I travel pretty regularly for music.
I play sax in a band called Fat Dog (which tours a lot), and make my own music as Morgan Noise (a little more stationary, travelling on occasion). It’s a huge part of the music scene and industry, and our lives.
So many small bands travel around for festivals and support tours, it’s not only a larger band phenomenon, still people talk a lot about the gigs but never about the travel. And never from the musician's perspective.
Being on the road a lot generates some interesting experiences, this is my travel diary and this is how it goes for me.
Ireland 15-18 Feb 24
Travelling, like writing, is largely practice. And I am currently out of practice. Hopefully week by week I will get better at both.
As is the way with Christmas, all our December gigs were in London (where I live). There was one gig in Bognor Regis in January, so these Ireland gigs are the first time I’ve taken a plane since November.
I used to be a very nervous flyer. I got over it a bit but whenever I have a break it starts to go. Sitting on the plane waiting to take off time is passing in stutters. A few seconds, then nothing, then a minute; seconds all stutters. A man gets on next to me, I judge him instantly and decide he is neutral, airing on bad, in an emergency situation.
This emergency situation is non-specified, but I know my judgement is correct.
We are not all sat together as a band because it’s cheaper not to choose seats.
A woman gets on and takes the seat to my left. This is good, this is a comfort.
I am looking at the still open door of the plane trying to decide if I run off into the open air or not. I don’t do it yet.
If I did have an emergency, most of the friends I would call first are men. Maybe this is part of being a woman in music, most of the people around you are men, you end up with a lot of male friends. It’s interesting that I still stereotype women the same way inside my head. I hadn’t noticed until I do it.
If I can’t breathe on the plane or part of me explodes or falls off this woman will be a comfort. Soothing and compassionate, I guess these are maternal associations. It pisses me off to expect this from her.
But I am also glad she is sat next to me, ready to become a fully formed person and not a stranger when needed.
She sleeps for the whole flight.
I wonder if people assume the same comforts from me.
We land in Dublin and I am still able to breathe and nothing explodes.
Evening
After the gig we are in a hostel. It’s a pod room, which means bunk beds, but more solid. They are like holes in walls, a set of ten coffin shaped boxes receding back into the wall, with an entrance point by your feet and a little curtain to cover that. There are strangers in the pod room as well as us, 10 holes in the wall total I think.
There’s an option inside the pod to turn the light blue, I put this on for a while. I feel like thinking a bit before going to sleep and this is a thinking colour.
I think about earlier after soundcheck when we spent about 40 minutes choosing an acceptable pub. We went back to the first one in the end. We’d walked down a street which I’d recognised “Oh ! This is where we were following Alex Rice around before !” I said “You know trying to see what pub they went to after the gig”
I was talking about the Sports Team support tour we did a year ago, and that gig was in Bristol. We are in Dublin. False familiarity.
It’s never with anything memorable, just the shape of an alleyway, or even the formation we’re walking in, that brings the false familiarity. We always end up in the same place wherever we are anyway. For an often lost group of people, there is an impressive internal compass for Irish pubs, in any country.
In my pod, in my brain, I start building a map. A pretend map, trying to glue together streets that end or start in the same shape, like you do in dominoes. Walking through that square in Bristol leads down into the alleyway in Dublin where we looked for the pub. Take a right on that corner and it becomes the corner of Liverpool where we looked for a Sports Direct. We needed to buy some pants.
I keep building it. If you draw one shape you can step into it and then face out in another direction.
I was a jazz musician. I still am a jazz musician, but I am currently out of practice. That’s the way with a lot of things at the moment; travelling, writing. I’m hoping this is just because of coming out of winter where everyone has a slump, and not as a general indicator of the way my life is going.
With jazz you can do the same thing I’m doing with the map. Draw a shape that you know and then step out of it in a different direction. It’s like piecing chords together. I like how it makes my brain feel and I think I should probably practise saxophone more.
I leave the map and go to sleep and wake up every hour because it’s so hot on the ground floor level of coffin pods.
I wake up grumpy.
The next day we go to Limerick.
Limerick
In Limerick we play at Dolan’s Pub. It reminds me a bit of Invisible Wind Factory, a venue in Liverpool. I think about adding it as joining point in the map, but it doesn’t actually look similar. It’s just a place near a dock.
After dinner (an Irish stew which was delicious) the others go outside for a smoke and I go outside for fresh air. I don’t smoke but I love taking smoke breaks because I want to go outside and breathe in the outside air. When I am not with smokers I really do miss the breaks.
We see one person enter the pub and tell the bouncer she’s here for to see our band. ‘Thats one in !’ we say to the bouncer once she’s gone and he realises we are the band, quietly watching who comes for us. ‘So what made you choose the name then lads?’ He asks us. He looks at the lead singer ‘Ah’ and laughs
‘I used to have a dog’ he says ‘called Spot. He died’
‘Did you not get another one ?’ Someone asks
‘Ah I did, I’ve got one now, but Spot was the best. I picked him up from the pound when he was just a pup. He only had one leg’
It takes everyone a while to realise he only had one leg, not that he was missing one.
We laugh, but not too much. Don’t want to offend.
‘Which leg? Did he have wheels or something ?’
‘The back one. No, no, he just sat in one spot. That’s why he got the name; Spot’
‘What happened to him?’
‘Well he died. Funny thing was he was still sat in exactly the same spot’
Having conversations with Irish people always makes you feel good, they all have narratives.
Home
A few more days, then we fly back from Dublin. The flight home is a lot calmer than the way out because I’ve remembered that I won’t explode now. We take off early evening and it gets dark while we are in the air. Not sat together this time either.
I look out the window a lot for this flight, and I feel more like I’m sat on a sofa or on a bed. My hoodie feels like a blanket. Maybe this is just because I’m really tired. I notice the exact point when we stop being over the ocean, we must be over Wales .
Looking down later, there is a long blue line stretching further than the eye can see. The kind of blue that hills turn in the distance, the shadow blue. The line is perfectly straight, reaching diagonally away from me. I can see the land on the left side of it, so far below.
This thing is so straight it must be Roman, a Roman road of some kind.
I think this is a huge wall below me and I wonder how I’ve never seen this before. A wall, lit blue on one side by the last dim glow of light. It looks beautiful and huge, I want to go see it as a day trip.
It’s somewhere I would drive past as a child going home from my grandparents, falling asleep in the back of the car. A half remembered place not seen in the day time, an unplaceable landmark in middle England.
Am I truly this tunnel-visioned that a landmark this huge has passed me by? I know the area we are passing over, how can I have not seen this wall. Do I really stick to the tour so much that I haven’t strayed far enough away from a venue to notice this ? Something so huge could go lost because it’s not quite en route, just over the next hill.
Of course there is no huge ever-reaching wall in the land below. What I am actually looking at is the wing of the plane, directly outside my window. This diagonal line reaching into the distance is the plane wing. On the left of it, yes, is the land below. On the right of it is the flatness of the wing. The land and the plane wing indistinguishable in their grey flatness. All you see is the shadow-blue gleam.
Even once I realise this, I am still able to see it as the huge Roman wall far below. It’s satisfying flipping back into seeing the wall. Like when you wake up from a really good dream and then manage to fall back asleep into the same dream.
I’m in quite a good mood with all this window-looking, so I treat myself and listen to Space Oddity. Looking down more carefully now, I see all the tiny dots in the ground. Not over a city, the lights are more spaced apart, little constellations of towns and villages. Every light equally circular, blinking up at you.
I think that the lights of the buildings are stars, I know they’re not, but this time I choose to see it wrong. And David Bowies says ‘The stars look very different today’. I am very pleased with this coincidence.
(Of course it’s not a coincidence, I am probably thinking about stars because I am listening to ‘Space Oddity’, but I tactfully forget that).
It’s very nice to look down and imagine the dark land is space and each light is a star. The plane must be flying quite low to see all that.
When we get to Gatwick we have to wait in the air for a while, there’s a traffic jam coming into land. We circle down to Brighton and back. It goes on just long enough to ruin the comfort, and remind me that I’m not cured of planes just yet. I think about a few things I thought about on the flight out. Then we land.
I end up rushing out to catch a train home and don’t say goodbye to some of the others. But I saw them today (which is two days later). We went to get Visas.
Because as un-routine and sporadic music can be, there are some guarantees to it. We’ll all be together queuing for something again in a few days.
When I get home Maddy had made some noodle soup (thank you Maddy), and I am very pleased with myself that I did a load of washing before I left.
Next weekend we will go to Bristol.
Just one gig and not too far.