Edinburgh Fail

We wake up and get on the road with thoughts to get to Edinburgh early, find a place to stay, and explore the town.

Instead, we arrive to the town being mobbed. It’s the first day of their Fringe Festival, and every bed in town seems to be booked. We knew that the festival was going on, but we didn’t think it was going to completely take over the entire county. We figured for sure that other things must be able to coexist at the same time as the fringe festival. We thought wrong.

So we slop about Edinburgh and its outlying areas and for a couple hours and still can’t find a place to stay. Wandering around wand being constantly thwarted is really exhausting and frustrating. Plus the place is overrun with tourists and thespians, making the place unnavigatable. The town is on lock down for the fest, every public service agent’s patience with the bumbling tourists is non-existent, and the local marble mouthed drawl doesn’t help you get around even when they do grace you with some directions. It’s a pretty city, but we don’t get to enjoy it at all. It reminds me a bit of how annoying Austin is during SXSW.

So, whatever enthusiasm we had earlier in the day has been replaced with the dreary, foreboding dread that we’ll be uncomfortably sardined inside our car at some reststop oscillating between states of agitated unconsciousness and unrest. Or we're going to have to bunk with this boar.

The club doesn’t offer us any respite from our predicament either. It’s the kind of place that doesn’t seem like it cares about fostering music, it only cares that live music sells more drinks. The band members are awarded for their services with one free beer each. James addresses this restriction by going around and asking each bartendress separately for the band’s five beers. Ah, my little grifter.

This what the show looked like through the CCTV:

I won’t bore you with the details, but over the course of about 4 hours, we get the number of the son of a family friend of James’ dad that just happens to be in Edinburgh. At 3:40 in the morning, James and I get a hold of him and wander over to meet him at some dance club, where he gives us the address of his apartment. We are saved from spending our first Scottish evening at some grim roadside water closet.

On the way to meet our savior, we watch a wasted kid topple over in the street, like literally tip over, right in front of two cops. The cops proceeded to make an “oh snap” kind of face, make fun of the kid, and then move right along. Where are we?

Sunderland

The day is covered in glue. Everything is moving slowly. Sleep sticks behind our eyes. The sun never breaks out from behind the gray curtain of moisture, and the clouds flirt with the idea of raining, but the downpour never materializes. It’s that kind of dreary day when a constant pour of rain from the sky would be an exciting distraction.

Instead, we drive circles around Sunderland, unable to find our club. We park in the loading bay of a TK Maxx and scout around. My mind is more interested in why it’s called TK Maxx. Are J’s more expensive to trademark in England?

We find where we’re looking for and Charlie quickly learns that he’s put on some weight so far on tour.

Foals. I know the name, but not the music. At least not well. But this country loves them. Every other band we play with is a Foals-clone. One of tonight’s is fronted by a cute dude whose swivel moves bring to mind the BoogieMan from Nightmare Before Christmas. Maybe that helps give an idea of how strange tonight is. Hmm, this billboard right outside the club entry way might help paint the picture clearer:

To add to the uncanny mix, the rape and murder scenes of A Clockwork Orange happen to play on the video screen during BBE’s set.

I go upstairs for a breath of fresh distraction and am met with a sex toy machine.

I’m pretty sure I know exactly what to do with the Heaven Beads, but I’m not quite sure what the Love Eggs are for. S&M eunuch role-play? In any event, all of a sudden A Clockwork Orange playing downstairs seems even grosser.

This stuff is pretty gross too. It has a piece of bison grass, not bison hair, in it. Or at least they say it’s not bison hair.

Leeds

Doing laundry is annoying. Actually, the way Europeans do laundry is annoying. In Coventry we asked where we could do some wash, and they enthusiastically said they had a washer at the club. They even took the laundry from us and told us they’d wash it for us. All we had to do was pick it up in the morning. Easy enough. And so when we arrive, we get two bags of clean clothes from the club. BUT THEY’RE STILL WET. And so we have no choice but to get on the road to Leeds with two bags of sopping underwear. Luckily, the club we end up at also has a washer, and I make sure to clarify that we need a dryer as well. They smile and say “of course we have a dryer too.” So at the end of the night, I head back to the dryer with the bartender and our stuff is still wet. So now we’re on day three of trekking around laundry that’s moist. We take matters back into our own hands, but we can’t find a Laundromat anywhere. Adding insult to injury, everyone we ask where to find one just gives us a queer look. Finally, we learn that the English call them laundrettes –PEOPLE GIVE ME A BREAK. From the common first two-thirds of both words, and the two bags of clothes in our hands, you couldn’t figure out what we were asking for? No wonder all our ancestors left this place for brighter lands.

So now we have damp clothes strewn about both our hotel rooms. This is a new development in the “No matter how large or how small our living quarters are each night, we must make sure to cover every available inch with our crap” method of touring.

I forget all about our troubles when I see how cute James and Charlie are in the morning:

My chopsticks alert me to the fact that they are proud of where they’re from, and looking at my wet laundry, I realize I’m also proud of where I’m from.

Oh yeah, the show is fun too.

Leeds seems to be a pretty nice city despite what I’ve heard people say about it.

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.

LOLZapalloza

The band has two shows today. The first being about 30 miles away. On a farm. Some dudes get together every year and have a party called Leopalloza (I think it’s on Lee’s farm.) Once we snail our way through Cornwall traffic, it turns out to be quite the affair. Like a garden party on steroids and Carlsberg, there are two stages flanking each other, a suspended sound booth that looks a bit like the preliminary stages of the Flaming Lip’s spaceship, a couple rows of young Aspen, a rave tent made of primary colored triangle panes, and a cheetah painted car chassis filled with wood and other incendiaries for what I’m sure will turn out to be quite the blackout-wasted, paganesque happening later in the evening.

Unfortunately, we have to leave right after the band plays to make it up to West Brom for show number two.

For the majority of the 4 hour jaunt, there’s a strange sense of accomplishment hovering in the car. Usually I have a hard time getting James and Charlie out of bed by this hour, and now they’re musing about wanting to be this efficient every day. I smile, keep my mouth shut, and keep driving.

I'm disappointed we don't have time to stop and eat at this place. Do you think Smiley is still smiling?

We also have already missed this:

I’ll be honest, Birmingham, West Brom, and the surrounding areas aren’t really much to look at, and they’ve been nicknamed the Black Country. In perhaps some attempt to move past this appropriate epithet, the venue for tonight’s show is done up in every type of brightness possible. One entire floor moonlights as a giant green screen, as the other floors are exercises in space pods and garish squiggles.

Unfortunately, our hotel seems quite proud to embody its hometown moniker. Thanks to an ill-thought through combination of three adjacent buildings, getting to our room requires navigating a maze up and down and back up and back down from the ground floor to the first floor. When we arrive, there is bars on the windows and the hallway smells like hot, wet paper.Sadness crouches in every corner and creeps up on you when you turn your back to it. I can’t believe we have to stay here for two days.

Charlie and I escape for a while to the awesomeness of “Inception.” It is the third time we’ve attempted to see it, and we finally prevail. I’m going to refrain from being picky about it and just say it is way more fun than Birmingham (UK).

On the way home I start to get an undying craving for Indian food, and I wonder if Leo put the idea in my head.

I go out for some time to myself and end up with some bright orange Chicken Tikka Masala. I can’t stop thinking that it must be radioactive. I feel bad not eating it, but really, I’m not starving enough to chock down something that’s the color of an electric crayon. I don’t know what is up with this city and fluorescents, but they should keep ‘em out of their foodstuffs.

Truro and St. Agnes

We start our tour of Cornwall in Truro at the Wig and Pen. I can’t tell what kind of town it is, but it sure seems sleepy.

After showcasing the band’s rock moves, we’re off to find our accommodation in the milky darkness. The plan- we’re following the guy that booked our gig out into the unknown, where we’ll met some dude at a shuttered gas station, at which point we’ll start following him back to his place to crash for the night. And so we sit in the car, under a sky clear of light pollution, listening to our friends’ band Charles on the stereo. I need to re-listen to the Charles demos, cause I think they unfairly became the soundtrack to my brain imagining creepy and psychologically disturbing things about to happen.

Of course, everything turns out to be perfectly legit and uneventful. Our host’s place turns out to be a quaint retreat tucked between the hills of Truro, which is also known as the middle of absolutely nowhere. He’s a producer extraordinaire, and his recording studio is a converted chicken coop. In the morning, the neighbors ride by on horses. I lace up my boots and tromp of down the gravel road into the hills. The faint echoes of lilac and honeydew fill my nose, and I enjoy the fresh, cool sweetness of the air as I meander along. It seems like Cornwall is a good place to get some thinking done.

We jump in the car and make it all the way to St. Agnes, which is almost the farthest West and South you can travel in the UK. It’s the type of place where cell phone signals fear to tread, or at least decide that they’re on holiday just as much as everyone else in this vacation town, and they’ll work when they damn well feel like it.

The show is being held at the Driftwood Spars, a full service vacation destination. The inside of the inn is done up in all sorts of knick-knacks, from ropes and taxidermied birds to old globes and tchotchke steel drums.

A sign about the door alerts us that our proprietress means business. The wood beams lining the ceiling make me feel we’re in a ship. The way things stand, we’re nearly close enough to the ocean that you could cast a long line and catch a meal.

We let the hotel feed us instead and take advantage of our free time to explore all the parts of the beach the signs tell us not to. I imagine there’s some pretty good creature stories tell their kids around here to keep them off the cliffs.