I am really tired today so I won’t write too much. We had to wake up early to drive to Covent Garden to the Rough Trade Record store and play an instore. And we couldn’t bring all of our equipment down the teeny spiral staircase so we had to do Salaryman LITE, which in my opinion wasn’t that great. People seemed to like it but I’m just not used to doing anything halfway I guess. Jim couldn’t bring his piano-sized midi-controller keyboard down the staircase because it would take up half the room, and my bass cabinet was heavier than the staircase, so that couldn’t go down. I just don’t know how we sounded today. Then we had a shitload of interviews, and we collapsed from Jet Lag halfway through the day, on our hotel beds, me wearing a t-shirt soaked in cold water so I could sleep in the heat. It’s really, really hot out here.
Tonight Wyndham cooked a beef stew for us and we spent a couple of hours in a pub playing pool, then went back to Wyndham’s where he introduced us to the hottest new British sitcoms, to study our reactions. We didn’t like “Men Behaving Badly” as much as “Father Ted,” a crazy Irish sitcom about 3 priests living on an island in the middle of nowhere, and as far as I can tell, none of them are very pious. It reminded me of the old show “Fridays” for some reason. Humor with a moral.
I find it really, really interesting to compare the cultures that we run into overseas; especially English because we all still speak the same language, so the differences are much less obvious and teach you something about your own culture. These differences are so less obvious, in fact, that I really can’t come up with any after just hanging out with Wyndham for a day. His roomates don’t like Pop Tarts. That’s all I know. They like Seinfeld and The Simpsons. But the other stuff on British TV is very different than what we have. The one thing I noticed: everyone I talked to about what was on TV said it was all garbage. (The word “Flotsam” was used in one case.) That’s the same as in the US.
I am ready to go home. I am worried about my plants. I hope they have enough water to last the 2 weeks. I miss throwing my body around at shows. I can’t really move around at all in Salaryman shows. There are so many people interviewing us as Salaryman, and I am hearing our show reviews are going to be awesome. We are going to be way bigger here than Poster Children, and I’m not sure how I feel about that. I almost miss our other band. I hope this doesn’t offend any new Salaryman fans, but you have to realize, we have spent 10 years on our first child, Poster Children, we’ve put so much effort and love into it, we’ve been indie and major label and have controlled every aspect of it, and now this new youngster comes along and it’s hard for me to neglect Pkids in order to be with S-man. Now I like Salaryman a lot, but it’s just so different and strange. Thank god there was a Poster Children fan at the Rough Trade show – a guy from Australia who saw us a couple of months ago in San Francisco. He was so happy he got to see us perform again – even if it was Salaryman. I am glad Poster Children is touring in the fall. (By the way, the ideas and opinions expressed here are ONLY my own and not those of Rick, Jim, or Howie. If they read this, they’ll probably think I’m nuts.)
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