Morgan Wallace continues her contemplative tour diary, on and off the road as saxophonist in Fat Dog.

Europe in April 03.04 – 18.04

A Bridge

We’re heading into Switzerland, driving in from Lyon. It’s four days into the tour.

I have my headphones on. I’m watching a video of myself playing at The Windmill a few weeks ago, trying to decide if it’s good enough to be on YouTube.

We are driving through the foothills of the alps.

The whole van jolts and I look up. We’re on a bridge over a valley. The foothills were shielding us from this wind, but the valley lets it in, pushing us to the side. 

I take my headphones off, it feels the responsible thing to do. To be in your environment. I reluctantly get sucked into a conversation about Viola Beach. Bas says ‘Nothing can go wrong.’

I put my headphones back on. A few miles later, a second bridge. The wind slams the van more this time and I think about all the amps in the back. The headphones come off instinctively when I feel that jolt, my head darting around. This time I am reluctantly sucked into a conversation about sexism. Reluctancy, not from lack of opinion. I know what I think, I will say it if asked directly. Reluctancy to have the conversation that would follow.  

I prefer Viola Beach. 

A day off

Zurich, and the first day off. I go down for breakfast but there is a bouncer on the door. I try and walk past. 

‘What’s your room number?’

‘113’. 

I walk away to grab a plate, he follows me. 

‘No breakfast included’.

I’d planned for this. In Paris only the single rooms had breakfast. ‘Sorry, 118’: Chris’s room. 

‘That room is for Chris Hughes’ he says. 

I tell him that Chris Hughes is my boyfriend and I stayed there.

‘OK. Your boyfriend doesn’t have any breakfast either’.

I try and name the tour manager, but I can’t remember the dutch surname. Too many vowels in a row. I say ‘Mr Leejeerheejeerman’.

Not quite close enough. 

‘Who is that?’

‘My boyfriend.’ 

‘I thought you already had a boyfriend. Also Mr. Leejeerheejeerman doesn’t exist.’ 

‘Fine.’

He tells me breakfast is 27 quid.

‘Fine.’

I say no and walk away. 

Ten minutes later I am sulking in defeat when Bas calls me. He thinks he can defeat the bouncer. I go back for a second try with Mr Leejeerheejeerman brought into existence. 

Bas has breakfast. He tells the bouncer I stayed in his room. ‘No.’ ‘It is only one person for only one breakfast.’ 

The two most immovable objects I have encountered on my travels are breakfast wardens, and Swiss people when they have a rule to follow.

We pay.

Once we’re in I eat a lot of food and make a lot of sandwiches. I can feel the bouncers eyes on the back of my head. We are the only people in the room and he has been wiping and re-wiping the plates for about 8 minutes.

I am wrapping stuff in napkins from the other tables. He comes in and dutifully refolds a new napkin each time I take one. Unaddressed. I feel it in my gut that I am doing one sandwich too many and he says it:

‘Ten Francs more for take away.’

‘Come on, man.’

‘I am eating this here,’ I say, and take a bite of my parcelled up sandwich while staring at him. 

He leaves to get more napkins and I walk out of breakfast holding my phone, wallet and hotel key in my hands. My pockets are bulging. I should’ve worn a bra to breakfast, then I wouldn’t’ve had to leave the apples. 

We are driving around Zurich, talking about people that come to every show. Bas turns around. ‘I stayed at this one guy’s house when we were out.’ 

Out in America, everything taken to extremes in America.

‘He had flaming lips posters everywhere and loads of weed. He just grew weed for a living and then when the Flaming Lips went on tour he followed them around the world in a Santa costume’. He’d been doing it for 20 years. I guess everyone just likes to have a place to go. 

We are heading to the Chinese gardens. We pinned them on google maps but can’t find them when walking through the city in three dimensions. We stop at the lake. The lake goes on past forever, and then around the corner to the mountains. We watch the birds for five hours and it is the best day. 

We feed them crisps which cost about twenty quid directly from our hands, and throw little paprika flavoured kangaroos out to sea. You can make friends quickly that way. There are two strange looking romantic birds far away. Their necks are weirdly long and the feathers shoot far out the back of their heads. They duck underwater seemingly for minutes but always pop back up again and kiss each other. And every half an hour the lake splashes us in reaction to a boat driving over it somewhere far away. 

Most of the days off, I watch the birds.

Into Germany

Driving to Munich, we listen to the Magical Autism podcast. It is a long drive, they are long episodes. The ‘Telepathy Tapes’ argues that non-verbal autistic children are telepathic. It’s fun to believe in it as long as you can. I text it to my mum and she tells me it’s old and a load of crap and sends me a de-bunking podcast. There is no time for the debunking podcast on our long drive. 

On the way to Nuremberg we listen to country music. 

Nuremberg

In the Germanisches Nationalmuseum I am looking at a board filled with nails. It is called ‘Field’. 

The plaque reads: ‘The artist appeals to the feelings of the viewer, who can remember what it is like to look out over a waving field of grain.’

The artist doesn’t appeal to me but the plaque does. It’s effective either way. 

I think, I miss home. Strange, because I mean home in the countryside. When I think that I normally mean London home. I look at the nails in the board and think of the field you’re not allowed to go in. The little triangle that looks down on the road out of the village up the hill. A tiny triangle of waving grass. 

I want to touch something. Passing through these cities doesn’t feel like you touch anything. I want something to run my hands through. With two hours to kill, the go to move is buy stuff or sit somewhere. I guess that is why I have come to the museum, to find a third thing. But you are not allowed to touch things here either. 

Nicht Berühren.

Back at the venue, the German Curse begins. The curse is that we cannot play a string of gigs in Germany without something going wrong. A week here will not fair well for any of us. Rob is on the decline with a bad cold and the venue man tells him he should drink warm beer with French cheese. It creates bacteria in your stomach which will cure you. 

The venue man tells us he will show us all the sights of Nuremberg. ‘I will show you where I first kissed my wife.’ ‘Do you know the famous rabbit artist? Oh you must know. From the 1500s.’ He is waiting for us to agree excitedly. We learn the famous rabbit artist was the first person to profit from art because he made and sold prints rather than selling originals. The venue man says again surely we must know the rabbit man. He looks at us all, Joe is almost folding when Michael says, 

‘Oh yeah I do know that guy actually yeah’ 

He saw it at the museum whilst I was looking at nails. 

A few days, and a few cursed events later we wake up in Osnabrück. ‘I’m getting a bit sick of Germany’ says Joe. ‘I woke up and thought we were in France and I thought about getting a sandwich.’ No sandwiches here. ‘I can’t do another fucking schnitzel.’

Amsterdam and leaving it

We are walking back to the hotel through the Red Light District. I have been to Amsterdam a few times, but, consciously or subconsciously, I’ve never come here.

I am drawn in through the eye contact, there is no choice to be a distant observer. The woman behind the glass stares at me. 

The closest thing I’ve seen to this is the Reeperbahn in Hamburg, an area of sex houses and prostitutes. In Hamburg they will will hiss at you if you’re a woman walking down a street where they are working. They only want potential customers. 

Here it’s different. The people look directly at me through the glass. It is disorientating to be challenged like that, to be seen watching. I am part of this too, whether I want to be or not. Another staring tourist passing through. 

I wonder if you are a tourist every time you travel. Where does that end ?

Two days later, the drive to Luxembourg. It’s peaceful. This is probably the amount of time it takes for something to become my new normal. A week and a bit. That’s a useful figure to have I guess.

Outside the window everything is moving away from me at different speeds. This snapshot is like a garden full of different pinwheels, each one spinning to a different rhythm. 

Two flying geese are going backwards against the speed of the van. Two ducks, closer to us, are flying forwards. 

A hedge right outside, and a diagonal row of trees in the middle distance. The hedge and the trees cross paths, touching each other at an angle. But as we drive the hedge moves faster and their angle changes, narrowing down into 90 degrees. And the windmills in the back, all of them spinning but one. 

Home feels far and this motorway feels normal with these people in their configured seats. This space will time out in three days though. Bas says we are driving through the Valley of the Seven Castles. He and the van will time out in three days too, and by the time we hit Luxembourg I didn’t even see any of the castles.

Luxembourg

Luxembourg feels bizarre, which makes it funny. 

We drive in through huge industrial gates towards a grey building with no windows. It looks like a secret plant for doing secret stuff. Inside the hanger, we will be playing to about 100 people in a 1.2k room. 

We walk through our room into the next one along. It is genuinely the biggest room I have ever been in. You can sprint across it and the sound of your feet is tiny and fading. Next month Viagra Boys will play to 900 people in this 7k room. 

Perhaps this is just how the people of Luxembourg like their gigs. They like to be stood apart, spaced out like people milling around an art exhibition. It’s quite a nice image. 

We get on a bus and hope it takes us somewhere. All the buses are free and the town is deserted. Waiting until something of note appears, it eventually does. We get off when at the Pirate Cafe.

I like the gig. ‘This next one’s from our first album’ says Joe and the mic stand instantly falls over without him touching it. The room is totally silent. It’s funny to me  

After the gig a dad and a son from Birmingham come round the back. This is the son’s early 18th birthday present. He wanted to see Luxembourg, I’m not sure why. I ask him how he’s finding it. “A bit boring to be honest”. 

I chat to them for a while, they are nice. The dad tells me Morgan Noise got a shout out on Radio 6. My other self. He couldn’t remember who, but he tells me they said it was the future.

Maybe I should enact that once this tour is done. Something to go back to.

Cologne

Back in Germany for the end, but no more cursed events just yet. 

‘This is fucking Lambeth Bridge,’ someone says. We drive over the bridge looking at the cathedral we stood beneath earlier. ‘How’d we get back here then?’ He is right, it is the same.

Trying to park up, we pass streets of Ibis and Novotel and no car spaces. ‘What is this, the hotel district?’ says Rob. Once he says it, you notice it, all of them stood back to back neighbouring each other. Surely the demand slightly reduces with this supply.

There’s a place to stick the van on the main road. We stay sat in the van, it’s nice. It’s raining outside the window, and the lights are streaming orange and yellow.

I watch the van back. He’s going as close as possible. I hold the space between the other car and the van in my hands and walk it forwards to show him. Everyone laughs at me holding my hands like that, arms frozen apart to preserve the distance. He goes closer. 

When he puts the hand break on the van sighs and relaxes back one centimetre. We all stare at it. There is about a millimetre of leeway. 

After the gig I kept asking people, ‘So, are you from Düsseldorf?’ They would say ‘no, we are from Cologne’ because we are in Cologne. I would say ‘Oh. Sorry.’ 

Tomorrow morning we will fly home from Dusseldorf airport. 

We play pool in the hotel foyer. Someone says we should get Bas drunk. He says ‘if you do that you will miss your flight back to London tomorrow’. ‘Maybe I don’t want to fly back to London tomorrow’ says Joe and I think that too.

Home

Over the channel, the sea and sky don’t have any barrier at all. Everything is blue and grey and the clouds become the shadows of themselves interchangeably. Light and dark areas lapping over each other from side to side, up and up. There is a line of container ships riding the waves and the clouds. I look closely at them and watch the boats float up into the sky. 

Any line I decide for the sea to end, the boats can sail above, further into the distance. It feels hopeful, the boats in the clouds. I am still going somewhere. I watch the ships fly beside the plane.