Youth Group

What would the tour diary be without another mention of Roger from Pretty & Nice? Roger has a tattoo of an octopus in a storm-toss’d sea playing a Moog keyboard with its tentacles. It’s an amazing tattoo. With each visit to the States I become ever more dazzled by the amount of ink the youth of America are getting done. In particular the bar workers and the bands. Australians as a whole are years behind this craze.

Roger was telling us (fairly innocently) how he’s had a lot of luck with the ladies over the last year and I thought to ask when he’d had his prominent biceps tattoo done.
“A year ago I guess.” began the Rog. Aha! “The very first night I got it I went home with this girl and she was obsessed by it. She kept on saying ‘I know I can’t touch it but I just want to touch it‘. Yeah, but then the next morning she said ‘Usually I don’t like people like you. People like you usually disgust me. I like, like, burly guys.’  She was completely crazy. I always attract the crazy girls.”

That he only got the crazies was a bit of a refrain for poor Rog.

“The only good thing about her was her tits. She had great big tits.” said Roger. He turned away like he was leaving then came back and added, “Yeah I usually I don’t say things like that….” and he paused….”yeah, usually I go for girls with small tits.”
Danny and I laughed till – literally – tears came to our eyes.

The Rog (whose twitter name is iamtherog if you want to follow him) stands 6′4″ or thereabouts. He wears tight T-shirts that typically have kittens playing keyboards printed on them. The Get Up Kids took to calling him Jermaine, but he was more like Jermaine wearing Brett’s clothes combined with an All American teenage exuberance. Roger is a man bursting with development as Danny said. He has a few pimples and prominent voice-box and too-tight clothes and a tendency to thrust himself into the fray each night after the Pretty and Nice set. A very memorable person.

After San Diego our compadres and us left the Pacific coast and drove inland, along the intersate following the trail of In n’ Out burger joints that are inexorably marching eastward along the freeways out of California. We drove thru the woebegone eastern tip of LA’s Inland Empire that lies in the desert between San Diego and Las Vegas. I noted the catchy naming of “The Steer n’ Stein Steakhouse”. It’s competition a mile down the road was the grisly-named “Cask n’ Cleaver”. There wasn’t, but there should have been, a Slurp n’ Turf or something, for comic relief from the mental image of a steer butchered with cleaver.

The show in Vegas was at the fabulous Mandalay Bay Casino, in the Vegas House of Blues. The amenities at the House of Blues are excellent as Jim Suptic from the GUK claimed. The casino gave us a buffet dinner and the A/C was a triumph, 100 degrees outside, 60 inside. But the House of Blues voodoo kitsch decor lacks a little in authenticity. Also drinks were a bit pricey. Out front as I watched Pretty & Nice play I bought a Jameson’s on the rocks and was stunned it cost $14. My only recourse was to tweet about it. Take that! But apparently the arm-and-a-leg prices are The Mandalay Bay style a Las Vegan told me. “Don’t worry, wait till you get to Texas” The Get Up Kids said “Beer is cheap there”. Before our show all four members of Youth Group were very tired after having stayed up late to watch the AFL grand final live on ESPN in a Kiwi bar in San Diego followed by an 8am awakening for the desert drive. If I had to take a spirit-level reading I’d've said we’d given up on having a good show. But a strange thing happened. We killed that night! It was exhilarating.

To celebrate the show Danny and I went out to a bar called The Double Down, way back from the strip. It was meant to be a locals only type bar. Not that we met any locals. While Danny drunk an Ass Juice cocktail with Joe (GUK merch guy) he met and befriended a whole lot of Mancunians wearing T-shirts that said “Steve’s 40th  Birthday”. I met a band called “Two Timin’ Hussies” who were from San Francisco. After the GUKs left the bar to make their 2am bus call Danny’s charm let him down, somehow, for a second (I didn’t see it), with the Mancunians. He had to scoot out of the bar for a minute at about 2:30am because, as he patched together a story for me, one of the Manc lasses got very up in Danny’s face, challenging him to a fight for some reason that we never did get to the bottom of. As we idly watched the entrance two blokes were dragged out, one after the other, onto the footpath, unconscious. Maybe the Northern battle-axe did em’, who knows?

Slunk into skunk territory in Arizona the next day on the way to Phoenix. Every ten miles or so the marijuana-like scent of skunk-squirted musk filled the air in the van. The road itself in AZ seemed unusually covered with shredded tyres from truck blow outs – never tidied up and ominous as we drove the next 1000 miles thru the desert without a jack. If we’d gotten a flat tyre it would’ve been a long wait in the desert for roadside assistance. Come to mention it, all through California and Arizona and Texas it was as hot as hell on this tour – I broke out in a heat rash.

The city of Phoenix rises from the desert as a provocation to good sense. At this time of year, the end of summer, it’s existence seems perverse. Deserts are meant to be uninhabitable – it’s their nature. I ask you, what sort of mental illness would lead all these people to want to shelter nine months of the year in air-conditioning? It so happens that Youth Group had cancelled two Phoenix shows in the last couple of years, both times because the AZ shows were scheduled at the tail end of grinding 6 week tours and we couldn’t face the 10 hour drive there and back from LA through the desert. This time there was no doubling back to fret over. Unfortunately this show was fairly uninspiring (perhaps we’d never needed to make it to Phoenix ever?) mostly due to us inadvertently having the same monitor mix as Pretty and Nice who obviously like to deafen themselves on stage with truly mind-scrambling levels of vocals and guitars coming through the monitors.

The American free-pour can knock you on your arse. This is particularly the case if a friendly bartender likes your band and pours you a monster drink. In Phoenix, at this punk rock club, after the show I bought a(nother) Jamesons on the rocks in a round and figured I’d only paid about $7 for an entire tumbler-full of spirits. Like a quarter of a bottle or something in one cup! In alcoholic-pride showed it to Cam and Jim from Jimmy Eat World who’d come to the show. Jim was good enough to humour the Aussie moron in me “Oh you’re going to feel that tomorrow,” he said.

Cam was impressed by the size of my drink and went straight to the bar and ordered one for himself. Turns out he paid $7.50 but he too came away with a cup full to it’s little plastic brimmy-brim-brim with delicious Jamesons. And so next Danny went looking for this huge mug of spirits. But alas he got the wrong bartender, he got the bar manager, who poured him out only a finger of whiskey.

“No I wanted the $7.50 whiskey” Danny tried to wink. This bartender was having no truck with the idea of bigger drinks for the bands.
“That is a $7.50 whiskey.”
“But that’s only a shot” Danny complained.
“That’s way more than a shot”
“But my friends bought one and they got a full glass.”
“No they didn’t.”
“Yes they did.”
“Who served them?”
“I’ll go find out,” said Dan, not wanting to look like he was trying to pull a swifty.
Danny came over to where Cam and I were standing and explained the situation.
“There’s no way I’m going over there to finger the culprit” laughed Cam.
“I’m not going either,” I said. “Tell him it was a girl.” This was sort of a joke – there was no girl behind the bar – but unfortunately Dan went back and repeated the story.
“They won’t come over but they said it was a girl”
“There’s no girl working” the bar manager correctly pointed out. The jig was up.
Those bastards, Danny must’ve thought, as he snatched up his measly nip.

At the end of our last tour, in May, we walked off the stage of the Detroit Bar, Orange County, and almost immediately scattered across the globe like the four winds: Danny, the East Wind, back to New York City; Cameron and Patrick, the North and West winds to Sydney; and me, the southerly buster, down to Mexico, Guatemala and then looping back to New York.  We will all meet again, in Denver, on September 15th for what promises to be an unprecedented weather event.
In the meantime, for those who are interested, here is the first instalment in the series ‘What we did on our holidays’.

Songwriting.
I have finished four songs and half-finished a few others in New York.  Most of this happened while staying in our friend’s apartment in Brooklyn.  She has a ‘meditation room’ which I co-opted as a ‘music room’.  It was good in the meditation room.  I got a lot done.

When she got back from holidays she wanted to know whether I thought the vibes of the room had helped the songwriting, whether I had noticed the energy in the room.

I couldn’t honestly say that I had, but I did tell her that I thought that a new environment sometimes helps release something that may have been pent up for sometime.  Energies?  Possibly.  It was certainly a relief to have my own space for a while after touring and travelling for three months.
The other thing that helps me finish songs is a looming solo show.  I rarely play by myself as I get distractedly nervous and find them impossible to rehearse for (try rehearsing by yourself, it feels ridiculous).  But they are bracing, like a dip in a winter’s ocean, and best of all they make me finish songs.  Its discipline for the undisciplined.

Solo Shows.
I did a month-long residency at The Living Room, New York, in July.  It’s a sweet little venue, with a good piano they let you play.  Apart from nerves it was fun.  And even nerves can be fun when transformed into relief.

At least half the audience on any given night seemed to be Australian.  This was unexpected as Youth Group shows in New York tend to attract mostly locals.  The Australian flavour was encouraged by Nick the doorman’s Aussie obsession.  Although a New Yorker himself, dressed in fabulous outfit of shorts and cowboy boots and a cheeky grin, he would always greet me with a string of downunder band names, ie “Skulker, Superjesus, Powderfinger. Disgusting!” One night Nicolai from 78 Saab was in town which coincided with his outburst “Saab 78! Disgusting!”.  His day job at Wholefoods provided a wealth of invective material – one night he told me that Naomi Watts had found herself at his checkout and so naturally he asked her whether she and Liev Schreiber had met while smoking crack at the Big Day Out.  When she replied “I beg your paaaardon” in a plummy accent, Nick thought she might actually be English.  I said probably a New Zealander.  He said “Disgusting!”  Everything was disgusting with Nick.  Coincidentally, The Grates were also doing a residency just next door at Pianos.  In keeping with the ‘Australians in New York’ theme of the night we tended to check out eachother’s shows, to Nick’s obvious disgust.

Not Paying Money
New York is great in summer.  Everything is free and everything is outdoors. If you pay for a gig or a movie or a performance you’re a schmuck.  In the city of hustlers and $24 deals it’s the ultimate legal scam.  You sit in the grass, under the Northern stars and the half-twisted moon, drinking a can of PBR, listening to music and you do it like they do in a city that is frozen for half the year.  You get to understand the big deal about summer here.

I’ve seen some fantastic free shows:
Built To Spill played at Coney Island and every time the Cyclone went past the screams of the passengers drowned out Doug Martsch’s guitar solos.  Later, lying back on the beach in the fetid, weirdly misty air a man walks by and sells us icy cold Coronas from his mobile esky (“sorry, no lime”).  I get his number in case we need anymore.
The Dirty Projectors played in Williamsburg, right on the East River, the New York skyline as their backdrop.  What can tend to sound like a complex mash on record is crystalline parts and charisma live.
The next week at Williamsburg is the Black Lips and Trail of Dead.  Towards the end of their set The Black Lips start to actively incite kids to storm the stage, flail their arms around and stage dive.  This pisses off the burly Brooklyn security guys who have to clump onstage and awkwardly wrestle with indie kids between microphone stands, guitar leads and a band who continue to jump up and down, grinning piratically, their golden grilles glinting in the stormy light.
Meanwhile, up the back of the park, Danny has enroled in a half-court basketball tournament.  His team puts up a good fight but they are almost single-handedly beaten by a semi-midget who smokes between games.  He is some sort of freak.  Like Phil Smythe reincarnated as a pocket-sized Dennis Leary.  There is some underlying violence to this game.  At one point a hot-head Ginger overacts to a hustle from behind and places a cannily directed elbow in the guy’s face.  There’s a moment of pause, time stops, everyone wonders “what will happen now” but incredibly nothing does.  It’s a miracle.  The Fairytale of New York.
Not long after the game finishes, the storm hits.  The Empire State Building is crowned in cloud.  Someone comes on stage and announces that the Trail of Dead set will have to be cancelled because of the lightning, and indeed the area cleared.  “State park rules” apparently.  I am secretly glad because I would rather go to the pub.  And you can’t really complain because it’s free.
They have free outdoor movies too.  But these are popular.  I went with The Grates to see Edward Scissorhands but it was too jammed to even get into the park.  Instead we sat under the Manhattan Bridge with the other latecomers and had a beer and hummus picnic.  My favourite part of the night was when everybody around us left when the movies finished, even though you couldn’t really hear/see from where they were sitting.  New Yorkers.  They just want to be at the centre of the world all the time.

To Be Continued…

Last Wednesday evening Newtown’s Vanguard, against precedent, put away its dinner-and-a-show tables and threw open its velvet-lined interior to some loud brat-rock. As Mikey from Sleep Debt said to the crowd early on: “The Vanguard is a pretty shmick venue so we’re all under duress”. It was a good thing that Mikey’s claim was unsubstantiated as drink-spraying, piggy-backing, general horseplay and walking on the bar went completely unpunished by the venue.

Darlington party boyz Sleep Debt opened up – they remind this “journalist” of updated Superchunk – a singer with a pleading, abrasive voice and a band playing everything top speed. They played well enough indeed to drag the smokers in from the street for a listen. And they pleasingly knocked out the catchy “Animalia” with multiple false endings to round out their set. Some minds (mine and my brother’s) are divided on whether it’s better to catch Sleep Debt on a night when there’s no-one in the audience – for looseness and give-a-fuck-ness sakes – but for mine tonight it could def have be better if singer Dan just loosened up his shoulders a bit – without losing his precision fret-work of course.

And as for the challengingly named Halal, How Are You? – they were remarkable. And pretty fucking funny. The kids there adored them….so what if three quarters of these were their mates? Everyone knows your mates are your harshest critics. Audience participation was the rule as members of the audience/mates variously tackled, worshipped, wrestled and borrowed the mic from the singer to shout “fuck”. They had an ace guitarist and a tidy combo all round – authentic or something – and a singer who spent all of 10sec on the actual stage the entire show.

“Can I get less Zacc in the foldback?” asked the bass player.
“Less of my voice and more of my skin” answered the shirtless Zacc. And so the tones continued from there. He seems, judging from his gaze, a man not entirely sure what he’s going to say between songs or do during them – but this band, for a change, doesn’t seem to rely on drunkeness for spontaneity. His M.O. during songs was to keep shouting, keep patrolling from the stage to the back of the room, fall down, get up, climb on something, generate some feedback and to keep talking in between. A singer with limited ability – he sounds a bit like a more shouty Tom Waits – and when he comes and shouts near you – as he surely did for each audience member at least 5 times during the hour long set – you can appreciate the effort of the continuous spectacle he’s making of himself. And also you can hear the lyrics better, which was a good thing.

Martyn P Casey (cigarette) bass player in The Triffids and The Bad Seeds with Patrick Matthews (stunned grin), bass player in Youth Group

Youth Group have now played eight Triffids Reunion shows. Four at the 2008 Sydney Festival, one in Melbourne last month and now three for the 2009 Perth Festival. It’s left me wondering about Dave McComb, the author of all those pretty songs we heard. And Dave McComb wrote a lot of pretty songs. That’s why this part of the Perth Festival was like a Dave McComb Festival. I never met the man, I can only approach the legend tangentially. Derive by approximation. But there are a lot of hints unto his character. First off there are those that called Dave McComb a friend. There’s the Triffids, the “ostensibly gawky, underage misfits” that morphed into a band. Then there’s The Blackeyed Susans, most of who turned up at the reunion shows. And then there’s his family, some of whom we met. His brother Rob was in the Triffids. All of his three brothers and both parents were at the Saturday show. There were heaps of his mates backstage. There were something like 30 people who got up on stage in Perth who knew Dave ‘back in the day’.

Dave was a story-teller in song but was he a raconteur in person I’d like to have known. He was certainly a fan of wit in others – I submit Triffids manager, and reunion show MC, Handsome Steve Miller as evidence here. He was a friend to those who ENJOY THE ODD DRINK it seems. I’d speculate (I have no proof) that some insalubrious drug buddies were left off the reunion invitation list but otherwise there was a broad sweep of friends he’d made through music. From princely bona fide rock stars he’d courted in the 70s and 80s to slightly awkward record-collectors who he’d corresponded with in the same era. But what was Dave like? His singing voice implies a stentorian, theatrical presence coupled with some sort of patrician arrogance to go with the towering height. Jill Birt described him as “tall, dark, very handsome and very much the frontman”. But as Graham Lee said “he was always our friend” rather than a rockstar. And there just is no way anyone who was good buddies with James Patterson was a big-headed wanker. Take my word on that. All that’s really left are the songs.

We toasted the man with booze. Fitting for someone who probably died of complications from alcoholic cardiomyopathy. We drank every night UNTIL WE COULD DRINK NO MORE and then woke up very late the next day to do it all again. Along with cigarette smoke there was some referred nostalgia in the air in the knowledge that Sunday’s concert could be the last for Triffids like Jill and Alsy. Graham Lee’ll perhaps be able to organise a similar piss-up at a UK festival but no-on knows yet. This could THE LAST TRIFFIDS SHOW EVER. For the second time around.

Graeme Lee is the Triffids pedal-steel player and concert organiser and he runs the triffids.com. As he said to me, about the reunion, quite late on Sunday evening at the afterparty in Toby’s room, “It’s hard to say what exactly it felt like or what it was like”. I find Graham Lee extremely phlegmatic and disconcertingly still, so I can’t remember exactly what he said next. Upon a weeks rumination I’d that playing in the shows was like looking through Dave McComb’s house while he was just out for a bit.

We stuck doggedly to drinking for three nights. Everyone seemed drunk by show’s end each night. Since we were at the Becks Festival Bar there was, in theory, an ample supply of Becks beer. However, due to the size of the cast and its proportion of heavy drinkers, the Becks had completely gone from the backstage fridge by mid-set on the first show day. The next night, as if to prevent a run on the banks, the beer was sensibly guarded in an ice bucket at Steve Miller’s feet, side of stage. There was always sweet white wine if you didn’t mind the headache. Everyone got stuck into something. We saw Mick Harvey at 1am inexpertly park his hire car underneath some tent sails, lurching to a halt and very nearly ramming the raised concrete edge of the stage. At the third show Mark Snarski, after his turn being the Triffids singer, took a tumble coming off the stage, sending plastic chairs flying. As I looked around at the CAREER DRINKERS, twenty years or so my senior, with their lustrous hair and their rosy complexions, I felt an uneasy premonition. Up close, capillaries have burst, hands tremor and vitamin-deprived skin is sort of dry and scaly.

This past year I’ve spent many an hour listening to the more recent Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds albums, mainly because I was struck at The Triffids shows by the UNMISTAKABLE GENIUS of Martyn P. Casey on the bass. Jill and Alsy call him the PRS, the Professional Rock Star. I’d like to talk about (to borrow a phrase from Steve Miller) his playing on Estuary Bed, second track on Born Sandy Devotional. To me it epitomises what’s great about that record and that band. There’s an shimmering nostalgia to it and it brings a TEAR TO MY EYE the way the pedal steel goes with the glockenspiel that in turn goes with Marty’s bass. Funny thing is, they didn’t even put it in the reunion set. But every night I’d find myself watching Marty play bass. I’d watch and wait for his little air kicks and his one-footed mashed-potato jive. I asked Mick Harvey (that’s right, I’m name-dropping) how Marty could play when he was so drunk all the time. He said they’d been wondering that for years. Matt De La Hunty from Tall Tales and True claimed that The Triffids were “terribly wussy until Marty joined”. Marty’s got soul, man. Whatever he plays is THE SONG. He’s the IS-ness of the business if you catch my drift.

The two reliable highlights of the shows (apart from Toby’s songs) came care of the Snarski brothers. Firstly there was a Blackeyed Susans song called “All Souls Alive” that Rob Snarski sings. I found it unmissable every night and even unmissable in soundcheck. The set’s second high point was Bury Me Deep In Love which the older Snarski sung. For context I’ll reproduce Handsome Steve Miller’s sarcastic introduction for Mark Snarski:

“Earlier our next guest was telling me he once received a most improved award…..I said, most improved in what?….Paranoia?……Self-interest?……Ladies and gentlemen, he was born disadvantaged…..He was born with no moral compass….He’s an utter bastard….Over east they call him THAT PERTH PRICK….He’s my kind of guy….Ladies and gentlemen, Mark Snarski”

Bury Me Deep In Love is, maybe, the Triffids second-best known song after Wide Open Road. It’s a BIG SONG taken from Calenture their BIG ALBUM and much of the audience would’ve been waiting for it. So it was with considerable elan that Mark Snarski pricked the enveloping pathos during the instrumental break at song’s climax by picking up a COLD ONE and taking a GIGANTIC SWIG, his body turned side-on to the audience as if to present his rotund belly.

Steve Miller’s wife Helen asked me, as we watched Toby go through his three songs as The Triffids singer on Sunday, whether it made me proud to see Toby up there singing. It did, I answered. He made the most of his climactic place in the set list. Mick Harvey was not the only one to have thought he stole the show.

2009 is looking up for The Y.G.

2008 had slowly and listlessly divulged its weak hand. In seasons past we were kept busy plucking bounties from corporate and municipal benefactors. Like fruit-pickers flown in from the South Seas to orchards unnumbered. At summer music festivals and at spring racing carnivals and at the temporally-variable (but evergreen) council youth events we harvested our tariff. The PA-hire men played pilot fish to our basking sharks. And then last year we sat glumly in our huts (back in the South Seas) forlornly strumming at our ukeleles wishing we hadn’t squandered last year’s remittances. But 2009 is looking up again.

If the bald mercantile metaphor of the previous paragraph concerns you with it’s lack of DIY vigour, or infact any pretensions to ideals, then too bad. It helps to remember that, as Thomas Pynchon said in someone else’s liner notes, “rock n roll remains one of the last honorable callings and a working rock band is a miracle of everyday life”. I take this to  partly mean that he wished he was born a few years later so he could’ve joined a band. And, dear reader, I don’t know what you did last Thursday night but Youth Group played a concert in the grounds of a castle in Fremantle. With a sea breeze at our backs. It was alright, as Toby said to the crowd. A miracle of everyday life even.

Our hosts were Death Cab For Cutie. Before soundcheck they spotted us and vainly attempted to ingratiate themselves by making small talk. We rebuffed them of course. Chris Walla was the first to greet us. He’s spent so much time in the dark of the studio (making great records) that he could pass for his own, implausibly thin, wax-works’ dummy. He is a freak of nature: such an eternally young, enthusiastic personality. They’re all great guys, including recently buffed-up singer Ben and his inverted-triangle physique. I find his stage banter these days amusingly aggressive. For example, he shouted, This’s song’a hope!, as his way of diffusing the tension surrounding their playing the song ‘Grapevines’ from the new record because the song is about wildfires. The comment seemed less about sparing the crowd’s feelings than warning them not to get upset. There were a couple signature Beefcake Ben, How-ya-doin’?, exclamations at guitar-change points in the set – these too were verbal flexing for the crowd. But Chris tempered this machismo by signing off at the end of the set with: Bye now double-u-ay. It’s all balanced.

Their songs are absurdly catchy. ‘No Sunlight’ stuck in my head for 24 hours. I reckon two newer songs, I Will Possess Your Heart and Remainder, have really toughened up their set. Given them “teeth” as Chris would have it. The slightly bloodless audience could take note. Another great thing about DCFC is their crew, whose number befits a chart-topping US band, and who are uniformly generous and chirpy which is like a masterstroke. Backstage there was always conversation, never sulleness or road-weariness.

We sat and watched the set on a grassy knoll in T-shirts on a summer night. Perfect. Now, on to Melbourne.

Even though the tour started in Newcastle last night, it really feels like the spirit of this co-headline, all-in, collaborative journey with theredsunband is established in Sydney tonight. And its established at precisely 11:20pm on the Annandale Hotel stage when all eight members of both bands join together for the show’s encore/finale/roof-lifting ceremony – a ramshackle musical union. We played three songs together: ‘Sometimes Always’ (the Jesus and Mary Chain song Sarah and I did on SBS TV’s Rockwiz ); RSB’s Devil Song and Shadowland. Anyone not playing a guitar is hitting something or shouting something into the din. In Devil Song I patrol the stage, simply screaming “LIES!” at the appropriate moment. I had fun. I scared Jasper (RSB drummer) a little bit he says.

Anyways, it was great, lose-yourself-in-the-moment fun and apparently sounded good. (”Talk about wall of sound” our manager Andy said later). You can see how ‘collective’ style bands, like Broken Social Scene for instance, get formed. Take some already established, disparate elements and combine. With everyone banging stuff. The banging is important. Cam said he likes the idea of taking two bands combining them onstage for a whole tour. Or a series of tours. A curated fusion festival.

Here is a photo of us all onstage from Adelaide.

Cam, Danny, Laura Imbruglia, Toby, Sarah Photo by Benon Koebsch

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.