Wednesday 6^th July – The Heritage, Bulli
I have always considered The Heritage to be one of the more genteel venues in the Sydney fringe region and so am surprised on arrival when Aaron Curnow (of Spunk Records, Holly’s label, and south coast local) informs me that as a northern suburb of Wollongong it has ‘an edge’ and is home to the infamous surfer group the Bulli Boys.  I resolve to be on my guards against these nogoodniks during my time here.

No sign of the Bulli Boys during my set; only dining couples who listen with polite interest. I have chosen to play ‘all new songs’ on this tour, and have chosen to play them solo, just acoustic guitar, no band.  The stakes are high.  The good people of Bulli do not fail me.

Seeker Lover Keeper are brilliant.  They have just enough accompaniment from Jim White on drums and Dave Symes on bass.  Lots of space for their voice.  And when they hit the three part harmonies it kills.

Thursday 7^th July – The Heritage, Bulli
We are lucky enough to be staying with friends at Austinmer and so today I put on my plimsolls and do my Cliff Young shuffle over the beaches and headlands.  My mind shuffles through various memories as I go:

-       I remember when Youth Group played with Screamfeeder at The Headland Hotel sometime in the mid 2000s.  The Headland is closed, boarded-up and sad now.  I make a note to self: organise the South By South Coast Festival at Austin(mer)!  Hold it at The Headlands!  Genius!  Must find investor.

-       I remember the last time YG played down this way.  It was the day of Barack Obama’s election in 2008 and we listened to his victory speech, broadcast live from Chicago, as we drove down the Bulli Pass.  Light, eucalyptus, ocean and Obama’s amazing voice.   It was an unforgettable moment.  Everything seemed optimistic.

The path of the free world hasn’t been entirely smooth since then, and sometimes it feels like its not very cool to not be cynical about politics, but I still like to wear my Obama t-shirt when I go for a ramble and to hell with the doubters.  So I am very pleased when I am passed by a two guys in a van who beep and wave and don’t call me a faggot.  And then I round the next bend and come across a man wearing a poncho and carrying a picnic basket.  A poncho!  If such things are possible, it seems to me that the south coast is still a happy place.  Then I am passed by a ute with the number plate ‘JD’ (Jack Daniels?)  Which of course is awesome too.  In its own way.

That night at the gig a large, rugby-ish looking, man dances suggestively among the tables as SLK sing ‘Even Though I’m A Woman’.  I wonder if he is a Bulli Boy.

Friday 8^th July – The Factory, Marrickville
This is it.  The big Sydney show.  I’ve got a few nerves tonight and so have a bit of a warm-up strum in the backstage stairwell.  It turns out that stairwells have amazing acoustics and I start to enjoy its reverb-drenched sound.  I must be enjoying it a bit too much because a ‘a punter’ wanders down to enquire whether it’s a free concert.

Its nice to play with a big pa, and I am starting to feel like perhaps these songs do hold their own like this.  Because my new record ended up having lots of parts on it – strings, piano, drums etc – its easy to forget that the songs started like this – just acoustic guitar and singing.   Its starting to feel like I’m doing ‘solo interpretations’ of my ‘solo record’.

The Factory suits SLK and they sound terrific.  Their last song is a great cover of Stevie Nicks’ ‘Wild Heart’.  There’s a bit when Holly and Sarah sing another beautiful harmony and then suddenly stop, leaving Sally’s voice suddenly by itself.  It is, as Danny Allen would say, goosebump material.  Its so great to see a band care so much about and leave so much room for singing.

Saturday 9^th July – Marrickville, Sydney
This one feels like a party night and there are various well-wishers, Sydney underworld identities and theatre lovies backstage afterwards, sifting through the ice to find the last of the rider.  Holly generously hosts a party back at her place, the highlight of which for me is finding ‘Lump’ by ‘Presidents of the United States’ on her iPhone and getting a massive dancefloor reaction from it.  I’m buzzing.

Monday 11^th July – Lizottes, Dee Why
I recorded this new album of mine at Oceanic Studios in Brookvale, just down the road from here.  Tim Kevin (producer) and I drove past this unlikely looking venue many times on our often futile searches for late-night dinner options on the Pacific Highway, and so I am keen to see what Lizottes is like on the inside.  Its like a Greek wedding reception venue is the answer.  Except they’ve decorated it in Boho chic: drums for coffee tables and accordions for lampshades.  I find this use of instruments simultaneously reassuring and unsettling.

But man, they know how to treat a solo artist here.  The backstage area is basically set up like a private dining room – formally-laid table and all.  SLK are nice enough to share this with me and we have what amounts to a pre-show dinner party, three courses and all.  We share school stories, camping anecdotes, 90s pop music trivia and after-dinner mints before its time for me to hit the stage.

The thing about Lizottes is its owned by Brian Lizotte (Johnny Diesel’s brother) and the things about Brian Lizotte is he likes to introduce the bands.  It feels like old-fashioned show-biz. My introduction is: ‘We are lucky to have him in Dee Why!  Toby Martin!!’.  SLK’s is: ‘three gorgeous…AND talented women!’

I have pretty much the best audience ever.  They are utterly silent when I’m playing.  You could hear a pin drop.  Actually someone does drop a fork and it’s deafening.

Thurs 14^th July – Lizottes, Newcastle
Same instrument-as-furniture vibe, but this time in a 100-year old theatre in a lovely, sleepy part of Newcastle.  I am feeling a bit phlegmatic on stage tonight for some reason (maybe it’s the effect of another 3-course dinner) and I am also genuinely worried that I am going to spit into someone’s seared ocean trout (the dining audience are really up close here).  And then I want to say something about it, but I am worried that might seem too gross.  So I don’t say anything and instead just start to silently  question the whole idea of playing a show while people eat their dinner.  This is a common problem for me playing live – my mind can wander instead of getting lost in the music.  There, I’ve done it.  Broken the mystique!

There’s really nowhere to watch the show without having a table here, and so I squeeze in behind Christian (SLK’s guitar tech) side of stage.  This is actually quite great because it provides me with the perfect view of Jim White’s extraordinary drumming.  There’s one song in particular – Sally’s ‘Every Time’ –  where instead of playing the drums themselves, he plays a drum case covered with a tea towel.  It’s a great song, and has a kind of a punky riff and there may have been a temptation to exploit that punkiness.  But like so many of SLK’s songs the obvious temptation is resisted and interest and subtlety chosen instead.  The drumless drumming fits this perfectly.

I have to drive back to Sydney tonight, and so I exit the stage door towards the end of SLK’s set.  I close the door and step out into the clear Newcastle night with my guitar in hand.  I can still hear the singing as I walk to the car: ‘Rest your head on my shoulder, and I’ll take care of your worries’.

TOUR DATES Toby Martin with Seeker Lover Keeper

06/07/11 – The Heritage Bulli, NSW
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07/07/11 – The Heritage Bulli, NSW
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08/07/11 – The Factory Sydney, NSW
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11/07/11 – Lizotte’s Dee Why, NSW
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14/07/11 – Lizzotte’s Newcastle, NSW
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Yah Yah’s (Mel) – Thursday 18th November

The Sando (Syd) – Friday 19th November

The Old Museum (Bris) – Saturday 27th November

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.

The band has been our lives for the last five years.  Pretty much from the release of Skeleton Jar, through the recording/release of Casino Twilight Dogs and The Night Is Ours, to the accompanying tours it has been our furious, intense and fulfilling job.

We poured everything we had into The Night Is Ours. Maybe it wasn’t exhausting, but it was exhaustive and we are just not ready to venture into that again in a hurry. We’re a band that has always valued the process of making a record as much as the end product. We need some time before the next one.

And well, we are just looking forward to having a good slice of time to do other, non Youth Group things with our lives.

We would like to thank all those that have been to a show, bought a record, bought us a drink, shared their couches, floors and lives with us. Until the next chapter…

…an epilogue: those in New York have one more chance to see us play before the break. We are playing at Littlefields, Park Slope, on Sunday 25th October. Goodbye Brooklyn. Someone will cry.

Toby, Danny, Cam and Pat
YG

The Vines and Youth Group have a poster up from their appearance in 2003, although it’s in a different room – upstairs on the balcony. This means, at least, that The Vines must have sold out their Fillmore show because (so I heard) that they only keep posters from sold-out events. Unfortunately it’s a shitty image of a mosquito:

So not every band gets their poster mounted on the Fillmore wall for all time. The Get Up Kids already had a couple from their own heyday around 99/00/01 but tonight’s event (some tickets unsold) was marked only by a one-off magic marker drawing of a mother waking up her two kids. The Get Up Kids – get it? After load-out Wes and I were talking to the doorman, who looked like he’d been on the door since 1971, and he said we could meet the poster’s artist if we wanted. I just wanted to know if it really was the show’s poster – it just didn’t seem very good.

“That’s the poster.”
“I can’t tell if you’re joking or not.”
“I never kid,” he replied, and with that, perfectly illustrated the death of the hippie spirit.

The doorman was part of The Fillmore’s local crew. This consisted of about half a dozen slow-moving, sandalled, grey-ponytailed relics from the Fillmore heyday. After the gig, as we loaded out in the alley next to The Fillmore, we found what amounted to the burn-out’s clubhouse. There was a collection of junk: a hash pipe, a ripped tarpaulin, a Halloween costume, some newspaper clippings about Hitler, amongst other “stuff”. Cameron recreated the cacophany in a drawing which he then turned into a poster for the Get Up Kids show in the bubbly-lettered Fillmore style:

I was joking with Joe from GUK crew about these acid casualties on staff and he told me how he’d been having a cigarette in the alley and one of the old guys came up to him and asked, “What are you doing?”
“It’s cool, I’m with the Get Up Kids,” Joe said.
“I guess you can smoke in my alley then” he replied. Like a sixty year old first grader taking umbrage but unprepared to duke it out for his turf.

The San Francisco show ended up being one of our all time best shows I thought.

We’re playing Fontanas on the LES on the 22nd Oct and Littlefields in Park Slope, Brooklyn on the 25th.

The remaining shows in the Northeast are:

Oct 13    Hoboken, NJ @ Maxwells
Oct 14    Philadelphia, PA @ Silk City Lounge
Oct 15    Hamden, CT @ The Space
Oct 16    Cambridge. MA @ T T The Bears
Oct 19    Baltimore, MD @ Fletchers
Oct 22   New York, NY @ Fontanas
Oct 25   Brooklyn, NY @ Littlefields

Look, the leaves are turning gold and red!!

The tour left Mountain Time and we entered Pacific Standard Time in Eastern Oregon. Our van (that Cam has illustrated, above) crossed and re-crossed the tufted grass and scree in the canyons of the Snake River in Idaho on the I-84. Famously, Evel Kneivel plummeted into the Snake River in 1974 during an unsuccessful stunt jump. In Eastern Oregon we were sensibly cautious as we crossed the pine-lined Rogue River. Due to road works in the Washington State mountains we progressed at snail’s pace thru the beautiful snowless passes near a town called Cle Elum. At rest stops on the journey we got out and tossed around the mini American football we’d bought from Walmart. We threw it between pine branches (in Oregon) and shiny SUVs (in California). It’s hard to get the ball to spin properly, torpedo-wise, but Toby is the most skilled at this. Then leaving the Pacific Northwest we drove past the massive Mt Rainier and Mt Shasta, two awesome glaciated volcanoes that abut the I-5.

West Coast Junk Food Blitz: In Seattle hotdogs come with cream cheese. Wes ate two in succession out on the street from the venue. Fletcher (from Wes’s band the Devoted Few) had warned us (via Twitter) to keep him away from Cheese In A Can and Double Doubles but we had to let him loose on the Seattle Dogs. Then in Southern California we all ate Double Doubles at In ‘N Out at every opportunity, sometimes Animal Style, sometimes not.

Portland was a town overrun by hipsters the night we played the Music Festival North-West (MFNW). After our gig we watched a band called Portugal The Man play our stage. They were like Dr. Dog but more cosmic. Their keyboard player Ryan and his buddies took Danny and I to watch this powerful indie-metal band called Red Fang. As metal as they were, The Fang’s lead guitarist, weirdly, played a Thinline Telecaster which is the guitar that Jonny from Coldplay uses and the guitar that Toby plays on Forever Young ie: the most indie of guitars. We were mightily impressed, buying a T-shirt each. When they played their song Prehistoric Dog it was obvious they had a hit. Danny stuck the CDs in his knapsack which he promptly left at a party that Portugal The Man put on. This Ryan guy was nice enough to post it back to him the next day along with the T-shirts and a CD of his younger brother’s band.

San Francisco we stayed on Divisadero in Lower Haight, not the grimy Tenderloin at the Phoenix Hotel as usual. Both nights in SF we went to a great bar right across the road from the hotel, peeking through the SF fog, called Page Bar. The second night, after the gig at the Fillmore (which fucking ruled in mine and Toby’s opinion – more on that later) we got royally flogged on the Page Bar’s monthly special, Finian’s Irish Whiskey – $4.50 a glass – and staggered back to our hotel. Roger from Pretty & Nice either was too drunk to walk home or couldn’t fit into their band’s doss house so we offered him a space on our floor. As repayment he showed us a really cool cat video . We declined his offer to show us some youporn.

We were greeted in Southern California by a heat-wave, conducted royally on the Fahrenheit scale. After six gigs in seven days and a thousand miles we could’ve done with a rest. But when we turned up at our hotel, a back-packer’s hostel in Hollywood, I was on edge as we tried to check in, surrounded by “them”, drunken backpackers braying at each other 1am.

“It’s karaoke night so it’s a bit crazy,” the guy at the desk shouted to me over the din. The next morning the “craziness” had been stultified as the young guests sat around smoking cigarettes with their feet up on the balcony rail in the mindless time-wasting boredom that passes for relaxation at the backpackers.