Justin Currie

Goodbye, Christchurch

I can’t get a handle on Christchurch. There are old-time trams on freshly laid tracks. It looks like a minor Swedish commercial hub expanded to fit the grid pattern of a city in Kansas. It’s as flat as a pancake with hills at its back so it appears as if some spilled batter is slowly oozing out to sea. This makes sense considering how many earthquakes it has suffered. They’ve rebuilt the cathedral spire so many times they may as well make the current one out of memory foam. There is enough surviving early 20th century quaintness to maintain continuity and much of the recent stuff is pretty decent looking. But there are big gaps all over the centre. If Auckland is Oceania’s Sly and the Family Stone, Christchurch is Keane. But the small Sunday night crowd in the pleasant James Hay Theatre get on their feet and, well…dance.…—More Tales

Auckland, NZ

The plane descends over what looks a heavy Tasman Sea into a thick bank of cloud covering the land mass. Soon we’re in the soupy gloom that spells rain. The droplets form fast moving lines that angle upwards across the windows. The engines are muted in the enveloping moisture. The plane rocks and lurches a little. We peer downwards in search of the sight of terra firma. The rushing air catches the lowering landing gear with a great yawn. The coast appears dimly at a few hundred feet and we’re down in what appears to be Glasgow airport. This is the furthest any of us have ever been from home and it’s British weather. It’s a half hour trip in driving rain to our sky-tower digs. Modern. The Do Not Disturb is a button by your door that makes your room number glow red in the corridor.

We…—More Tales

Show day, Melbourne

I have a stormy sleep and wait in the morning for an interview that never happens. I tap at my laptop for an hour immersed in the simple task of admin. My friend Stephen from Hong Kong gets in touch and we have a Vietnamese lunch down on Barkly St. He explains some things about the post-Covid economy in China. I’m beginning to understand how far away from home we are here. On the other side of the world someone I know is in hospital and another is in a morgue. It’s thirty one degrees in Melbourne and nothing makes much sense.

I have a coffee and an ice cream in a shady cafe after a quick soundcheck. I notice what look like toothpaste stains on my black T-Shirt. I’m a grotty old codger in poorly cut-off jeans. A Scottish woman I met in Adelaide comes up and…—More Tales

Melbourne

Heading out to St Kilda from the airport we hit our first traffic jam of the trip. We skirt sluggishly around the skyline. Somebody has dumped a forest of graceless structures on the city we first fell for three decades ago. Grand theft auto. Jesus. Melbourne has been invaded by vulgar giants. Our hotel is a mite tatty but we’re at the beach, by the venue and in the thick of lots of cafes, bars and restaurants so we’re happy. St Kilda is still a two storey sort of zone. My 1st floor room looks directly onto a brick wall covered in bird shit. Two scruffy pigeons preen their oily plumage on a grimy dividing wall. Some yuccas just about reach the bottom of my window from the tiny courtyard below. Time to poke about the neighbourhood.

I walk across tram tracks down to the bay where the…—More Tales

Show Day, Brisbane

I have an epic sleep – 2AM through to midday with only one stop for defuelling. I potter about with some emails and head off out. I aim for Story Bridge but I have no ambition to see anything. I’m going to weave about randomly. I step into a record shop for a bit, buying two things – Roberta Flack and The Impressions. Second-hand record shops are weird. No matter how long in the tooth, you always feel judged by the expert music geeks behind the counter. It’s always one or two blokes in obscure band T-Shits and they’re always about 48 and haven’t seen daylight since 1986. You wonder – do they think I’m a wanker, a dilettante? Am I betraying naivety in my rack riffling? Will they secretly scorn my pathetic selection? Ha! The fool has bought the dodgy Canadian reissue!

I take a river stroll…—More Tales

Day off, Brisbane

I have a patchy nap after the long morning of circadian chaos. At 1PM I make plans. I’ll head for the Brisbane Museum in the city and explore from there. The museum turns out to be a fairly predictable municipal affair housed in the handsome neoclassical city hall. There are a few rooms of generally hideous paintings with a couple of interesting cityscapes from the thirties, especially Vida Lahey’s Central Station 7:30am. A group portrait from 1952 by Margaret Cilento (Sunday in Moorooka) catches my eye as does a lovely small portrait which turns out to be by the same artist but in a different style. But there’s a lot of dross and many of the exhibits (as is the way) are for children. But it’s free and it’s air conditioned. I eschew a trip up the clock tower and head back into the throng of a very busy city…—More Tales

Adelaide to Brisbane

The jet zips up from the scorched runway into the limpid blue. We climb out over the St Vincent Gulf, pleasure craft below scraping white scars in the turquoise sea. We quickly turn landward and I see downtown beneath us, a small square of high-rise in an ocean of single storey suburb. At the city limits low hills lie thick with deep green canopy. Beyond that are parched looking farms plotted on a grid and peppered with single trees. It could be anywhere in the western United States. For a while we seem to follow the route of the huge meandering Murray River, clogged with sandy islands. The terrain takes on a motley aspect — stains of dark forest, patches of blindingly white sand and what look to me like salt lakes, curvilinear and milky green. All baking in the noonday sun. It’s an hour before I see any…—More Tales

Perth to Adelaide

After the second show I walk down to the river around midnight. A city of two million people and not a soul around. I peer up at the constellations in unfamiliar array. The brackish water of the Swan laps imperceptibly at the bank and I startle a couple of ducks lurking in the gloom who flap off to safety. The breeze is delicious to the skin. This is the most chilled major city I’ve ever been in. Everyone is so open and relaxed. There are no sideways smiles. In my room I watch an Attenborough show about a colony of king penguins. It’s like being thrown into Times Square.

We load our monstrous pile of bags into a little silver trailer on the back of a minibus and head for the airport under a sky of eggshell blue. The security hall is spacious and calm — nobody obnoxiously…—More Tales

Perth

We reunite at arrivals with our long lost colleague, Skip and are quickly at the hotel. It’s balmy out, with a gusty wind that carries rumours of the tropics. I march abroad in search of a bank, which I find and which miraculously regurgitates Australian dollars into my grasping hand. I’m flush so go looking for food. Downtown Perth is much like many US cities at night — built on a wide grid whose streets are lined with corporate towers in the modern style. The eucalyptuses lend it an exotic vibe and in between the glass and concrete red brick relics of the last century remind you where you are. I walk in to four or five restaurants all of which are full of customers but closed nonetheless. A humiliating little ritual. Nine o’clock is the witching hour round here. I opt for a 7/11, picking up a moth…—More Tales

Doha to Perth

After a luxury repast I get horizontal for the rest of the flight. Having put my watch on WA time I start with a breakfast. This causes mild confusion. The jet sails gently into the sunrise as I lie conked out in my noise cancelling headphones. I am not in the world. I listen to some audiobooks and rouse myself for the occasional sortie to the bog. On the approach I take in views of the Indian ocean through daubs of cloud. There’s still no sign of Australia from my side of the plane but it’s there on the tail plane camera on the screen at the front of the cabin. Good bit of slow TV, that. The map on my own screen tells me we’re heading towards the Moore river past Rottnest Island into Fremantle and Perth, so good they named it twice. Rottnest appears in my window…—More Tales

Heathrow to Doha

We re-lounge at Heathrow, surrounded by the snooty, the successful, and the sordid all wheeling their valuables around the polished tiles like plastic pets. We hike to the gate and as I take my swanky seat on the plane I see resentment and loathing in every face filing past. I usually ignore the smug business class passengers but if I do catch an eye, I’m sure mine are filled with hatred. Here I am. A comfortable cunt.

As we taxi out a baby cries, sounding like the ghost of someone in incredible pain. I have been issued with a stiff menu boasting of a “talented team of chefs” and claiming to have been “carefully curated”. It has a textured cover like the matted wallpaper you see in hotels. All three starters, including the soup, have been “roasted”. The engines groan and we rattle cumbersomely along the concrete. With…—More Tales

Glasgow to Heathrow

Long haul. The start goes smoothly. Guitars, packed two to a golf bag, are weighed and spirited away on a conveyor belt into a tunnel to tomorrow. I sit in the corridor outside the nob’s lounge where the others are toying with freebie croissants. It’s cool and peaceful and affords a view of the Kilpatrick hills, pale against an opaque sky. There’s a muted whirring from an air duct and jets whine politely beyond the windows. Airport hallways are the safest havens for the avoidance of advertising but there is a smattering of illuminated panels. Staff march by on phones in airline livery and hi-vis tabards. I’m sitting in the rushing sound of stillness. First stop Heathrow. Then the long haul.

I succumb to the lure of the group and join the rest in the lounge. Attendants sweep surreptitiously around, clearing dishes with a soft tinkle. We’re inured…—More Tales

Munich

I sit in the back lounge listening to Sky and the Family Stone’s There’s a Riot Goin’ On until I’m weary enough to insert myself into my perch. The long drive rocks us through deep sleeps and we hop off the bus refreshed in the light rain. It’s Sonntag, sleepy Sunday in Bavaria. I walk over a river and pass the Deutsches Museum but don’t feel the cultural pull. As I move into town I spot much lederhosen action, unsure if this is normal. There are old guys in the full Bavarian — leather shorts, long socks, hat with feather. The younger guys wear those lapel-less Beatle jackets with their hand-tooled leather plus-fours. Women too are kitted out in Heidi-type garb. It’s like a New Romantic convention. I meander down a typical wide pedestrianised thoroughfare, all shut chain stores and lonesome pigeons. Where once hooves clopped now skinny jeans…—More Tales

Berlin

We all sleep fractiously after a late leave and a lot of stopping. I slouch off the mothership into a concrete compound containing some rubbish hoppers and a crowd of old cars waiting to be souped up or scrapped. A man is waiting to have a pile of things signed and I realise the need to perform my ablutions is too urgent to spend the first five minutes of my day scrawling my name over images of my own face. I get back to him later without remorse for my rudeness. How would you feel if there was a guy standing outside your bathroom in the morning with a pen and a copy of one of your old school photographs?

I meet a friend around two and we have a coffee before getting the U train to the Memorial For The Murdered Jews of Europe at the Brandenburg…—More Tales

Copenhagen and Hamburg

I don’t sleep much after 2AM so read until 6 when I finally slip under. I charge off the bus around 1:30PM, walking a mile or so along a nondescript high street to town. There’s bugger all to see — just bike shops and burger joints. I pause by the canal at Christiansborg Palace, watching tourists disembark from open-topped barges. Sitting astride a snorting horse is Frederik VII, proudly guarding his palace with a silly helmet with a bird perched on top. A bird on a hat on a man on a horse on a plinth. The sun is out but there’s a strong sea breeze whipping about. I weave into the snarl of narrow streets marking the town centre and cut through some pretty arcades. It’s very busy and where not pedestrianised, the pavements narrow. Copenhagen (the whole country) is flat and the bicycle is king. The cyclists…—More Tales

Stockholm

We’re late arriving after getting stuck at the Norway/Sweden border in the middle of the night due to a closed customs post. The day is gloomy and very wet. I meet a lovely music writer called Anders who is just off the plane from New York and we have a long chat about music. He tells me a little about the impending newly elected right wing government. Though the votes are still being counted, it seems certain that a coalition of wankers will take power. He mentions the word Nazi. Sweden, for Christ’s sake.

The rain eases after dinner and I have a brief gad about. The club is by a body of water called Årstaviken and the neighbourhood is a middle-class residential zone with people in puffa jackets walking ridiculous ornamental hounds, some of whom wear similar attire. Put them in a stew and be done with it.…—More Tales

Oslo

The bus brings us into town. This is not the Oslo I remember. It’s all gleaming towers in the downtown American fashion. Half this stuff wasn’t built in the early ‘90s when we were last here for some promo nonsense. But it’s a relief to be in an urban environment. The old brick and granite buildings are redolent of San Francisco. It has the feel of a major capital, solid and monumental. I hop off at the venue and find a street food court, long benches with QR codes on the tables surrounded by scores of purveyors. I opt for a Bibim Bap at a Korean stall. I head in any old direction down a busy thoroughfare; cafés, bars, falafel joints, clothes shops, veg stalls and halal butchers. It’s more multi-ethnic than I might have ignorantly predicted. There are a few panhandlers and I pass

a man slouched…—More Tales

Cologne

Like yesterday the venue is nowhere near anywhere. I sniff the air outside the bus. Cool, overcast, intermittent cats and dogs. I walk into a forest park in the teeming rain. I make for a mushroom shaped pagoda and stand in the shelter for a bit, the forlorn rock singer in a Gore-Tex shell. The rain is making the sound of unbroken applause and screens the surrounding traffic din. Dog walkers disconsolately escort their mutts on their thin chains.

The path weaves through tall trees and leads me to a field, recently reaped of some indeterminate crop. Parts of the park appear to be in a process of re-wilding, others highly managed. Beyond a distant bank of trees I hear the familiar pink noise of a motorway. Four crows amble about and peck among the yellow stubble like officious pitch inspectors. Desultory birdsong broadcasts from the tree line.…—More Tales

Stuttgart

This is all I saw of Stuttgart.—More Tales

Frankfurt

I peer out of the back lounge window. Dark clouds torn and tattered stir around the sky. Downstairs I discover that we had a blow out on the trailer last night, sparks flying off the wheel rim, truckers honking warning. Simon and Buddy managed to get the spare on in what must have been trying circumstances. Most of us slept through it all. I go up an exterior industrial spiral staircase to our dressing suite. At the top I survey the area. Factories, warehouses, heaps of rubble, a wooded hill with houses. I meander through roadworks to a thickly forested park where I sit in a brief patch of sunshine opposite a pristine football pitch. It’s spookily quiet for a lunchtime. I can hear city traffic at the end of a long straight path and I head into its promise and the possibility of lunch somewhere. Promise of civilisation…—More Tales

In Amsterdam

There’s a milky green canal two feet from the door of the bus. I edge tentatively along its edge and head out into early autumn sunshine. I find myself in familiar places, the American Hotel, the ornate town hall. The Dels spent two freezing days here in February 1992, shooting for the Change Everything album sleeve with tall-drink-of-water American, Kevin Westenberg. It was here I discovered my first grey hair, a single long wire that I had David Cummings pluck out immediately. I remember swallowing a bit of hash when we wrapped and travelling home in cruise class. Bshzzzzzzzzz….

I take a table at a corner café to hoover up eggs, crispy bacon, OJ and tea. I’m on Tweede Weteringdwars Straat. Woollen Knickers Street. There’s a mild hubbub of tourist tattle in many different tongues. Bicycles stream by and electric delivery vans nudge through cautiously. The background noise…—More Tales

To Amsterdam

I’m sitting in my usual seat in Glasgow airport in a quiet corridor just beyond the scent and shades gauntlet. Work people are drilling and sawing overhead, doubtless building more retail disgorgement centres. It’s another flight to Heathrow to pick up the tourbus en route to the former mainland (now the Lost Territory). There’s a nail bar (Aerospa Airport Beauty Lounge) behind me emitting a regular sidestick, the telltale signifier of “chillout” music. Music that is called music but isn’t music but a hybrid of background noise and air pollution. The launch factory is quiet today, a few stragglers dip in and out of the crud purveyors in vain attempts to achieve distraction. Wheelie cases give out little railway rhythms on the tiled floor as they glide past. A man in a hi-vis tabard comes by with a comical troglodyte gait, static arms arched out from his body with…—More Tales

In Ostend

I roll out of my air-con coffin around 1 after a long sleep broken by the odd rattling noise coming from the bunk opposite. It wasn’t the fleshy sound of a snore but a metallic grating. It was coming from Buddy but how he was generating this racket is a mystery. Off the bus I meander away from the sea front through a snare of shopping streets to a square with a market selling tatty togs. There are a few pre-war French-style buildings but most of town is post-war, designed in that neat, unassuming low-rise way. It’s very relaxed and much cleaner than soiled Glasgow. Shoppers stroll and pensioners take luncheon as cyclists and scooter kids sail between us. I take repast in a standard corner café gobbling up a croque madame with a lascivious alacrity. My coffee is served with a shot glass of caramelised condensed milk and…—More Tales

To Ostend (We must go on)

The tour bus is waiting for us in a bay right outside Terminal 5. It’s a double-decker with a trailer and decorated in the usual European style — half Blake’s 7 half super-yacht. Maybe not an oligarch’s but certainly a high level drug dealer’s. There is brown and grey leather seating, pink and blue LED lighting strips, and Smeg appliances. The bunk corridor doors are panelled with studded leather. The crew cram the gear into the trailer and off we set for Ashford to pick up the sound boys from Liverpool. I stretch out in the upstairs back lounge and watch the trees float past beyond the tinted windows. I’m in the rock bubble. Unreal, insulated and above all endlessly boring. But we must go on. Late summer clouds fly above like white continents. The bus creaks and gently rattles on its air suspension as we worm our way…—More Tales

To Guilford and Weyfest

Andy, Jim and I sit gossiping in a taxi, keen to be back at work, preparing ourselves for the onslaught of mundanity that is the summer airport. Through security I park my bony arse in an airside corridor and daydream to the confluence of tinny soundtracks emanating from garish retailers. We’re travelling light to somewhere south for our show at the Weyfest Music Festival tomorrow night. The corridor is teeming with holidaymakers, honeymooners and hen parties in straggles of wheelie-case caravans. People meander out of Boots with bottled water and unguents and I consider killing some time at a magazine rack, having neglected to pack my book. The hallway is a high street of concealed despair. Flights all over the board are showing delays and I find the rest of the team in the grim bar at the far end of the terminal. It’s looking like a…—More Tales

To Southampton (When Will Bingo Die?)

I’m to be limo driver this morning as the Glasgow taxi landscape has become increasingly unpredictable since the pandemic hit. Four of us are airport bound from the west of the city so I gather all up in my creaking ride and in no time we’re jumping out on the roof of the multi-storey in the June sunlight. The airport is humming with holidaying humanity but pretty calm and security isn’t too fractious. I buy reading matter and a vessel of water in an automated process that is alienating, forlorn and brutal. Hardly anyone is masked despite the virus numbers being alarmingly high and reinfection with new variants rife. I have on my N95 respirator which gives me a comforting sense of (misplaced) protection. I take a seat in a remote corridor and regard the hordes as they drift through the turbid air in travel stupor. The mingled scents…—More Tales

Stirling

I was going to start this sentence with the word “so” but I caught myself just in time. So I started it with “I” instead. And that’s as it should be. We jump out of the van at quarter to four and the dressing room is so unpleasant I immediately strike out in the June drizzle, walking a scenic path uphill towards the castle through tall mature trees where I am cawed at by a crow, accosted by a female blackbird, peered at by a squirrel and surprised by couple of rabbits. It’s like the start of a children’s book. I reach the old graveyard near the summit and remember being here in the 1980s but for what reason I can no longer fathom. Just a jolly, possibly. I recognise a weird marble statue of an angel and children encased in a bell of glass. It’s the Martyrs…—More Tales

Belfast, 6th June 2020

Our propeller plane glides southwest down the Firth of Clyde to land with a gentle bump at George Best Belfast City, the only airport in Europe named after a famous alcoholic. All Australian airports are named after alcoholics while most of the Caribbean ones are named after murderers. We are greeted by a friendly driver whom we follow to a minibus. There is radio news of UK PM Johnson facing a vote of confidence today and we are very quickly in town avidly spotting any obvious changes since our last visit years before the Belfast Agreement. I dump my bag in the pleasantly day lit dressing room and go abroad for a nosy. I find myself in a modern downtown sort of zone where I’m served Irish stew in a brown cardboard pot with delicious homemade bread in a lunch joint. I take a table outside in the…—More Tales

To Durham

Just three of us sit in the little van taking us south from dreich Glasgow to (possibly) sunny Durham. I disconsolately cast my eyes over the bleak landscape of southern Scotland and wonder what makes it so different from similar American terrain. I realise the main missing visual element is the billboard. You can be in the middle of seemingly endless wilderness in the States but there will always be a billboard along in a few minutes trying to drag you off the interstate into a one horse stop with some gas pumps and a shelf full of poisonous snacks. That’s why Hawaii feels so un-American. They banned billboards there. You should visit. The greens are different too, of course. The grasses of Northern Europe are just that bit more vivid. Their brightnesses always surprises you after a month across the pond. America at its most verdant is just…—More Tales

I sleep till one thirty and head out to meet a friend at the Hall of Fame. There’s a Get Back exhibition showing and we’re both big Beatleheads so it seems like a good way to kill time on a Sunday in Cleveland. My route is blocked by a footbridge closure and I’m forced to make a long detour to get across the Ohio river from the Flats to the city. It’s hot with a dry, dust-infused wind mocking my progress across one of the big high road bridges. I get to the R&RHoF exhausted and in no mood for the tawdry, dreary, tatty, uninspiring exhibits. If you’ve seen one old guitar and moth-eaten stage costume in a dimly lit case you’ve seen them all. I have fun peering at an original Mellotron (purportedly used on Strawberry Fields Forever) but the rest of it is so much…—More Tales

Warrendale, PA

I’m sitting outside a pizza place situated at an oblique X-shaped intersection and gazing over heavy traffic to a 7-Eleven somewhere north of wonderful Pittsburg. I could be treading softly through the Andy Warhol museum but instead I’m scoffing a floppy chicken parmigiana washed down with weak black coffee pretty far from anywhere. The sun is beaming down through a light warm breeze. There’s a strong smell of gasoline. Boy racers zoom through in purple muscle cars, bikers on flashy machines race one another from stop lights. It’s Saturday in rural western Pennsylvania. I long for the city but longers can be losers so I decide to make the best of it. I watch the traffic. People round here must have “weekend” vehicles. There are all sorts of wildly impractical throbbing monstrosities chugging by. Where do they go? Do they just drive around until somebody vaguely attractive yells, “Nice…—More Tales

Summersville, WV

Burly workmen carry me from my station to a high wall where, in a horrifying initiation ceremony, they mount me onto metal brackets, my back facing out to a grinning crowd. I crane my neck to see the first nail getting hammered into my left hand and am awoken by my fists pounding the roof of my bunk in an attempt to escape. It’s 11AM in Nowhere, west of Somewhere and I peer out of the front lounge windows to see low wooded hills, a highway embankment and a big garden centre car park full of pick-up trucks. Presumably (and this is a novelty) picking up stuff you need a pick-up truck for — like earth or a bush. I head out in the warm sunshine, meeting Andy coming down the slope. He’s seen a snake. I gingerly pick my way up the highway verge amongst the detritus of…—More Tales

Atlanta

We have a food poisoning casualty in the shape of Iain, who only barely makes it back on for the encore. He’s parked in a hotel room to recover in Atlanta after resting in the back lounge overnight from North Carolina while I meet former A&M fixer Al Marks for a catch up lunch. It’s warm and sunny in Little Five Points, the boutique-y neighbourhood that’s grown in size and diversity since it began to be gentrified in the nineties. I saunter off for coffee after soundcheck and just as I sit at a sidewalk table an unlikely married couple approach. Unlikely because they don’t look like Del Amitri fans (whatever that means). But they have flown from Honduras to see us. I’m quite bowled over and am overjoyed to be able to have a picture taken with them. An ancient biker farts his massive bike onto the pavement…—More Tales

Carrboro, NC

I stir at sunrise and sit in the front lounge as the bus pulls into the leafy campus of Carrboro-Chapel Hill. The sun is a pale gold orb above the horizon. Suddenly there is foliage. We pass through neighbourhoods of those charming southern houses – all whitewashed wood, pillars and porches. Miniature grandeur among the trees. After more sleep I go off in search of the Target I spotted on the way in. I’m a man in search of underwear. Many old and ugly things have gone down the garbage chute on this tour. I need replenishment of the smalls. En route I drop into the Ackland Art Museum, a building devoted to exhibiting the cream of the wide-ranging collection of English actor, Josh Ackland, star of White Mischief. It’s very mixed-up, the ancient world rubbing up against the medieval but there’s a gorgeous little Degas sculpture in the…—More Tales

Virginia

Before we leave for Alexandria at 3AM we drop into the Red Lion opposite the gig where a five piece are performing full throttle on a low stage to an empty room. We line up at the bar and lend encouragement as they motor through their tried and tested versions of Blondie, The B52’s and a song from the Rocky Fucking Horror Show. Their finale is a note for note rendition of the godawful Whole Lotta Love. I sense a meeting of minds over shots impending so make a quick dart for the door. My $7 Heineken Zero has not imbued me with the spirit of bonhomie.

Early afternoon and I’m off to Waffle Shop, an old diner offering limitless waffle experiences. I order corned beef hash and eggs over easy but I’m sternly encouraged to order house potatoes. This is all served up with a side plate…—More Tales

New York, New Jersey

I cannot muster the enthusiasm to emerge from my cotton sheet cocoon until late afternoon. I make out for the ferry crossing that lies north of the hotel but getting there I decide to avoid Manhattan for today and head west on a pedestrian bridge over the waterfront highway and railway taking a metal staircase up the cliffs to explore Weehawken. I hear some rustling in the undergrowth and spot an opossum grubbing around. I cut through a beautiful neighbourhood of wooden houses and at a main road am beckoned into a Mexican bar by a young guy who’s taking out the trash. I explain that I can’t scan the QR code he points at so he shows me the menu on his phone. I get him to recommend something as the worst band in the world strikes up in the back room. After I order I take a…—More Tales

Toronto and Philadelphia and Boston

The dreaded day off, day of the dead. I open the curtains of my room on the 16th floor to an extraordinary panorama, the CN tower within throwing range with the huge railway station below, open water and islands in the distance. It’s an astonishing vista and I draw the curtains closed on all of it and languish in my vast white bed. The venue the next day is the Horseshoe Tavern where we last played perhaps in 1990. It’s a loud, grotty joint with a basement dressing room so grim it resembles a set from a slasher movie. But the audience kindly stick with us all the way. Through thick and thin you might say and boy are my efforts thin. We overnight back across the border on a long drive to Philadelphia and after squeezing every last drop from the dubious sanctuary of my bunk I take…—More Tales

Milwaukee to St Paul

In Milwaukee I spend a few hours catching up with Bobby T, an original eighty-sixer and friend. We have wraps wrapped up on the waterfront of the inland sea of Lake Michigan. We have two shows today, one at 4PM and another at 9. Kris thinks the first show was better than the second and who am I to disagree?

I take an early bath and wake up late the following afternoon in Minnesota where I am kindly driven off to lunch with flower lady Jodi, who’s been gracing us with her gorgeous company and stunning bouquets since the nineties. It’s nice to get off the boat for a few hours. Nice to hang with a sister.

Back at the Fitzgerald Theatre in St Paul I go for a wander along the Mississippi and around town, Florence and her Machine glowing flashily from an electric billboard…—More Tales

Milwaukee to St Paul

In Milwaukee I spend a few hours catching up with Bobby T, an original eighty-sixer and friend. We have wraps wrapped up on the waterfront of the inland sea of Lake Michigan. We have two shows today, one at 4PM and another at 9. Kris thinks the first show was better than the second and who am I to disagree?

I take an early bath and wake up late the following afternoon in Minnesota where I am kindly driven off to lunch with flower lady Jodi, who’s been gracing us with her gorgeous company and stunning bouquets since the nineties. It’s nice to get off the boat for a few hours. Back at the Fitzgerald Theatre in St Paul I go for a wander along the Mississippi and around town, Florence and her Machine glowing flashily from an electric billboard bolted onto…—More Tales

Milwaukee to St Paul

In Milwaukee I spend a few hours catching up with Bobby T, an original eighty-sixer and friend. We have wraps wrapped up on the waterfront of the inland sea of Lake Michigan. We have two shows today, one at 4PM and another at 9. Kris thinks the first show was better than the second and who am I to disagree?

I take an early bath and wake up late the following afternoon in Minnesota where I am kindly driven off to lunch with flower lady Jodi, who’s been gracing us with her gorgeous company and stunning bouquets since the nineties. It’s nice to get off the boat for a few hours. Back at the Fitzgerald Theatre in St Paul I go for a wander along the Mississippi and around town, Florence and her Machine glowing flashily from an electric billboard bolted onto the Enormodome. St. Paul has a…—More Tales

Salina, Kansas

I drop down from my bunk around 6AM, rosy-fingered dawn spreading across the plains. Gary the bus driver pulls into a vast shed where several men with angled hoses spray us down like a pit stop in an episode of Wacky Races. I crawl back into bed till 1:30PM when we are scheduled to go on a tour of the Acoustic Sounds high quality vinyl pressing plant in Salina. The tour proves fascinating. Having visited a CD factory in the zeroes, the contrast is striking. The manufacturing of vinyl records is a far more hands-on thing. For a start, here humans are key in every step of the process while CD factories are devoid of people on the floor and are essentially run by robots. It doesn’t look like a bad place to work at all; from the making of the mother mould and her stampers, through to the…—More Tales

Denver

I have a rough night of it on the bus. Sleep will not swaddle me, it just claws me down  into its shallows intermittently. The bus feels like it’s one minute skidding across train tracks, the next floating on pillows of cloud. I wake in a sour mood, go marching off for breakfast which I find (like all the others of our party) within a few blocks in a traditional American diner. The Huevos Rancheros are delicious but come with an enormous slice of melon, which along with fucking strawberries is a 1980s Californian affectation that should NEVER have been adopted across this great nation. Eggs and fruit on the same plate are like biker jackets and neckties — they should never be seen together. Why would I want egg yolk on a pice of melon? In god’s name why?

One of those circular ceiling loudspeakers drizzles pop…—More Tales

To Salt Lake City

We’re off at 9AM to Utah and after a brief stint in my coffin I make bus coffee and gaze out at the dry West, dust bowl farmsteads and snow-capped peaks on the horizon. A few spindly trees mark property boundaries, some showing a fuzz of fresh green leaf. We hear news that Spiritualized, also playing tonight in SLC, have broken down, losing a tyre on the way from Denver. There’s a picture online. They’re stuck in a mountain pass and it looks cold and gloomy. We will be on that route later tonight (or tomorrow morning if you want to be a prick about it). The mountains loom to our left, on the right are grain silos, truck and trailer graveyards, processing plants. We pass through Ogden, its grid mapped out on the valley floor like a plaid tablecloth. As we near Salt Lake the icing dusted mountains…—More Tales

Day Off, Boise

BOY-see not BOY-zee says Wikipedia. Well, the streets are immaculately clean and everyone exudes that rural hospitality so typical of the US beyond the megacities. There’s blossom on the trees and snow on the hills and probably a fair bit of Trumpism in the wings. I breakfast at Bacon, a disgustingly porcine themed place a few blocks from the hotel. They’re playing country music and all the bacon tastes of Coke. They serve a little board of five different grades of crispy rasher in shot glasses. It’s a dreich day but not too chilly so it’s time for another bout of aimless walking. Presently I find myself glaring into the void of a window in the Egyptian Theatre when a man swims up from the dark interior and waves at me. I wave back uncertainly. I stare at a weird poster for a Joe Jackson show. He looks like…—More Tales

To Seattle and Vancouver and Portland

Today we drive by day for the first time and I stretch out on the leather upholstery of the back lounge gazing across the fertile valley of the Willamette river to forested hills. White puffs of cloud hang temptingly overhead ripe to be hooked into a daydream. The landscape reminds me of Stirlingshire but, as with everything here, on a grander scale. You feel like you could feed most of Scotland from these fields alone, mapped out to the far ridges on the horizon.

We de-bus in Seattle around sixteen hundred and after a few desultory turns round some used clothes stores I go looking for sustenance choosing a balls basic Vietnamese gaff where a dandy of a waiter serves me a delicious bowl of noodle broth which I slurp with enthusiasm. The area around the gig is gentrified hip, if that means anything at all anymore. If…—More Tales

Berkley and Eugene

I drop down from my bunk around 10am. There’s a foul odour in the air. Gary, our trusty driver, informs us “we got bad water” and goes off to find some bleach. It’s so fetid aboard I abandon ship and hike up a hill to a student café on a corner of the vast university campus. As I shovel in the victuals the street beyond comes alive with a swarm of scholars. The weather is cloudy and cool, the scene civilised and serene; we ain’t in So-Cal no more. I begin to contemplate what the hell I’m going to do for the next five hours once I’ve dabbed these few letters into my demonic device. Wandering about aimlessly seems to be the best option. I’m not too keen to be back on swamp bus any time soon. Descending through leafy college departments I’m treated to a glimpse of San…—More Tales

Back to LA

Back we come overnight from Phoenix to a sodden Hollywood for an early morning check-in prior to the Kimmel show booking. Fat raindrops trail down the window pane of my room as traffic swooshes below in a river of white noise. The sky is all mist and moisture. You expect Sam Spade to be lighting up in a doorway in hat and Mac.

A luxuriously appointed automobile ferries us the short trip through the rain to the ABC studios and we enter the realm of TV time where Earth minutes are not respected. We wait for hours, soundcheck and wait for hours more. By which time we are all getting antsy, nerves suddenly jangling. Live TV (well, taped as live) is always a high-wire act and lack of practice leads to wobbly walks and occasional spectacular plummets. My own nerves are not helped by the sight…—More Tales

To Phoenix

After the Canyon Club show we say hi to some old friends in the parking lot before the pack begins. To save costs we’re transporting all the stage gear in the bays of the bus. I remain entirely unconvinced we won’t have to pack the back lounge with equipment but B&B and Del work some Tetris magic and make it all fit. How this was achieved is a mystery (and in the dark to boot) but we are comfortably stowed and soon on our way overnight to Phoenix. This is my first tourbus bunk sleep for 28 years but I slip back into the way of it, climbing up to my top bunk like a spider monkey. I drop down from my perch around ten on Sunday morning after map researching a nearby gaff open for breakfast. It’s starting to get hot and I fear I may shortly…—More Tales

In LA

Good morning Hollywood. I crank up the window blind to a foggy scene right out of Chandler. There’s a 1940s apartment block opposite decorated in that instantly recognisable Colonial style and a few cars pass below, windows tinted as black as night. We gather in the TM’s room to have swabs taken by a gentile Latina nurse for the Kimmel Show we do on Monday. I’m glad to be starting in the west having always found the eight hour time difference easier to adapt to than the five or six. Last night I walked to a 24 hour pharmacy and stocked up on Melatonin pills. They seemed to do the trick, placebo or not, I got straight back to sleep every time I came to. Now I just feel weird, like there’s an electric current running through me but it’s a sensation I’m familiar with. It’s slow hysterical…—More Tales

To LA

The device chirrups at my ear and I click into staring consciousness. It’s 3:30AM. I scrape some marmalade across a slice of toast and park myself and my big red suitcase on the street to wait for the cab. The pre-dawn cacophony of birdsong echoes around the buildings in a symphony of mad whistling. The cab is very late which proves to be the first of the morning’s many calamities. The airport is awash with masked and strained humanity queuing in loosely disciplined lines. In the departure area Glaswegians eat burgers and chips, sip lager and rosé at six in the morning because airport time is out of time and the goddamn holiday starts here. Everything is in motion while the city still sleeps a few miles yonder. There’s a thick fog beyond the windows and I worry a little about delays. The connection at Heathrow to LA…—More Tales

In Kirkwall

I draw back the heavy woollen curtains and sunlight streams in like honey. The harbour lies gleaming below my grand room and a hooded man sits on a quayside bench talking into his phone. I potter all morning until a man called John arrives to pick us up to take us on a tour of the Highland Park distillery which sits on an elevated spot just outside of town. John has a long grey beard with a chin plait and is refreshingly unpatronising. The distillery feels like a little village, its grey-black sandstone buildings set into a hillside and crowded together around cobbled streets. It’s utterly fascinating, different aromas filling each shed as we are walked through the process from the malting room to the stills and finally the bonded warehousing. The work they do here can be accurately described using the dubious adjective “artisanal”, which when you break…—More Tales

To Orkney

Blue, blue as an egg, the sky says spring and my watch says go. I don my two small rucksacks and take the short saunter through town to our rendezvous at a hideous hi-rise Hilton, a building which resembles the ironic tombstone of a deceased chain smoker, all nicotine beige and granite black. Our deluxe van U-turns onto the grimy Glasgow urban motorway and we soon break out of the shitty city edge zones into open country, spindly winter trees clawing at the crisp air and drinking in the sun. We’re en route early enough to indulge in a traditional listen to the Popmaster quiz slot on Ken Bruce’s Radio 2 show. The verges are scrappy with bare bracken and some last few rotting leaves but the meadows beyond are vibrant emerald and freshly ploughed soil sparkles in the day’s angling beam. The hills of the eastern Trossachs lie…—More Tales

To Southampton

We park up outside the front of the Guildhall and head to catering to discover our chef Sarah has broken her wrist, slipping on a leaf. Not a salad leaf I presume. She’ll be flown home to Glasgow tonight. We say goodbye to her before the show. I meander along to a vintage clothes place I remember and buy a velvet jacket and two cravats, though I think my cravat days may be behind me. Neckwear is very ageing on old men and unless you’re some stylish Italian silver fox, scarves and such can make you look like a grandpa. I spot two of the crew having a sneaky pint while they wait for the venue sound curfew to lift, the students in the area easily disturbed by the thump of a drum and the chime of a guitar. I join them for a few moments but we’re all…—More Tales

Day Off Birmingham

On arrival I chuck my stuff in the room and get out for a wander. I take the canal path towards Broad Street, thinking vaguely about eating something. It’s mild and dry and coming back I encounter a nice couple from Liverpool who are in town for the show and are just going out for drinks and dinner. We do an awkward semi-distanced phone snap. Someone should do a collection of these — people standing at an embarrassed distance from public faces they know. I hide in the hotel for the rest of the night, snoozing on the bed with the TV muttering quietly. The morning is heavily overcast with a stubborn haze of weak rain. I decide to loll. This is not a day to engage with the world. I plug in my audio box and browse some current pop from the stream. The Christmas meat market is…—More Tales

To Dunoon and Oban

A few powder puff clouds hang in a limpid sky and a raptor sails over the first of the fields as we leave Perth. We voted to take the scenic detour today, twenty minutes slower but avoiding motorways and Glasgow. The first part is a road I’ve rarely driven and there are some weird village names; Madderty, Innerpeffray, Fowlis Wester. Three young deer nose at the yellow stubble at the edge of a wood and the road winds and ululates through deciduous copses, motley foliage radiant in the October sun. We snake through the picturesque old cattle (later spa) town of Crieff, all mature trees and rustic Victorian sandstone. We come to the very pretty village of Comrie and weave out into more rugged hill country, the rocky tops fringed with brown heather, to reach the eastern end of Loch Earn marking the edge of the leafy Trossachs. The…—More Tales

In Inverness to Perth

In Inverness to Perth

After scran I take an amble through the twilight along the river Ness. I cross a pedestrian suspension bridge, passing beautiful Georgian terraces. The riverside is admittedly pretty. I reach a playing field where battery powered floodlights are stationed around on tripods allowing kids’ football practice to continue into the night.  It looks like a scene from Field of Dreams. The tree covered hill beyond is silhouetted against the purpling sky. I can smell the fallen leaves and the verdant grass around me, there’s that distinctive autumnal tang to the air that’s been so late to arrive. A ball breaks loose from the pool of light and I boot it gently back from the darkness. It’s the first time I’ve kicked a ball since the onset of the pandemic and I experience a frisson of delight. On the way back a stranger…—More Tales

To Inverness

We angle northwest through Aberdeenshire’s rich pasture, autumn a little more advanced up here, patches of foliage coloured as if touched by a brush. Sheep and cows dot the emerald fields, dark gorse clinging in the ditches. It’s not typically Scottish terrain but somehow it couldn’t be England either. Parch it all with the Italian sun and it could be Tuscany. We fuel up at Strathbogie and Iain gets out, seeking a copy of Classic Tractor from the shop’s array of farming and forestry magazines. He returns with a selection: Farm Machinery (featuring Forestry Machinery), Classic Tractor and Earthmovers. I leaf through the last title, discovering the world of telehandlers, vehicles whose purpose seems to be lifting heavy loads from very awkward positions. Our tour manager informs us they are often used to lift mixing desks out of tricky festival sites. We pass through Keith, getting stuck behind…—More Tales

To Aberdeen

We are debating when we might have played in the granite city last. I wager it was the Music Hall the night before the millennium Hogmanay, December 1999. A quick check of the complete list on the Dels info site confirms this. So just the 22 years, then.

The black road leads us north from Glasgow, the trees ranked along the verges just starting to turn yellow and copper. Iain puts on another Theme Time Radio Hour episode as we cruise through the mizzle under a thick bruise of low cloud. Robert Johnson and the Grateful Dead sing of the devil and we slip past the distinctive turreted mounds of Stirling, the historic redoubt of this central Scottish plain. The castle sits in a bath of mist like a stone galleon. We pass under pylons marching into the murk carrying their ropes like mountaineers. Bob Dylan’s voice purrs…—More Tales

Sheffield to Newcastle

I sleep poorly therefore sleep in. But I have my packing honed to a military efficiency and make the van three minutes before departure. The weather looks British but still feels suspiciously Mediterranean, a warm breeze playing under a lid of cloud. It’s the last show of the first leg before a fortnight’s break and we’re sorry to be stopping. We all feel we’ve improved each night and want to keep going until that stops. The sun burns off the smoky, tattered clouds and Iain plays Bob’s Theme Time Divorce episode kicking off with the half-comical hoarse whoop of Tammy Wynette. Dylan’s absurd parody of the late-night disc jockey has been good company on our little hauls up and down the English highways though the playlists occasionally rely a little too heavily on kitsch.

Great white letters painted on the road read THE NORTH as if…—More Tales

Day Off, Manchester

I wander off in early afternoon, sniffing out a few local recommendations. The first thing I do is buy a second hand suit in Afleck’s, an indoor boutique market akin to the old Kensington one. It’s a 1960s Hepworths designed by Hardy Amies. I have at least three things styled by him, they always have quaint little kinks — an extra seam here, another button there — not too much but just right. It’s a dark brown pinstripe which will make shirt choice tricky but a rich pink would do. I still have one somewhere if it didn’t get jettisoned during the last charity shop pogrom.

I take repast in a breakfast meat emporium, sitting outside in the slightly sullen light. It’s one of those gaffs where you order everything via your phone. The clientele are forty-something urban home owners wearing clothes ten years too young…—More Tales

Blackpool to York

In the early evening I walk south along the waterfront, the Welsh hills pale in the distance reaching out to Ireland. I come to the end of the promenade and find a stretch of natural beach, with high grassy dunes. I climb up and watch another sunset as a dog barks and the sea spills onto the sand with that whisper of applause. There’s a figure with a paddle standing on a board on the tide. They don’t look like they’re having much fun. As they manoeuvre into shore I see it is a man and he steps into the surf and wades ashore like a conquistador in the Caribbean. Three metal detectorists scan the sand. A girl on a horse trots past. Behind me the three-quarter moon peeks back at the sunken sun as if from the wing of a stage. The horizon turns tangerine for…—More Tales

To Nottingham and Blackpool

The milky light leaks around the hotel room window blinds and I toy with getting out for a stroll. A cursory glance at the map reveals we are situated at the airport. I don’t much fancy sitting in an airport coffee shop with weary tourists so I stay put and open my laptop to stare at last night’s setlist. Something is getting the chop.

In rehearsal we were discussing the curse of the one-hit-wonder. Those acts who essentially have only one song most of the the audience wants to hear. Where do you play it? Too early and the crowd might get restive, too late, restless. Do you open with it and do a reprise at the end? Do you NOT play it in protest and put up with demands for recompense? Hello, we’re the Wombles, we hope you like our new direction…

We leave at midday…—More Tales

In Cardiff, to Southend

We head straight for the stage door, leaving hotel check-in for later. I scope out the venue and find a fast staircase back to the street. I take tea by a little food truck and watch the passers-by. I see Kris march past single-mindedly. He has a new bag. I also have a new bag. This, I feel, betrays a quiet optimism.

I walk into a Victorian indoor market and browse through the racks of a large record shop on the balcony, fleetingly stopping at a few sleeves. Little of the stock is original, it’s all twenty quid vinyl revival reissues most of which is probably cut from dodgy digital masters. I try to visit the city castle but the security man at the gate says “Last entry free” which confuses me until I realise he means “three”. I look at my watch. It’s a minute to three.…—More Tales

To Cardiff

We’re on a day trip to the outskirts of Wigan. Seven days of rehearsals done, we’re decamping south to get an early start on the Cardiff soundcheck tomorrow having eschewed a full day’s production rehearsal. In our experience production rehearsals involve twenty people standing around for a day with about an hour’s worth of music. I suppose they’re necessary if you have costume changes, dancers and explosions.

Summer is finally showing signs of leaving, though the air is still thick with a warm fug. We bend in a great arc around Glasgow to find south, the sun lowering prettily behind the high quilted grey. Our vehicle is of the “executive class” sort — leather seats and gadgets. A display in the roof reassures me that the temperature within is a steady 20 degrees. I flip a switch to notch it to 21. I am the all-powerful ruler of…—More Tales

Queens Hall Days Two and Three

And off we set a second day, the weather still madly midsummer. We discuss some changes to the set as the Glasgow towers pass by looming over the road like sentries with a hundred eyes. Glasgow is a stupid twenty three degrees, Edinburgh a sane sixteen. At school in the seventies we were taught the adage; west coast wet and warm, east cold and dry but in recent years the rule has gone out of the window. Ten years ago I spoke with an American painter who’d been living in Tuscany for twenty five years. He told me that the climate there had recently turned on its head, the formerly cool wet winters now mild and dry, the hot dry summers strangely wet. The flora was unrecognisable from a September I’d previously spent in the area. What had been parched and pale yellow was now lush and deep…—More Tales

Queens Hall Day One

Here’s a white van, glinting on my street, three rows of seats, side door open. We enter the bubble, so called because it’s easily breached by the pinprick of a spike protein. All five of us are early and the sun is cutting down through the air like a sword. The Glasgow to Edinburgh corridor reels us into Auld Reekie as mildly excited conversation circulates. The last few days have been forebodingly hot with a musty warmth creeping into our rehearsal dungeon. The consensus is we’re two days shy of being fully prepared so tonight will be tense – everyone hanging onto the arrangements by their fingernails.

There are white clouds scattered above and the roadside trees throw pretty shadows on the gleaming tarmac. We sit at sixty in the inside lane pulled along by the lorries ahead. Iain and I visited Edinburgh a week ago…—More Tales

Promo Day 2, May 28th, 2021

PROMO DAY 2

To the bathroom, to the bag, to the cab to the radio. Virgin is based way up on a high floor in what appears to be the News UK building — Rupert’s Redoubt to you and I. We are to set up in a large scalene shaped space with 240 degree views of silvery London. Below us the mud green Thames wends through the empty castles of the City, hardly a boat afloat. It’s 8:30AM and there’s not a soul upon London Bridge. It’s serene and it’s odd. We shuffle about with our leads and tuners and run through a few numbers. By the time we go live the nerves are jangling. I feel like I’m on day release from the nursing home. We used to do this stuff every day and now it’s an uneasy novelty. Our colleagues on the business side arrive…—More Tales

Lewis, songwriting, company

I’m sorry to see the back of Lewis. Its blasted moors knitted tight with heather and the sea everywhere about, licking at the rocky coast have kept my mind occupied with peaceful thoughts mostly. I came for the quiet to write and walk. I have twenty new tunes scribbled on A4 and wailed onto cassette locked in an old briefcase in the boot. I queue for the ferry under high cloud and savour the sadness of departure like a sour sweet. There’s Friday night excitement in the air as folk stand around their cars gossiping and watering their dogs. The mainland is pulling us all back. The stillness here has an effect on you, making you reflective. You can hear your soul shifting in its sleep. I think of Glasgow’s grime and aggro and feel unprepared. I have bought a bottle of wine to celebrate later, it sits…—More Tales

Nairn

I’m driving northeast to Nairn, where I am appearing as an unannounced guest at their beer festival. It’s a pub gig with the world’s best pub band – no rehearsals, just count in, play and meet at the end. When I arrive at the Braeval Hotel there is already a crowd milling around outside in the warm May evening, jocular and ruddy with two days of beer drinking behind them. Gordon, the hotel’s tirelessly accommodating proprietor, tells me it was so busy yesterday that the local streets were impassable. How he and his wife Morag cope with all this while maintaining customer friendly smiles is beyond me.
I check into my attic room which looks out over the wide sandy bay and pull on my professional clobber, having been wearing shorts for the drive. It doesn’t do to slum it amongst one’s public. People talk. Our drummer tonight, the wonderful Ted…—More Tales

Edinburgh, St. Celia’s

I’m playing a “songwriter-in-the-round” charity event in Edinburgh with Ricky Ross, Karine Polwart and old friend Gary Clark. It’s taking place in the oval Georgian recital room that is St. Celia’s Hall, now part of the Music Museum with its virginals, spinets and harpsichords sitting around at every turn. There’s an ancient little pipe organ powered by a foot pump at the head of the room. This is all quite posh and interesting. We meet up, soundcheck and have a little rehearsal of our finale before I duck outside to take a gander round the capital gleaming in the evening sunlight, angling madly everywhere, making sudden shadows at corners, blinding you as you cross an intersection. I drift up the Royal Mile, past the countless cashmere and shortbread shops, to the castle esplanade where Dels Utd play in July. I look out over the Firth of Forth, with its steely…—More Tales

Changing server

We may lose contact soon.

Everything’s gonna be alright.—More Tales

London

So to London, choking snakepit of billionaires. Our abode is way uptown, a barren tower in a morass of roads and malls. We briefly check in then squeeze through the ooze to the venue, the Jazz Cafe. It’s a new one for me and very reminiscent of US style jazz clubs, the stage stretched across the long side wall so all the punters are within earshot of at least one soloist. The balcony looms over the stage like a frown and during the gig you get the impression that the audience is on top of you and sitting in your lap. It’s quite hard to perform to a shallow room when, like me, you tend to project everything towards the back. You end up playing to a wall.

In the early afternoon I decide to walk from Brent Cross to Camden, marching right across Hampstead Heath. I meander uphill through thicket…—More Tales

Brighton and Colchester

I’m sitting on the seafront basking in the sun. My bench has a plaque that reads: “FAY HARRIS 1921 – 2007. Please take time to sit and stare”. So I have and I do. A seagull the size of a toddler comes pecking up. Let’s call him Adam. He mooches about the bench for a bit, then gives up. I am not a feeder. Fuck off, Adam. Out to sea lies a wind farm looking like a flotilla of giant insects rallying for an invasion. The warm sun makes my skin prickle with delight. Behind me relentless motor traffic washes like surf. I’m loath to leave but I’m late for load-in around the corner. Holiday over. The local crew at the Old Market are super-professional and friendly. They are the first venue crew of this tour to introduce themselves to us as opposed to the other way around. Mr. Pringle…—More Tales

To Preston and Nottingham

Bristol, goodbye. Not a cloud to be seen, October at its most beautiful and here we sit, strapped to our thrones in the Grey Toupee. Mr. Johnson is a little late but forgiven, it being his first offence. One more and he’ll be hung drawn and quartered on the gallows of group ribaldry. We hit traffic outside town. This looks like a long Friday on the motorway system. We pull free and puffy white clouds appear in the pale blue like the credits of The Simpsons. Stupidly we’re going back north, to Preston, retracing our route of a few days ago, just a bit further east. The Malvern hills sit out to our left, sun-dappled and moss-coloured. I catch a momentary flash of Worcester cathedral through a brief break in the verge. Tourism in glimpses. We veer further east to avoid tailbacks, going around Birmingham to the north rather than…—More Tales

To Bristol

We approach Bristol from
the south, passing black lakes of solar farms. Portishead lies out to the west, a few ships snagged in its nest of warehousing, cranes and windmills. You can see the two Severn crossings like bracelets on the river’s wrist. The sun is piling down and west England glisters like buttered corn.

The rooms are still being cleaned at our Bristol hotel so I dump my case and get out into the light. I tour the usual haunts, buying a couple of records in the covered market, then have some Korean street food. I’m going to call my songs “street music”, see if I can’t sell some units. In a corner cafe affording 180 degree people-watching potential, I study two workmen on their knees cutting paving slabs with an angle grinder. Their work is stunningly precise, leaving perfect 1 cm spaces between each bespoke piece. They have a large…—More Tales

To Exeter

We grab some scran on the way out of Cardiff and are soon cruising across the Severn bridge stuffing our faces with Welsh cakes and butterscotch travel sweets. I have a bucket of tea beside me and am content. I am CONtent too. This is content, you the reader are content as soon as you comment or share. Much of our social interactions are commodified and packaged, data-mined and sold for a dime a time. We all toil in a factory owned by billionaires, making a product of entirety our own design, using our own resourses. And at the factory gate they sell it all back to us in spades.

At the stop we bump into Morris Minor Man, a colleague of a friend of ours, Zac from The Proclaimers, who has a vintage car refurbishment business. He has just bought a black model and it sits on his trailer looking…—More Tales

To Cardiff

Farewell Holiday Inn, sterile lodge on the edge of town. Today’s route takes us directly south along A-roads edging the English side of the Welsh border. Wales is unknown to me. I have no pictures in my head that swim into focus at the mention of its name. All I remember is ferry ports, Cardiff town centre and a brief sojourn to the Pembrokeshire coast. I can’t tie it all together to make a whole. In the 80s we frequently played Treforest, a student gig on the circuit. From there we were sent to Betty’s – “the best curry house in Wales”. This was a squalid cafe that served boil-in-the-bag gruel served by a woman about as Indian as Brad Pitt. We did a TV show in a former mining town in the zeroes where we met Travis, who were terribly young and sweet like tender-stem broccoli. I think this…—More Tales

To Chester

We arrive at our hotel outside Chester in good time. There are a few hours of daylight left so I cab it into town. My driver is a bit of a bore but sweet enough. He’s into motorsports and technology. He expounds on solar power, satellite systems and alternative fuels. His daughter is a vegan (as is her partner – a nice detail). His cab feels like a prison cell as the divider between passenger and driver is almost completely shuttered. His voice comes to me through surprisingly high quality speakers in the roof. If he starts playing Megadeth I’ll be in Cab X-Ray. I have a feeling there is no equivalent on his side. He ignores my every utterance until I tell him I’m a singer/songwriter. Then he relates to me his love for Joe Bonamassa and Carlos Santana. He also mentions Stan Getz which gives him a Brownie…—More Tales

To Norwich

We snake towards the motorway through Yorkstone villages, passing a vast estate. The aristocracy are everywhere, like rats or Nando’s. The leaves on the trees and bushes are hanging on, Ophelia having achieved only partial defoliation. The general aspect remains green. We drive between hawthorn hedgerows enclosing rural England’s endless quadrilaterals. We sweep past place-names; Wittering, Stibbington, Water Newton along the river Nene. Lorries in their corporate livery make walls around us, we’re doubly hedged-in. I swig some water from my canteen, and a late Hockneyesque copse flies by. Outside Stilton I see an army of dumptrucks flattening a field. Maybe they’re building a massive post-EU cheese empire. We are just a few miles from Denton where Iain Harvie and I did a few weeks of writing sometime in the zeroes. One fogbound morning I awoke at six o’clock and looked out on a white horse standing on its hind…—More Tales

To Wakefield

I make my own way back to the hotel after the Glee, amazed to find no restaurants open after 11 in Chinatown or anywhere else. I overhear some lads looking for a club saying “Too many Asians”. Maybe they’ll find Club Dick. The city is magically atmospheric in fog, the new towers and cranes disappearing into the cloak of the sky. I peer down from my room at this marooned town, taxis crawling through the streets like U-Boats, buildings reaching down into the murky sea, and feel complete contentment.

We leave at eleven and are soon spat out of Birmingham into a rainswept England, joining the trucks in their endless slog. The lane dividers pull us forward, we’re trapped between the stitches on a seam. Our usual routine is observed; some sleep, some speak on phones, some clamp music onto their skulls and drift somewhere else. I’m tapping, tapping, tapping like…—More Tales

To Birmingham/ Day Off

The infernal chirruping of my phone alarm pokes me into resentful consciousness. It’s 11am but I could cruise the halls of sleep another few hours. We stop early en route to Birmingham so I can do a phone interview to promote the Wakefield show. I’m fucking useless at interviews, as boring as a drunk gardener. The thing to do, to make them entertaining, would be to lie. Lie about everything – the songs, the band, the “career”. But I get sucked into the classic old duffer thing of droning on about the fucking music industry, which I know nothing about. But it’s hard to lie because it feels like dreadful disrespect to some poor professional who has diligently read the press release and scanned Wikipedia. In Nashville in 2014 the record company were so bereft of promo bookings they foisted me onto some poor DJ live on air at what…—More Tales

To Newcastle

Suitcases packed in the back of the Grey Toupee, we build up to escape velocity. England is beckoning. We pick up the guitarist at pre-arranged stop somewhere in the North, finding him standing in a bus shelter like an ageing rent boy. We are a team. I look out of the window from my leather covered perch. Misty autumn drizzle lies over the country, vehicles zip by on the opposite carriageway with a lazy sizzle, throwing up small arcs of spray. The low rumble from the tarmac beneath us is punctured by cackles of conversation. The nuclear power station at Torness glides by on our left looking like a cubist rendering of a pale blue elephant. The sea beyond is chopped-up, almost purple in its sullenness. We climb inland, passing through pretty wooded hills, the trees emitting wisps of steam as if harbouring secret fires. Most of the foliage is…—More Tales

To Edinburgh

I come to in my own bed, not yet fully on the road. I set the kettle on its plastic teet and toss a teabag into a stained mug, longing for the antiseptic soullessness of a chain hotel. At the appointed hour I make the ten minute walk to the venue. LOCAL MAN POPS OUT TO ROCK.
I like the ABC as a venue. There were once two vast screens here. It was my favourite cinema. I saw Dune in cinema one and threw my neck out sitting in the front row looking from one side of the frame to the other. Terrible film, made much worse by the acting of Sting. Even World War Two would’ve been made worse by the acting of Sting.
But the ABC stage is the perfect height, it’s Saturday night and the crowd are in fine voice.
I make a fast exit after the show, breezing home…—More Tales

To Manchester

As soon as we are on the road Mr. Nisbet christens our vehicle “The Grey Toupee” after a gentleman’s club existing only in his imagination. The van is decked out in grey leather and burgundy velvet. I have taken a raised seat at the rear from where I can survey the troupe and record any encroaching bald spots on the back of their heads. So far so hirsute. The road lays out before us like a charcoal carpet welcoming us back to touring life. The air is thick with the warmth of a distant hurricane. We all begin to readjust. The initial flurry of conversation dies and we start to poke at our phones, those small furnaces of desire. I notice a turbine turning slowly on a hill like the ghost of a Spitfire. Autumn touches the tops of trees with a powdering of gold, the verges still rich and…—More Tales

To Bogbairn

To Bogbairn

Today we are traveling to Bogbairn farm just south of Inverness. We’re playing a boutique festival called Northern Roots, run by my old friend from Blazing Fiddles, Bruce McGregor. Bruce has his fiddly fingers in a gamut of tasty pies. He hosts an excellent radio show called Travelin’ Folk on Radio Scotland, gigs with the Blazers and has been running a little annual event on his farm for a few years now. I believe he is also an apprentice milliner. But I have seen his hats and that way lies lunacy.

High winds and scattered clouds, bursts of sun and sprays of rain decorate this three or four hour journey. The sun sits very high this time of year so the afternoon gets flattened out with scant shadows lending the greenery a uniform dullness. It’s the sideways light that makes this country ring and glow like god. Ben Lomond stands…—More Tales

Day Off, Liverpool

Our hotel is a ’70s brown brick building refitted to resemble an art-deco ocean liner. So I went out roaming last night after the gig like a sailor on a 24 hour pass. Town was pretty dead around midnight but I followed some young folk and found the party zone where fast food was plentiful. It’s pleasant, when sober, weaving amongst the drunken as long as you don’t have to talk to them. I wouldn’t suffer myself after four drinks for a second.

In the early afternoon I begin preliminary exploration of the liner’s locale. I stop by the big 1960s Catholic cathedral which on close inspection is impressive, lovely even. A bronzed fitness fucker, tooled up with wraparound shades and a Fitbit is huffing up and down its steps, Rocky style. Inside I take one circuit, admiring its open-plan layout and enormous crown chandelier. It has a touch of Sagrada…—More Tales

To Liverpool 

White cumuli hang lazily in a milky blue sky as we angle up to Merseyside. Everywhere about us there must be party campaigners canvassing surly voters on their suburban doorsteps. They say Corbyn is gaining, the gap between Labour and Tories narrowing. This is good for ratings. Do we pray for a hung parliament leading to a coalition of “progressives”? Will the exit from the EU be fudged leading to a cataclysm? The soldiers and civil servants who run the secret state must be curious about this. The game is not completely rigged and the house does not always win but it’s best to expect stalemate and disappointment. However, there is no reason why the divisiveness and hatred instilled by the reactionary British press over Europe can’t lead to civil war. I would imagine they have thought about this. How will they keep us quiet? How will they, at all…—More Tales

To Wolverhampton

I investigate my face in the bathroom mirror, pink and pillowy like an eleven-year-old girl’s bedroom. I should put a Harry Styles sticker on my forehead to complete the look. I attempt some redecoration by dragging the grey stubble from my cheeks with a razor. There is little improvement. The blue rings under my eyes resemble the outside of a mussel shell and some rogue eyebrow hairs appear to be evolving into serviceable antennae. Hotel mirrors bring the brutal news you can avoid in a dimly lit home. Things change but later in life they slide and by the end it’s an avalanche. You see people buried by increments or you see them flattened in seconds. Nobody has a chance.

We kill time on the three hour journey answering general knowledge questions read from a little box bought in the last town. I’m surprised how much this excites me. A game!…—More Tales

To Pocklington

I wake up in the dark cocoon of my 70s hotel and draw back the vinyl shades to reveal a net curtain filtering the view like Vaseline on a lens. But I’d opened the nets last night. It’s mist and drizzle, the world’s awash with fuzzy humidity. It’s cool now, I close the window. I perform ablutions and tidy up, pack. With the black remote I taser through the cheap daytime channels, snagging on an old British Bake Off. I watch the sinister presenters prod and chew various breads like medieval kings before a banquet. I fantasise cutting Hollywood and Berry in half with a Gatling gun.

We drive through low-lying, nondescript country drenched in a fog of rain. Brake lights blink ahead and we caterpillar up to a queue. We pass a pig farm, a stately home and an enormous pink monument celebrating John Noakes. The place names are full…—More Tales

To Holmfirth

The lid of doom is clamped on the country and a porridge of grey prevails. Summer’s over, boys or maybe just commenced. The air has cooled a little and weaves about more turbulently. The heart sinks a notch – will we ever see sunshine again?

We track down to Engerland, the verges bursting with blossoms and rampant bushery. Everything looks sordid in the flattened light, the greens darkling like a murderer’s eyes before the act. We doze and read and eat Haribo, do the occasional line of coke off the dashboard. At a Moto I buy the-most-expensive-cup-of-tea-ever-served at an outdoor kiosk. I sling in some UHT “milk” and neck it in a single gulp, repulsed, angry and broke. I am that bitter old man you want to avoid. Small slights make me incensed, major injuries mildly riled.

We pick up our front-of-house operator at another motorway clip-joint, finding him loitering with his…—More Tales

To Perth

TO PERTH

Oh, shit – the sun is shining, shining down on all of bonny green Scotland. What does this portend? We load up in the the lane, box upon box, case upon case. Amps at the bottom, stringed instruments atop. We will travel in a thing called a “splitter”, the front cabin containing the humans, the rear the gear. There is a schism already.

We meet a fair-weather tailback on the motorway beyond Stirling’s pretty vista, its castle and monuments sitting perkily erect on the glacial plain. The lowlands are in fresh full leaf and all the managed, manicured greenery flutters and glints in the luxury of the brilliant light. We experienced Scots know not to mistake this lovely weather for the start of summer. Summer never starts in Scotland, it just vacillates wildly between spring and autumn and occasionally lights up like a furnace causing universal astonishment.

The people of Perth…—More Tales

Excitement

With the encroaching cynicism of middle age, episodes of excitement become increasingly rare. Perhaps a trip to some unvisited country raises the heart-rate a little but the unearned sense that you’ve seen-it-done-it lends every novelty a suspicious odour of staleness. Perhaps the arrival of grandchildren kickstarts some enthusiasm and shock and grief will cause ructions in the millpond of mild surprise but on the whole, you greet life with a shrug. Governments come and go and you whine weakly at their various crimes.

It comes with a jolt then to find yourself excited by anything, but releasing an album remains one of those things. You spend years pondering and collating, writing and recording all to the ultimate end of letting something out, freeing something and in turn being freed from it. So the actual day of its public exposure remains supremely important and there is no other word for the emotion…—More Tales

This Is My Kingdom Now out today on all capitalist tech outfits

This masterpiece of meh can be retrieved from here in physical form: https://justincurrie.tmstor.es/

And here in bits: http://apple.co/2naovtO

And from the tax dodging employee exploiters here: http://amzn.to/2n0Noch—More Tales

Tour with The Pallbearers announced for October/ November!!!!!!!

Tickets on sale 9:00am on Monday 15th May

See Parades for details.—More Tales

Separated at Perth?

Perth want me to punt this:

http://www.perthfestival.co.uk/event/justin-currie/

Consider it punted, Perth.—More Tales

Album release announced via satellite, telegraph, semaphore etc…

Good moaning. I take great pleasure today in announcing the pre-release (whatever the fuck that is) of This Is My Kingdom Now, my latest collection of stuff.

Hear the brand-new-smash-hit-number-one single, Sydney Harbour Bridge here: http://spoti.fi/2ndHjtQ

The album is out on May 12th (May the twelpth be with you) but you can pre-order it here: http://amzn.to/2n0Noch

OR if you want the thing bundled with an ART print (feel the quality, see the shine) stylishly signed by my hairy mitt then get in here:

https://justincurrie.tmstor.es/

You can hear the title track here:http://spoti.fi/2nOJ97I

More exciting smash hit news to follow. Smashing, isn’t it?

 —More Tales

This Is My Kingdom Now

Link to high-budget video. Directed by Steven Seagull.

https://youtu.be/ab-jjL6fWo0—More Tales

Short UK jaunt announced

Just added some dates in May/June to support the forthcoming release of This Is My Kingdom Now on Endless Shipwreck records.

May:

Fri 26 ​Perth Concert Hall

Sun 28 ​Holmfirth Picturedrome

Mon 29​ Pocklington Arts Centre

Tue 30 ​Wolverhampton Slade Rooms

Wed 31​ Liverpool Hangar 34

June:

Fri 2​ Cambridge Junction 1

Sat 3​ Islington Assembly Hall

See Parades for dates and ticket links.—More Tales

Show at Linlithgow August 8th, OK? This year. God knows how you get tickets but you can figure it out.

—More Tales

Bonus Ball

20/11/14 – 11/12/64

I sit in my seat like a teacher at a staff meeting, room service beer in full flow, and watch my last guest die. Ella Guru has gone to the other side. Being young, she has seen the sense in heading for the hills of immediate sleep. My banter, demanding as it must be of recipients, falls on deaf ears.
I bear witness and keep vigil. Ella Guru slumbers as soundlessly as the pharaohs, her beer propped up in her lap like a leaning Eiffel. The squeaks and strains of morning erupt around my room – o shit, the world is awake.
Nighttime is everything to me, I could not live without its cloaking. Mornings are murder, murderous and murderers. They are deathly, depressing and disastrous. They bring clinging women, creepy uncles: mornings are cunts that catch one at play.
A little diseased breath in…—More Tales

Leeds to London, November 16th-19th 2014

After four nights in the same hotel in Leeds it’s refreshing to be back on the road proper. It’s heavily overcast and muggy, the southbound traffic sluggish. With three shows left there’s an air of weary resignation in the van. My body, on waking, felt like a block of hardened rubber, as if some entity had poured moulding material down my throat in the night. I’ve set stiff and sit like a bag of cement in the front seat. I need a drainage contractor. A dim orb of pale grey hovers in the gloom above like a ghoul. Tiny spots of rain collect on the windscreen like alighting insects until, forming too dense a firmament, they are swiped away. A sunbeam strikes through ahead with an abracadabra and, peering upwards, I see a flat white disc; our furnace star reduced to a glinting tiddlywink.
The…—More Tales

Selby and Uppermill, November 12th-14th 2014

At last we escape the clutches of the country club with its therapy pool and veneer of hushed sympathy. I feel like we’re on the lam from rehab. The A-Road north is as straight as a Roman nose, we are the only deviants. Ploughed fields fill the flatness dotted with hamlets, farmhouses and groups of trees loitering like sulking teenagers. It is very still, the sky a white soup with puffs of smoky clouds trailing along the horizon like steam from an antique train. The rectangular torpedoes of lorries barrel towards us but it’s slow going this side of the road. We cross the odd canal and the sun, swimming out to our left in a sea of grey muslin, manages to throw blurred shadows across the tarmac.
It’s already crepuscular as we turn into Selby, a little town not without an earthy old-fashioned charm. We’re early, so we set up…—More Tales

Norwich, November 11th 2014

Heave-ho, we head out of Bury, swinging round the sugar factory which belches white smoke into the crisp blue sky. It’s a short hop to Norwich across the flatlands of Norfolk but the sat-nav takes us on a wild goose chase around half the county before we arrive at our abode, a country club type joint, all golf courses and spa treatments. I HATE golf. It’s the refuge of the respectable Nazi. I immediately order a taxi to ferry me away from this hell. The driver is a cheeky chappie from Larkhall in Scotland. He wears a black waistcoat with a silver pinstripe and tells me about his daughter’s graduation. She’s the first of his family to go to university. I congratulate him but he’s more concerned with what the do is going to cost. Then he tells me he just won £1400 on…—More Tales

Bexhill-on-Sea, November 8th 2014

By the time we hit Bexhill the warm southern wind is whipping off the channel in swiping gusts. We hear the local fireworks event has been cancelled due to the danger of rockets launching five feet in the air, abruptly bending to the horizontal and blowing children’s faces off.
The De La Warr is smaller than I had remembered it but beautifully sculpted and remarkably unspoilt. The auditorium is a wonderful room, perfectly proportioned and reverberating with a gentle slapback highly conducive to music and speech. I watch our opening act Ella The Bird and am enormously impressed with her composure and dynamic control. My own show feels too effortless to be trustworthy and my mind wanders during the last half hour; I go within and feel like I lose the crowd, leaving all a little stranded. The sea lies to my right twenty feet beyond the wall, black, tormented and…—More Tales

To Liverpool, 7th November, 2014

We start at ten. The gear goes in the back, the boys go in the front and we get on our way, out into the You-Kay. Liverpool shivers at the end of the road in a milky November morning. The road-signs are blue and the cones are red – fields and fences, copses, hedges – everything crumpled into the confines of this congested country. The sun swims low in the southern sky, slipping through knots of clotted cloud, making its way to the Atlantic.
It’s a short jaunt, a quick buzz around provincial England ending in two London nights. The trees cling on limply to their remaining leaves not yet taken by the wind. Winter hasn’t taken its first real bite but you feel it coming. The pasture is that British/Irish emerald that you see nowhere else and it sings in the sporadic shafts of sunlight. Everything glistens in autumn dew.
We…—More Tales

Phoenix to LA, LA to San Francisco, October 4th – 9th 2014

We load into the van at eleven for the seven hour drive to LA, the mountains of the southern desert brushed with pale green and sitting out at a distance on either side of us the whole way. I nod off and dream of backstage corridors and hotel fire escapes and awake in the snake-pit of LA’s freeway system. The I-10 virtually takes us door to door, from our Phoenix hotel to McCabe’s Guitar Store in Santa Monica. This is a renowned gig for its setting – the acoustic guitar room of a music shop – and its unique and intimate ambience. Lincoln, an urbane and witty man who epitomises So-Cal cool, gives me the run-down on the place’s history which is illustrious and quirky in equal measure. The backstage corridors are covered with photographs from LA music history. I stare into a black…—More Tales

El Paso to Phoenix, October 2nd & 3rd

Another morning, another fucking beautiful day, still in Texas. But not for long. The route out of El Paso hugs the border with Mexico for a while before cutting north into New Mexico and turning west for Arizona. Mexico lies just beyond touching distance, only discernible as a different nation by the marginally more ramshackle nature of its housing. An ugly fence, like a stern and humourless drill sergeant, frowns along the frontier for a few miles until succumbing to the heedless power of the landscape. There is no border, just two cultures and economies smashing against each other and melding, melting into one: Amexica. Only the mulish attitude of politicians, harvesting fear votes, prevents this territory from being the same country. The absurdity of the frontier is no less acute than that between North and South Korea. People pour across the official channels – roads, bridges and ports -…—More Tales

Dallas to Austin and El Paso, TX, September 1st & 2nd 2014

Texas is a different world, an unimaginable place in, say, Manhattan. It sits culturally apart from the rest of the States, has its own mindset. We drive south to Austin, stopping at Style Station on the way, a used clothing treasure trove just off the freeway recommended to us by The Mastersons and our buddies, The O’s. Having been forewarned that its proprietor, Art, is big on radical politics and conspiracy we are pleasantly surprised by his hospitality and extraordinary knowledge, from the history of the British monarchy to the convoluted and corrupt machinations of US manufacturers in the Second World War. He’s quite an amazing man and tells me about an electric trolley car system that served the area until it was dismantled by the motor industry in 1948. He has, against state policy, installed his own solar panels and powers most of…—More Tales

Dallas, TX, 30th September 2014

In the afternoon of the show I hook up with old friends the Kresses who in a replay of 1986 have come down from Little Rock, Arkansas to see me. We have a lovely lunch in Deep Ellum and swap tales of death, disease and the absurdity of life as their three charming kids suffer us incredibly politely. They are very widely travelled people and their stories are fascinating. This puts me in what I can only describe as a good mood, a state of existence I am barely familiar with. They have brought me gifts, one of which is a mini photo album from ’88 when they were backpacking through Europe where we all look like fucking babies. It’s shocking. I actually don’t recognise myself. Fuck me – what happened to THAT guy?
I find myself actually relaxing by the pool before showtime. I…—More Tales

Minneapolis to Dallas, September 28th to 30th 2014

We leave the Twin Cities early and are in the sticks in no time. We look at the map and follow a long straight line to Kansas City where we are stopping over en route to Dallas. The highway bears us over shallow inclines through fields of cereal without deviation for four hundred miles. South of Des Moines in Iowa it gets a bit more scrubby and wild. As we head south we leave all signs of autumn behind and are frequently tracked by Vs of ducks flying alongside like banners.
Kansas City suddenly appears on the horizon like a tombstone in the sun. The hotel, The Aladdin, is a beautiful Art Deco structure built in 1925 and my room on the 11th floor has windows on two sides and is remarkably smartly decorated for a Holiday Inn. The…—More Tales

Minneapolis, September 27th 2014

We cross the Mississippi four times, once in, once out and twice in the course of going out. It astonishes me that the river still has the power to carve a city in two so far from the sea. One end might sit in the icy chill of frozen Minnesota while the delta sweats and oozes into the Gulf of Mexico more than a thousand miles south. Minneapolis has a strange personality. She is twins so perhaps that’s to be expected. As we roll in from Chicago we see streets thronged with sandal and shorted mobs. It’s Saturday and unseasonably warm. Everyone is out making hay. Any day now a front could come in from the north and there won’t be a soul to be seen on the street. It always strikes me as a very clean place, as if the hellish winters scour…—More Tales

Chicago, September 25th 2014

Why do we wave to people on boats? I’m sitting under a high sun by the Chicago river beginning to roast in jeans and a black shirt. I give a casual little flutter of the fingers of my right hand, my arm hanging nonchalantly across a park bench. A blonde woman in big sunglasses waves back from the pleasure cruiser slipping past my vantage point. The sun is beating at me, really hammering. A sparrow drops by for a morsel I do not have, hopping around my boots with its back to me, keeping one eye on the chance of a flung breadcrumb. I’m not in the habit of carrying breadcrumbs. I don’t need a reputation as a groomer.
This city has been the scene of much debauchery for me. Chicago was often the gig you did about a month in, when the madness descends.…—More Tales

To Chicago, 24th September 2014

We escape the clutches of the city early in the morning, all the heavy traffic on the opposite carriageway. Once through the gauntlet of New Jersey’s chemical industry we’re in the endless woods of Pennsylvania. Fall is in first flame, the yellows and russets spreading through the forest like a rash. Coming around some bends the whole horizon is afire in the angled morning sun. It’s nearly four hours before we see a clearing – a farmstead set in an emerald meadow. The route has a mesmerising monotony. It’s a kind of Appalachian Amazonia. We stop for breakfast and luxuriate in the changed pace, the rural folksiness, the twang in the accents. In a matter of hours we have arrived in a different universe still confederated under the same oath and flag.
Road and more road. To get across Pennsylvania alone it takes six hours.…—More Tales

To and From Philadelphia, September 22nd 2014

We take a leisurely amble down the 95 to Philly and seem to drive straight into the gig without deviation. The pale blue sky is tiered with those puffy white clouds from the opening credits of The Simpsons. I’ve done this tiny venue, The Tin Angel, before. It’s a charming long narrow room with a very tight stage down at the opposite end from the bar where the toilets are. People have to file past you during the show when they need to micturate. It’s good to make fun of them.
We’re done soundchecking by seven and I go out to mosey around the vicinity. I rummage around a second-hand shop but it’s all a bit precious. The word “vintage” gets bandied about as if old clothes mature like wine. I only wear used things because most modern clobber is so repulsive and badly made,…—More Tales

New York City, 21st September 2014

Around lunchtime I take a walk over the Brooklyn Bridge dodging through the streams of tourists on their Bloomberg bikes. I cross the narrow tip of the island to the west side and seat myself in a restaurant on a corner looking onto a small park. The new One World Trade Centre looms over me, its pointed hat in the clouds. I can’t fathom its scale at all. For all its claim to be the highest in the Western Hemisphere it looks more like a chubby than a stauner to me. My table offers a strategic people-watching panorama. An ancient Chinese woman sifts through a garbage basket, her trove of refundable cans and bottles in an enormous plastic bag at the end of a pole (with a counterweight at the other) that she balances on her shoulder. A twenty-something couple straight out of a…—More Tales

To New York, September 20th 2014

Onward up the eastern seaboard we go, the weather consistently glorious. Virginia, Maryland, Delaware, New Jersey. We pass Baltimore’s scrappy skyline and skip across wide inlets densely forested on each bank. I imagine the fear and wonder of the Europeans sailing up these rivers into the unknown in the 16th century. We twist around the base of Manhattan, spotting emerald Liberty from the arc of the Verrazano Narrows bridge. The great “fuck-you” of Freedom Tower rises from the ashes of ground zero, ugly and crass compared to the streamlined simplicity of the twins it replaces. It’s odd to be driving straight into Brooklyn and not setting foot on the island. I may walk over the bridge tomorrow to rub Manhattan’s monumental grandeur into my eyes. The gig is surrounded by a swarm of hipster dipsticks, pushing prams and tousling each other’s angled fringes. I…—More Tales

To Vienna, VA, September 19th 2014

I awake to the tragedy of my own people rejecting radical change to cling to the false security of the last flotsam from the shipwreck of the British Empire. I am tuned to BBC Radio London and the glee and jubilation of the powerful spouting forth from the radio is suffocating. I cannot deny that I am very angry. I was angry last night when I saw the way it was going and I am angry this morning in the harsh light of the result and I’ll be angry when I go home. I feel like the hope just got kicked out of me. I feel like I am being held down by a gang of victorious sports fans because I am wearing the wrong colour, walking down the wrong street and have been singing the wrong song. The surprising flame of Scots radicalism…—More Tales

To Pittsburgh, September 17th 2014

We are out of Cleveland by 9am, pale blue skies above. There are three tasks to be completed today. A live performance on radio, getting me a US social security number and finding a nut wrench to loosen the truss rod of my Taylor. Ooh, missus. It’s enough to make Rod Taylor blush. If he weren’t long dead, pecked to death by deranged birds. Pittsburgh is the destination, a city I last visited in the early nineties for some outdoor radio event. The most recent proper gig I did there was 1986. It was the Electric Banana as I remember and we stayed with a Dels fan’s parents in suburbia. I have unforgivably forgotten her name but I do have a photograph somewhere of me and our guitarist, Brian eating out of a dog bowl on all fours wearing pet collars. It was near…—More Tales

To Cleveland, OH, September 15th 2014

I am sorry to be leaving Nashville. After last night’s show a pleasant bevy of friends and acquaintances coalesced around the backstage zone exchanging gossip and news. The dressing room grapevine. People here are very interested in the Scottish Situation. We endeavour to explain and quickly figure out that it’s easiest just to wait for them to ask, “So you wanna be like Canada?” Yes, that’s pretty much it. The disillusionment with domestic politics is so extreme here now that this makes perfect sense to them.
We pull out of town at 9am and are straight onto the freeway. Within an hour we’re in Kentucky passing through rolling pasture studded with copses and the odd little cornfield. There is the vaguest blush of autumnal bruising staining the trees and the sun breaks through exposing high maps of thin clouds above. We pass a Glasgow and…—More Tales

To Nashville, September 13th 2014

We lift out through thin fog and reach over Islay’s inner seas, the island glistening in the September sun, its bays and beaches deserted and beautiful below us. We leave Scotland in the light, a land hovering between shadow and something else, staring into its Celtic soul and asking: to be or not to be?
I’m headed west to America with my trusted lieutenant, Mr. Niz at my side, so I am “we” and we are “me” and we are all together.
Over the Atlantic we cruise in our tin-can tube of Boeing, the ocean rippling out beyond, somewhere lapping at the coast of a Carolina or two. Within a few hours I’m gazing down on endless schools of icebergs carving their way south. We are, as Joni Mitchell sang, at icy altitudes. With the trolleys stowed and the crew at rest after service the only…—More Tales

NYC City Winery

Still tickets left for this show here:

http://www.citywinery.com/newyork/justin-currie-4-22.html.—More Tales

Update USA

Hallo good people of USA. Here’s a quick update on the upcoming tour. It’s all up. For debate. Firstly I’m going to be on the wireless in these places on these frequencies.

WRLT Nashville Sept 14th.

WYEP Pittsburg Sept 17th. Live on air 1.15pm.

WXRT Chicago Sept 25th. Live on air 12- 12.30.

Thank you to all who bought tickets for the following shows. These are all sold out now.

Tin Angel Philladelphia Sept 22
Space Evanston Sept 25
Schubas Chicago Sept 26
Dakota Minneapolis Sept 27

There are tickets still available for all the other shows so if you go here:

http://www.highroadtouring.com/artists/justin-currie/itinerary/

You can figure it all out.

I’ll see you all in a couple of weeks.—More Tales

Rotterdam to Cologne, January 6th 2014

In the morning I peel back the flimsy curtain and glimpse the first whisker of dawn. Rotterdam’s blinking constellation creeps imperceptibly closer until its vast industrial tangle fills the horizon. Every one of the countless chimneys is festooned with lights like some Christmas apocalypse. Ships, tugs and barges, container terminals, wharfs and warehouses, petrochemical plants, cranes, barrels, boxes, piles of gravel, sand, coils of chain and rope; it’s the machine-mouth of Europe drinking its lifeblood from the seas. We are disgorged from the ferry’s bowels onto the dockside in our little cruiser and set co-ordinates for the centre to breakfast and make a coffeeshop pick-up. Town is a stimulating mish-mash of modernism not without its charms. The Luftwaffe destroyed the medieval town in 1940 in an effort to cow the Dutch after the Nazis met much fiercer resistance on the ground…—More Tales

Hull to Rotterdam, Jan 5th 2014

I am standing at the stern of an enormous ferry staring out into the watery darkness to the distant lights of the Humber bridge, a fat lady’s necklace strung across the throat of the estuary. The “sun deck” is the highest public tier on our vessel and a clench of vertigo grips me as I peer straight down the side of the ship to the strip of brown water between us and the quayside. Disconsolate stragglers smoke cigarettes wreathed in self-disgust. The open-air bar is empty; a solitary server eyes me with lethargic disinterest as a flickering TV, recessed into the wall beside him, shows the dying minutes of an Arsenal FA cup win. The polished decking is slick with a layer of rain and I cautiously skate back into the warm bowels of the boat, my arms extended forward like Frankenstein’s…—More Tales

Bob Harris session, London, December 9th & 10th

I come burning out of the JPR Management Christmas party in a rage of resentment, flailing desperately at passing cabs whose lights are resolutely unlit. I’m cutting this fine. I’m in Shepherds Bush bound for Glasgow and my flight leaves Heathrow in about eighty minutes. Tick, tick, tick. That was a party I didn’t want to leave. I rouse a sleeping cabbie outside the Hilton with a gentle series of knocks on his bonnet, slowly increasing in intensity. He comes to with a smile, perhaps appreciative of my sensitivity to the truth of the proverb concerning sleeping dogs. We speed off to Paddington with an alacrity born of rich experience of London driving. He asks me about independence and I give him my tuppence worth. He is impassioned about its potentially disastrous effect on the Scots. Although I agree I find…—More Tales

Monday 4th of November, 2013

Being the dick that I am, I pride myself on passing pointless little tests. Having de-nuded myself and placed every conceivable metallic accoutrement on my person into a plastic tray I still set off the alarm as I pass through the arch of the detector at airport security. My bafflement is assuaged by my body searcher who reassures me I have been selected randomly. “Nothing in life is certain”, he smiles. But I’m certain of this: they’ll never find that hand grenade stuffed inside my colon. Not without a lengthy stick.*
I am en route to a rehearsal with Jimmy Webb in preparation for our duet on Later tomorrow night. I can’t quite figure out if I’m nervous about meeting Jimmy as we have spoken on the phone and he’s so immediately affable you can’t help feeling at ease. He’s an Oklahoma boy…—More Tales

September 20th 2013

I am again suspended in the air on a fourteenth floor looking out over Bristol, the Avon green and glittering in a great arc around the city below me. People are thronging in the square catching the fag-end of the summer warmth. I venture abroad and order a burger at a dockside bar and crane my neck out over the water to catch precious rays on my face. Light ringing, light singing, spilling everywhere in splendour.
The end of the road has been reached, last stop Glasgow tomorrow. The phone has been quiet these last few days, phase one completed. Then there is another video to make and hopefully a little more plugging and pushing to do on single number two. And onto the reunion and my reacquaintance with the bass guitar. There’s only four strings so why worry? That’s a whole…—More Tales

September 17th – 19th 2013

Everyone’s face is crippled with displeasure. The slanting rain and the callous wind are harrowing even hardened Mancunians. I pass a ditched polystyrene carry-out container, brimming with rainwater, a tomato quarter and some scraps of livid meat. Even the rats have taken cover. They’ve probably “…all got rickets” and “spit through broken teeth”.
The cinema is showing wall-to-wall shit, the museums are closed and walking is a thankless pursuit. I take a late breakfast in a proper caff full of bubbly regulars and shuffling OAPs. I watch a staff member chalk up a black A- board. He writes “Were close” which I think might be a comment on some football score until he thinks to add a “d”, squashed on the end like an unwelcome worm.
I wander about, hands in pockets. I am as aimless as a snowflake. This particular part…—More Tales

September 14th 2013

And we’re off to Harrogate with two hangovers in the van. Long Island Iced Teas are to blame. Once the Del Amitri day-off drink of choice in the US, now to be avoided at all costs. Five kinds of white spirits in one glass. I used to serve them in my nightclub barman days. If they came back for a second they were not seen again. Not in this world.
It’s sunny but with a sky busy with tortured clouds reaching down from every altitude. I have spent the morning listening to AM by Arctic Monkeys. Hm.
Harrogate is hoaching with slowcoaches. Swarms of daytrippers trudge about looking disconsolate. I have noodles in a place packed with families. I grimace at their moaning kids with no sympathy, no patience and no clue. Poor bastards. I can’t say I’m a fan of these…—More Tales

12th September 2013

The fair city of Edinburgh is warm in the morning and I amble across town to the BBC in my shirtsleeves*, stopping fitfully at second-hand shops full of crap and ducking into what appears to be a women-only café. My coffee is so repulsive I immediately leave. It tastes like tar and acid and wormwood. The cakes looked good, I’ll admit. There’s a place next door that looks more promising. They have bacon rolls.
I don’t know Edinburgh, I’m a tourist here. I know ten other farther flung cities better. It’s a lovely town, utterly unique. It leaves Glasgow trailing in its wake for cosmopolitanism, institutional infrastructure and architecture. It feels international, engaged and on the go. It has deep roots in the Enlightenment, the historical Scottish establishment, finance, football casuals and mass heroin addiction. You can see how Scotland’s five cities…—More Tales

11th September, 2013

Come morning I’m back out on the balcony again, sunning myself like a retired military man. I put on Curtis Mayfield then listen again to young Lloyd’s album, Standards. Myrtle and Rose is very touching. Then I listen to a bit of Neu’s second album and I am struck by the obvious lifts Martin Hannett and Joy Division took for Unknown Pleasures. The heavy plate reverb on the gated snare, the unsettling sound effects. It’s funny to think that Joy Division were essentially a seventies band. But they sounded like the future and the future sounded like hell. So here we are.
We motor north to London burning diesel, the great belt with its white stitches tugging us forward. An eiderdown of cloud blankets us as the sun slants between the sheets bringing the road alive with a trembling light.
I have…—More Tales

Brighton, September 9th 2013

We haul out of Cambridge through desultory drips of rain. I have taken in a croissant and good coffee in a local Italian caff seemingly run by super-efficient Latvians. Or Lithuanians, one can’t be sure. Whatever, they looked like handsome villains from a James Bond film. I was interrogated as to the quality of the fare and felt somehow that I didn’t pass muster. After I’d commented on the sound quality of the coffee, my waiter looked horribly insulted. “But the croissant was lovely and fresh also, no?”
“Oh, yes, very fresh, very good too”.
I had a feeling had I said no that the supplier would have had his little finger chopped off. You don’t get that in Starfucks. They probably chop entire countries off.
The rain starts lashing at the windscreen as we get out of town, spray spinning up around…—More Tales

Cambridge, September 8th

The broken white lines stream towards me like tracer fire, England in early autumn slides past the van’s windows all around me. Sunny spells. My stomach twinges with hunger. I wonder what culinary delights await in my Cambridge dressing room. Last night’s show, wrecked by nerves, has me on edge. I need something but know not what. A long violent massage from a fat Turk? Caravans, vans, trucks and trailers: I’m in the world of wagons. Cambridgeshire’s flat expanses exert their pull. I’m getting there but when I do, “there” moves somewhere else. Hunger leads not to satisfaction, just further want.
I didn’t touch down in Wolverhampton, I seemed to fly through in a daze. There’s hardly a mote of Midlands dust on the soles of my shoes. A man invisible to me said goodbye during the show, said he had to go. I could do nothing but bid him…—More Tales

LOL

Lolling in bed.

LOL—More Tales

Back to Gatwick

.

After an arduous soundcheck trying to fit eleven lines into eight channels I take a stroll to the river beach, a strange French phenomenon whereby a bend in a country river is converted into a virtual beach by the application of a few tons of sand. It’s not for me at all. It’s just weird – people doing beachy things in mottled green water with trees all around. I walk to the end where there’s a weir. Some local teenagers are frolicking in the miniature cataract, a relatively risky business. I take a cold cola in the “beach” bar and gaze out upon the odd scene from the shade of some saplings. It’s slightly reminiscent of Seurat’s The Bathers but with more undressed flesh. An English man standing near me has swimming trunks so short that he looks naked from…—More Tales

French village

I wake up in a pleasant little hotel in a sleepy village which on further investigation turns out to be a suffocatingly picturesque tourist trap crawling with those middle-class tourists who frequent stupid shops full of gourmet this and vintage that. There’s a shop that sells cupcakes for fuck’s sake. They’re all wandering around sleepily looking for orifices into which they can ram their money. I hide in a bar out of the heat and scowl, like I ain’t the same as them. But we’re Brits abroad together no matter that I’m here to “work” so I drift along with the posh scum, nosing into an overpriced antique shop and poking at dull things. I flip through a box of vinyl which contains three Rubettes albums, some 80s Hi-Energy 12inches and a Richard Clayderman LP. Nothing even resembles bad taste, it’s…—More Tales

To Gatwick and beyond

My cabbie offers me a pellet of chewing gum, perhaps reacting to the reek of last night’s garlic. I accept and take pity on him and open a window. Glasgow is glittering in August light as we cross the Kingston bridge, the new Hydro – almost complete – nestling amongst its silver sisters like an old-fashioned idea of a spaceship.
The airport teems with holidaymakers and a smattering of Scotland fans on their way to Wembley to meet the Auld Enemy in a friendly. Their kilts sway above white woollen socks and Timberlands, the footwear of choice for the marching Tartan Army. I sense the odd look of disgust cast furtively in my direction. That soppy little poof disnae get it wi’ his maudlin shite. So be it. I give off a faint air of disdain. Come on, Scotland? Come ON Scotland.
The country…—More Tales

Hitler Youth watches Coronation Street

Member of Hitler Youth watching Coronation Street during half-time of Celtic game.

—More Tales

London July 26th 2013

Airports. I walk the gauntlet of painted ladies and try to fight off the olfactory assault. Right after the martial roadblock of security the inquisition of the wallet. If there’s an empty space, put a shop on it. You can’t get near a chair until you’ve done the corridor of consumption. I buy a Private Eye from a scrupulously polite young man in a glorified kiosk. He’s going places and so am I. I espy in the lounge a soundman with whom I am acquainted but he’s deeply buried in a book. A little further on I see Stevie Jackson from B&S but he too is engrossed, headphones locked over his curly hair so I resist interrupting and take a seat in my own little patch. We all have our own little patch. A very pretty young mother approaches with two red-faced bairns and parks opposite. I pick up my…—More Tales

London, 11th July 2013

I’m sitting in Berkley Square completely surrounded by the inexorably circling feeding frenzy of London traffic. The stately Georgian townhouses seem to glare down upon my classlessness. Behind me in the Bentley shop window, big glinting automobiles squat like hounds panting gently on the lord of the manor’s drawing room carpet. The noise around me is vast and unnameable and lulls me into a pleasant stupor. The odd horn blast declares itself above the din but it is this huge congregation of machines that predominates. London is alive with the dread sound of engines burning oil and spewing every kind of particulate into the warm evening air. Business types flit by on their borrowed Boris Bikes; a sprinkler, muted by the cacophony, flicks fake rain about the place which the lurid grass drinks enthusiastically. I regard a pair of red telephone boxes set beside an old-fashioned…—More Tales

Bend To My Will (album version)

http://youtu.be/KEu8-YyhBIA—More Tales

March, 24th, 2013

Peter Hitchens, mad as a hatter though he is, said this: “Even now, in a corner of every newspaper office in the country, a faint shadow is growing and gathering. In time, it will thicken, darken  and resolve itself into the chilly, relentless figure of the censor.”—More Tales

Sheffield, February 26th 2013

Like every English city Sheffield has been pimped, the yawning gaps left by sixties demolition and eighties recession suddenly filled in with the brash evidence of the credit boom of the early zeroes. It’s as if the tumbling of the Trade Centre spawned a desperate spasm of tower building all over the West as some kind of gesture of defiance. Fuck you, nutters – here’s a thousand more shining targets. That’ll keep them busy. It’s modernism as a political one-fingered salute. Look how fucking free we are, we can plant Manhattan everywhere at the drop of a Google Maps pin.