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The first show was in Colchester, which is the oldest city in the UK. Don't worry though - it still looked like every other city in the country except for London. We played in a nice church/venue that had give up all the pretense of being a church (except for the old time graveyard outside) and had great sound and sightlines, but there was little sign of Jesus or any of that nonsense. A lot of eldery people showed up to our show, which was great, because they will probably start coming to this website to write lame comments that will make our skin crawl. When we drove downtown after the show to get some food, the second we stopped the bus it was mobbed by people. Not fans, just people who were drunk or high, and our giant green bus probably resembled a giant bud, so these people flocked to it like bees to honey. Somehow they all had markers and start tagging the bus as soon as it stopped, writing like "Baz" and other inane British shit all over it.
We had to bail, because we had an overnight drive to Knebworth park to play Sonisphere.(which is basically just on the other side of London from where we were) because our van is really slow. We got to the park at like 3am, did a pee and got back in the bus to sleep in the parking lot. I think thats how Oasis did it when they played Knebworth anyway. As you know, we are a hard band to categorize. You may find us playing along side Mission of Burma, or The Gossip. Today we played a big metal festival with Metallica and Nine Inch Nails. The headliner for our day was Limp Biscuit I think. This was the vibe:
Which, I feel is a pretty good characterization of our sound - punk, but with emotion, you dig?
After our set Damian made us all do this autograph signing, that 4 people showed up to. It was embarrasing, but we met a kid who's mom was in The Dolly Mixture, and who's dad we think is Captain Sensible. He's the kid not getting autographed
This is what the line up looked like (The kids actually in line were for the band after us):
Then we got back on the bus for a 2nd overnight drive within the UK in a row. Again, just to the other side of London. We got to Luton (or something) at like 4am and basically immediately started to line up. I lined up for almost 3 hours to check a bag, and then got in another huge customs line. We flew to Helskinki and where there for about 20 hours to play Ankkarock (which I think means "Duck Rock" because there were little ducks all over the program). The rider was like 80% weird Finndish candy, and 20% snap peas whole in shell. A few weird Finnish bands played that we saw in the paper the next morning, then us, then two big US indie bands. We were back at the hotel in bed by 8pm and out of the country by noon.
Back in England, we headed all the way west to Newquay, the country's very own laid back hippy surfing village. Aside from the Relentless Energy Drink banners that had been placed on every flat surface in the city (they were sponsering that weeks surfing competition), it was very pretty, and we even saw some detached houses, which was a first. The venue overlooked the bay. We would have gone in but everyone in the water was wearing a massive wetsuit, since you know it was still only August and probably still freezing.
Then Sandy did a shoot for Good Housekeeping:
Next - and if you have a compass handy, you will probably be pretty confused by now -we headed for the Czech Republic. After filling up on Cornish pastries and watch women in 18 inch heels pass out all over the place, we got on the road for a 22 hour drive straigh east into the heart of darkness. We learned many things on the road over those two days, none of which can be repeated here.
Despite having been in a van for the good part of 2 days straight, we got to Kutna Hora with only 30 minutes before our set. Kutna Hora is a very small gothic medieval town with no paved roads and all connect buildings that turns it into a giant (well not that giant) maze. Add to that the show was taking place in the backyard of some random church that seemed to be connected to other churchs on all 4 sides. Not that many people live in this town, but many appear to be HEALTH fans.
Kutna Hora also features probably the grossest building I've ever been in. The Sedlec Ossuary is like a reall regular church basement, except instead of being filled with hardcore kids, it is filled with bones. Not fancy bones or famous people bones, just piles of really dusty, dark, gross bones. They have a website, and it looks like a geocities-era black metal bands website. Apparently some monk sprinkled dirt on a cemetary on the ground many years ago, which made it a popular vacation spot for bohemian corpses. The demand was so large that they had to build an ossuary to store all the skeletons. Apparently because they were bored, or because lego hadn't been invented yet, at some point they just started playing around with the bones and making chandeliers out of the spines and shit, and little crosses out of femers. Pretty grim. And there was thick dusk on every surface of those 40 thousand skeletons.
Thoroughly creeped out, we drove to Poland to play OFF festival. They meals were in this fancy restaurant on site and we had many meats and peirogies with dill and kraut. Our set was in the middle of the forest mostly, and was cool except for almost the entire set some weird old guy was staring at Ben like Hannibal Lector, I think I even caught him licking his lips once or twice. I'm assuming he posts here. They divided the audience into two sections to make room for the Polish slip and slide.
I was so happy to be there I literally split myself in two so I could experience it twice at once.
After that I gchatted Sandy to talk to her to several feduciary aspects of the band, and later caught Ben and Jonah both pretending to be her the whole time.
Where was Sandy? Oh thats right, pretending to be a ghost:
The next morning on the way out of Poland we were so tired from moshing to Spiritualized the night before that this cute moment happened for a brief moment in time:
Until Damian put a coin in Josh's mouth and Josh punched me in the neck.
We got to Essen to play some other fest. It was taking place in an old 1940s machine gun factory. It looks like two huge train stations connected to each other - it was massive. I don't know what was going on in Germany in the 40s, but whatever it was they must have needed a lot of machine guns.
After the show we cut our roadies hair. Remember I was telling you about the bones church? This was more gross. Adams dreadlocks were older than most of those bones in that church by like centuries. Here is a series of pics for you high-girl-with-braids-cutting-gross-dreads-while-high (german) fetishists out there (and you know you are).
It was a horrifying experience for us all. We learned a lot about the mysteries contained in a vintage set of thousand year old dreads. Afterwards we put some of them in a pizza box and tried to trick John Josephs into eating on of them like a pizza, but he wasn't impressed and beat the shit out of all of us repeatedly. But later I saw him smoking one of the, nuff said. See you next time, Europe.
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