviously The Ritz of Milwaukee. The diner also had a shuffle table where I again proved that I should probably take shuffling(!?) up professionally as I destroyed Sam with a spectacular 2-0 win. The whole diner was on their feet.

After this highly emotional diner visit, we headed over to the venue which was called THE RAVE. Why? I don’t know. There’s something about that name that troubled me. Again, I don’t know why. Maybe it’s because when I think of a rave I think of people taking 1000 ecstasies and then flying away into space. Freaky. The building was pretty old, and at one time must have been a sports centre or something like that because there was a big swimming pool. Apparently someone drowned in the pool years ago and now they haunt the venue. I don’t know if I believe that, although I do believe in ghosts as i’ve seen all the Paranormal Activity films and they are factual documentaries. And to add the slightly ominous vibe of the surrounding area, the hotel where serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer murdered most of his victims was directly across from the venue. That can’t have been good for business. Homely!

The show was pretty good, slightly muted response at first but people came round to it in the end. There was two gentleman who possibly knew our songs better than we did so they generated a vibe for the whole room. After the show I watched most of Mastodon’s set, who were playing the bigger venue upstairs. I’m not a huge metal fan but I love Mastodon. Their drummer Brann Dailor is perhaps the tightest drummer in the world, it’s like listening to a metal drum machine. Every fill is perfectly in place. The sound in the room was pretty ‘pish’ for lack of a better word, but you could hear the drums well and isn’t that what music is all about!? DRUMS. Also, their guitarist has something tattoo’d on his face and I think it might be bullets. He’s like Mike Tyson but tougher. You can’t mess with that.

Milwaukee - Done. The main points to take from today are Bill Clinton, Ghosts and Face Tattoos. And DRUMS. Today’s blog was brought to you by the letter ‘C’ and the number ‘5’.

BIG BIRD OUT.

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Red Headed Sluts: A Minneapolis story

2011-11-14T07:13:00.000-08:00

We awoke in Des Moines, Iowa after a lengthy drive from Colorado on our day off the previous day. Slipknot are from here but I didn’t see them kicking about the La Quinta we were staying at. I guess they probably do well enough to afford their own houses these days. I wonder if their families wear masks too? It would make meal times a chore, but it would keep up the mystique of what their faces look like underneath them. I’ve seen their singer Corey Taylor’s face now and I was pretty disappointed that it wasn’t horribly disformed - it’s just kind of a normal human-esque structure. Two eyes, two ears, nose, mouth.... all the trimmings. Disappointing. So if they were cutting about the hotel without their masks on then chances are they just look like normal guys. Except the guy who plays the oil drum thing, I imagine he probably carries that about with him. Not sure why, I just think he probably would. But then I came to my senses and realised that the chance of ANY of the popular metal band Slipknot, never mind all of them, being at the La Quinta in Des Moines was about as probable as me giving birth to a fully grown tiger. Not impossible... but highly improbable.

As we left the hotel to head to Minneapolis for that night’s show a moment of comedy genius happened. Our long suffering sound guy Paul ‘Paulshoid Peesh Bag Hep-pants’ Hepburn managed to do a Home Alone 2 ice slip fall... from standing. Truly remarkable, and it happened in about three frames: He was standing up, he was horizontal in the air, and then he was flat on the ground. There was no motion in between these 3 steps. This is probably the only time this has ever happened in the history of ice and humans, and I was there to see it. I felt very blessed. Also, as we pulled out of the hotel we saw Middle Class Rut and they threw ice at our van. Ice had been a key player in the day’s events so far. After this nothing of note really happened until we got into Minneapolis. Oh, apart from when I gave birth to a baby tiger. Not a full sized one though, that would be highly improbable.

Minneapolis is one of the ‘Twin Cities’ of Minnesota, the other being St. Paul. I don’t know why they’re called that - I should find out. They aren’t identical twins though, if they were that would be really confusing. Take a wrong turn and you could end up in the wrong city and not even realise. You’d goto your house and someone else would be living there. That would mess you up. Anyway, as far as I know we didn’t take a wrong turn and we did end up in Minneapolis. The gig was at The Varsity Theatre, a venue we’d been told was rubbish but this turned to be very far off the mark. The place was so cool, the opposite of rubbish. The best part was probably the bathroom, a big open plan dealio upstairs, with a sink system that kind of waterfalls into different tiered bowls. Very impressive. If you are a fan of bathrooms then you’d really like this one - one of the best there is probably. The rest of the venue was also very nice, but that bathroom was breathtaking. The Mona Lisa of venue bathrooms. The cut-off point for passable venue ‘restrooms is usually when there’s a door on the toilet. So this place had far surpassed this.

The show had an early start meaning that we went onstage at 6pm, an inappropriate time to cultivate a captivating rock and roll show. Sam’s logic is that 6pm back home is when The Simpsons comes on television, and in his words “I know i’d rather be watching The Simpsons, eating my dinner, than rushing to a gig.” Elegant sentiments Mr. McTrusty. The show was alright, we played well but it wasn’t until half way through our set that the place started to get busy. I guess most people were probably eating dinner at home, watching The Simpsons. To be fair, it might have been a good episode. Or it may have been Fajita night. Not to be missed. After we played someone who shall remain nameless was sick in the dressing room bathroom 4 times in the space of 5 minutes. 4 TIMES. That’s about as probable as me giving birth to another baby tiger today. Highly improbable. But not impossible. Regardless, it was very impressive/disgusting. To add to the mental vibe that had cultivated itself in the general dressing room area (which was about the size of a phone box), myself and Sam got interviewed by a woman who looked like the singer of an 80s hair metal band who played in a band called ‘Rapedoor’. I’m not making this up, their album front cover is a picture on a toilet with no pants on. By the time this had happened too much had happened for me to digest in one day.

Afterwards, as it was still only 9 o’clock when the show finished, all of Twin Atlantic and Middle Class Rut went to a bar round the corner from the venue called the Kitty Kat Klub to partake in the consumption of a couple of casual alcoholic beverages. This was destroyed almost immediately though, when the first thing Ross bought me was a delightful shot called a ‘Red Headed Slut’, which is essentially all the different alcohols in the one glass. I was very much enjoying my Miller High Life until this was presented to me too. From here we went on a journey of American booze, including their take on a White Russian which is essentially a glass of vodka with cream on the top. We left at midnight obliterated and headed back to the hotel where I was subsequently chased around the hotel by an unnamed (for reputations sake) naked assailant. It was up there with the scariest things that’s ever happened to me. There are pictures. And they are explicit.

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Fort John Collins

2011-11-13T07:49:00.000-08:00

Not a lot of people know this, but Fort Collins in Colorado has a massive connection with Scotland. That’s right, as it was named after former Scotland football internationalist and Glasgow Celtic hero, John Collins. It’s a tightly kept secret, but John came here as an enterprising young man and built a huge fort at the entrance to the city - naming it Fort Collins. Before this, the land was just called ‘Unnamed Colorado City #4’. The fort was the first of it’s kind, impenetrable to any attacker - even Rangers goal scoring legend Ally McCoist. John would spend his days volleying footballs from one of the fort’s turrets, sending cylindrical warning shots as to let people know not to mess with him. It was his improved accuracy from volleying these footballs that taught him the skills he would use later in life when he moonlighted as a professional footballer, essentially giving up his life as an olden times King. The fort is now long gone and nobody talks about it, and those that do know about it (like me), keep it a secret so John Collins can live a quiet life without having to answer questions about building the world’s first perfect fort. And guess where we were playing on the next date of the tour? Fort Collins! Exquisite storytelling - I can almost taste that pulitzer. It’s kind of brassy tasting I would imagine.

As we’d driven here after the previous night’s show in Colorado Springs it meant we could relax a little before heading to the venue. We soon realised that there is not much to do at a La Quinta in the middle of nowhere. There was a hot tub, but it smelled like it may have been filled with bleach instead of chlorine water. I like my hot tubs clean, but I also like to have skin on my body too. I’m weird like that. We headed into Fort Collins a little early to look about, get a feel of why John Collins decided to start his dynasty here. We ended up in a shop called JAX which possibly had all of the items you would ever need in the one shop. It was brilliant. They had a camera section, a flannel shirt section, and a CANOE section. As I said, anything you couldn’t get here is probably useless. I bought two canoes and 8 flannel shirts and then started the long journey to the venue, arduously rowing my canoe along the pavement with the other canoe on my head. It took ages, and the canoe on the ground was in pieces by the time I got there, but I had the most profound sense of achievement. Or it could have just been massive pain, as I had rowed on my arse for the last half an hour of the journey as the first canoe had completely worn through.

We were playing the Aggie Theatre, which looks like it’s been here for a long time - it was cool though. It had lots of wooden barriers and railings about the place, i’m a big fan of the wooden barrier. Our tour manager Andy ’Daddy’ Dunlop had bought me a present from JAX, an American flag bandana. I’m still not sure wether it was meant as a nice present or if he’s bullying me. I toyed with the idea of wearing it to play but then quickly changed my mind as - a) It made me look like Hulk Hogan and b) It could be construed as borderline racist. It’s the moustache man, mix it with a bandana and your in stereotype redneck American territory. Or WWF superstar. It was too much of a gamble though, who knows what side of the coin it would fall on for the crowd. Getting smashed in the head by a projectile bottle from the crowd whilst wearing a bandana would be pretty embarrassing. There’s no coming back from that really is there?

Show went well, we didn’t really go for it as much as we should have though. We were a bit subdued, not sure why. Crowd were nice to us though, and because I didn’t wear a bandana I could play without fear of being killed. Always a nice feeling. We didn’t find out until we were packing up our gear, but disaster had struck during our set. Our guitar tech Sam Thomson a.k.a. Pam Johnson (It’s confusing having two people called Sam in the one van), had gone over on his leg during the set and his ankle had now swollen to size of a football (notice the repetition of the football theme, classic storytelling). And not one of those small size 3 footballs either, i’m talking about a size 5 football, a MANLY football. At one point I was worried that it might just not stop swelling up, and his ankle would engulf him. Thankfully this didn’t come to fruition. Pam Johnson is made of tough stuff though, and he rescinded an offer of painkillers in favour of a cold beer. That’s one of the many reasons why he is a key player in the Twin Atlantic family. I had a friend from Scotland who lives in Denver at the show so I spent the rest of the evening chatting with him. He goes by the name of Conzy and he is a diamond geezer.

That is all i’ve got to report about Fort Collins, I hope you’ve enjoyed reading this and you’ll leave feeling fulfilled and perhaps a better person? I know I feel better just writing it, i’m probably the J.K. Rowling of our generation, even though she is still technically part of this generation. I didn’t have to rely on magic wizards to spread my gift though, just cold hard facts. If there is a public vote for a Pulitzer prize, will you vote for me? I’ll let you all come and see the trophy or whatever it is they give you.

It better not be a certificate, I want some gold for my mantlepiece.

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America: Land of the cold.

2011-11-12T09:51:00.000-08:00

It’s an unspoken thought that anyone who doesn’t live in America believes that everywhere in America is always sunny. Even though we’ve all seen Home Alone and it definitely looked really cold and there was definitely snow on the ground - we all just assumed it was camera tricks. I think it’s probably because most of our first experiences of America is going to Florida in the summer to flock to it’s many overpriced theme parks (a bargain for the chance of meeting the real life Mickey Mouse) and to complain about the heat. “It’s not the heat that gets you, it’s the humidity” - a sentiment heard by every child from their parents on their first trip to the Sunshine State. Parents, i’m pretty sure it’s the heat too - that big orange ball that you can see in the sky isn’t there for decoration. And it’s not just a big Vitamin C tablet as I was once wrongly taught by a teacher. Last time I checked, Vitamin C tablets don’t make you go blind when you stare at them. Why have I started this richly informative discussion (read: solid gold factoids)?

Because we are in America and it’s cold.

First off, Las Vegas broke the first rule of being situated in the desert by being cold and not so hot that you see mirages of palm trees and camels. It just didn’t make sense. So when a snow storm started half way as we drove through Utah towards Colorado, all our balls simultaneously popped off out of shock. I’d only packed 20 pairs of Speedos for the duration of the tour, and one vest. Severely underprepared. Luckily, Ross had brought an emergency fleece jumpsuit with him which he’s kindly let me borrow until we get home (I haven’t brought any money for things like clothes with me as I assumed that people would be so impressed at the the sight of my Arnold Schwarzenegger-esque body in Speedos that they’d just hand me money). It’s both fashionable and warm. Luckily we had a day off between the Vegas show and the next show in Colorado Springs so we could take our time, if there’s anything I know about snow and ice is that it’s slippy when you go fast on it. I learned that from Home Alone 2. Most of what I learned from the ages of 5 until 16 can be attributed to those first two Home Alone movies. Everything else I learned on the tough streets of Bishopbriggs maaaaaaaaaaan. I once saw a boy in my class being forced to eat a leave from a tree... shit got too real that day.

The snow started to clear up as we drove into Colorado Springs, just like when Moses parted the red sea - except not physically impossible like the latter. It just kind of started to become less noticeable on the ground as we got closer, which is physically possible because the snow clouds probably didn’t reach there. As Ron Burgundy famously said “that’s just science”. And he was a newscaster so it must be true. Tonight’s venue was called The Black Sheep, named after the famous black sheep who used to run Colorado Springs until the residents realised he was a sheep and not a human, rendering him pretty incapable of making decisions on matters of the land. He gracefully stepped down and saw out his days working as a campaign worker on many successful Presidential campaigns including Richard Nixon and Dwight Eisenhower. I made that all up by the way, that would be ridiculous. Although i’m sure a sheep could probably make more thought out decisions than a lot of politicians these days. That’s right, I went there.

The show was sold out, AWOLNATION fever clearly spreading the country - an exciting time for them. I worry for them in these colder climates though, they’re from California so their only real experience of cold is when they’ve perhaps got too close to the freezers in the supermarket. The venue was smaller than others we’ve done on the tour, and had an in-house sound system that was perhaps wired by a sheep, but even before doors opened you could tell it had a good vibe. The kind you can’t just create, it just happens. I’m perhaps saying this in hindsight as the show was great, crowd were really receptive and we played well. Someone even shouted nice moustache at me, and I don’t think it was said in a ridiculing way for once. What a breakthrough. This elation at the combination of a good gig and praise for the joke gone wrong on my upper lip was crushed when we went to eat after the show and the only place we could find was Taco Bell. Going to Taco Bell to eat is the equivalent of trying to do a backflip onto a moving car: You’ll regret doing it and you’ll likely end up in hospital. I had a 7 layer burrito which is essentially seven different kinds of coloured mush in a wrap. MMMMMMMMMMM! The good news is that it’s now a day later and I haven’t died yet. Result.

Afterwards, we drove the 2 hours to Fort Collins where we were playing the following night so we could stay in the same hotel for two consecutive days. This is a rare treat on a tour, and it gives you that strange semblance of reality that you’re not constantly on the move. The hotel becomes like your actual house, you refer to the receptionist as Dad and and leave your shoes at the front door. This has led to many pairs of my shoes being stolen over the last four years. And many receptionists asking us to leave because a group of strangers keep referring to him as their father. Good night, if you need me i’ll be at my home at the La Quinta in Fort Collins. Just leave a message with my Dad at the reception.

click photos to enlarge...

Fur and Loafers in Las Vegas.

2011-11-11T10:35:00.000-08:00

Las Vegas. The home of gambling. And strippers. And gambling strippers. And stripping gamblers. They have it all here. As long as you like gambling or strippers. Luckily I am addicted to both, I have to blow at least £10k at roulette and a cool £500 at my local Gentleman’s Club every day or I get really ill. They call it ‘corruption flu’ and it’s highly contagious. I caught it off of Phil Collins. He caught it off Cliff Richard. Once you have it you can’t get rid of it, but luckily as long as you’re engulfing over £10,000 of debt per day you feel totally fine. It’s a small but financially huge price to pay for healthy peace of mind. If anyone has a spare £750,000 going spare it would be greatly appreciated, it’s been an expensive 2 years since that regrettable coke/gambling/stripper binge with Big Phil. It turns out the thing Phil heard “calling in the air tonight” was nothing more than a stripper asking for him to settle his tab.

We’ve never been to Vegas, be it for business or pleasure - although I imagine that any business taking place there inevitably turns into pleasure. That all changed on the 5th of November 2011 when we headed there for a music conference called Rock The Block, the only show that wasn’t part of the tour - although AWOLNATION were headlining it. We set off from Phoenix about midday and arrived in Las Vegas around 6pm, meaning the drive was about 6 hours long. How did I figure that out? Well, by taking midday as 0 and 6pm as 6 and subtracting 0 from 6 I arrived at my figure of 6. And the unit of measurement was hours so that becomes 6 hours. That’s just good math. Just before Vegas you hit the Hoover Dam, which is famous because it is not a dam in the physical sense, it’s actually a Hoover brand vacuum cleaner that sucks up any water that tries to get past it. It does the job that a normal dam would do but also cleans up any crumbs that get dropped in the water aswell. Breathtaking to watch, yet another reason why the vacuum cleaner is up there with lego as the most practical thing that man has ever created.

As we arrived in Las Vegas a special feeling hit me, although I soon realised that this special feeling was in fact solid fear of being robbed by a hooker before we got to leave. Sometimes I mix up special feelings with feelings of terror. We were playing in the old town part of Vegas, which is kind of like downtown Vegas if it wasn’t looked after for 20 years. We were staying at the Plaza just round the corner from here, where the waitresses had possibly worked there for 60 years. In the same dresses they were given when they started. I also saw a very old man wearing what can only be described as stripper clothes. It was depressing to look at, and only a bit arousing. The show was taking place outside and Las Vegas had decided to drop the temperature to somewhere around freezing to make it a little more fun. The other bands playing apart from ourselves and AWOLNATION (Honestly, try and write that in lower case - it just automatically capitalizes it) were all from the Vegas area and I felt compelled to ask if they knew The Killers, in my head everyone from Las Vegas must know them personally. It turns out my theory may be true - one guy used to tour manage them and someone from another band is the drummer’s brother. Therefor EVERYONE here nows them.

As we went on stage a man kept shouting ‘SKINNY JEANS!’, which was weird. But he kept shouting it, on and on and on and on. To the point where I thought maybe he thought that was the band’s name. Or perhaps he was a simpleton who had just learned those two words and was showing off to his friends. Whatever it was, a drunk Sam put him in his place half way through our set and also called another girl in the crowd ‘a bitch’. And somehow people were still cheering at the end? I like Las Vegas. After we played we packed up in world record time as we got mentally ready for what we really came here for: wasting money in casinos and drinking free cocktails whilst we waste that money. We got back and all changed into our suits, not sure why... but it felt right. Someone said we looked like a multiplied version of Rain Man. I love making jokes involving Rain Man and this may have been my favourite one yet. Trumped at my own game.

The first place we headed was the Belagio where I managed to lose 40 dollars within two minutes of walking in the door at Black Jack. I had a minor victory two minutes after this when I won $7 at the electronic roulette machine - I should stick to playing against machines. They can’t tell that I don’t have any clue what i’m doing - I imagine that my face in a casino is the same expression as if I just saw a unicorn. Total shock. After this we headed to one of the new casinos called Cosmopolitan, which has girls dancing on shelves above the bar in an alluring fashion. It was quite scary. From here we went to a dive bar where we got strange looks from men in leather waistcoats and drank a delightful concoction called ‘ass juice’. It tasted like fruit juice. From here we went to a bar that was empty apart from the aging hip hop owner and his equally old oriental wife who tried to burn me $30 for 5 Café Patrons and where I won a further $3 at electronic Black Jack. Ballin’.

This took us upto around 5am where we decided to try out one of Las Vegas’ famous ‘convenience stores’ and all bought 40oz cans to drink out of brown bags on the street. A lifelong goal was reached. It just tastes better out of a bag on the street. Our final destination was the Hard Rock Casino where I saw the outfit that Cristina Aguilera wore in the Dirrrty video - another lifelong goal was reached. We got a limousine back to the hotel to fully complete our clichéd trip. I wasn’t finished gambling yet though, myself and Barry went to the casino in the Plaza where I gloriously won $20 at roulette. It’s probably up there with the biggest wins in the Plaza’s history - as I left the casino I could tell that everyone was in awe of me, and not because I have a moustache and was wearing a full suit.

Consider Vegas conquered. I’ve got the 20 dollars to prove it.

click photos to enlarge....

Tempe, Arizona - A weather mecca of wind.

2011-11-10T07:23:00.000-08:00

We awoke in Palm Springs on a golf resort. I didn’t think i’d be uttering that sentence until I was at least 65 years old, but life likes to throw these things at you. I also got arthritis when I was 15 years old, perhaps i’m a real life, less rapid version of Benjamin Button. In 20 years time i’ll start to have an urge to play with Barbie dolls.... I mean Action Men. Outside our hotel room was the most glorious fairway you’ll ever see - the grass was so green that I think it may officially be as green as grass can get. 100% GREEN. There was no time to play golf though, or admire the grass, as we had to mosey on to Arizona for the show that night in Tempe. As I am rubbish at gold this didn’t bother me that much, but the other three are mad gay for golf. They were crushed.

Tempe is very close to Phoenix, for those of you wondering exactly where it is. I know that isn’t exactly where it is, but I don’t have the map co-ordinates for the exact center of Tempe. Sorry geography fans. It’s been my experience in the past that Arizona is always roughly as hot as being in a room that’s on fire, whilst you’re also on fire. Not the kind of weather that someone from the UK will probably ever feel comfortable in. But this time was much different... weird shit was going down. First there was these strange grey things in the sky, and this wet stuff started coming out of them. The people or Arizona thought it was free juice from god, but were confused by it’s strangely bland taste. Further into the journey we hit a sandstorm, which looked like something from a movie - although I can’t think what movie it would be. Was there a movie called Sandstorm? If so, it’s probably that. Also, do you remember the song Sandstorm by Darude? My Dad bought it on CD single when I was younger. Absolute trance anthem.

When we got into Tempe the sandstorm had become what I believe would be called a ‘windstorm’, like a sandstorm but with no sand. So just wind, not quite as deadly as sand to the face. The venue was called The Marquee, a pretty big place in the middle of nowhere. We’d arrived pretty late so it was all go when we got there. Gretsch have given me a gold sparkle kit for this tour, i’m terrified of it because part of me believes it to be real gold. It sounds amazing though, probably because of the crafted wood inside it, not because of the sparkly gold exterior. Unless it is laced with real gold, i’d imagine gold would have a real smooth resonance to it. Right, if anyone asks, Gretsch have given me a solid gold kit. It’s worth a bazillion rupees.

After a rush for soundcheck we had a long hour and a half wait to play after doors opened. We retreated to the dressing room which had been heated to feel roughly like a mild sauna, so come stage time we were all about to go for a nice little sleepy. We stumbled on stage and played the first couple of songs in a state that could be described at best as sub-par (sneaky golf reference there, refer to first paragraph to confirm context - classic writing as usual from me) but woke up again after that and had a pretty good show. I fell asleep on a tiled floor in the dressing room a little while after we played, a regrettable move. Tiles are classically not that malleable, and neither is the human head. I learned a valuable lesson. Watched Middle Class Rut and AWOLNATION’s sets - really enjoyable because they’re so different from each other. And both drummers are incredible so there’s lots for me to learn from. Learning is of course different from stealing.

After the show there was yet more crazy weather as a huge storm hit Tempe just as were leaving. Someone told us that this was the first rain all year, I don’t know if I believe that but it would be typical if it was true. Scottish chaps roll through town and ruin the fun. Sorry Arizonians. We were staying at another gold resort that night in Phoenix - would there be time for gold in the morning!? You’ll just have to wait until the next time I can think up enough terrible jokes to constitute a tour diary entry. You could be waiting some time so i’ll give you a clue.... The answer is the opposite of ‘yes’.

That means they didn’t play golf. In case you didn’t grasp that.

That couple of lines between those last two paragraphs built quite a lot of tension didn’t it? I was even excited writing it. Give me a pulitzer prize.

click photos to enlarge...

What's better: Olden times or newer times?

2011-11-09T07:19:00.000-08:00

I like Los Angeles. It’s really easy to get Mexican food, and you might get to see Lindsay Lohan crash a car into a tree. You won’t get to see that anywhere else in the world. Unless she went on holiday and rented a car and crashed it, but the odds of that happening are even slimmer. If you want to see a celebrity crash a car, Los Angeles really is the place to be. The first time I came here I remember thinking it was rubbish because it was really sketchy, and I had to share a bed with Barry for two months. And he got really frisky some nights. And he’s really strong so I couldn’t stop his advances. He didn’t quite rape me, but the psychological damage was just as great. But I found when I got home I really missed it. Not sharing a bed with Barry.... Hollywood baby. It’s just got an excitement to it, it’s that mixture of fear of being shot and the chance that you might bump into Simon Cowell shopping for a new fashion pet. And guess where the second date of the tour was!? LOS ANGELES. Seamless storytelling.

Before the show we had a day of stuff to do:

We sat about a hotel whilst Sam got his hair cut by a woman who has made Haggis from scratch. I don’t know if that means she emptied out a sheep or not, either way, it’s disgusting.

Me and Sam did an interview at a radio station where I found out that my voice is too quiet for microphones. It was a crushing fact to learn.

We did a meet and greet ‘thing’ at Fox Sports. This was Barry’s dream come true. Sam played some songs and it was quite awkward but good. Afterwards we got a tour of the Fox Studio lot and they showed us the building where The Simpsons is filmed. It has taken me until now to realise that this was a joke as The Simpsons is a cartoon. We also went to the Fox Studios restaurant which is themed to be like Moes Tavern from The Simpsons. Moe wasn’t working though. Again, it has taken me until right now to realise that he couldn’t work there because he is a cartoon character.

We did a photo shoot on a roof where we all wore matching suits. And sunglasses. In Hollywood. I have figured out that this is the exact point where we finally sold out completely. No going back from there. I can now wear a cowboy hat and carry a cane in public as it won’t be as mental as wearing matching suits and sunglasses.

This takes us neatly up to around 6pm, when we headed to the venue for soundcheck. The venue was The Music Box, which was formerly called the Henry Fonda Theatre. That old name was so much better, The Music Box sounds sinister. Henry Fonda got screwed over. It was however, a great looking venue - old theatre, it even had velvet curtains. That’s right... velvet curtains. It was like being in the olden days but better because we now have Nintendo DS and iPhones. But also much worse because we now have reality television stars and swine flu. The olden days didn’t have to deal with those things. The velvet curtains even closed when doors opened to hide the stage - MYSTERIOUS. Well, only for the crowd. I knew what was behind those curtains.

Show went really well, as far as LA shows go. People actually cheered, which isn’t meant to happen here. We played well too, which doesn’t always go hand in hand with the show going well. Sometimes you can play terrible and people still love it, or sometimes you play great and people don’t give a shit. It’s a weird thing to get used to, like learning that a tomato is a fruit and not a vegetable. We tried to get food after we played and failed miserably, ended up in a Thai restaurant with a club singer crooning beside our table. I freaked out and left just as I was about to order. Don’t know why. Went back and watched AWOLNATION, great live. And their drummer Hayden is a beast. His kit is also transparent, and looks glitzy as funk. That’s the mark of a great drummer, when you can pull off the transparent kit.

We headed to Palm Springs around midnight to cut down the drive to Arizona the following day. We were staying at a golf resort which caused Sam to die through excitement. We managed to pick up a new singer on the way there though, and Ross gave the stranger a make over so he looks just like Sam. We ditched the old Sam in a bin, hopefully nobody finds him. When we arrived I was so tired that I fell asleep as we checked in and dreamt that I was a golf ball and someone got a hole in one with me then forgot to get me out the hole. Terrifying.

I didn't take any photos because I was too busy meeting my famous celebrity friends like David Hasselhoff and Britney Spears. In fact, here's a candid one I did take of Paris Hilton when we went for drinks in the afternoon...

Shuffleboard Champs 2k11

2011-11-08T09:16:00.000-08:00

Another day, another dollar. Never quite understood that saying. What about this dollar? Is everyone getting a dollar every day that I should be getting? Do you have to apply for it? Is it only for US citizens? And why is the American government giving away dollars for free? It’s in direct contradiction with their capitalist ways shown in the government public information videos 'Wall Street' and 'Wall Street 2: Money Never Sleeps' starring the actor Michael ‘Sexy’ Douglas. Or perhaps the saying was mis-interpreted over the years and is actually ‘Another GAY, another dollar’? It’s origins may be in a childish game between co-workers who placed a bet of a dollar for every homosexual that they spot?

In my head, that is definitely what happened.

Anyway. That first paragraph was quite apt and was in no way made up in the spot as a neat bridge as we’ve just embarked on another American tour. In the United States of America. Where they use dollars. We left Glasgow on Halloween which was coincidentally the same date we left last year to start recording in Los Angeles. And where we flying into this time? Los Angeles. It was like Groundhog day, except with 365 unique days in-between them. On the plane I had dry cous-cous with aubergine in a metal tray, it was possibly the least appealing thing i’ve ever eaten. I did watch the Ayrton Senna documentary though, which was amazing. I now want to be a racing driver, but I may have left it too late. I also need to pass my driving test first, I assume you need to be able to legally drive a normal car before they start letting you cut about in Formula 1 cars.

After a day off in Los Angeles where we re-accustomed ourselves to the fact that you can’t really walk about here at night unless you want to get raped by a crack addict (or cracked by a rape addict) and all bought matching suits (I wish wish wish that was a joke) it was off the next day to Bakersfield for the first show of the tour. Bakersfield is famous for being the birthplace of Korn and also Meth addicts. Not the birthplace of Meth addicts, that would be weird, just where they like to hang out. I am not a big fan of Korn or Meth addicts so I wasn’t expecting much. We turned up at the venue which was called Ryder’s and was actually a sports bar with a stage. As the famous saying goes ‘Come To Bakersfield, Play In A Sports Bar’. They did have a shuffleboard table though, it is definitely my new favourite sport. Is it an Olympic event? If so, there is a good chance I have a shot at the gold medal because those little puck things just glided right where I wanted them too. Evvvvvvvery time.

On this tour we’re supporting AWOLNATION and Middle Class Rut, who are both American bands from America. Both bands have had some pretty big radio hits over there, so hopefully by the end of the tour their success will have rubbed off on us and we can retire and all buy condos in Florida. That’s every man’s dream. As their wasn’t much to do around the venue after I mastered shuffleboard in about 30 mins, myself and Sam and Barry went to Home Depot to buy essential items for the tour. Mainly a merchandise board and pins for the merchandise board. Essential. Home Depot is the exact same as B&Q from back home. Exactly the same. I used to work there before a started fooling around with music, and I was quite gutted when they sacked me. I loved stacking those shelves. I might leave the band and move over here and get a job in Home Depot, it’ll be like being back home except it’d be much easier to get Mexican food.

The show was alright, for the first night of a tour where jetlag joins our usual inability to play like we’ve practiced in a year for the first few gigs - it was actually pretty good. There was a man in the crowd with a big handlebar moustache who looked like he may like to beat his own children who kept shouting ‘I WANNA JUMP!’ for reasons unbeknown to us. Perhaps he was trying to commit suicide and had mistaken the venue for the ledge of a tall building. I shall never know, but I felt his pain as I also have a moustache. We’re a dying breed. Although his is much more acceptable because he was quite old and not in his mid-twenties. We got to stick around for Middle Class Rut but had to leave just as AWOLNATION (You have to say their name in capitals, it’s the law) started as we were driving back to LA to get chased by hookers.

And that was the first entry of our American tour. Give me a Pulitzer.

click photos to enlarge...

I am learning to cook.

2011-08-24T14:06:00.000-07:00

So far it has been a startling success. I may give up all of my other life pursuits and try and steal Jamie Oliver's crown as 'King of Food Making'.

If anyone needs catering for weddings, funerals, birthday parties or anything in-between, i'm your man.

As long as you like pasta or eggs. That's all i've mastered so far.

And guacamole. I've mastered that too.

The newest member of the Kneale dynasty.

2011-08-22T13:18:00.000-07:00

His name is Hamish and he is brilliant. He already knows how to knock down a small stick with his head and is capable of biting through a human hand and running really fast in a circle. One day he will hopefully give birth to a small fleet of similarly battle hardened warriors and they'll be able to defend my castle when I have funds to buy such a property.

WM3

2011-08-19T16:33:00.000-07:00

The West Memphis Three were finally released today for a crime they so obviously didn't commit in the first place.

It took 18 years to come to that conclusion.

This is a good example of why the justice system was possibly/probably designed by chimps. And not even those intelligent chimps who can scratch their own backsides and decipher the difference between a banana and an alligator. Nope, particularly silly chimps...

Seriously - 18 years!?

1991 Intelligent Techno

2011-06-17T05:48:00.000-07:00

The hay fever has got me bad. As sure as you know it’s Spring when flowers start to bloom, I know Summer is starting when I wake up and my eyes and nose feel like they’ve been glued shut. So you start your day blind, and then have to resist the urge to rub your eyes for the rest of the day - which is impossible, so you end up looking like you’re on a permanently stoned trip. Hippies approach you from all angles asking where you’ve found this ‘weed of life’. I’m sorry my friends, it is merely a cruel joke being played on me by nature. Plus, you have the hay fever sneezes, which aren’t like normal sneezes. They’re like large explosions taking place inside your head, that reduce you to looking like a mad man as it gives you about 1 second to prepare yourself for the detonation. Hay Fever essentially steals your dignity, and reduces your social status to perma-stoned/sneezy guy. And nobody wants that title at a party, that’s up there with midget/pervert guy in the unwanted character stakes.

My hay fever came back about 3 weeks ago and has so far refused to give me a day of grace. One day, that’s all I ask. One day where I don’t feel like my head is filled with bees. NOPE. Hay fever is a cruel task master, if it were the boss of a factory he would make you work 7 days a week and you wouldn’t get toilet breaks or lunch. Basically, hay fever wouldn’t pass trading standards tests - it’s lucky it’s just a force of nature and not a middle manager. Anyway, we were now in Copenhagen and the weather had gotten that little bit hotter. Therefor I know resembled a fetus in the morning as I couldn’t use any of my senses. I had to be dropped in the shower, which acts like a magical-rejuvenating container, so I can come out 10 minutes later with partially working eyes and a nose that wouldn’t be deemed useless. As you have guessed, i’m not too happy about hay fever. Why do some people get it and others don’t? I must have been cruel to some pollen in a previous life, that’s the only explanation.

But because I am as mentally tough as a bear, I soldiered on. I know... you’re really impressed and are probably coming to realise you will never be as brave as me - living with hay fever like it isn’t the worst thing that can ever happen to a person. It’s ok, take my bravery as an incentive to go out and live your life like I have. Use my suffering as your strength, i’m like Jesus but without the robe.

Right..... it turns out that Copenhagen has some sort of unspoken ban on ugly people. And also on unfashionable people. Everyone was beautiful and dressed much, much better than us. Any time we saw a police car we were on edge in case they pulled over and arrested on crimes of wearing cheap clothes and not being physically perfect. We stood out more for the fact that the weather was scorching and Scottish people react to sun by turning completely red. This was shown most spectacularly on Sam whose back had turned a sort of glowing crimson, and it was possible to cook food on it. The lesson to be learned is if you are white and Scottish, live underground during the summer and don’t come out until at least October.

We were playing at a venue called KB18, which may stand for Kool Boyz 18 - but I have no proof of this at all. There was a dance music festival on for the full weekend, so the venue had brought in a bigger PA as there were electronic acts on after our show. They had brought in a PA, but had forgotten to bring anyone to set up so poor Paulshi had a rather stressful day trying to do it for them - I approximate that he sweated 8 litres of water over the course of the day, which is about 2 litres more than usual. In the meantime we had a walk about Copenhagen and saw many more beautiful people, and zero ugly people. Even the homeless guys looked suave. We checked out the dance festival and saw many people going ‘mad for it’ and many more people peeing in the street. One man was even wearing a lifejacket as a ‘wacky’ waistcoat - what a maverick/loser. Although, to his credit, the lifejacket may have been worn practically in case the volume of people peeing in the streets caused the city to flood...

Once Paul had worked his magic on the desk we played the gig and it was about 60% good. It was one of the shows with a bit of a weird vibe, there were people there but the atmosphere was a bit awkward. But, as they say in this bizniz, ‘Some gigs are awkward, like kissing your sister’. I’ve never heard someone actually say that before - but I imagine that someone probably has at some point in the history of the universe. After we played a man started DJing, who described himself as a VJ (not DJ) specializing in 1991 intelligent techno. If that isn’t the wankest thing ever then I don’t know what is. From what I watched his VJing seemed to consist of projecting a tiny spinning rubik’s cube onto a mannikin’s chest. MINDBLOWING.

Mind Paintings.

2011-06-15T15:39:00.000-07:00

Look at these realistic paintings of my memory of traveling from Frankfurt to Copenhagen.

HOT DOG.

2011-06-14T13:24:00.000-07:00

Frankfurt is the city where frankfurters come from, without doubt the weirdest of all the sausage family. Yep, even weirder than Wee Willy Winky sausages. If you are not from Scotland then you might not know what they are - if you don’t then you should count yourself lucky. The packaging features a little guy in a night gown, I don’t know what his connection with the sausages is. Perhaps he’s eaten so many of them that he’s gone mental and wears a night gown at all times. But... frankfurters are definitely weirder - purely because they usually get put in a little sausage shaped bun, kind of like a yeast boat for meat. And when you combine the two a hot dog is born. A hot dog!? That is a crazy name for food. You should never heat up a dog, it wouldn’t like it. That’s why dogs go crazy in the summer, because of the heat. So really, they should maybe call a frankfurter in a bun a ‘crazy dog’. What a pointless paragraph.

We were in the home of the frankfurter, for the final German show of this jaunt around the European mainland. Because the Italian shows had been cancelled it felt like we hadn’t played a gig in approximately 1 year, even though it had only been 4 days. It turns out that days off are only really enjoyable when they’re like treats that you’re given once a week instead of multiple treats in a row. We found that we actually really enjoy playing these ‘gig’ things, and although you’re essentially playing the same songs night after night - it’s much more variable and exciting compared to just being in a different city on a day off where you end up spending most of your day doing nothing. The days off had been fun but we’d all gotten a little bit restless and were as excited as a German eating a frankfurter at the prospect of playing a gig that night. I’m assuming that most Germans get excited eating sausages for that last sentence to make sense, if that’s not true then I have been cruelly misinformed.

We were playing a venue called Das Bett. I’m not sure what that translates to in English because i’m ignorant - I’m going to take an educated guess that it says ‘The Craig Kneale Venue for Gifted Humans’. In stark contrast to the heatwave we’ve experienced while we’ve been here the last few weeks, the weather was a bit shit today and there was all this wet stuff falling from the sky. I think it’s called rain but I can’t really remember, it wasn’t as warm as that sun thing anyway. Our excitement about getting to play again was cut short when it quickly became apparent that our 4 day break had caused us to forget everything we had ever learned about music. Firstly, we all forgot how to set up our gear - Sam had his amps set up behind the bar, Ross’ bass cab was plugged into the van’s inverter and I had my bass drum placed on my head like a hat. Then we tried to play and it got worse, Barry tried to ring out a simple chord and it made the sound of an frog being strangled, and when I tried to hit the snare I simply let go of the stick in mid-air and just punched the drum full force - breaking my hand and then falling off the drum stool, taking the whole kit with me. It was highly embarrassing and demoralising.

So we spent the time before we played studying diagrams of how to play chords and how to hold drumsticks, then watched motivational videos from various members of 80’s hair metal bands on how to ‘rock’... before long we had the magic back. I was doing stick spins like it wasn’t the wankest thing in the world, and the rest of the guys had their chorus star-jumps synced up nicely. So we played and it was great, we’d forgotten how to play most of the songs but our cliché rock moves were breathtaking. There was one point where I had my tongue sticking out whilst I threw two sticks in the air whilst spinning two more between my feet - most of the audience were crying because it was so amazing/sad. We came off stage and at once demanded some groupies backstage but the only people available were Paul and Spider, and this weird old guy that we found outside the venue. The site of the three of them in front of us, offering themselves up in the name of rock n’ roll was enough to bring ourselves to our senses and realise that those motivational videos we’d watched earlier were a very bad idea....

Don’t take advice off a hair metal band - their brains have disintegrated due to spandex fumes.

How much salt can a salt mine salt if a salt mine could salt salt?

2011-06-13T07:43:00.000-07:00

In what was becoming more like a nice holiday than a tour, we visited a Salt Mine in Hallein (near Salzburg). Many years ago the salt from this mine made rich people even more rich. They used wooden slides to access deeper parts of the mine, and you can still use these today. The slides are like modern day slides except no-one has pee'd down them the night before. You also had to dress in seriously uncool white suits for reason's that never made themselves known, perhaps only so you look like a mental patient for the duration of the visit. I would recommend visiting the Salt Mine if you like salt or white suits.

Rain/Football.

2011-06-12T04:41:00.000-07:00

The following day after our unexpected day off in Vienna we drove back to Salzburg as we had another day off. Not much happened apart from the fact that it rained for the first time since the day we got here and we played football in the road for a bit. Both events I have captured with stunning emotional clarity...

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Once Upon A Time in Vienna

2011-06-11T10:33:00.000-07:00

The day after the Vienna show we were meant to travel to Italy for two shows, but we ended up staying in Vienna for an extra day instead. Why? Because we'd found out it was mathematically impossible for us to reach Milan in time for the gig because the trailer we pull with us means we can only reach speeds of 10mph (and that's on steep hills). Plus, Barry was the only driver so it would mean he would have had to drive for 16 hours after playing a show, and then play another show. Chances are we would have all crashed and died and there would have been no more shows ever.

So, instead - here's my annotated guide to Vienna.

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Here is Sam in the morning thinking about emotions or something.

Here is Sam and Spider playing an authentic Vienna game called 'Pillow Case Gypsy Battle'.

Spider was replaced for the day by his camp French cousin Pepé.

Sam was shocked to see that they have the sky in Vienna too.

Barry... thinking about football maybe. Or monkeys.

In a stroke of simultaneous bad luck, these three boys all dropped their phones as we passed by this laundrette and they landed in 3 different washing machines. What are the chances!

This is a scene from a forthcoming movie called 'Three Men In A Cafe'.

Believe it or not, the light bulb in the middle of this display is the original lightbulb that Thomas Edison invented in 1879. Somehow it has ended up in a laundrette on the outskirts of Vienna.

People live in these.

People also live in these, disguised as chewing gum and Tic-Tacs.

Vienna's underground system, where 98% of the world's babies are conceived.

We found these identical statues of us beside this fountain. Ker-azzzzeeeee.

Barry and Sam direct their first porno on a Vienna rooftop.

Ross' spot on impersonation of Michael Douglas.

Some poor guy fell asleep during a Sunday service and they hung him up in the church to make an example of him.

Criminal masterminds at work. And Spider.

The secrets of Ultravox's hit song 'Vienna'.

2011-06-04T14:24:00.000-07:00

Ohhhhhhh Vienna.

Not my words, the words of Midge Ure and his band Ultravox in their smash hit song ‘Vienna’. What does this sentiment mean? It sounds like he’s either annoyed at Vienna (‘Ohhhh Vienna, you’ve left a wet towel on the floor again!) or amused by Vienna (Ohhhh Vienna, that story you just told about when you fell over that antique chair was divine!). However, he does claim just before he belts out that famous line that ‘This means nothing to me’, and he’s wearing a big jacket in the video and it’s filmed at night so i’ve shrewdly figured out that it is probably a serious song - therefor he must be annoyed at Vienna for something. I’m not sure what, it must be something bad though as he’s taking a pot shot at the whole city and it’s a pretty big place. Unless Vienna is perhaps the name of a pet that Midge Ure owns? I simply don’t know, all I do know is that we were playing in Vienna on the next stop of a thing we’re calling a ‘tour. If I bump into Midge when i’m here i’ll be sure to ask him about the song.

So, Vienna it was. Mozart and Beethoven lived and worked here. I wonder if they’d have approved of our music? I’m imagining probably not. Although, Beethoven was kind of deaf so I don’t know if i’d value his opinion - 9 symphonies!? I’ve written 12 myself, they’re all composed on the recorder. It’s basically 12 different variations of Three Blind Mice that get more atonal with each version, it’s very contemporary. They’re not technically symphonies as it’s only one instrument, they all last about 30 seconds and none of them are particularly in tune. But still, if you say something is contemporary or abstract you can call it whatever you want. Anyway, we were playing a little outside where Mozart and pals used to bring their classical talents to town - at a venue called Arena. Except it wasn’t an arena, it was something much more interesting.

Arena was kind of like a punk commune. It was an old slaughterhouse that had long been closed and had since been taken over and turned into a series of venues which were all enclosed inside a complex, and there was enough graffiti on the walls to make Bart Simpson fall off his skateboard. The place was covered, looked amazing. We were playing one of the smaller halls which had just had new subs added to the PA, this made the in-house guy very happy I think - he was talking in Austrian but it sounded like happy Austrian. Paul, our own little Scottish sound man, had to leave the tour for a few days so we were without him for the first time in quite a while. We always get scared when Paul isn’t doing our sound as he knows us so well, and he also lets us give him an unlimited amount of nicknames too. If you ever find someone who will let you do that you should stick with them forever. So when we looked at the sound desk there was instead a man with a thick Austrian accent demanding ‘‘BASCH DRAHM’ and ‘SCHNARE DRAHM’. Because I am a cultured guy I knew what this meant.

Before we played we discussed how we would quite like to move to Austria and live inside the Arena, disregarding the fact we speak a different language from everyone here and have nothing to offer them. Maybe we could be gatekeepers and stop other people getting in the commune? I have to say that it wasn’t actually a commune, everyone that worked there seemed to go home at the end of the night - but it was more exciting to think of it as a commune. For the purpose of good storytelling i’m going to say that everyone in the commune wore clothes fashioned from bedsheets and slept in tents inside the grounds - even though that is a complete lie. The show went well, although Ross’ bass pedals just stopped working after 2 songs so he had to play with a clean bass signal for much of the show. He managed to fashion distortion pedals later on out of his shoes and use them to give his bass the growl that we all love so much.

We stayed at Arena that night, in a room with bunk beds in one of the other buildings inside the complex. They weren’t just bunk beds though, they were triple bunks that reached up to the sky - and they looked very dangerous and handmade. It also had the most penis drawings possible in one room, any more and the place would have exploded in an overload of playground graffiti. My favourite thing written on the wall definitely had to be the huge piece that simply said ‘REST IN PIECES, YOU FUCKING BITCHES’. Touching, so touching.

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Switzeria Drive.

2011-06-03T12:42:00.000-07:00

If you drive from Switzerland to Austria this might happen:

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Pratteln, make some noizzzzze.

2011-06-01T13:22:00.000-07:00

Pratteln is a place in Switzerland. Switzerland is where the rich hide their money in secret bank accounts, and where people who’s skin is so tanned they’ve gone orange come in convertible sports cars to chill out from their everyday life as retired millionaires. Switzerland is also where Zurich is situated, and that is where all business men are born. Apparently all baby boys born in Zurich are born straight out of the womb with a mobile phone in one hand and a Mont Blanc pen in the other - ready to make powerful stock deals from day 1 of their lives. The Swiss doctor’s also give them a dose of industrial strength hair gel when they start school so their hair will always be slicked back and greased - even if they try to wash it out. It is a little known fact that Zurich is so rich that the mountains have been replaced with ‘mountain effect’ gold bars and that people hard-boil Fabergé eggs for breakfast and wash them with a glass of tears from the worlds most famous explorer, Indiana Jones. But, Pratteln is not Zurich. It’s about 50 minutes from there, and just has your ordinary nature-made mountains and the locals have probably never tasted the sweet but powerful tears of Harrison Ford’s alter-ego.

I must confess that i’d never heard of Pratteln until I found out we were playing there. This is due to general ignorance toward geography on my part, and nothing against this fine city. We managed to get there without being rinsed for tax at the Swiss border again - rumour has it you get charged one Euro for every day you have been alive. And i’ve been alive for nearly 100 days, so that would be approximately 100 Euros. That’s just hard math. We arrived in Pratteln to find it was situated in some sort of mountainous valley and was quite breathtaking. What kind of took away from that was the fact it seemed that we were playing in a shopping centre in the middle of nowhere. Sure enough, we found the venue on the top floor, opposite a pet shop. Which is nuts. Which is apt because there were nuts for sale inside the pet shop. BOOM. So far Pratteln had proved itself unwilling to follow the trend of where venues are classically situated. And I liked that. Think where Pratteln could go from here? Think about this... a venue that’s underwater. It’s the future.

We couldn’t soundcheck til 7 o’clock, which was also when doors opened. These two facts did not add up. We also found out that we had sold a grand total of zero tickets, which basically means that zero people had deemed us worthy enough to purchase a ticket in advance. By my shrewd calculation I calculated that meant there would be zero people at the gig. But, on the bright side - there was a shop on the same floor that sold glasses which had mirrors on the lens so when you looked straight ahead you could see your feet. It was like walking with your head down, except your head was up. If you really liked your shoes then this would be a worthy purchase. You would never step on an insect again, but you may bump into approximately 5 people and 2 walls a day. So the glasses would probably break after 1 day of use. Unless you wore a protective bubble over your head to protect the glasses. But this in turn would impede the view of your feet, essentially limiting the glasses main function. It’s a functional nightmare.

We went onstage to rapturous applause, oh wait, no we didn’t. In the end, there were 12 people in the room, which somehow made it infinitely more awkward than there being zero. We did play our full set, because we are determined/stubborn, which I think angered the ‘crowd’, but there weren’t enough people there for a riot to start. In all seriousness, thank you to the 12 brave people of Pratteln for sticking with us - you are all heroes. I’ve named you the Pratteln Twelve, an elite team of hardened human beings willing to withstand the most brutal of social situations. If I were an army general I would give you all little badges to stick on the sleeves of your civilian gig-wear so the rest of the world know the plights you have been through. You have made your country proud, hold your heads high and know that you stood through an event that many would have slunk away.

To be fair, this is what we had expected the whole European tour to be like, and the fact it had taken until now to happen was pretty amazing. We had genuinely expected less than 12 people at every show. So, we left that shopping centre with our heads held high too, and with our dignity intact. Well, until I tripped over my own shoes whilst trying on those mirror glasses one last time and crashed through the pet shop window, knocking over the enclosure holding the tarantulas. The biggest one bit me in the leg, causing it to swell up so big that my trousers literally burst off, meaning I had to load out in a pair of Iron Man pants with one massively swollen leg. Gutted.

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Boring day.

2011-05-31T17:16:00.000-07:00

Hello there. My name is Craig. I was going to write about the gig we just played in Munich but I don’t have anything interesting to say about it. It wasn’t a bad gig, it was pretty fun - but our whole day really consisted of traveling then setting up and sitting about for a while and then playing. I did count all the merchandise with Spider, and I did make great strides in my career as a professional Angry Birds phone athlete. But apart from that nothing happened. Absolutely nothing. Therefor, i’ve decided to write about what could have happened to make the day interesting - it’s all entirely plausible.

We woke up in our hotel to find a herd of buffalo crashing through the room. There was so many that we were all lifted out of our beds and through the opposing wall into the hotel car park. These happened to be a rare kind of ‘speed’ Buffalo, capable of velocities of up to 200mph. Before we knew it we were on the German autobahn, each of us holding onto a pair of buffalo ears - terrified and wondering how we were going to get out of this unusual situation. We must have travelled for around 2 hours in the opposite direction of Munich, where we wanted to be headed - and we were all in our pants, apart from me. I was wearing a full Gucci suit as I like to sleep in one as it makes me feel like a business man. Suddenly, the buffalo all turned off the road and got even and faster as we broke through thickly-cultivated fields on their backs. By now the fear had subsided and we were getting a bit hungry instead. And I kind of needed the bathroom, and I didn’t want to pee on a buffalo’s back incase it got angry and mauled me.

Eventually we reached a clearing and the buffalo herd started to slow down, coming to a full stop in what seemed like the middle of nowhere. The head of the buffalo tribe (we knew this as he had on a crown, and was smoking a cigar) pulled a small remote out of his fur coat (it was actually a fur coat, mink to be exact - his buffalo skin was underneath this) and pressed the only button that I could see on it. It was a big red button that glowed red, so we knew it was important. Seconds after his big hoof had pressed it, an opening appeared in the ground and revealed what looked like a man-made tunnel that had been hidden under some leaves. The buffalo leader signaled for the rest of the buffalo to follow him and again we sped off down into the tunnel for what seemed like another hour. This was all getting a bit tiresome, and we were in danger of missing playing to a handful people in Munich that night. I tried to ask one of the buffalo where they were taking us, but he/she or it couldn’t hear me under the cacophony of stampeding feet. Eventually we reached what looked like a service elevator door at the end of the tunnel and it opened instinctively as the herd approached. And then it got really weird.

We realised that the door didn’t lead to a service elevator but instead inside was what looked like any sort of mid-sized venue you could find in any city. We were ushered inside and finally let off the top of the buffalo. In what was strangely not that shocking after what had happened to us so far today, the head of the buffalos started talking in a distinguished English accent. He explained that he’d heard us play in Berlin the previous night after hiding himself in one of the PA speakers before we reached the venue. He said he’d enjoyed the performance, a little bit too heavy for him, but he’d wanted all his buffalo friends who hadn’t been able to get into the gig (because buffalo are not allowed into gigs in Germany) to be able to watch us aswell. He apologised profusely for the way they had barged into our hotel room that morning, and said that he’d had a friend collect all our bags that had been left behind and then had our van and cargo transported to Munich for the show there this evening. He asked if we would perform again for him and his friends and said that he would pay us €1,000,000 for the inconvenience that had been caused to us.

So we played to an excited crowd packed to the rafters with buffalo. They’d hired in the same backline that we use anyway, so we felt comfortable and in no way awkward being there. Even the fact that everyone was in their pants, and I in a full Gucci business suit, did not effect proceedings. And when I explained that I needed to goto the bathroom all the buffalo laughed and said “Ha ha, we are buffalo my friend - urinate where and when you wish!!” So I did, and it was very relieving. After the show we had a couple of drinks with the buffalo, but politely declined their offer of cocaine and speed - it turns out that buffalo are big recreational drug users. The herd leader, now a little bit wrecked from the mixture of alcohol and speed, said that he would now take us back to Munich so we could play our own show that night. He opened a small door at the back of the stage that revealed a massive aeroplane hangar with a harrier jet stationed in the center of the room with ‘BUFFALO #1’ painted on the side of it. He jumped (leaped) into the pilots seat and we all squeezed in behind him. He dismissed all manner of runway and takeoff procedure and just pulled back the accelerator and let rip. In what felt like a couple of minutes we were in the air and going at speeds that must have been illegal. We arrived in Munich with plenty of time to still soundcheck and get a sandwich before we needed to play. We swapped numbers and promised to stay in touch, and before he departed he told us some buffalo curse words (If you ever want to offend a buffalo, just call him a ‘FDKHKJELVNDJOS’). And then he was gone, and our lives returned to normal.

So.... none of that happened but it would have been cool. The end.

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