No Cover in Coventry

We program the GPS to take us across town as slow as possible. We only have a 33-mile trip to our next show, but those 33 miles are filled with the expansive wasteland of Birmingham and its outlying areas. We watch a daunting exercise unfold in front of our eyes: finding something interesting to do with our day here.

I spend a good couple minutes wondering aloud what Iggy Pop gets out of hawking car insurance. I mean, really?

After a couple false attempts to find the perfect place for breakfast, we end up at the Cosy Café.

It’s next to a liquor store and has bars on the windows, so this must mean one of two things: the place has furniture/china worth stealing, or the chef is always wasted and will make some rad food. My money is on guess number two.

I have a hard time not ordering off the kiddie menu. I've never had a Turkey Dinosaur.

The Kasbah is where BBE is playing tonight, and it seems like a great club, with several rooms for shows, a la First Avenue. Dimitrious is our handler and he’s quite the excitable fellow with a wind-up mouth. Once it winds up, it doesn’t stop for a while.

At one point Dimitrious tells me than he’s had sold out shows for everyone from Kate Nash to the Cribs, and all for 50 Quid. At first I think he’s saying that the tickets to get in are 50£ each, and I’m amazed those bands are that popular. Then I realize he’s proud that the club only paid those bands 50£ each for playing sold out shows. I don’t find this inspiring.

Even with the Kasbah taking care of us, well, it’s still just an empty box during the afternoon and it still just smells like stale beer and ammonia'd puke. So I walk around town, unfortunately just finding the usual–suspects: poopy fried food holes, Every-thing-for-99-Pence stores, and a Primark. The combo of these three things has led, at least to my eyes, the UK to rival the US in numbers of obese people in front of my eyes in public places. Which is not a good thing. People in jeggings, not a good thing. Seriously.

As I'm looking for a copy of "As I Lay Dying", I come across a bombed out cathedral. A building without a roof is a pretty fun thing to walk around in. I find it mind-blowing that the steeples survived.

Finally I check out the museum of Transportation, which is interesting, despite being a bit shabby. A fascination with cars is growing in me as I get older. Some are truly sexy machines that you can tweak to do all kinds of things. Maybe that will be one of my projects some day- to have a car in pieces in the garage that I slowly weld, bang, and oil back to life. I can see myself getting kind of bored with the process though. Maybe I should just buy a car that works.

This picture is for Mike Wisti.