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 6 - Gothenburg, Sweden

I’m a little sad that my time in Norway has been so brief, I don’t really feel like I got to grips with the city, but such is life, and I hope we’ll be back soon enough so I don’t get too down about it. Really, I’m lucky enough to be here in the first place, so that’s just how it goes I guess.

We leave and make our way back across the border to Gothenburg, Sweden. More amazing scenery, and lots of ‘danger’ moose crossing’ signs which are amazing. We stop off for some lunch at what turns out to be a huge cash and carry store. It’s hard to resist spending all of our money here, bags of M&Ms the size of pillows, gigantic Toblerones and all the imported American sweets you could think of. We like to consider ourselves sweet connoisseurs so I’m pretty amazed that we don’t come out with armfuls of tasty treats but we make do with some pizza and a few cans of American root beer and stuff like that and continue our journey. I eat a pizza called Obama while some of the others opt for a Da Vinci. I have no idea why they are called this but hey. 
We carry on and arrive at Gothenburg on time (shock horror).

We are fed in the restaurant next door to the venue, and it is SO posh, there is absolutely no way we belong in here but we soak it in, and it’s a cool experience eating in such a good quality restaurant when it’s closed. We mooch around the venue for a bit, looking at the wall of photos of cool other bands that have played here. Lamb of God were here on their last tour! Badass.
Tonight’s show is a lot better; the crowd is massive and treats us really well. Said it before, but we LOVE Sweden!



It is officially Ben’s birthday but we’re all so tired and worn out that we don’t really have the energy to go out. We are staying at some friends of Emre’s tonight, so we wait for them to finish up in the club post-show, and head back to theirs. They are lovely but both drunk and one of them pours a pint of Jack & Coke all over Simon on the journey back, much to his delight. We sleep in their spare room and make an early start the next morning.

-Gus.

European Tour Diary: Day 3 - Day Off in Stockholm, Sweden

Although we’ve only played one show so far, it’s really cool to have a day off so we can acclimatize to being in our new European surroundings. We get up and head out into town and basically spend the whole day walking around Stockholm looking at the sights and drinking coffee.

We eat an awesome Mexican lunch and go to a supermarket and buy essentials. Not being used to the different currency means that we spend LOTS without realizing, and come away with lots of different types of bread and not much else. Oops. We decide to head out for some drinks at a really awesome bar called Garlic & Shots. Funnily enough, the only other place in the world that has a Garlic & Shots bar is London, so we’ve basically ended up in the only place possible that we could just go to when we’re at home. Go us! Garlic & Shots is famous for (unsurprisingly) shots made out of garlic, chilli and all kinds of other crazy shit, so we choke down a few then hang out with the Danko Jones guys who are also in the bar eating dinner.The highlight of Fraser’s night is buying a Simpsons Duff branded beer, which is basically a normal beer but with a Duff sticker on it, and a much higher price.


I’ve spent the whole day stumbling along behind everyone else as I managed to get struck down by the worst toothache known to man, pretty much the second I set foot on European soil. I knew I should have gone to the dentist before we left. Looks like I’ll be in pain for the next 7 weeks then. Good good!

We have some more shots and head out to some cool rock bars where we hastily get rid of more money we can’t afford to spend, but we can’t help it - we love Sweden!

-Gus

European Tour Diary: Day 2 - Stockholm, Sweden

We gather in the lobby of the hotel we’re staying in and get ready to go. It is absolutely freezing in Stockholm, but none of us mind, and besides it gives us our first chance to try out our winter jackets we bought in preparation. We get to the venue which is a great place called Debaser and begin setting up for the day, getting our merch ready, getting our gear ready to sound check etc. Danko Jones have a cool light show, and I’m really jealous. It makes our homemade MDF boxes look a little tame but hey, you work with what you got, right? When, and if, it is ever our time to have lights, then we will. I hope.

While the others are mooching around at the venue or killing time exploring the local area, me John and Fraser grab our acoustics and head off to do some radio stuff for some radio stations nearby. It is another cool experience, and another first when we play an acoustic version of Weight of The World for John our DJ and host. Melts my mind that I’m sitting in a studio in Sweden singing a song we wrote in our rooms (pretty much), and I am struck once again by how funny life is. You just never know what you’re going to be doing in the future. Cool. We sneak off for an amazing Swedish lunch of Meatballs and Mash Potato and watch as a huge group of people sing happy birthday (I think?) in the restaurant we’re in. It sounds so cool and so Scandinavian and otherworldly, it gently stirs the notion or feeling that part of my history is here in this foreign world. We go back for another interview then head back to the venue.

We warm up and prepare for the show, before eating dinner at the venue before doors, and proving once again that the food is just amazing over here. I could get seriously fat doing this.

We don’t really get nervous (some of the things we’ve done this year pretty much hammered the nerves out of us) but we aren’t really sure what Danko Jones fans are going to make of us so we take to the stage half not expecting anybody to turn their head our way. The crowd is lively and ready for a good night so it works out fine and we flop onto the couches upstairs afterwards tired and sweaty but pleased. 28 more to go!



One of the reasons we were so excited about the idea of doing the Danko Jones tour (apart from visiting all these great countries and actually getting to tour with a cool band) was the idea that we would be playing to an entirely new bunch of people, which is something we’re all really keen on doing. We see making our way over to Europe as in some ways starting again, but in a good way. We’ve been lucky enough to have a great year at home in the UK, and we are appreciative of that but we also want to take our band as far and wide as we can. Europe is a big part of that, and just like at home where we built things up one person at a time, we aim to try and play hard, play well, and to get people to listen to our music that maybe wouldn’t otherwise do so. I hope (and think) that there is something in our music for different generations, genders, and any other divide you care to mention.

We celebrate our first night on tour by going out for some drinks with our managers and booking agent Sean, but every place we go to seems to be closing in 10 minutes so we pass through like ten different bars before the night ends with us (me) being denied entry to a club on a boat because I don’t have ID and apparently look like I need it. Score! Kind of…

We head back to the hotel and pass out. It’s funny, in some ways it feels like we’ve been on tour for ages, and this is only day one.

-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!)