Guardian Tour Diary 1997
I wrote this piece for The Guardian in 1997 (I think) and received a fair amount of flak from US fans for its sneering tone. I can see their point but I was trying to be sympathetic to them while undermining the rock-star persona by being honest. I probably got it wrong, but it’s a document of its time so here it is in its original form before the G2 editors got their (rather capable) claws into it.
One Week on the Wheel of Pain: How to Brownnose with Impunity
Monday, Arrival
You plane, you deplane. You’re a foreigner, a form-filler, you’re a hasn’t been who might be in the land of the wannabe. You have come here, willing and supine, ready to wear the promo smile for the people, to sing your song for the sake of the sell. Live on-air, live in-store, a week of grease on the week of release, welcome to the wheel of pain.
Tuesday, Chicago
8:00am. You stretch-limo to WXRT and play your pretty new tunes on borrowed guitars. Attempt razor-sharp sarcasm in airy exchanges with morning jock, Lynn Bremer. Time-lag, however, renders your wit limp, lumpy. You sound whiny. You’re a whiny Limey.
11:00 am. You stretch, you de-stretch. The sheet says to expect 1500 people at the in-store. Five hundred or so watch you play a tune or two then stand around embarrassed when the power goes. Ah, when the power goes. 1500 people suddenly appear as you sit down to sign sleeves. You ask number 62 who it’s for. “It’s for me”, she says. You ask if that’s with a “y’ or an “i”.
Wednesday, Minneapolis
Your morning acoustic performance has been elbowed. Suddenly there is acres of real time. You panic. Six hours to kill. You open your Sheraton net shield. Minneapolis is nowhere to be seen. Reception soothes you. “Uptown is five minutes away, sir”. You know from extensive experience of America that this translates as ten miles in a taxi – but six hours is six hours.
Uptown Minneapolis is what they now call a “Starbucky area”. This means that you can walk between cafés and clothes shops without resorting to wheeled transportation. You wander, read local free-sheets, try on thrift shop suits, worry over your absence of style. Should you be swaggery Mick-Jaggery or homely Jarvis-Cockery? Either way you know you’ll look like Arthur Askey and feel a fucking fool. An in-store ensues. Friendly north-midwesterners file past your signing station. “You guys are incredibly awesome”, says one. “I love your metaphors”, says one more. You try to resist the innuendo. Resistance is useless.
Thursday, New York
7:00am. You drag yourself awake after four hours slumber in the icy air-con of the Sheraton Manhattan, your headphones around your neck , the Wu-Tang Clan in the Discman. Always nice to drop off to some deranged polemical ranting.To WRNN where a morning zoo awaits. This is where DJs acting like teenagers on their first line of speed “fun” over the air at unfeasibly early hours of the morning. The real zoo is out there where the audience is fed daily doses of shit by these keepers of the short attention span. You play your songs, ply your trade. At least on radio your grin can be dispensed with as you act the ape through a thin grimace of disgust. TV land beckons.
1:30 pm NBC TV Studios, Conan O’Brian Show taping. You’re here, o joy of joys, to play your noo cut to the nation, coast to coast, your mug mooning in every home. Your group’s spot is between ad break 5 and 6. It occurs to you that chat shows are adverts for commercial breaks, not really programmes in a proper sense. You are, in a way, the incidental entertainment during the intermission, the turn that keeps the dopes glued to the brightly coloured river of crap that no one needs but everyone just has to have. You do your bit, break for the train station – Philadelphia waits for you at the end of the line.
Friday, Philadelphia
You train, de-train, check in and kip.
8:00 am, WRML. Another morning zoo, you trot out the same old stuff. Today’s DJ is a kind of trainee Howard Stern whose own success you can only explain by his apparent possession of a whole half-brain. In the kingdom of the brainless the half-brained man is king. Your jock, on the other hand, possesses only a deft ability to find innuendo in every inanity you utter. You call his bluff and ask him if some silly slang they are all fnarr fnarring over means clitoris. Sudden, desperate guffawing smothers the conversation like teargas, dispersing any ugliness bearing the banner of reality. No fun there.
2:30pm In-store, Downtown. A veritable Artie Fufkin situation arises. No instruments, no amps, no people. While hanging around waiting for the gear and looking for whose ass to have ironically offered up, folks by the name of fan miraculously start to appear. You sing, you sign, you sling your hook. Philadelphia is the birthplace of a free world of sorts so it seems appropriate that today’s in-store yields the grandest of free CD hauls for the band. Popularity is an empty reward; the scams are the real satisfaction.
The great cushioned submarine of the tour-bus drags you back up north to Boston, everyone gleefully unwrapping their bounty like kids at Christmas. Best blag has to be an absurd Bob Wills record. You yodel along like nervous hounds before a hunt all the way up the sleek freeway.
Saturday, Boston
12:00pm HMV In-store. You wake up feeling like shit, like someone’s put a breeze-block in place of your torso. The familiar signs are there – cold, shivering, aches and pains – bus flu. You muddle through your performance as best you can. Boston folk, cold but polite, sympathetically cheer. You take requests and play your hits, the children in the crowd blank, bored and embarrassed at their parents’ sides, unsure of their allegiances. You do the singing, limp-wristed and turbo-sweating, smiling that weak smile of the sick – thank you nurse, only a few more days. You return to your Swiss Hotel room and are immediately absorbed by the bed. A posher than normal place this, the main differences being chocolates on the pillow, Q-Tips in the toilet and a desk lamp that is a bronze horse, one leg ceremoniously lifted, a sad idea of elegance. The tour manager’s call wakes you and you mini-van to the Open House Party, a live syndicated radio show beamed by satellite from a house outside Boston to second-rate radio stations all over Canada and the States. They take calls. Stacey from Dayton, Ohio wants to hear 2 Unlimited, says she’s going clubbing tonight and wishes her best friend a happy birthday. The sprawling mass of extra-metropolis America comes home to you in an instant, a disconnected place littered with dead ends and false hope even for these suburban whites who call in. A place of low aspirations and even lower achievement. They are your bread and butter, those semi-rural states where your band does its business: Ohio, Illinois, Michigan, Iowa, Indiana. You know in that moment that glamour will never touch your world; a solid constituency of straight-laced music lovers is your bedrock. New York is not calling, Milan is not on your sheet.
Sunday, Boston/London.
You plane, you deplane, taxi down the emerald-edged English motorway and flop into a furnished flat. There are birds bleeping in the rafters, motorcycle messengers on the streets. You’re a hasn’t been who might be, buying a pint of milk, opening a new roll of toilet paper, drinking a cup of tea with the newspaper. A little day off from the wheel of pain, a beautiful sky, a moving movie, a record you’ve brought back from a trip abroad that shakes you up, makes you play it again and again.
being a pretend musician, i would like to just say, not being a literate as the other guys, i would give my right arm to be you, or maybe me left toe as i wouldnt be able to play the guitar, not that im that good any road, stop moanin ya swine, yer fookin brilliant
ps, I’ve put a link to me website as I’m trying to promote myself at the tender age of 42
“you’re a hasn’t been who might be in the land of the wannabe”
If this isn’t the best thing I’ve ever heard, then its second only to “Life, on the whole is pretty bleak, utterley pointless, anybody who claims there’s a point to life is a fucking liar”
both Currieismables.
I like this. I like the atmosphere you create in your honesty. Honesty is great (most of the time!).
I wonder if you feel some nostalgic affection for those times?
You’re an asshole, sir. And, you know it. That’s why we love you.
It is what it is….. :)
Thanks for giving me a grin for the day – it was over the words “noo cut”.
The question is, I suppose: would you do it all again, would you ever cover over your soul with generic rock star artifice to gain the adulation and the acclaim? Would you be prepared to play the game now, knowing what you know?
Del Always seemed to confound those who sought to get their measure by being: multifaceted, unpigeonholable, boxless, and without category. Its really no wonder the music press couldn’t work it out, and were always one swipe of their red pen away from expunging you from history, so they wouldn’t have to quantify your worth. It was a cruel joke of you, Iain and the boys to cloak the hidden depths and endless layers of quality and meaning with a veneer of distracted sarcasm. They must have wondered if they were looking at men of intellectual and artistic depth or merely staring at the latest tyro’s to array themselves in the emperor’s new clothes. They should have looked harder.
They just couldn’t bridge the ‘disconnect’ between the seemingly laissez-faire attitude to promotion, as compared to the utter beauty of the music. It’s hardly surprising that the majority of journo’s just didn’t get it really; the real strength of the music is how it touches you so personally, how it speaks to, and of, your own life, how it affects you. Thats hard to communicate to others. I’m still finding new things that excite me 25 years on, as I grow and evolve so the music seems to take on new life.
How would anyone review the pleasure (and bittersweet pain) I still get at the “clock reading 505” or the direction to “roll down the window, and let me hear the rain”? They couldn’t; its beautiful and its personal, and that’s sort of the point isn’t it?
The reaction to the G2 article is interesting. I think fans of Del Amitri were a reasonably deep bunch on the whole, pleased with themselves for latching onto something that transcended the disposable common denominator of the day. As such they probably hoped for eye-contact, a pat on the back, or to be made to feel special for taking the harder road, and steering away from the disposable dross that lesser men chose. What they absolutely didn’t want, was to be made to feel mundane, ordinary, or like they were just part of the slog.
It’s ironic that people brought up on the stark tortured honesty of Del Amitri lyrics, wished that their relationship with the band was founded on a kind of mutual idealistic love that probably doesnt exist in the world. It’s the same thing that makes people ask you if you enjoyed yourself on stage after a gig. Incredible when you think about it.
The wonder is that you survived all the artifice around you, and retained a sense of self in order to create What is Love For, and The Great War. Musical masterpieces. Yet still knowing all of this…there’s still always a little part of me that wishes you would whore yourself around the radio-waves and newsprint every day until everyone has the opportunity to discover this beautiful, beautiful music. I know, I know.
Thanks Justin, as always.
Perfectly said leslie.
It’s a brilliant piece Justin. No wonder it was published in the Guardian. It’s very funny and witty and HONEST! It’s your honesty and the courage that it takes to be so entirely without artifice that makes it so compellingly readable.
How could anyone take offense at this? It’s the truth! Ask any teenager growing up in Ohio or some other rural area and they’ll tell you there’s f-all to do except get drunk! lol The farther away you get from the coasts here, the more likely you are to expire of boredom. There I’ve said it. I had to spend two weeks in bumblefuck Pennsylvania last summer to escape from hurricane Irene. Let me tell you…I’d rather die than ever have to go back to this hole whose big claim to fame is a Wallmart and a weather predicting groundhog who lives in a place called “gobblers knob”. I ask you…;-)
Also, I think most people think touring is some charmed way of life. It’s refreshing to read the reality of how it really feels to be jetlagged and exhausted and ill and then have to do some inane bullshit press.
I’m gonna say something incredibly cheesy right now…you suit your name Justin.
Thank you for posting it.
Love, Glinda xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
ps…I include major cities, like Chicago, as well as the coasts in my civilization soliloquy. I apologise to the good people of bumblefuck in advance for sounding like Bill Murray from the film “Groundhog Day”. I’m sure if you were born in-bred…uh I mean and bred, it’s just fine! ;-)
I keep laughing today about the “veritable Artie Fufkin situation”! xxx
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cv5FwzRBc_Y
Well….. you do sound a little bit pissed off……