2–17 October European Tour
The Start
We’re in Madrid sat around a table on the street. Drinking out of glass is boosting everyone’s morale after a morning of planes and plastic. I am drinking Fanta because there’s no Orangina here. Not all of Europe as one, I guess. I don’t really know Spain.
‘Here’s to one month together!’ Jacqui says, and instantly a glass falls hard, smacking the middle of the table without anyone touching it. We all look at the glass. ‘Great’.
To me, the glass didn’t come from anywhere. I hadn’t noticed a spare sat in the middle of the table, it just came into existence as it fell. It must have already been there. Joe doesn’t cheers after that, thinking about omens for the month ahead.
Later
I am in a Campanile motel, sat on a bed facing a window facing a road. A roundabouts and McDonalds kind of scenery; all the cars either breaking or accelerating to adjust to the main road from this slipway place.
The room is built for looking forwards, like a windscreen. The headboard is facing a rectangular wide window, so on the bed you are still sat in the front seat of a vehicle. You never have to leave the motorway at all.
It is two days after Madrid. This is the first night I have a room to myself. A rare treat. I run myself a bath and walk around naked: the best things I can think of doing. The bath is boiling hot and I have to run pure cold to make it survivable. I dip tip-toes in and fold myself over, my chin resting in the cupids bow of my knees. I watch the water fill up below. From behind me, a single hair floats forwards, sitting on top like a pond skater. It is not my hair. I look at it and think about scooping it out. Instead I turn the taps up. More water, faster, drown the hair out.
A second hair floats in from behind where the taps are. This hair is long and dyed red. I think semi-proudly how my hair is not that thin. The harder the taps are turned the higher the water, and the more hairs lying dormant on the walls gain the confidence to peel off and start moving. I do not scoop them out, I just keep turning up the taps.
I turn my head to the left, looking through the bathroom door into the undisturbed room. Yellow light streams from the bed. I think of it empty, apart from me. Strange. I turn my head to the right and notice the pond is covered in algae. It sits beautifully on the top, like drops of paint left over in water as you wash off paintbrushes.
The pond is the same as the bath from last night. Everything rising to the surface.
I turn my head forwards, towards the road to watch where we are going. I am clothed now, sitting in the van driving to Paris. It’s 12 hours later.
‘That’s your ghost’
‘What?’
‘That’s your ghost, Jacqui’ Joe says in the green room in Paris.
He’s carrying on the conversation from Madrid three days ago, after the glass smacked onto the table unprompted.
Something else has just knocked over.
Jacqui isn’t in the conversation from Madrid anymore so is confused.
‘The ghost that follows you around, like in Spain’
‘Oh’
‘Maybe she was never clumsy all this time’.
I’m not sure if having a ghost is preferable to clumsiness.
I leave the green room to go find a view. I have just over an hour, but this is one of the bets bits of tour. I always find a view in Paris.
I cycle for a bit then head to the top of the escalators. If you find the perfect height, there are no buildings in the sky anymore and everything flattens out. I place myself exactly at roof level, and the buildings become a new ground; one I am inline with and can look over.
I sit at this street level, which now happens to be four stories high, looking out over the flatness at the fading sky. It’s like leaving the city, going somewhere where the sky is open and the walls are not blocking you from seeing.
Everything rises to the surface, all the roofs bobbing themselves to the top and evening out like the algae on the lake.
Holland and Belgium
In Groningen, we never have to leave the venue. It has a pub in the basement, the gig room where we are playing on the first floor, and accommodation up the top. I go up to my bed after soundcheck – only a 30 second walk from the stage up some rather deadly stairs.
There is one bedroom empty and I try and make some music, something I always fail at on tour. I’ve been watching the intro to Billie Eilish’s new tour, an electronic thing that’s pure hype before she actually starts playing. It has amazing bass sounds and a huge glowing cube. There is one really clear video of this on instagram that I keep watching over and over again.
I decide it’s time to become that, and start making music on my laptop with the midi keyboard I stole from stage. The tune doesn’t end up great, but the focus is genuine, and I get so into trying to build something that I’m no longer anywhere at all. Purely focussed on making one thing then the next thing, not in a venue or in a different country, or a cog within a larger schedule.
Very quickly it’s time for the actual gig. Before looking up, I am in my bedroom. I’m not entirely sure what that means because I’ve moved house so frequently recently. I am in the idea of my bedroom.
I look up and I am in a room with red walls and a strange mural. And then this bedroom actualises and lands itself on top of the venue. Slotted back into place. I get out of bed and walk downstairs where the kitchen ought to be if I were somewhere normal. Instead I walk onto the stage.
After the set I go back upstairs to my room and sleep for four hours before the early van call. Leaving the venue in the morning it’s like we never had a night-time at all. The evidence suggests that, we are still by the greenroom, still just behind the stage. Who would imagine there is anywhere to sleep – we have not left. It is hard to imagine the space. Everything slightly bleeding into itself.
Later
I am having a shower, I can see Joe on his laptop and Chris on his phone.
Looking through the slit in the shower curtain, where a bathroom would appear if this were somewhere normal, I see a plate of cheese and meats, brick walls, and the others sat on a sofa. We are in a basement of a venue in Belgium, the shower within the green room.
It feels like a house got shuffled, all the wrong rooms next to each other so you could open the bathroom door into the kitchen window. Architecture short circuiting itself. It’s strange, in this busy schedule, architecture collapsing before time does. You could feel sure that there is not enough time for all of this. Yet we carry on forwards, ticking on through buildings that don’t make sense.
A Walk
In Tourcoing, a few days earlier, me and Chris go for a walk. It’s cold and we are looking for a broth. We order ramen from the first place we see. It looks almost like a chicken shop inside. Not what you’d imagine from the pictures of Asian food plastered on the street. The ramen is made up of one piece of fried chicken on top of a pot noodle sprinkled with seaweed. It tastes bizarre. There is no broth but the chicken is surprisingly good.
We venture back outside. Trying to find the city centre, trying to find the point of this place where you see a building and understand what the town is about. But everything is closed and the buildings seem mismatched. Shitty corner-shop chains next to 1700s architecture.
There are some trousers draped over a railing in front of me. It doesn’t really seem like the kind of town where you leave unwanted belongs on the street and they are quite nice.
I think of taking them back to the venue. It has an in-house washing machine and I’m running low on clothes. Before I even reach my hand out I look up to see a policeman watching me, leaning back on one of the many closed shops. I walk away.
Some people pull up in a car next to us, get out, and then walk away very fast.
‘There’s a strange look in the people’s eyes here,’ says Chris.
‘It feels like an aftermath,’ I say
We get carried away in this, a perception probably just fuelled by us being cold and hungry.
Something must have happened yesterday in this town. All the residents making a pact never to speak of what happened in Tourcoing on Saturday. That is why they are all walking around with the ‘aftermath look’ in their eyes. This Sunday is the first day of not speaking about it. It will get easier with time.
It’s funny to watch the people walking around with this backstory, it seems to make sense.
Danny lets us back into the venue car park. He seems unimpressed by this story and we scurry back to the greenroom.
Amsterdam
“You can’t escape the fucking green room” says Chris, as we are checking into ‘The Backstage Hotel’ in Amsterdam. A hotel specifically for musicians doesn’t particularly appeal to anyone right now. The check-in desk is surrounded by saxes and guitars mounted to the walls like taxidermy animals. The wall is plastered with vinyls, the circles making a garish 70s pattern. Inside the room all the furniture is made of flight cases. It reminds me of the first few seconds of waking up when you never have any idea where you are.
That night we play at Skate Cafe. It is a long narrow room that widens at the back. High ceilings. From the stage you watch the audience funnel away from you, widening in the distance. And on the back wall some lights are flashing at me. They are VHS TVs on the top of some tall shelves, but the stage is pretty tall making them eye level with me. Green light blinking from a far.
Earlier when we were eating dinner I went to look at those TVs, they were playing our music videos. Now from within the gig I watch the TV play a pixelated version of myself, running on the spot. A music video we did where we are all inside a video game. I see the video game me play the saxophone and I play the saxophone too, watching her. And I am in the video game too, on this stage a little too high up. Moving in the correct way at the correct time to complete the level, and the crowd squat and swell in front of me like a murmuration as my vision stays locked onto myself at the other end of the room, watching her play the game too.