Towards the end of August 2006, British Sea Power set out on a tour that would see them play 18 gigs in 21 days. A number of fans planned to go to most - or in some cases all - of the gigs. This is how I documented it at the time, excavated from my old Myspace blog - I have deliberately copied and pasted the whole thing without editing (from the HTML view so as to preserve as much of the formatting and pictures as possible) so apologies for any typos, links that no longer work or random gremlins... welcome to 2006!
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~ PROLOGUE ~
It's about half six on a Tuesday night and I'm on my way to a gig. I came out straight from work and should be in town by half seven at the latest... oh yeah, and I'm thousands of feet above the Welsh coastline. There are a few fluffy white clouds like the sort children draw, and the evening sunshine glints on the odd fishing boat - it's almost indescribably beautiful. I'm bound for Exeter. I was actually there almost exactly 24 hours ago dropping my mate off after a pleasant afternoon on a clifftop on the North Cornish coast - we'd set off early that morning from London after I had convinced her, several beers into the previous evening, that that wasn't really too far to go for an afternoon out. She didn't really take much convincing, and ended up phoning her boss to book today off as well. me I haven't really got the holidays left, and was back home in Manchester at half eleven. I will be back there by 8 tomorrow morning and in work for 9. You think that's a ridiculous amount of effort to go to to watch a few gigs? Maybe. It's all relative though. Said mate is originally from Japan, although she lives in London - we met, of course, watching this band. She's got another Japanese friend with her on Sunday and Tuesday who does actually live over there; she's just come over for a few days for these gigs. So why didn't she come to Cornwall with us on the day in between? Oh, she was off watching Radiohead that night... in Amsterdam.
Sat with us in the pub on that Tuesday night are two fortysomething men - one, married with kids, has brought his entire family down to the South West for a camping holiday so he and his eldest daughter can go to these gigs - his car has packed up and he has no idea how he's going to get home to North Shields, some 400 miles away. He couldn't really be much further from home and still be in the British Isles. The second, like myself one of the small number of British Sea Power fans with a three-figure gig count, has a wealth of stories that start "When we were out watching Bowie in Prague / the south of France / a forest in central Denmark". He once flew to New York to watch Bowie play one song at some awards do. The laugh is when I asked him once (as we headed for the Suffolk coast towards another typically remote British Sea Power gig) what the song was, it took him a while to actually remember. ("Heroes", if you're interested). So the fact that our little table of people came from Manchester, Birmingham, Tyneside and London (all via Cornwall) and Japan (via London and Amsterdam) to be here seems perfectly normal to us all. This is the way it is. You may not like British Sea Power, but the chances are if you are reading this you do love live music; you probably have a favourite band - welcome to our world, the world of the Away Trip. A world of Travelodges and "comedy airlines" (definition - any airline whereby the tax costs more than the actual flights). You may never want to waste your time off on two weeks' sunshine again...
~ PART ONE ~
~ SOUTH WESTERN WARM-UP ~
Trip Counter: 1229 miles
Bank Holiday Sunday, 27th August, Sackville St, central Manchester, 8am. The streets are full of the detritus of a good night; Gay Pride continues for a couple of days yet and amongst the discarded (and occasionally "revisited") fast food, club flyers and condom packets there are few people around. The odd bug-eyed raver, still clutching a can - and me and Nick heading out to the car with a couple of small overnight bags. God knows what the motorways are going to be like on the last blast weekend of the summer (officially, though not of ours) - best get an early start. Three and a half hours later we're pulling up in the car park of Battersea Travelodge - the M56, M6, M6 Toll, M1, A5 and most of central London having been almost spookily quiet. Maybe the country just isn't up yet. Check-in's not officially til three but we're lucky, there's a room available now, so we don't have to leave anything in the car and soon we're walking across Clapham Common in the sunshine towards a featival.
Get Loaded In The Park - the name isn't encouraging. Previous headliners have included Happy Mondays and the event is backed by Metro, the insidious freesheet wing of the evil Daily Mail organisation. It's official website shows pictures of the worst sort of shirted laddish lads raising lager in the air, as if in a toast to Nuts magazine. This year however Babyshambles are headlining, so chuck a load of over-made-up teens and London scenesters into the mix. Oh and with the cancellation from 65daysofstatic (whose mildly sarcastic bulletin also made reference to some of the above features of GLITP whilst surmising it probably wasn't a crowd that would lap up brain-meltingly loud instrumental post-math-rock-electrocore, which I can't exactly fault them on) there's really not much left on the line-up that interests us. Oh, apart from this...
It's true, Misty's Big Adventure have played pretty much the same set every time I have seen them which must be 5 or 6 times now. And Erotic Volvo (as I'm certain his passport doesn't say) hasn't pursued the intention he stated in an interview at least a year ago to "regenerate like Dr. Who" - yeah, he still looks like, well, that. But this is a band who, watched once every few months, never fail to leave me smiling. They look like a local drama workshop group, and from Gareth's dark-psychedelia spoken intro to their eponymous theme tune, through the wonderfully danceable hey-wow-man-heavy-concept "Two Brains" to their forthcoming single, already a live favourite taking the piss out of the (now not so) New Post-Punk scene whilst cheekily pilfering its hi-hat-heavy disco-punk beats - this is a band doing exactly what they want to. By the end of their half hour they've put most of the tent - including a few of my BSP crew who haven't seen them before - in cheerful mood... the problem now being there is sod all else on worth watching until our lads themselves, four or five hours hence.
That's four or five hours, depending on whether you believe the official programme (£5, and "the only way to find out today's running orders") or a member of the band who has been good enough to keep us up to date by text. Right. After the furore at last week's V Festival regarding such practices (see last week's blog entry for full rant and press stories - oh, and a colleague of Nick's who went also mentioned that car parking was not included in the £120 ticket price , and cost an extra seven quid... bargain!) we're amazed they've got the cheek. We have a look at one. 65days are still listed, but worse still for anyone wishing to watch BSP who isn't part of the regulars' texting network is that they will actually be just about finishing their set by the time they are listed in the programme as starting. It's nothing short of a fucking disgrace to be honest. The beer, too, is limited in choice and pricey. This could be a really shite day. And then we find the Pimms Bus...
...and that's most of the afternoon accounted for. We are vaguely aware of De La Soul debasing their fine legacy with some half-arsed nonsense on the rather distant main stage, and then it's getting quite close to BSP's (actual) slot and as the tent is getting quite full we figure we'd best get in and find a decent spot. The downside to this is that it will bring me in close proximity to The Official Cath Aubergine Worst Band Of 2006 - oh for a box of eggs or fruit to launch - Guillemots.
The gushing praise heaped on this pile of self-important hogwash almost had me believing Night & Day (some time earlier this year, and still the one time in my life where I have not filed a review for a band I've had press tickets for, on the grounds that sitting through most of their painfully tedious set was hard work enough and I could not think of one single redeeming factor to them) may have been a fluke, but no, Fyfe Dangerfield (above)'s position of the most overrated man in music (yes, seriously; even Doherty has two good tunes, although as we'll find out later not necessarily the capability of delivering them) seems safe for now. Cerys, Yuko and I spend a long time trying to work out even in what vague genre this pointless pretentiousness resides and come up with "watered down Flaming Lips with no tunes". It is a really, really long half hour.
British Sea Power look like they mean business. Aware that their set is insultingly short, they bang straight into energetic everyone'll-know-this-one "Remember Me" and swerve into last summer's highlight of more festivals than I can remember "Please Stand Up". Yan is at his commanding, slightly unhinged best, bouncing around dressed entirely in red like a small child that's scoffed a few too many sweets. With the neutral portion of the audience now firmly on side it's time for a couple of new ones - first the rather Julian Cope-ish Hamilton-led "Mary" (tipped to be the next single, although some faintly preposterous re-titling shouldn't be ruled out) and then the (early)Chameleons-ish Yan-led "Atom". The excellent reaction to these songs from a crowd who have for the most part never heard them before must be as encouraging to the band as it is to us as they prepare for that traditional musician's leap into the unknown that is the third album.
It's good to see one of my personal favourites "True Adventures" an almost permanent fixture in the live set these days. In an earlier incarnation as "Chicken Pig" this was one of the first Open Season era tracks to get played regularly live back in early 2004 and reactions to it were not always favourable - its proggy space-rock feel rather out of keeping with the spiky rules of the day. Now however with the re-emergence of effects-heavy "new-shoegaze" and the likes of iLiKETRAiNS, this beautiful song has been proven to have been just a little ahead of its time, woth Hamilton's dreamy vocals proving him the true successor to Dean "Galaxie 500" Wareham and the cornet and viola of extra players Phil and Abi filling out its already massive sound.
My other favourite "Carrion" is next (This is not a deliberate attempt at democracy, although the band would be a far lesser beast without either one of the complementary talents that are the inherently adorable Wilkinson brothers) and then an abbreviated thrash through the usual set-ending rock-out... and then it's half seven and we have not much else to do for the rest of the evening. One bunch decide to make an early exit down to Devon to give them a head start for tomorrow's leg of the journey. The rest of us hang about for the UK's number one festival tart Badly Drawn Boy.
The emergence of Mr Gough and the Twisted Nerve scene in the late 90s was, however preposterous this may seem now, as important to the music scene in Manchester as those Sex Pistols gigs in 76 that spawned our highly regarded post-punk scene. If you're not from round here, or are too young, you may not remember just what a terrible wasteland the city's music scene was in the mid 90s. Britpop meant little here - we sent them Oasis and they gave us nothing much back; our living legends such as The Fall and New Order knocked out run-of-the-mill, resting-on-laurels albums, venues closed, and as bands like Puressence discovered being from Manchester had somewhere around negative cool value in the post-"Madchester" (sic) era. Then Andy Votel and Damon Gough came along and, like Shelley and Devoto two decades earlier, invented a label to release their own records. Now looking back at the array of stunningly designed if frequently unlistenable ten inch singles the label put out in its early years, it's clear most of the music was a bit on the self-indulgent side. I should know, I own most of them. But they - along with Manchestermusic's proto-unsigned-fest Chairsmissing, and the twice-yearly month-long restricted licence community radio station Radio Space, started to wake Manchester up again. And for that, as well as for excellent tunes such as "You Were Right", I will always have time for Badly Drawn Boy.
Tonight, however, isn't the right time. Well not for the decidedly maudlin string of almost MOR new material with which he opens his set. Were you not watching the last band, Damon? Festival set means open with the hits and slip the new ones in the middle when people are already having fun. After the third dirge I can't bear the idea that this Manchester legend is almost as boring as Guillemots, and the scrappy "Silent Sigh" we hear as we leave the tent doesn't really encourage us back.
For below par versions of classic songs though he can't hold a candle to car-crash Babyshambles. We have been standing - admittedly not too close to the stage, but not to far away either - in the main arena for a couple of minutes before I realise the vaguely familiar song being bashed out by what sounds like the local community centre's pop group project for teenagers with learning disabilities, is the Libertines' classic anthem "Time For Heroes". To massacre your own song in a way that no cover band would dare is sign of someone who's lost their way. And no, I don't mean the drugs - I'd never touch smack myself but Spacemen 3 and their splinter bands managed to make a few good albums with its help, and I'd never judge someone on their taste in recreational assistance. It's the music. It's gone. It could be the drugs rotting his mind, or it could simply be that without Carl and The Other Two he's not actually that talented, but after an equally dire take on "Killamangiro" we realise that if that's how he plays his best songs we really do not wish to hear his others. Newspaper headlines about Monster Pete and Cocaine Kate flash on the backscreen. We are unimpressed and head for the pub. A car pulls up and some lads jump out and set up amps on the roof, perform a brief guerrilla gig, and then get shouted at for blocking the car park - we never find out who they are, but they're arguably better than Babyshambles. We are all very pissed by this point. "I wish I was going to that Cornwall thing tomorrow" says Yuko, and I tell her that if she can make it to Battersea Travelodge for half eight she can have a lift with us.
At 8am she texts me to say she's on her way... I can barely remember how we even got back to the hotel... it's a lovely day though... right, next stop only 250 miles of A-roads away... some would question the sense of heading out to one of Britain's tourist hotspots on Bank Holiday Monday, but what else were we going to do today?
I hate the M4 so we opt for the A303 past Stonehenge, and four hours on we're a mile from the venue before we hit any real traffic. It's useful that we do, as we know we're in the right place. By venue, you see, I actually mean field. This is how the Guardian Guide supplement recommended this afternoon's events...
It's good to see some of Cornwall on the way down too. The county is beautiful on this bright but not blazing late summer's day, and disturbingly (but not unexpectedly) packed with really weird things. There is a Bee Centre, a Museum of Witchcraft, and a village called Broadwoodwidger. No, it's just the way he's standing, etc etc. Mind you, we all have a good laugh when BSP regular Kevo shows us where he's staying.
And no, this is not your average gig venue, festival, anything. It's more like a particularly demented church fete. The woefully inadequate catering (two not very with-it women who serve one bacon butty or baked potato approximately once every five minutes, causing an hour-long queue) means we sadly miss the donkey racing, although the gang who'd departed for Devon yesterday turn up in time to place a couple of bets. I do catch the Cornish wrestling though, which to be honest would be better described as pub car park brawling in big shirts, with a referee.
The crowd is one of the most bizarre ever. Alongside the 20 or so British Sea Power regulars and another 20 or so we identify as probable fans, there's a smattering of the local "alternative" teens in T-shirts from the Rakes to Green Day. There are a lot of families, presumably some local and some on holiday - lots of kids and lots of dogs. BSP regular Mark has entered into the spirit of things by bringing a family and a dog of his own - they're camping in the next field for a couple of nights, although now have no idea how they will ever get back to North Shields as their car breathed its last somewhere around the Devon border. There are lots of "literary types" here as expected; beards, sandals, upper middle class accents and expensive looking outerwear; we'd not really considered the potential windsweptness of a Cornish clifftop and are quite cold in our T-shirts depsite the hazy sun.There are plaenty of "grannies". And no small number of "celebrities", although by "celebrity" here we're talking Martin Clunes and The Archbishop Of Canterbury as opposed to people who used to be in reailty TV girl bands or whatever. By the time we have our food the brass band are playing "Bohemian Rhapsody" and John "Bergerac" Nettles is judging the childrens' arts contest. Sod Reading, Leeds, V, Get Loaded, you name it. You don't get a line-up like this every day.
I get a brief glimpse of Ralph McTell, although the tent is absolutely rammed. He's been playing for a good hour when the tent erupts into massive applause... yes, it's "Streets Of London". Poor bastard... we recall the 'Big Train' comedy sketch of a few years back, whereby every time the poor old sod struck a chord people shouted for his One Song, and he was forced to play it over and over, occasionally stammering that he had other songs... to little avail. (Mind you, recent reviews of latest flash-in-the-pan emo-popsters The "What's that coming over the hill is it a monster" Automatic would seem to imply that one known somg syndrome is not just confined to old folkies...) Sadly the intriguing sounding Poetry Boy Band cancelled, and claiming our seats early for BSP we're left with a pretty long wait - although this does afford some time to chat with the nice couple next to us who turn out to be from Macclesfield. They are surprised I've heard of the place, as they say nobody ever has, and more so still when I tell them I'm originally from there myself. Talk turns, of course, to Joy Division, and it turns out not only were this couple school friends of Ian and Deborah Curtis but that the wife now teaches the Morris/Gilbert children. Longterm Joy Division obsessive Kevo is sat just out of earshot at this point - shame... we also meet a friendly local fan called Trevor who has read the band's forum and is having fun putting faces to names. And he's a Chameleons fan too, so within seconds we are discussing a particularly obscure Peel session only track ("Things I Wish I'd Said") and he's asking why they split up again but I really don't have the time... but on the off-chance you've followed a link here off BSP forum Trevor, look in my blog archive, there's an entry on 10th April 2006 which explains it all as best I can...
I think this is the first time, in 115 British Sea Power gigs, that I have watched them from sitting down. Someone will possibly dispute this. It's a rather odd experience; children sitting on the floor in front of the rowns of seats, and a set of semi-acoustic obscurities, B-sides and their unique take on Betjeman's "Licorice Fields Of Pontefract" (in case we'd forgotten why we were here) which the possibly quite chemically enhanced Yan managed to make sound really quite filthy. He has several attacks of the giggles throughout the show and forgets loads of words. Meanwhile Hamilton's sweet and silly "Don't You Want To Be A Bird" is quite a big hit with the blue rinse contingent. It is really strange watching the band from a school assembly type wooden chair with little kids in face paints eating crisps on the floor in front of us, but also rather pleasant.
The evening entertainment consists of a charity gala dinner which some of our number are staying for (apparently it was rather dull, but the food was good) but we have a long, long way to go. Dreading miles of surfboard-heavy traffic jam we make a quick escape, and remarkably the roads are once again clear as they have been all weekend; we drop Yuko off in Exeter and I contemplate the fact that after a day's work and a flight I'll be back here, and make the remaining 200 plus miles home in cracking time.
When the new airport security measures were announced I'd considered this trip probably impossible, but a call to FlyBE says things are generally leaving on time so I'm off down the airport straight from work with as much stuff as I can stuff into last year's In the City delegates bag, which is idealy sized for the new restrictions. I knew it would come in handy one day. With four security staff per metal detector unit I actually spend less time getting though security than I have on many previous flights, but I'm still aware that it's too labour-intensive to be sustainable without a massive increase to airport running costs which will ultimately be passed on to customers, but for now I'm off to Exeter for about a tenner. Its city status is more to do with the rather enormous and impressive cathedralthan anything like a high level of civilisation, and it's a bit, well, dead. The venue's not open til half eight. I have come down from Manchester after work and I am... early!? there's not much town to walk round and I soon acquire Captain and Mrs Riot, and we had to the bar opposite where we're joined by Yuko and her friend and Mark and his eldest daughter; it's the smallest showing of regulars for some time.
It's a lovely little venue. Support comes from Brighton's Actress Hands (above) who play upbeat indie rock with a few odd twists - this is Cornet Phil's other band and he plays not only that but keyboards and backing vocals - a man of many talents!
The point of this tour is for British Sea Power to road-test new material in small, characterful venues away from the Academies - in bigger cities such as Manchester, London and Glasgow this pretty much guarantees that most of the audience will be pretty big fans who snapped up the tickets when the gigs were publicised on the band's website. There's been no national press advertising at all, but most of the dates have sold out. Exeter however probably doesn't actually have 200 British Sea Power fans - this presumption is effectively confirmed later on when the band play "Scottish Wildlife Experience" (a regular live favourite whose only actual release was on the B-side of a seven-inch about three years ago) and few of the crowd respond to it. Prior to it have been four new songs, two of which I havent even heard before.
It's a bold move but they're losing the crowd's interest. "Remember Me!" shouts one person. And then another. Noble politely explains that this is about the new songs, and a few people in the crowd look a bit pissed off. "Remember Me!" Yan is starting to look ruffled. And then from somewhere in the middle, a voice calls out "Streets Of London!" Cheers Trevor; I assume that's who it was... it does the trick anyway, Yan's smiling again, and soon they knock it out just to get it out of the way. Well yeah, you can see above that's where it was on the setlist anyway, but probably for this precise reason. (I mention to the lad stood next to me that they should just start with it and get it over with, which strangely is exactly what happens at the very next gig...)
It's a brilliant, raw set, and I honestly hope some of the crowd realise how privileged they were - there were five songs in the set which should they ever become singles or general favourites, Exeter fans will be able to say yeah, they played that here first. Two of these - listed as Plover 1 and Plover 2 - are instantly brilliant; the latter a kind of new-shoegaze/spacerock instrumental with shades of Ride about it. The club's open til god knows when; I wish I'd known that, I could have saved myself £26 on a Travelodge and just got a taxi to the airport, but as it is I decide to go and get some sleep sometime around half twelve, en route to which I have a fascinating if rather grim tour of Exeter's evidently quite upleasant history ("this is the road where the gallows used to be.... oh, when they were digging the foundations for these shops they found the bones of executed witches... ah, that's the prison there..." - cheers!) off a clearly extremely bored taxi driver. I collapse into my Travelodge bed about 1am, and set the alarm for half five.
This is how I got to work Wednesday morning. Not often you get to say that, is it?
6.45am and the plane should be taking off, but we're still sat at the gate, at which point I do start to question the wisdom of this particular excursion. There wasn't really a lot of slack in the schedule. I'm fidgeting. Switching between tour mode and real life is weird enough at the best of times, but on Wednesday I have a colossally important meeting at 10am with some very senior people - and I've only pre-booked an hour off anyway so I'm supposed to be in at 9.15. Eventually we board and take off, and the early morning mists over Wales and England are beautiful, but I'm in little state to appreciate them. The flight's an hour but feels like about seven. I'm first off, first out, no luggage, sprinting along the moving walkway to the station, on the train, off the train, another sprint across the university campus to my parking space behind the Spar, no time to go inside and dump my bag off, bloody hell, for someone used to setting off to work about half seven the traffic round Piccadilly isn't half hectic at this time, traffic lights, more traffic lights, Oldham Road... and relax. I clock in at 9.12. That was too close. The meeting is dull then adjourned then dull again, and by the time it's finished being dull I'm leaving sadly too late to make it to Liam Frost's HMV instore at half five, so it's a gig-free night on Wednesday. Not many more of them in the near future...
A lovely little warm-up then. The next instalment brings me closer to home, with the wonderful York Fibbers on Thursday and the first big gathering of regulars, this ridiculous sea-fort business on the Mersey Friday, a home fixture at the Roadhouse on Saturday which at the time of writing I am very much still recovering from, and if I'm not too exhausted there's a pub gig in Leicester on Monday. Right now I can't see me not going, but anything could happen between now and then... and no, I've no idea when I'll next post anything. Wednesday, maybe. I've a day to kill in Oxford, and they must have cybercafes down there what with all those students, mustn't they? This is the part of the tour where the wonderful iLiKETRAiNS come on board for a few dates as well, which is about as good as it gets.
That Pimms Bus already seems a really, really long time ago.
Mistys Big Adventure - http://www.mistysbigadventure.co.uk/
British Sea Power - http://www.britishseapower.co.uk
Badly Drawn Boy - http://www.badlydrawnboy.co.uk/
John Betjeman Official Centenary Events - http://www.johnbetjeman.com/
Carruan Field, Polzeath - http://www.carruan.co.uk/
Go to gigs in Exeter c/o FlyBE - http://www.flybe.com
£26 rooms if booked early at Travelodge - http://www.travelodge.co.uk/
Exeter Cavern - http://www.cavernclub.co.uk/
Actress Hands - http://www.myspace.com/actresshands
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