Random musings on touring in the UK and Europe, March and April 2008.

I’m going to call the gigs we did in March the UK shows. I know we didn’t play in Scotland or Northern Ireland so technically we didn’t play everywhere in the UK (I know, I’ve had the emails) and I could just be culturally insensitive in a different way and call them the English shows and wait for the Welsh emails, but referring to them as the English and Welsh shows is simply too long-winded. Similarly, having had my knuckles rapped for referring to our April gigs as a European tour, I’m going to refer to them as the German shows (with the implied inclusion of the one show in Prague). Enough semantics, on with the show!

Having just finished the German tour with four stupidly long drives, I realise just how small the UK is in comparison. I shall think twice before moaning about a drive back to Leeds from Hampshire. Routing is always a nightmare – the logistical challenge of finding eleven shows that are both decent in themselves and not too far from each other is almost impossible. Easy to remember that now, but obviously no comfort whatsoever when we’re stuck in the same traffic jam near Frankfurt as two days previously and there’s still 300 km to go. And it’s so hot (for the first time on the tour) that we have German newspapers stuck on the windows against the heat. (Disembarking at a service station we realise that the page we’ve been proudly displaying to all passing motorists is the obituaries. Still, it could have been the Sun’s page three girls – or page one girls as they are in the Bild Zeitung. 

Touring easily becomes a series of snapshots (literally in Phil’s case) of a country, a town, a gig. Often, when we’ve been to a town in the past and we’re trying to remember it, it’ll be the graffiti in the dressing room, or where we got taken to eat, that we recall, rather than the architectural landmarks. As Boff said in one of the MySpace tour blogs, you end up existing in a sort of non-space – probably more so in Europe than at home, where at least there are more immediate things to keep you in touch with the world around you – newspapers, TV news, football on the telly etc. (And in my case, Radio 4 in the headphones at all times that reception permits. I have a knack of drifting in and out of deep sleep in the van, somewhere between The Archers, You & Yours and I’m Sorry I Haven’t A Clue, gob open, catching flies).

Internet access becomes a much sought-after commodity on tour (and the Germans score more highly here than England). You just have to accept living in a state of mild dislocation for a couple of weeks, where all normal habits – diet, exercise, keeping abreast of current affairs – go out of the window; the window with the obituaries pasted across it, of course. Makes you hungry for them all when you get back – even if that first run/visit to the gym is a killer. Oh but the first avocado on home soil is soooo good.

On the road we necessarily abandon ourselves to a life of cheese – you even get it for breakfast in Germany. But at least most German breakfasts are buffet affairs where you get left alone to marvel over the array of fresh fruit, cold meats, cheese (obviously) and seven types of delicious bread – and no pinny-clad fussing landlady hovering over you with a spatula and a Full English as you scramble to your seat just before the 8.30 am breakfast deadline.

We’ve lost count of the number of German shows we’ve played in disused factories, slaughterhouses and breweries. It’s what they do. And they are almost without exception, cool and interesting spaces full of cool and interestingly diverse cultural events. We start to bore ourselves with the number of times we find ourselves saying “why don’t we have anything like this in Leeds”. UK Arts Centres have been a life-saver for us and we’d play them over a rock venue in the UK any day of the week (unless it’s somewhere legendary like the 100 Club) but they just don’t have that German hip-ness. It’s something to do with how artistic and cultural activity is perceived in a country (and thus how it’s funded).

The provision of funding for cultural centres goes hand in hand with other things that they seem to ‘get’ in Germany (and other Northern European countries) like organising domestic recycling in a no-nonsense unhysterical way; grasping the concept that if you want to make cycling an appealing and safe alternative to driving a car then you build proper cycle lanes away from the traffic – where the biggest danger you’ll encounter is stray English people wandering into them because they don’t realise what they are. No, we’re English, we expect to see cyclists dicing with death in amongst the rush-hour traffic! It’s the same mentality that realises if you put drinks in bottles with a deposit in them, it’ll encourage people to take them back and not just chuck them out of car windows. The windows with the obituaries pasted across them, obviously.

I have to stop this rant. We do it all the time we’re in Germany. Oh I don’t know, I love England with its shambolic charm and at least we understand how to make a decent cup of tea and we’ve got the Yorkshire Dales and the Lake District. And great music and good TV, radio and newspapers (being away for a while makes you unnervingly fond of the BBC, the Independent and The Guardian). And the football of course. And look how green everything is when you fly over the Peak District and in to Manchester! And the pubs of course, and that British sense of not-doing-what-you’re-told which makes us home to great mavericks and eccentrics who refuse to wait until the little man goes green before crossing a car-less road. Yes, I know. But. But. But… but of course the one thing we can truly share across the geo-cultural divide is the insanity of the traffic. Motorway, Autobahn or Highway: they’re all steadily filling up and slowing down. And who’s filling them? Why, it’s those musicians, crammed in and hunched up, headphones on behind the obituaries.