Right then, a hell of a lot to catch up on (not least the sleep which even after an early night at home is still deeper in the red than Nick Clegg is telling us our country is) so let’s see how I get on.

If you read Tour Diary pt 1 then you’ll no doubt have been  waiting with anticipation to see whether I made it home safely…………..well……………….drumroll: I DID! Go me. I did have to stop and sleep in the very last services before home, which is only about 20 minutes away – better lame than never I suppose.

After that drive of insanity I got up and went to work, and spent the day staring into space, borderline hallucinatory with fatigue, and even had to resort to spending my lunchbreak asleep on the floor of an unoccupied office – rock and roll, my friends, is the most glamourous thing in the entire world. Anyway, enough moaning; the tour continues;

DAY 3: BRISTOL. In which we go back to work during the day, have lots of people turn up to our gig, instigate mass singalongs, and then go home sweaty and boozy.

There’s a bit of pressure involved in playing a home-town gig on tour – the “will anyone turn up” factor is heightened, the desire to play well increases, the fear that simply everything will go wrong/turn out shit becomes all pervasive………… thankfully it was all unfounded as everything fell in to place to make it a great evening; Big Jeff rocked up at the start, openers Andy “100% Nan-Safe*” Price and Gaz Brookfield worked their magic, my set was 30 minutes of noisy fun (including a nicely ramshackle first outing of my album-closer All Done Bye Bye with Ben on 2^nd guitar/backing vocals, a rare** outing for Gold, and plenty of banterous nonsense ). I then grabbed some drink to enjoy Ben’s set, chatted a bit, and then went back to Castle Thief with Mrs Thief and Kev @editradio to put a few more beers into my face, make him about a million cups of tea, and watch The Smell of Reeves & Mortimer, which I promptly series linked before zonking out.

DAY 4: OXFORD. In which we pick up a new hire car, murder some people,  eat ice cream, drink beer, and play darts (badly).

My hopes for a decent lie-in were dashed by my bodyclock’s insistence that I wake up alert at 8.30am sharp. Stupid bodyclock – didn’t you get the memo that I’m on tour now and must therefore revert to student levels of lie ins…no? Oh, ok then – you’re let off. Don’t let it happen again though you hear? However unfair my sleepytime woes were, they weren’t a patch on Kev being woken up at 5.30am by Monty (our cat) punching him in the face and meowing loudly. Poor Kev – if you see him, be sure to give him a hug.

Whilst waiting for the car hire company to pick me up (yep, we decided to save £25 by not keeping the car for the whole week – that’s how we roll) I watched an old sitcom on G.O.L.D (G.O.L.D!) called “Dear John” about a recently divorced man that was a strange mix of utterly awful and yet quite charming. I series linked that too, intrigued as to how it would develop.

A ring of the phone and it’s off to get car #2 – sadly not an estate this time (must’ve been a fluke upgrade) that doesn’t have an obvious nickname from its numberplate. We thought of one later on but then forgot it. We notice that it’s not a diesel, so have to work out a song to remind us not to put diesel in this time – how confusing.

Arriving in Oxford we stash our gear at G&D’s and head into town to wait for Ben to arrive, look at old buildings, and play “Lewis”…a game that chiefly consists of filming each other pretending to be dead for later splicing with clips from the actual TV series – it’s going to be the best thing ever/totally rubbish. I think my death was the most convincing…up until the point where I started laughing. Later a local friend turned up and took us to a pub where they used to shoot Morse – I’m impressed but have never seen Morse, we’re a strictly Lewis household***.

Ben turns up (hello Ben!) and we go to Nandos for dinner – I have never been to Nandos before. Ben & Kev warn me off the hot sauce, but I sample some on a chip; it tastes pretty good. I proceed to pour loads of the stuff on my plate and mop it up with my medium-strength chicken quarter. They are impressed – I think I have established myself as the alpha male of this tour. GET IN.

Then it’s off to G&D’s for an unusual, but lovely gig in an ice cream café during which I cause a couple of older patrons to leave, am studiously ignored by some Japanese students, and nearly bring the entire building down on my head with an ill advised double foot stomp. Then we got free ice cream; yeah, you should be jealous. After Ben’s set Jack Alcopop and I take the gear back to his & head to the nearest pub – which closes about 10 minutes later. A quick game of darts later (I lose the game spectacularly using my nice darts, then have a quick throw with the shitty pub darts and score a cool 100 - wtf?) we decamp to the Oxford institution that is The Jamaican/Hi-Lows. 

Therin Ben is harassed by a strange man, we discuss street carnivals with the landlady, and the landlord shouts at people who fail to enter the bar using the correct airlock-like door procedure. Thankfully the atmosphere stays constant throughout , and I make a mental note to come back here as soon as possible before we stroll back out into the night at around 2am…with Jack needing to be up for work at 7am. Ouch.

THANKS JACK!

More tomorrow, I'm off for a nap..............

Tour diary - part 1, take 2

I say “take 2” because I already wrote about 80% of a tour diary for the first two dates of my tour with Ben Marwood but then managed to press some previously unknown keyboard shortcut which not only deleted everything I’d written whilst simultaneously disabling the blessed Ctrl+Z combo, but also autosaved the emptiness ensuring that there was absolutely no way back. That’s why I’m now typing this in Word 2007 (yeah, Windows XP – take that Apple fanzoids) and planning on copy and pasting back in.

In the meantime Ben has written his own account of the last two days which his being a failed music journalist ™ means that it’s already far more entertaining than anything I could write*, but hey ho: here goes.

DAY 1: in which I drive from Bristol to Leeds via Reading, make noise, listen to words, and drink tea until almost breakfast time.

The drive to Leeds began with the picking up of our first hire car – a bright spangly new silver Astra that we later nicknamed “Juicy Lucy” due to it (her?) having a number plate that ended in “JCY”…that’s the level of intellect we’re dealing with here people. Being somewhat surprised by the epic bootspace, and terrified by the newness of it all, I departed onto the M4 and studiously began staring at the fuel consumption display…herein to be referred to as the OCDometer; 40mpg…60mpg…999.99mpg…this thing was clearly not to be trusted, let alone stared at in lieu of looking at the actual road, but some quick mathematics suggested that if I drove at the optimum speed then we might actually have a chance of not going bankrupt through diesel costs on this tour. HOORAY!

After picking up Ben and our tour pet Kevin (who is making video and audio documents of the week and presumably putting them on www.editradio.co.uk at some point) we made our way to Leeds, with a quick stop at our first services of the tour**, and prepared to “do our thing”.

The gig was a delight from opener, err, Open Invitation, through to my first Ben Marwood set of 2011, via clever/funny/thought provoking wordage from the newly christened Fear of Cardigans  and Suzannah Evans (@nightowlpoet).  Plans were mooted, suggestions made, but in the end a combination of migraine and proximity meant that we ended up drinking tea at Peter and Nicola’s house until the early hours of the morning, at which point I transformed from rock beast to taxi driver and took everyone home. Because I’m nice. To be honest, it was the perfect end to the evening – much as I love watching Ben Marwood screaming System of a Down lyrics into the face of strangers at The Cockpit, I was dreading the thought of Day #2’s million mile/hour drive so the prospect of doing it with an epic hangover was worrying to say the least. We still stayed up till 3.30am though, so that technically means we’re still hardcore right?

DAY 2 MOTHERLOVERS: in which I drive from Cheltenham to Leeds, listen to some BRILLIANT music in the car, make noise, fail to sell any merch (but we still love you Cheltenham) and then I go home….via Reading.

My body clock gently brings me back to life at 9am, having had 5.5 hours sleep, and refuses to let me go back to sleep despite not needing to be up for another 3 hours. The bastard. I do read some blogs and then doze for a little while, so not all is lost. Then we have an epic breakfast of tea, orange juice, lovely jam, more tea, grilled pig products, and gather our thoughts and possessions ready to leave. Oh and we also spend some time reading from The Mystery Method, a “how to have sex with ladies” manual that only stops slightly short of suggesting you batter them unconscious with the hardback edition and have your way with them before they wake up***. We also check out the related internet forum which makes manages to make me both giggle like an idiot, yet feel compellingly embarrassed on behalf of the entire heterosexual contingent of my gender. A bit like Men Behaving Badly.

After stupidly putting our/my trust in the OCDometer when the amount of miles it said we should be able to do nicely coincided with the number of miles to Cheltenham, and therefore very nearly running out of diesel# about half a mile away from the venue. Thank the sweet baby Jesus~ for the Tesco Pay at Pump system.

Our eventual arrival at Slak was heralded by the rolling down of our windows and the pumping out of the Karate Kid soundtrack like 80s obsessed rude bois. It was fun. Then we went for food and due to the cruel hand of fate wishing to poke me in the eye, I ended up with some rubbish boil-in-the-bag filth sneezed onto my plate while everyone else had a huge chunk of roast chicken. Taking pity on my sulking face, Ben came to the rescue and gave me a load of chicken : WOO HOO!

Anyway, gig itself was super – Ben on devastating banterous form, we both got a bit of a singalong going, and I made an off the cuff crack about Intelligent Design that made some people laugh, making me the Robin Ince to Ben's Stewart Lee. Oh yeah I managed to sweat out pretty much all of the moisture from my body as well…the benchmark has been well and truly set for self-disgust my friends.

Jim Lockey brought us a set of almost exclusively new songs, all of which sounded great and have been in my head ever since, and we sat around putting our best puppy dog faces on in the hope that people would buy our merch – they didn’t, Joe Summers’ poster purchase aside.

Still, Cheltenham is so officially awesome that we don’t even care - we’ll be back for more of their enthusiasm and charm.

Then we set off for the ultimate drive of doom: CheltenhamàReadingàBristol. Did I make it back in one piece? Did I have to have a half hour nap at a service station just 20 minutes from home? You’ll have to wait until the next instalment to find out.............................

OT

*I’m presuming he failed by virtue of being able to write prose that both informed and entertained the reader in equal measure, as opposed to being a self-aggrandising pseudo-omniscient tosshole that touts whatever crap 80’s aping claptrap he’s been paid the most to espouse as the future of music ™.

**Donnington Park – which was impressively the first service station I ever saw an M&S in back in the day, but now looks quaint compared to all the Waitrose and Harrods ones these days.

***Case in point “if the woman says ‘we should stop’ you should reply ‘yeah we should stop’…but don’t actually stop”. Maybe it’s the Julian Assange guide to sweet lovin’…………

#we wrote a little ditty in the car to remind us that it was a diesel engine…which we then promptly forgot. It featured the words “it’s a diesel, diesel, DIESEL” over and over again though, so while the tune is gone forever, the message isn’t.

~who resides somewhere in Mexico I’m told.

HAPPY NEW BEER!

2011 seems to be about deadlines and countdowns so far;

• Tour starts Saturday (see the last post for dates) which will be fun with a capital FUCK YEAH. Ben Marwood and I are playing 10 dates around the country, packed into a rented car with our pal Kevin.
  
• Digital single is planned for March, which entails getting my writing arse on and working on some new b-sides. Oh and I should be going down to Falmouth to make a video with my friend Rob of www.littlemanfilms.co.uk, coming soon(ish) to a Youtube near you.
  
• Album is keeping its fingers crossed for an April release, so think it's just artwork to be finished off  along with a re-jigging of one of the track's introductions as it's proving pretty much impossible to get in touch with the people who made Withnail & I to ask if it would be ok to use some of Uncle Monty's words of wisdom (if anyone happens to know Richard E. Grant then please let me know).
  
• NEW MERCH! Which needs to be done before the tour via the third part of my increasingly fractured personality SewFuckingWhat. This consists of a scarf emblazoned with "Oxygen Thief is louder than you" and a special tour-only hat that has "OT FTW" on one side, and "BM FTW" on the other. Ben also has one that reads "Property of Ben Marwood" which most people will probably assume is a clever joke, but in actual fact he will still legally own the scarf after you've paid him money for it, and will pinch it back off you if he gets chilly. Let that be a warning to you. I'll post photos later this week.
  
• That's all for bullet points.

Bye!