Cathy and Leon (along with people from a bunch of other bands) talking about the silliness that is nuclear weapons, for a new documentary called Countdown To Zero.

Watch the interviews here

Sadly we had to pull out of two gigs in the last week. One of which was the awesome Summer Sundae in Leicester. We had to pull out of last years event too due to the dreaded swine flu Cathy picked up. This year it was because our usual driver was rushed to hospital minutes before picking us up to take us there. We did eventually get in the van 3 hours late with a maniac behind the wheel. He managed to nearly kill us several times and get himself into more than one shouting match with other white van drivers before getting us stuck in gridlock traffic 5 miles outside of London and subsequently missing our already pushed back stage time. FAIL!

We have not had very much luck with Vans, as you regulars may be aware. This recent stint in Europe just wouldn’t have been the same without a frantic day running around a foreign city trying to get our van fixed or replaced just so we could make the next gig. We’ll predictably fate didn’t let us down and this is exactly what we ended up f**king doing. AGAIN! Seriously. I can’t talk about it because it’s all too recent. FAIL!

So all you awesome people who gave a shit and wanted to see us at Summer Sundae or Munster, the five of us are so sorry and Amos has agreed to verbally beg forgiveness on 07978…….

Ha ha

One shit heap van to another in the Czech republic

Justin

As i write we are back on the road in Europe. And thorougly refreshed we feel too after a 4 week break in which we all but one decided to leave the country. For my vacation I decided to split it up between San Fransisco and Chicago. Something i have always wanted to do since i started spending so much time in the U.S., walking their wide flat streets and vast expanses of open space and breathtaking scenery was take my bike there and just ride around a whole bunch. Well this was the only opportunity i was gonna get for some time so i packed my Dave Yates Track Bike up in a box and flew to Oakland just outside San Fransisco.

Bike in a box.

Bike getting stoned in Dolores Park

I spent the next 11 days rididng around what i now think is the most beautiful city i have ever been to. Not only have you got the awesome ‘hip and happening’ Valencia where all the cool kids hang out and get stoned in Dolores park but you got some of the raddest parks and forests within spitting distance in which i rode my little heart out. They also have an island with an old prison on it, a massive red bridge and plenty of sun and palm trees.

The bike and i on a romantic trip to the Golden Gate Bridge.

Bike on a boat checking out George Lucas’ inspiration for the AT-AT’s(fact).

Chicago, after spending so much time in SF was kinda like coming back home, in the sense that there is a lot of urban decay, a whole lot of noisy traffic, it rains a lot and there is a Starbucks and Vintage cloths store around every corner. I kinda liked it.
Romance definately brought me to Chicago, but it’ll be Baseball that takes me back(hopes she doesn’t read this). After attending a Chicago Cubs game at the awesome Wrigley Field and two Chicago White Sox games at The Cell i can safetly say that i have a new obsession and The Chicago Cubs have a new fan. I now have a Major League Baseball.COM subscription so i can watch the live games online and four bandmates who are getting sick to death of hearing about baseball. I also have a new tattoo of the Stars and Stripes I aquired in Chicago which i may or may not regret in the future.

Bursting with excitement before my first baseball game.

Taking patriotism about someone else’s country too far. Cool.

Justin

There’s nothing like easing yourself into touring with a sunny day in a European city. But there’s something almost utopian about the sheer number of bikes, water features (canals, lakes, The Sea), and public art displays in Rotterdam. A particularly eye-catching piece was visible out of our window: 6m (20 foot) Santa holding a giant butt plug (its bigger than his head!). This bronze ‘Santa’ (chocolate and inflatable versions also exist): quickly came to be known locally as a ‘gnome’, and no wonder: it looks strikingly like a garden figurine or a Disney character out of Snow White. It’s at once captivating and repulsive, capturing the irony of a children’s mythology that has become aggressively commercialized. Yet for me this saucy statue is also unavoidably about sexual liberation. The contradictory assemblage of butt plug and santa together form a sort of dark anti-mythology where we are confronted with our own unspoken fantasies and desires. And all this miraculously through the medium of (nervous?) laughter.

Later on, after our show at the very awesome Rotown I was approached by a middle-aged woman who introduced herself as Janne. It turns out she is my friend Nick Goss’ aunt (you can see his breathtaking paintings here, and coincidentally was one of the people who lobbied the city council to have the statue put on public display. The city bought the sculpture in 2003 without anyone having seen it (or presumably having done any research at all – this is work from a man who has smeared himself with ketchup and put a Barbie doll in his rectum). The statue initially faced huge opposition from within the council and in 2008, as a compromise, was displayed in the inner courtyard of the Boijmans Museum. “Think of the children” was the slogan of its detractors. Janne’s retort: “if a child knows what a butt-plug is, then there’s a problem”. She says the local kids just see a gnome with a stylized Christmas tree or an ice-lolly. I like the idea of this statue having a part to play in local adolescents’ story of sexual self-discovery. Janne was certainly thrilled when it was finally unveiled in its original planned location ‘De Koopgoot’ at the intersection of two busy roads in downtown Rotterdam, for everyone to make their own mind up.

Finally, I wondered if I could extend my own interpretation to what looks like a bell in the gnome’s left hand. Could it in fact be another accessory to the contemporary liberal menstruator: the mooncup ? If other people see it too then, ladies, this gnome has our future in its hands!

Until next time
C

After the usual post-return-from-america waking up at 6.30 AM despite getting to bed at 2 AM, then tossing and turning in impatient denial of the fact that there is just no returning to sleep, I’ve given in to the facts and am having a surprisingly decent breakfast at the Orly airport hotel. We are at the very last stretch of our seemingly never-ending run of shows that have kept us on the road pretty much since October. And perhaps it is the feel of imminent freedom to actually do other things than play gigs that is throwing my brain into creative overdrive this morning, or perhaps it’s just sleep deprivation induced. But there just seems to be a million ideas wanting to fill my notepads today. Funny how boredom and coffee does that.

Then I go on a internet reading spree. Looking up 50s Mardi Gras costumes. Reading The Onion. Looking at Fender Jag wiring schematics trying to figure out what’s wrong with the pickup selector that I had to open up and attempt to fix just before a show the other night in Paris. The sight of your instrument lying gutted on the stage surrounded by bolts and wiring is slightly unsettling. Then catching up with the news. Volcanoes? Cancelled flights? This is the first I hear of it. I really do hope that we will be able to return to London after tomorrow’s last show of the tour in Granada, lest all our plans of time off will be foiled. If our previous times in Spain are anything to go by tomorrow will be a crazy night. The fact that we’re playing at two in the morning is also an indication.

Also was looking at some documentary stuff and was reminded about the Thax Douglas documentary. To refresh your memory, Thax is a poet from Chicago, these days living in Austin. A pretty eccentric character who will write off the cuff beat poems about bands and present them on the spot as an introduction at the band’s show. He wrote a brilliant one for us when we played in Austin end of last year. We posted about this in our Advent Calendar (Day #10) at the time, but I don’t think we mentioned anything about the documentary that was made about him a few years ago. Really like what I’ve seen from it… here’s a segment:

A few hours until the flight (if it leaves!), so time to head into Paris and check out the catacombs before I fall asleep.

z z z

Simon

Holy shizzle, what happened to the weather?! Thank goodness we did the filming in the river yesterday. It’s so freaking freezing today there is no way any of us would’ve gotten in the water if it had been today. I know we said yesterday we were willing to suffer for our art, but this is ridiculous. it’s like the year’s gone through a mini time warp back to early January and maybe a bit of a geographical shift too to somewhere completely baltic. Can you tell we’re English(-ish), never happier than when discoursing at length on the weather?

Today is split between working in the studio and playing our final South-by show. Why are we putting ourselves through it trying to nail stuff in the studio in the middle of a busy week in Austin? Thank you for asking. Well, the real reason is there’s this demo of our song ‘Atlas’ tempted into a big movie, and if we can’t better it before the end of the month there’s every chance they’ll go with the demo (if they go with anything at all), and the demo is crazy faster than the way we play it live these days. Fine if they do, but nicer still if we can get a take this baby through the stratosphere in here tonight.

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We’ve also got to get Cathy’s “parts” down ce soir before she goes off on a week long trip with her boyf deeper into Tejas to some spa/ranch type combo. This means twin sessions with Mike McCarthy at his bijou recording facility in Nth Austin somewhere up the I-35, sessions which bookend the ‘Chopshop’ showcase in Brush Square at 7pm. Producer Mike (of Spoon/Trail of the Dead fame) came to the Ale House show last night and seemed genuinely psyched and deeply into the band; an impression we haven’t seen necessary to reappraise now we’ve been here a bunch of hours. He’s awesome.

Anyway, dunno what you know about being in the studio, but it’s not the richest seam of blog gold, consisting as it does of sitting around waiting for someone in another room to do something overandoverandover again til you feel like taking up a battle axe and going quite literally berserk.
Still at least it’s warm while you wait, which as I’ve alluded to is more than can be said for outside. Brass monkeys out there, mate. I’d like to say, we made a quick neat job of performing tonight in the tent downtown, but that’d be lying. In reality mistakes were made, strings were broken and mandolins unaccountably malfunction, but people were nice enough to cheer n’stuff and make sexual advances at the end (OK maybe not the latter so much). So I guess that’s a good sign.

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Anyway, not so much happened today that aside, so here’s a picture of Amos’s neoprene apple holder for all you fruit casing fans out there. He already has a banana one.

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Fanfarlo

Our planned early start to get to the Austin Green Belt in order to film our as-yet-untitled cinematic masterpiece is somewhat undermined by the fact that Justin rings up at the departure time of 10am saying he’s overslept. Clearly he’s in some part of the city other than La Quinta motel, and this delay gives everyone else the excuse to shamble off and get unscheduled breakfasts/whatever, meaning we rock up to the pretty backwater close on an hour late, a delay which will shunt through the day in a chain reaction of mild stress.

Director/visionary Brian Gonzalez’s idea is to have the band immerse themselves in the invigorating waters of Barton Springs. For invigorating read f@cking freezing, a situation not assisted by the fact that the day starts out pretty chilly and overcast – although in truth by the time anyone gets wet the sun is out and we are wondering whose fault it is we don’t have any sunblock.

Brian has the band get in character by issuing motivational hints such as ‘surprise’, ‘bewilderment’, ‘trepidation’. Everyone in the band looks deep within themselves to deliver stirring method performances.

surprise!

“Bewilderment.”

more surprise!

“Trepidation.”

Anyway, don’t want to give any spoilers, suffice to say the footage looks great downloaded a few hours later, and when was the last time a music doc won Best Picture?

One thing I can reveal is that for the last shot of the day before we rush off to fulfill yet another radio obligation, everyone has to duck their heads into the brain freezing torrent and emerge in ecstatic unison. Unfortunately the brisk current whisks Justin’s glasses clean off his beak and carries them to thru the rapids beyond all hope of search and rescue. Thanks river, just what we need another thing Justin can find to feel sorry for himself over.

Fanfarlo

As befits a band of our elevated station we are staying on some anonymous freeway cloverleaf somewhere far south of south-by. Here the culinary options are limited, so every morning we hop like good little bunnies to the IHOP next-door for the best our pds can buy. Here even the “healthy” options to come with coronary alerts, but nevertheless we fill up with egg substitute omelettes and dishwater coffee ahead of our date with MTVu at the disused power plant close by the river back in town.

The location is frankly stunning, some gutted industrial monolith that would make a great location for the Hollywood remake of Tarkovsky’s ‘Stalker’ (now there’s a thought).

It is in this concrete cathedral that we are expected to give an decent account of ourselves playing something original in under 60 seconds. We choose to butcher out the “exciting” bit of ‘Luna’ to satisfy today’s average lo-attention-span viewer. Anyway, the machinery of the shoot is suitably impressive and we are quickly done and dusted and thereby free to clamber around the slowly rotting and rusting carcass of the building.

After that, it’s back to insanity of 6th Street for load-in to the Paste party at the same venue as yesterday, only this time we are mercifully playing indoors instead of out. We are performing at 2pm so don’t have long to kick around before showtime comes around. The gig itself goes down as a good one, by Mr Mgr’s account three times better than last night, thanks mainly to the fact that the sound system doesn’t seem to be built out of cocoa tins and string. This solves the bittersweet feeling of the previous evening, a result from coming a third of the way round the planet to play to a thousand people and royally suck. On the contrary, today was a good day. We got on on time and played a full-ish set of 8 songs all with a modicum of competence. it was almost worth getting out of bed for.

After some more inane jabber to people with microphones about why we supposedly rule, our promo tormentors let us loose on Austin to do as we please, which turns out to be arguing about whether to go for BBQ or a nice vegetarian. This is an inevitable predicament whenever you a band and crew get together to spend some kwality time, but for once the vegetarians don’t play the trump card and we go, not for barbeque, but for burgers and chili fries at Frankie’s down by Barton Springs. We’ve been here before previous years, and while the kwisine is basic, the place is outdoors under huge spreading oaks, there are lots of interesting dogs to fuss over and you can throw some ‘washers’ into a dusty niche a few feet distant in some feeble display of machismo under the guise of a game. Wonderfully, tomorrow’s birthday boy Amos trounces all-comers and for once the meek really do inherit the earth.

After that, folks disperse to whatever far-flung corner of the festival takes their fancy, strong drink is taken and tomorrow is pushed from the mind. Amos gets his rox off to Gonzales before joining Leon who’s been queuing for an hour to miss Band of Horses but see Broken Social Scene, Simon swoons to winsome Danes Efterklang, Justin gets hard and horny and buys the t-shirt, at Goatwhore (pur-lease!), while Cathy nips off home before former Occupanther faves Midlake can persuade her she really ought to stay. Everyone retires tuckered out but happy. Aww. Big day tomorrow.

Le Fanfarlo

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