Sunday brings our first show with Snow Patrol. The smallest capacity venue on the tour holding a mere 6000. Needless to say we were all very excited. The day went to plan…That is until soundcheck. Within minutes I had worked out that my bass was broken. Instead of producing the dulcet, beautiful tones people are used to from me I instead made a horrid electrical din. Snow Patrol’s kind guitar tech opened the beast up to inform me she was broke beyond repair and I would need to find another guitar. This is the last thing you want to hear half an hour before you are due on stage to play the biggest gig you have played thus far. The next half an hour involved management (John and Dean aka Jean) and I frantically running around trying to produce a bass guitar whilst telling each other to calm down as the rest of the band prepared a set that involved no bass guitar. Ten minutes before stage time, Emre (our driver/sound man) and John drove off at illegal speeds and returned seconds before the show with a bass from god knows where. The gig itself was great, we enjoyed ourselves and so did the packed out venue.

We had the 3 hour journey from Bournemouth to look forward to. Annoyingly at 11 o’clock the van broke down 2 miles away from the venue. After an hour of pissing about the AA informed us that due to driving regulations we had to be towed half of the way by AA rescue man #1, dropped off at a service station (where we stocked up on provisions and Cathy perused the top shelf magazines) and then picked up by AA rescue #2 to take us the rest of the way. This of course took most of the night and we arrived home at 6am. The Weed and Codeine haze (and possibly the burning rubber gas from the mangled clutch) in which we travelled softened the edges and all in all it was a miserable affair that kind of intensified the camaraderie of the touring experience.

Living the dream.

Justin