We hired a 12-seater van and a trailer for this month-long tour. The drive to Newcastle was a bit of a test-run for the longer legs that loomed ahead. My verdict: I’d like to be lying unconcious in the aisle for the majority of any 14-hour jaunt, thank you please. In the days leading up to this first gig of the tour I’d liaised over tour contingencies and logistics with our tour manager, one Robert F. Cranney. The tour manager is the foreman in our irresponsible workplace. He’s the one that has to kick your feckless arse out of a motel bed when you’ve had 2 hours sleep and missed a 6am lobby call. He has to stay sober to count the T-shirt money at the end of the night while others carouse. He’s the one who has to deal with the hostile promoter in Bendigo who wants to cancel the gig cause there haven’t been enough pre-sales because your band isn’t popular in Bendigo.
Of concern today was the available space for musical equipment. Bobbo and I were both worried that we might not be able to fit all of Youth Group’s and The Red Sun Band’s and Jordy Lane’s gear in the trailer. We didn’t know how big it was. On the phone the usually unruffled Bobbo had blurted out an off-the-cuff solution for me, Fucken Danny can’t take his two floor toms and we’ll fucking have to leave Jordy’s keyboard in Sydney.
Perhaps The Best Tour Ever would devolve into a prolonged shouting match? It was lucky then that we fitted everything into the trailer so fucken Jordy wouldn’t have to play with just a borrowed guitar. It turned out that Bobbo was the finest of tour managers and his early under-pressure outbursts bore no relation to his demeanour on tour which was urbane, considerate, sober and pragmatic. And he also ran a first rate music-trivia quiz in the van to kill a few hours here and there.
October is a nice time to tour. The springtime is warm but not too hot. We stopped for lunch at one of those motorway services and I remember saying to Jordy, I love the start of the tour when you still feel healthy and not tired. Jordy just grinned back at me, perhaps wondering why the birds were singing just for me. When we started up on the highway again there was a sublime moment when we were listening to one of Wes’s CDs and The Jewel and The Falcon by Gaslight Radio kicked in on the stereo. Wes turned up the volume and everyone in the back seemed to hush and it was good.
The Cambridge Hotel is a friendly pub in a slightly run-down part of Newcastle. From the balcony you can look out over Hunter Street and its boarded-up shopfronts. In the front bar I was stared down by a man with face-tattoos. Luckily the bands play out in the back bar. At the soundcheck our grizzled house sound-guy played some instrumental rock band called “This Will Destroy You” that sounded great.
The most memorable thing about the Cambridge is the mind-blowing halfway house set-up upstairs. The residents are blokes who sit on the end of single beds, in their singlet tops, drawing back hard on cigarettes, quietly staring into the corridor as you walk past. We played the same pub in 2006. We had a dressing room in a big corner room upstairs. When the bands were downstairs playing an old codger who was staying in one of hostel-rooms climbed out onto the adjoining balcony, attempting to break into our dressing room. A young bloke who worked for the hotel, he may have been the manager, had caught him red-handed and was giving him a dressing down in the hallway. It was poignant (but a bit funny too) to see a young man lecturing the sheepish old bugger.
This time around (2008) we stayed downstairs all night and didn’t venture upstairs. We were all hanging to see Jordy (with a Y) Lane (from Sydney) our hand-picked opening act, play. I’d seen him at the Hoey a month or two beforehand but I was drunk and he got a weird sound mix that night. By this time I knew all the songs on his record. Needless to say he was excellent. The sound-guy at the Cambridge actually gave him a fair bit of wattage through the PA and it sounded great.