European Tour Diary: Day 37 - Eindhoven, Holland


Ouch. Heavy night. Great fun hanging with old friends in Amsterdam but man are we feeling the effects today. I’ve managed to catch about 2 and a half hours sleep and that was on our friend’s floor. The charm of doing things DIY can wear off real fast when you’re crashing on floors or couch surfing all the time, and I’m really bloody glad we don’t have to do it as much as we used to.

We leave our friends and walk back to the venue where the van is parked. Amsterdam is a beautiful city, one of my favourites out of the cities that I’ve seen in my life, but the canals it is so famous for serve to make every street look pretty much the same. It is VERY easy to get lost in Amsterdam, especially when you’re us, and even more so when you’re us and hung over. A five-minute walk takes half an hour and when we spend another good half an hour deliberating over what to eat for breakfast we are well on our way to being late before we manage to get to the safety of our van. We crawl in and assume the position - earphones in laptop out, TV show/iTunes/whatever running, and brain off.

Somehow Ben has gotten chewing gum in his hair and slept with it in, which is the only thing that keeps me alive – laughing at Ben is a great way to pass the time!

I watch some more of The Wire and work on more tour diary stuff while everyone else sleeps, and then I succumb as well and wake up as we arrive at the venue, face imprinted with the faint shapes of a mac keyboard. Coupled with my Movember moustache which I truly hate this is a strong look. On that note, if anyone isn’t aware, we are all growing moustaches throughout the month of November in support of raising awareness and raising money to help combat prostate cancer in men. It kills one man an hour which is a pretty horrifying statistic so if you want to help us out make the pain of all looking ridiculous for a month, and get involved with a worthy cause then head over to UK.Movember.com and do a search for either myself Gustav Wood or our team Young Guns UK (or indeed any of the guys in the band or crew if you know their names) and donate whatever you can. Even 1 pound or 1 euro, whatever you can – it all helps.

We play the show and somehow, despite all feeling like crap and being pretty certain that we were going to suck, it’s one of the better shows of the whole 6-week tour. The sound is really good and everyone is into it. Awesome. Afterwards we sit upstairs with our managers and have a meeting where we talk about our plans for next year, touring, writing; recording etc., and also the upcoming UK run. We are so fucking excited to be doing these shows. The biggest we’ve ever done, and with a bit of luck, and the help of some of you guys reading this, the best. I can’t believe we’re headlining a show in London at the Electric Ballroom, but more about that another time.

We wrap the meeting up, I head down to talk to people by the merch stand and say goodbye to a few of the people that have travelled loads over the past few weeks to see us. Sad to say goodbye but we’ll be seeing them again in February seeing as we just announced that we’re coming back over here on tour with our friends in All Time Low. Can’t wait for that.

We load the van in the rain, say some more goodbyes and are given a few more presents by people (thanks!!!) and head back to the hotel. Our TM Emre has gotten us a deal in a nearby hotel. The hotel turns out to be a 4 star hotel and we spend the nights doubled up in the nicest most expensive looking hotel I’ve ever stayed in. After a few floors and a lot of Formule 1 hotels, this is an amazing luxury, and I spend ages underneath the gigantic shower and crash out in the world’s most comfortable bed. Next to Emre, granted, but still better than every other sleeping space so far.

-Gus

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European Tour Diary: Day 35 & 36 - Amsterdam, Holland.

Day 35 – Day off – Travel to Amsterdam.

Today is the last of the long journeys thankfully (except for the mammoth drive home) so we get into the van and yet again slowly make our way to The Netherlands and into Amsterdam through horrendous amounts of traffic. The heavens open once again and this time chuck some thunder and lightning in for food measure. At one point lightning must have struck really close to the van because the whole van is lit up as if a bomb went off nearby, so bright that it wakes the people that are asleep. Scary.
Weariness is definitely beginning to set in, and we literally inch our way into Amsterdam’s city limits. We arrive at 9pm and check into a hotel called The Backstage right next to tomorrow’s venue, the awesome Melkweg. The hotel is designed around the idea of live music and touring bands and is one of our favourite places to stay when/if we can afford it. There is a communal area with a bar and instruments on the walls, and an old piano covered in the signatures of bands that have stayed here before. All the rooms have furniture made out of flight cases; all the light fixtures are saxophones, snare drums and stuff like that. It’s really neat.
Our friend Steve who sang for the band Outcry Collective until they split recently has flown out to join us in Amsterdam, so we head out to meet him then go for some dinner and drinks.

Amsterdam, let’s do this!



Day 36 - Amsterdam


Love this hotel! It’s so cool. We check out and go for breakfast/lunch before making our way to the venue. This is one of the few places we’ve played in Europe before. The Melkweg (‘The Milky Way’) is an awesome modern venue right in the centre of Amsterdam and we’ve played the smaller room here twice before, first with The Blackout and then with Madina Lake. This time we’re playing the big room and it’s nice to know your way around a venue. We are good friends with someone who works here so she takes care of us for the day while we hang in the dressing room. I do 3 or 4 interviews and then we pre-record 10 or so video messages for TV stations in Japan. I cannot fucking believe we are doing this! This is all amazing for obvious reasons, but mainly because when I was a kid, first exposed to rock music properly through my brother, I used to watch a VHS he had of Nirvana religiously. It was called ‘Live! Tonight! Sold Out!’ and I must have watched that thing a thousand times. To my 10/11-year-old eyes being in a band was the most incredible thing.... Obviously I didn’t quite grasp the enormity and musical/cultural importance of that band in particular but still, I just connected with what I was seeing. I will never forget a clip on the video where they do a bunch of ‘idents’, little short clips for music TV, and one of them is for Space Shower TV which Kurt calls ‘Golden Shower TV’. For some reason I never forgot this, something about it just stuck with me. Now it’s 2010 and not 1994 and I’m sitting in a backstage dressing room in Amsterdam filming a video clip for Space Shower TV. Clearly our situation is vastly different to Nirvana’s but regardless of that the enormity of what I’m doing is not lost on me, and although it’s not in itself a huge thing (I’m just sitting in front of our shitty little camera filming a 10 second clip) to me it’s huge and the more I think about it the more it affects me. I tell the guys, and none of them really seem to grasp it as much as I do, I guess it’s a personal experience and without the emotional attachment it might seem stupid, but to me, it’s not. I will now listen to nothing but Nirvana for a few days, in homage.


Tonight’s show isn’t one of our better ones, it must be said. I have a few problems with my voice and the guys have technical problems. Coming off stage and being disappointed at yourself is a really shitty way to be, but sometimes there’s nothing you can do about it – it’s just so annoying. I walk around under a black cloud for a while but remember earlier and tell myself not to be a prick and snap out of it. Let’s be clear here, I’m not diva stropping around the place, but truthfully I can (to a degree) understand why people can become precious and hard to work with when it comes to playing music live. Maybe I’m opening myself up to a lot of piss-taking (probably) but the thing is, when you care about something so much and want to be good at something so bad, when it doesn’t work out for whatever reason, it’s crushing. To me, in this frame of mind, a bad show isn’t just a “bad show”, it’s not ‘just one of those things” it is a revelation, the curtain finally lifted on our true shitness that I suddenly think I always suspected, all my hopes are pointless because we suck and are going to get nowhere, and I’m a fraud. Really it’s ridiculous, it simply is a bad show and I’ll be fine in about half an hour, but I would hazard a guess that most people in bands feel this way, if perhaps not quite so extremely. It’s just a byproduct of wanting something so bad, being so emotionally involved in something. Either that or I actually am one of those Divas you always hear about. Shit!

Anyway I have some drinks and chill for a while and all is well. We hit Amsterdam again for another messy night.

-Gus



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