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.
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