European Tour Diary: Day 34 - Cologne, Germany

Ah, Cologne! Or Koln, as it is in German. This is one of the few places that we’ve randomly ended up playing a few times this year already. We first played here with Madina Lake back towards the beginning of the year, then ended up with Story of the Year back at the same venue, The Underground, less than two months later. After that, just before we played Pukkelpop festival in Belgium, we came back again for a one off show with Anberlin a few months back. These shows have always been great, so we have a soft spot for the city and for that venue in particular.
This time, we are playing a venue down the road, that up until now we’d only heard about, The Music Hall, which is a hell of a lot bigger. We’re coming back here with All Time Low in February but we aren’t allowed to announce that yet! Any more and it’d probably make more sense for us to move to Cologne, but it’s nice to feel like we’re beginning to build something out on the continent, and as I said, we genuinely like the place.

It’s a good show, and it’s nice to see some familiar faces in the crowd. It’s amazing that people are coming to these shows just to see us play. I feel bad that they’re paying so much money just to see us play a half hour support slot but we’ll be back to do some headline shows next year so hopefully that’ll make up for it. 
We say goodbye to some of the people that have travelled to a few of our German shows on this tour, and head back to our room for the night. We’ve agreed with another venue to let us rent out the flat above their venue for the night. Far from gross, it turns out to be a really nice place, which is always a nice surprise. We put our bags down, freshen up and go for a few drinks across the road in a bar that turns out to be full of Danko Jones fans. They’re all good fun so we have some drinks and head back to sleep. Yet another long journey tomorrow.

-Gus

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European Tour Diary: Day 33 - Saarbrucken, Germany

Unlike Marlebach (which is in France anyway) Saarbrucken is a lovely town/city/place/whatever it is.
Me John, Dave and Ben have our heart set on eating some Mexican food for lunch and have seen a cheap place in the centre so we leave the others in the venue and go off to find it. We stuff ourselves with fajitas and enchiladas and head back to the venue content and in serious danger of lapsing into a food coma.

We’ve not had many chances to use the internet on this tour, often the venue’s wireless networks don’t work, or do but are being hammered by all the bands/crew/venue staff, but today is usable so we spend a few hours catching up on e-mails, sending off these here tour diaries, doing mailouts and taking care of business. Nice to feel connected and not out of the loop for once.
We’ve been writing and mucking around with ideas on Garage Band on this tour so spend the early evening showing each other ideas, playing around with the acoustics we’ve brought with us and talking about album number 2, which is on everyone’s minds at the moment. What do we want out of it? What should it sound like? All these questions are circling around in our heads and we’re excited to really begin the whole process again. I can’t imagine actually sitting there having a second finished album – right now it seems like a million years away but as we’ve learnt these things have a habit of creeping up on you, and one way or the other there will be a point in time when we have our second record in our hands and ready to show the world. I can’t wait.

Today’s show is ok, not one of the best but not one of the worst either. It’s a big room but the crowd is here for one reason and it sure ain’t us. We play and get a polite reception, and pack up our stuff to go back to Merlebach for another night, meaning that we came from France this morning to play in Germany, now have gone back to France to sleep. Back to Germany tomorrow.

-Gus

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European Tour Diary: Day 23 - Dortmund, Germany

Today’s show has been one we’ve been simultaneously looking forward to and been nervous about. We’ve been lucky enough to do a series of short video blogs for the German music website Visions.de which is great for us and a really cool chance for us to introduce ourselves to the German rock scene, which have all led up to todays event, a 2 day indoor festival in Dortmund. We’re honoured to be playing below John Garcia of seminal stoner rock band Kyuss fame, and the whole thing is being filmed for German rock TV show Rock Palaste which is the equivalent of, we’re told, Top of The Pops in the UK. No pressure then. We arrive in the afternoon and walk in to John Garcia and his band sound checking. This is really really cool. When I was at university I listened to a lot of Kyuss (who counted Josh Homme of Queens of The Stone Age/Eagles of Death Metal and more) in their ranks and influenced a whole generation of bands, so to see JG up singing on stage is cool. He’s a total rock star, shades on indoors, walking around with that air of someone who just knows they are cool (almost as bad as Ben). We hear rumours of his demands to be moved not just bed, not just room, but hotel when he found what appeared to be a pubic hair on his mattress before coming here. Nice work John, nearly as bad as Fraser.

We mooch around backstage for a while surfing the web or laughing at the fact that our manager Andy accidentally called the band we’re sharing a backstage room with ‘Pink Snot Red’ instead of ‘Pinks Not Red’, before doing an acoustic version song for the Visions.de website. We’ve done this a few times on this tour now, but this is my favourite time that we’ve performed the song. We wrap it up and have some food and coffee before getting ready to play. The show itself is an odd one. Great stage, great lighting, but the audience is definitely hard to get moving. We aren’t unused to this though, so plug away and do our best. It’s always tough but we plug away and get a good response in the end, which is awesome considering that John Garcia is such a cult figure that most of the people here are die-hard stoner rock fans. Not so much our target audience, perhaps. We get given a CD of filmed footage from our show straight away when we come off stage but I hate watching videos of us playing live so I elect not to watch it.

We hang out, watch Danko Jones and some of John Garcia play before we get ready to leave, which brings me to the other reason we were apprehensive about today. Tomorrow’s show is in Lyon. Lyon is in France. We are in Germany. It’s a 900 kilometre drive and there’s no travel day. This pretty much means we have to leave the show in Dortmund and drive all night and all morning in order to arrive at the venue in time to make our soundcheck the next day in France. Shit. We spend so long in this van anyway being in here for 14/15 hours straight really sucks, let me tell you. You go a bit mad, but it’s all part of the experience, and electing to do it as DIY as we have means you have to do things like this. The guys take shifts of 3 hours or so while I sit in the back enjoying the one time that not being able to drive is a benefit.
I’m beginning to lose track of which country we are actually in.

-Gus



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European Tour Diary: Day 22 - Frankfurt, Germany

We pick Ben and Simon up from the airport as they flew home for a few days, and make our way to Frankfurt, the night before our first show since our little break in Italy. When you spend pretty much every minute of every day together, it feels really strange to spend time apart and it feels like we’ve not seen each other in years. We catch up and grab a bite to eat in a pretty dingy diner by the motorway that is full of what I can only imagine is the German equivalent of chavs, getting pissed and being obnoxious. Nice to know that we aren’t the only country capable of producing meatheads, though we do seem pretty good at it. We eat the food, which is the worst we’ve eaten in our time out here, and leave. Off to the hotel to get some rest.

The next morning we’re all excited to be touring again, the time off has been awesome but it’s been really nice to get back to work and be playing music again. We’re all rested and excited and it feels obvious when we play. We’re all full of energy and it’s one of the more enjoyable shows on the tour so spirits are high. Ahead of us we have one of the tougher stretches of the tour so we try to get as much rest as possible.

-Gus

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European Tour Diary: Day 15 - Lindau, Germany

When you’re away for so long, it’s pretty difficult to pack appropriately. Some of us have brought way too little (Fraser…), some of us have brought way too much (Simon, I’m looking at you here…) so there is always shit everywhere, wherever we go. We put stuff back in our suitcases, and try to salvage what we can find that’s clean enough to wear. Luckily, the mini kitchen we had access to had an antiquated washing machine and dryer so we’ve managed to wash some clothes at last. Thank god. We drag our suitcases downstairs and into the van and set off to Lindau.

The journey is long and uneventful and we spend it on our laptops or reading or whatever, but after a few hours someone looks out the window and exclaims. In the distance, over the hills and almost invisible, are The Alps. No way! We crowd the windows taking pictures like the tourists we are. Such an iconic sight, silver-glass-blue mountains with white peaks on a clear afternoon. I’ve never seen them before, or even mountains like these anywhere. Awesome.

We cruise along and The Alps settle to our side, visible every now and again through glimpses in the roadside trees/rocks/hills etc. It’s easy to forget where you are and then things like this bring you back to reality with a jolt.

More tags in the venue, I spy The Blackout’s handiwork on a couch, NOFX and some other cool ones. We play then load out our gear at the back of the venue. Heading into Switzerland (which we are tomorrow) can be tricky – if the border authorities suspect you of being a band with merch they will make you take it all out, they will count it all and tax you for the privilege of taking things across the border that you intend to sell. In itself not unfair, but the tax is super high, so people stash their merch where they can in the hope that if they are searched, their haul won’t be found. We pack some into our home made stage boxes that we use, and put the rest in suitcases, mostly in Simon’s as his is massive.

Lindau is a great little town but being a little town it doesn’t really have much to offer late at night, we leave the venue and head into the outskirts of the town to try and find some late night dinner as we didn’t really get to eat tonight. All that’s open is a McDonald’s, so as depressing as it is, we pull in and go to grab some food. I don’t know if it’s because there isn’t much to do, but it seems like every young person in Lindau goes to McDonald’s to hang out on this Friday night. It must be said, though; even the McDonalds is moderately decent-ish.

We stay in a quaint B&B style hotel for the night. Simon has to drag his suitcase up 3 floors, which at this point is so heavy with all his clothes and extra merch that all the handles snap off. I can hear him rattling up the stairs as with his coffin of a suitcase as we get into our hotel room.

In bed I read for a little while. I am reading a Stephen King book on my Kindle called The Last Gunslinger, about a man named Roland wandering a foreign land looking for answers and chasing something he’s not even sure exists. In many ways I feel the same.

We fall asleep to the sounds of rats scurrying through the walls all night.

-Gus

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European Tour Diary: Day 13 - Nuremberg, Germany

The plan is to get up really early so that we can travel early and see some of the famous sights of Nuremberg. Nuremberg was (as far as I know) the place where the post WW2 tribunals were held, many Nazi army figure heads were tried here, and the city was the place of the infamous Nuremberg rallies, as well as the site of the Nazist Coliseum. By this point it will surprise none of you to know that we fail to make it there to see any of these amazing things. We are out the door by ten but make a stop off at a gigantic music warehouse outside Nuremberg called Thomann’s. Emre needs some microphone clips for his drum kit mics, and as a band you can never have too much gear so we muck around trying out all the different pianos, guitars, basses etc. Why are instruments so expensive!!!! Music shops are funny things, people are always trying to out-play each other, me and Fraser are fucking around on a cool keyboard we’ve had our eye on for a while, when some middle aged German dude comes up, muscles us out of the way and starts shredding out some jazz on it, before sauntering off without even looking back at us. Dude alert.

Simon buys a cool new pedal for his bass that makes it sound even more rowdy, and we collect Emre’s clip and head off. We are stupid for spending too much time in a music shop but it always happens. Damn it.

We turn up at the venue and make our way to our dressing room. It is approximately the size of a matchbox, but we’re used to that so we all squeeze in and set up our little stations where we can eat, surf the web, warm up or whatever. Being in the room is like being in a game of Tetris, you all have to work together to be able to be in there at the same time, fitting around each other. There is a small table with one chair, again this doesn’t bother us as we’ve played small shows for years, but why they provided one chair at all is a mystery. Maybe it’s to see who will assert their dominance, and so the game of musical chair begins. We eat, play, and watch Linda strafe the crowd combing for signatures. Go Linda!

It seems the further we get into the tour, the more people are coming to the show already fans of us. Small numbers, but it’s still really encouraging to see, so we hang and have some drinks by the merch (I’m on water as I don’t want to get properly ill and still feel a bit shit) and get back to our old tricks of hustling CDs to people as they make their way home. When you’re just starting out as a band it’s just what you have to do to make cash to eat with etc. Maybe some times you feel like a dick selling your EPs or whatever like you’re working on a market stall but you simply have to do it, and I actually quite enjoy it, engaging with people, persuading them to part with their hard earned money. I am pretty confident that if people take the plunge with our music they’ll end up liking it anyway so I don’t feel bad. It works though as we end up selling out our CDs that we brought with us on tour. I can’t figure out if we’ve shot ourselves in the foot or not. Will have to order more from home I guess. Good to feel like we’re making progress. If you can get someone to take a CD with them if it’s the first time they’ve heard you, you have a much better chance of getting them to come back to see you next time you play the area, instead of forgetting you exist, so job done!

We leave the venue tired but happy and make our way to the hotel. John Emre and Simon demolished the whisky on our rider so they have a little disco while the rest of us sit there in the dark getting elbowed. Good times. I’m jealous, but have to try to stay focused, and as boring as it is sometimes it means not partying. It’s a small price to pay or getting to sing in a band so whatever. Hopefully see you next year Munich.

-Gus

European Tour Diary: Day 12 - Munich, Germany

We wake up in our dorm style rooms and climb out of our bunk beds for showers. Some of us decide to go back into town (the venue is just outside) so we get in the van and drive back in, happy to be seeing Munich in the daylight. We park and get out, and the first thing we notice is that Munich is fucking freezing. The second is that it’s an amazing city, the architecture is grand and has an old-world feel to it. In many ways it looks like the kind of European city that I had in my minds eye… Imperial and ornate buildings stretching out around us, sculptures, fountains and open squares.

We walk around for a bit, do a tiny bit of shopping for some hats/gloves (I get a bobble hat beanie ‘cos I lost my hat somewhere) and have some pizza in a cool little Italian restaurant. The waiter seems to speak in both Italian and German, but not English so we try to order as clearly and un-english as we can. By some miracle we all get the orders right and stuff ourselves, though why we bother ordering loads of different food when we all just cover it with Tobasco and it tastes the same is anyone’s guess. For the record, we all love Tabasco sauce. It makes everything good, and we’ve gotten into the habit of putting it on everything we can, even if it shouldn’t be put on. Short of cereal, there ain’t much we won’t douse in the fiery delicious sauce.

Before we know it our time is up so we navigate our way (badly) back to the van and drive back to the venue where Emre is waiting unimpressed. We are late, as usual, so quickly chuck our gear in and soundcheck.

Tonight’s show is cool, and it’s awesome to see a few people already wearing Young Guns tee shirts. We also have a street teamer from heaven (or hell depending on where you stand) that kicks everybody’s ass and gets pages and pages of sign up names for our mailing list. Linda you are amazing! We owe you.



We hang out by the merch as per usual, watch Danko’s set which is again tight as fuck and really gets the crowd going, then head back for an early night. I’m currently addicted to The Wire so I watch a few episodes in bed before turning in. I’m getting ill, which really sucks but is not at all unexpected. Oh well. Good night Munich. I wish I could have seen more of thee.


-Gus

European Tour Diary: Day 11 - Travel to Munich, Germany

Today is a travel day and it’s good to have the rest. That is to say, it would be if I didn’t have to wake up at quarter to eight in the morning to pay for parking on the van, which inevitably is more complicated than would first appear. This is mainly due to the fact that it’s my job and I’m pretty inept at, well, pretty much everything. Especially at 8am. Once I’m up I’m up, and besides I have a few interviews to do early anyway so it’s for the best. The walk to the van on my own isn’t as unpleasant as I thought it would be - though I emerge from the dark hotel room and into the blinding early morning autumn light blinking and squinting like a mole, really it’s kind of cool to have some space and to briefly walk the streets of Hamburg on my own. I head back, tidy the room that me and Dave managed to make a mess of in less than 10 hours, and do a phone interview with a Japanese magazine for our first Japanese feature. So fucking cool! Japan has always been my number 1 wishlist thing-to-do-before-I-die, and everyone else in the band feels pretty similar so to start doing press there is seriously cool and exciting – hopefully it’ll be the start of a long journey to get us over there. We’ll see.

I miss breakfast (standard) and meet the guys half an hour late to leave (again, standard), and we begin the 800km journey to Munich.

I’d love to know what bands like Motley Crue or any of the 80s party-animal heyday bands did during the long journeys. Bands in this day and age pretty much seem to exist stuck to their laptops, watching films or whatever, and we are no different, so that’s a big part of spending most of your life in a van. Laptops are up, earphones are in and the stereo is on for the driver’s benefit (which today is Dave for the first half, and then John for the evening stretch). You can never quite concentrate on anything ‘cos the stereo is too loud, or because Simon is air drumming hour upon hour next to you. You watch the countryside flit by with your face against the window, or the miles of road slip underneath us out of the front view (always makes me feel like we’re missing so much whenever we travel, but sadly we are always against time) or if you’re me you read a book (more specifically my prize possession – a Kindle which I love to bits), write lyrics or tour diaries like this, or whatever. There’s also a lot of Garage Band going on as people muck around with ideas that may or may not end up on album 2 (something on our mind a lot, of late). Don’t even get me started on seat politics; I’ll be here all day – who sits where has been the source of many arguments.

So, across Germany we go, doing all of these things and stopping for way too many pee-breaks and eating service station bockwurst/bratwurst/schnitzel/pretzel every chance we get (again, Europeans, you guys are amazing at this food thing) and arrive after night has fallen. Spending nine or ten hours in the van sucks so we put our bags in the backstage area that we’ll be staying in for tonight and tomorrow night, and go into central Munich for some dinner. We aim for the Hofbrauhause and get there at 10pm-ish. It seems like all of Munich are out at the Hofbrauhause and are drunkenly singing along and dancing to the life horn section band that are playing in the centre of the huge pub/restaurant that almost looks like somewhere in Hogwarts or someplace similar. Big long tables with lots of people animatedly talking and swinging around big 2 pint jugs of potent beer, often standing up and singing at the top of their lungs. This place is amazing! We have some traditional german dinner of bratwursts, sauerkraut, roast pork and dumplings, and of course, a few jugs of beer, served by women in traditional german garb. It really is an incredible place, and feels extremely German, which we love.

We sit and drink our beers, stuffed and merry underneath the big chandeliers before deciding to leave and get some rest.

On the way back to the venue we get pulled over by the police and spend 30 minutes with them, they check our van and threaten to bring sniffer dogs, but since they clearly find nothing and seem to believe that we are above board they let us go and we climb into our bunk beds. I have to set my alarm for half 8 as I have to do a radio1 interview over the phone. Tom Deacon is covering the morning slot for a week and has chosen Weight of The World as his record of the week so is going to ring me for a chat, which is brilliant except for the fact that I appear to have no signal here. Typical! Anyway I set my alarm and after catching up on e-mails/skyping to friends and loved ones at home, we get some sleep. Bring on tomorrow! Can’t wait to walk around Munich again in the afternoon.

-Gus

European Tour Diary: Day 10 - Hamburg, Germany

When we get up, we take a quick walk around the local area for some breakfast before we leave for Hamburg. Our Tour Manager Emre can speak pretty much every language in the world so we come across a Turkish café. Seeing as Emre is Turkish and can speak German we figure we got all the bases covered and go in for some sandwiches and coffee. We walk back to the van noticing how common street art/graffiti is over here on the mainland. From tiny little pieces to building sized paintings, it seems more accepted over here. We open the doors to our travelling waste bin of a vehicle, and my suitcase flies out onto the pavement. From the top. That’ll be my one-week-old suitcase broken then. Awesome. It’s holding on for dear life and still has one zip that kind of holds it together so all is not lost, yet. It’s my property and will therefore break soon though.

We travel to Hamburg while Emre delights in telling us what’s going down in Turkey thanks to his Turkish newspaper he picked up in the café.

I feel like I keep on repeating myself when I say ‘the venue is really cool’, but truly that is the case, a lot of them are converted buildings and have a past history, and some are just laid out really well and are super accommodating. Partly I imagine it’s because Danko Jones pull big crowds so play good venues. Makes sense really, great for us though. This particular venue is close to the Red Light District of Hamburg and is called the Reeperbahn, which we are told by DJ’s crew is second only to Amsterdam’s - not that we even get to see it.


I do another interview in our dressing room while all the guys set up on stage for sound check and then join them on stage where we noodle around with a few new ideas and things to play on our next UK tour.
The show is great, but nobody is in the mood to go out after Berlin’s late night, and finally have the chance of a decent night’s rest so we pack the van and go back to our hotel. We paid for a shitty one but for some reason have been upgraded to a few really nice rooms at the top of the building which offer a great view out over Hamburg, which is awesome, but now we have three rooms that have a grand total of 12 beds in, instead of the 8 we ordered so somehow it feels like we are getting ripped off (we had booked 3 rooms to sleep our party of 8).

We hang out on the balcony of John and Mark’s room for a while before having probably the strangest half-asleep argument in the history of mankind over the rules of Heads or Tails. I lose and it is decided that I will be the one to get up early. Shit.

-Gus

European Tour Diary: Day 9 - Berlin, Germany

We finish the journey to Berlin in the morning and get to the venue, which used to be a massive post depot so we walk around its wide-open spaces, very industrial and very cool. It is also very cool to be in Berlin! I’ve never been and always wanted to, so I’m excited to be here. I remember watching The Berlin Wall being pulled down on the evening news when I was a kid, and now I can see it from our dressing room. Mad!

Sadly, we don’t have that much time before doors so we shower, eat yet another incredible dinner and get ready to go on stage. Tonight is a massive venue and to come to Berlin for the first time and be able to play to so many people is a great opportunity so we try our best to get them warmed up for Danko Jones later on.
After we’re done on stage we go upstairs, get cleaned up and wander down to the merch to hang out and meet anyone that wants to pick up merch or come say hi. I always find this to be one of the most rewarding parts of being on tour, meeting new people that have seen us play and have something nice to say. It’s a good feeling getting out to new people, especially when the crowd is made up of people who wouldn’t usually give our kind of thing a listen. We hover around merch until the show is over, sell as many CDs as we can and get on with my favourite EVER part of being in a band; The Load Out. This bit sucks. We heft all our heavy gear out of the venue and stick around the venue for a few hours as it turns into a club night. We drink lots of our new favourite beer ‘Berliner’ and then make a late exit to walk back to the hotel we are in for the night. It’s basically one big room with 8 beds in it so it feels like a school trip. In many ways, pretty much everything we ever do feels like a school trip. Make of that what you will…

-Gus