Today is our first show. We picked up the equipment we’ll be using in a Warehouse that had also stacks of equipment sitting next to ours (ours was marked “Salaryman”) for Oasis, the Eels, and some other bands we hadn’t heard of. Last night we met with Wyndham, our English CitySlang (that’s the label Salaryman is on in Europe) correspondant. City Slang is the label that paid for us to come over here and is taking care of us – it’s a Proper Indie Rock tour! It’s very different from the last couple of times we came over here! We have people from the label taking care of us, hanging out with us, complimenting us and telling us how well our record is doing over here! We have interviews, press, photo sessions, radio shows, and we have a John Peel session which is pretty neat. That is a recording session I guess, for the John Peel show, which is a good radio show here in England.
Our Tour Manager/driver/person in charge is called Alyson, and she has lived all over the world. She lives in Chicago now, but has been living in Berlin for years! It turns out that she is originally from North Carolina. She is really nice and smiles a lot and seems very intelligent, and also at the same time really young. She also has a really great way of talking where she doesn’t sound British but also doesn’t sound American. It’s not an accent as much as a sort of melodic way of talking. I’m envious of that, because even though last night Wyndham told me we don’t seem overtly American, today I walked into a Donor Kebab stand and after the guy behind the counter said, “Open Or Closed?” too quietly for me to hear, I said, “Whaaah??”, and he said, “You can’t understand me, can you! Americano!” I was back in the ‘wishing I had a Canadian Flag sewn on my backpack’ mode. (Reference: American students when going to Europe are told to sew Canadian Flags on their backpacks so people aren’t mean to them.)
Wyndham last night told us that he likes to work with American bands because they seem so laid back and have a good attitude. He said some bands with Indie Rock status even complain sometimes when they have to double-up on hotel rooms and don’t get their own room! Sheesh, can you believe that? Decadence. But seriously, imagine complaining when you know how much all this stuff costs, to ship a band overseas and rent equipment and everything.
Anyway, here we find ourselves on a beach composed of small orange quartzish rocks, staring at an amusement park built on a pier off in the distance, in Brighton, which is south of London, on the coast. Man, that’s a lot of prepositional phrases. I have never been on a beach that is made of rocks. We are waiting for our load-in time at The Freebutt Club, where we’re playing tonight. There are castles around here as well, and every corner pub is named “The something & something-else.”
The show was fantastic! I guess the promoter was afraid that people would leave before we played so he padded us with 2 local bands, but ended up giving us our headlining slot (which we were supposed to have) at the last minute because of all our gear. The promoter was really worried that we’d clear the place out I guess, when we played, and wanted to make sure he’d still get his beer sales, but as it turned out, people stayed outside during the openers, and came in during our show. On top of it there were phone calls asking when Salaryman was playing – the phone was ringing a lot at the little pub. So the promoter seemed impressed. He really liked the show. The audience seemed to enjoy it as well. It was a really, really small club.
After the show we stopped at a convenient mart/gas station to get a snack salad, and looked closely at the foods there. I hadn’t ever really had a chance to check out the names of English snack foods. There were Luxury Oat Slices, Digestive Biscuits (I was going to buy some of them; they were crackers with chocolate on them but then I noticed the word “Digestive” on them and thought maybe they were laxatives), drinking yoghurt, among other things. I wonder what “Pepsi MAX” is.
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