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 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

European Tour Diary: Day 8 - Copenhagen, Denmark

Denmark! Another first for us and me personally. I can’t wait to get there, even more so once Ben tells me that Biffy Clyro are playing a show at the same venueon the same night! They have a different room to us (obviously) but they are one of my favourite bands right now, and we’ve been fortunate enough to meet them a few times and hang for a while (they are possibly the nicest dudes ever) so it makes today even more exciting. We load in and make our way to the dressing room and once again fiddle with our laptops, doing a bit of demoing and putting some rough ideas down. I’m in the middle of a song that features the sound of John eating crisps in the background I will later discover. Interesting.

Tonight’s show is smaller, but a wicked one and I feel like we play it pretty much as well as we possibly can. Also, there is a group of people here that are actually fans of our band and give us some incredible presents of local foods, sweets etc. We are a lucky bunch of boys, and no there is no denying it, Anna and Karoline you guys are the best, thank you for our lovely present! And to our Swedish friends that have come to the past 3 or 4 shows and hung out with us, thank you so much. It means a lot to us. I can’t wait to come back again and spend more time with you all.

We rush to get all our stuff packed away and get a bit of Biffy Clyro in before the night ends. They are predictably good, and though Simon is sick, the songs still sound great, especially the material from the past 2 records, which I’m particularly a fan of. You just can’t argue with song writing of that quality. Simple as that. I really do feel Simon Neil’s pain though, even if nobody else notices much, not being able to perform as well as you know you can is infuriating, and when it’s because you’re sick there’s often nothing you can do about it. It’s like playing guitar with broken fingers, but as they say the show goes on so you just do what you can, and tonight they do that with skill. Good job gentlemen.

We leave and are taken to a Turkish restaurant by Emre (himself a turk) and we eat what might possibly be the best food ever. Fresh chicken shish kebabs cooked over hot stones, fresh hot wraps, delicious tsatziki and pitta etc. Literally incredible. We settle into our seats and begin the journey. Tonight is a long haul, 3 hours to the ferry that crosses from Denmark to our next destination: Germany! The ferry crossing is two hours long, and then another journey to the town of Rostock which is a midway point for us between Denmark and Berlin. The guys have slept in the van and on the ferry but I suck at sleeping so am pretty exhausted by the time we get into bed.

-Gus

European Tour Diary: Day 7 - Malmo, Sweden

This will be our seventh day in Scandinavia, and I love pretty much everything about it. The people are beautiful and hospitable, and so are countries themselves. I could live here very easily. I’m so grateful to be here and to be doing what we are.

We travel to Malmo without incident and arrive at the venue to watch Danko Jones sound check. They are so tight; it’s really something to see/hear. I’ve been using in ears for the first time ever on this tour so far, and I love it, but one of the earpieces stops working during our sound-check and afterwards I realise it’s because somehow the right ear has just…broken. Somehow it managed to disconnect itself and is just sadly dangling on a broken piece of cable. I either break or lose everything that I like, I am beginning to believe that I am cursed. Either that or just really really irresponsible. Perhaps it’s somewhere in the middle of the two, but it is so annoying. Damn it!!!! I’m not surprised, but it is so frustrating. When we’re playing supports, like this tour, often you have minimal space on stage once all the bands gear is up on stage. This makes it really hard to hear what you’re doing as a singer as most of the time all you can hear is cymbals and snare or bass guitar, having your voice and everything else actually in your ears can be really useful, but there’s not much I can do it about it so I just get on with it.

We chill for the evening and do a bit more song writing/demoing on our computers and warm up for the show. It’s another cool one tonight, and it is great seeing crowds that maybe wouldn’t give our band the time of day being won over and banging their head, it’s good to feel like we’re making progress.

Sadly, it is our last show in Sweden until whenever it is that we get to come back. We go out for some drinks with some of the Danko Jones guys and stay with some friends for the night.

-Gus

European Tour Diary: Day 1 - Home to Stockholm, Sweden

We get back to Young Guns base camp (a.k.a Ben’s mum’s house) at some hazy point of the early hours of Thursday night/Friday morning. Our last UK show for a month and a half was also one of the best (Warwick University you guys ruled and provided a brilliant end to the University tour) and now we are all exhausted, so we stumble out of the van (spilling food wrappers, drinks cans and bits of crap that make up most of a touring band’s day to day existence all over the driveway, as per) and get a few hours sleep strewn around the place at Ben’s. We wake up (late, again, as per) and get a lift to the airport worrying about passports and wash bags and all the other shit that we tend to leave. When I say we, what I really mean is me, as I tend to be the only one that actually forgets shit. I like to romanticize it (‘hey, I’m a dreamer, it’s not a crime!’) but really it’s just plain stupid. Still, this time we are ok and make it to the airport on time and squeeze our way onto our first Ryanair experience. All I will say on that particular matter is that it really fills you with confidence when they have to shift around passengers on the plane in order to ‘balance out the aircraft’.

We land in Stockholm and bid farewell to our new friends that we’ve made on the flight, on account of not a single one of us sitting next to each other, and hop into a cab to go to our hotel. Nick from Leicester, and your Swedish wife Anne, nice to meet you both - thanks for the Carlsberg.

We show our passports, collect our bags and meet our friends Dave (merch guy and professional handsome man) and Mark (all round helper outer, anecdote master and get-shit-done extraordinaire) and bundle into our new ride for the next 6 weeks, oohing and aah-ing at the leather seats and marble effect ceiling (why...?). Dave and Mark, along with our Tour Manager (master of everything) Emre are the people that are working with us on this tour and are in many ways as much a part of the band as we are. Without a crew, bands, especially a band like us, are nothing. The help they give us on a daily basis is beyond essential, if it wasn’t Emre in particular’s constant direction and knowledge we would be up the proverbial creek, and most definitely without a paddle. We love ‘em, and they probably hate us. I would. They will be spoken of in more depth for sure at some point soon, but back to our journey.

We set off from the airport, and I sit with my face stuck to the window looking at Sweden zoom by in the fading light, and it is only at this point that it dawns on me what it is we’re about to do. See, when you’re in a band and manage to get to the place that we have gotten ourselves to, often things can move so fast that you never really have time to catch your breath, and days weeks and even months can go by in what feels like the blink of an eye. You can be looking at your list of shows for the impending summer, with things like playing main stage Leeds and Reading seeming like a distant impossibility let alone a 6 week European tour a few months after it, and wondering what I’s all going to feel like, and then suddenly you’re driving through Sweden’s capital on the way to your hotel. It’s scary really, and makes me wish time was less cruel. I resolve to try and drink in every moment I can, but know I will fail. It’s a blessing, a curse, and the ultimate irony of being in a band and progressing/becoming more successful than you were. The more you get what you want, the more it slips by without you noticing. I hate this.

We get to the hotel and although we are all exhausted we are also getting more and more excited. Sleep is not an option just yet so we walk from the hotel to the nearby petrol station and spend 10 minutes fucking around there, looking at the new foods on offer and eat a light dinner of hot dogs and ice cream. Ah, tour diets! Even these are pretty amazing though – I always hated reading bands in the press slating UK food when I was younger but sadly, it would seem they’re right, europeans just do it better (though Sweden is crazy expensive). We wander back and get some rest before the first day of tour.

-Gus.

(We'll be posting these regularly, providing we can jump on wi-fi. As today is the first day, pictures were few and far between, but we'll be posting them too, and sending some to view exclusively on our new phone app!)