On Tour (Part 1)

Tour Diary — Another Sky — U.K, 2019

01/02/19 — The Waterfront Studio — Norwich, England

Jack salutes a magpie as we drive out of London. At the nearest petrol station, a newspaper holds a headline about the coldest day for seven years, showing pictures of Americans throwing boiling water in the air, watching it turn to ice in seconds. We’ll be there in a month.

There’s a road sign for a prison as if it’s an amusement park. We drive past a missing person’s sign for a man in his young twenties as Dead Boys plays. A power line resurrects itself in the distance.

This backdrop of rusting agriculture doesn’t quite match the atmosphere forming in the van. The air is a different colour inside, it’s as if we’ve stolen the sun and it’s too intense. It’s our first headline tour and our bags are on our laps, the backdoors won’t shut properly and the van could spill its entrails onto the motorway at any second, its charcoal smoke billowing from the back.

Our first observation of Norwich is that ‘people queue for the bus!’. It looks like every British town or city ignored because it’s not the capital; stagecoaches from the 80s/90s, coalesced poundlands and a lot of radical grey concrete, echoing lost notions of ‘streets in the sky’.

In the dressing room, the boys are talking about being hit in the elbows at school or having their ankles trodden on. Ten minutes before the gig, Max removes a ‘dog tag’ from his necklace. I ask him what that is. It’s a metal plate army people wear to be able to identify them in case they die.

One of our support acts has synesthesia and tells us what colours our songs are. Brave Face is orange, All Ends is blue. I feel like I can see colours in the fog on the way home too, apparating over the van like spirits.

02/02/19 — The Fulford Arms — York, England

I was really sick in the night, so I’m in the bath at 6am listening to Brian Eno - Music For Airports. This air B and B is not unlike an airport. It’s also a passing place dressed up as a home. The floor twists and turns like Alice in Wonderland and there are black flies trying to escape through the bathroom window. I open it for them, but they won’t fly out.

York tonight. My sister comes to the show. It’s hard to make out her face. Drunk on adrenaline, we sell a lot of vinyl and a woman tells me her kid is learning Chillers on drums. Naomi says she’s so happy she could cry.

3/02/19 — The Mashhouse — Edinburgh, Scotland

We wake up to chickens and horses. We’ve stayed on a farm somewhere between York and Edinburgh. I think about how snow arrives in February now. The adrenaline is taking its toll on my stomach, but that’ll settle down after a few gigs.

I want to write about the U.K as if I’ve come here for the first time, but everywhere looks like everywhere else. It does on the motorway, at least. We stop at a service station opposite a creepy abandoned Little Chef.

At the venue, Grouper serenades us over the P.A. I like Scotland.

04/02/19 — SWG3 Poetry Club — Glasgow, Scotland

We drive to Glasgow, unloading at The Poetry Club. The stage is so small we barter to get the P.A on the ground, but there is something incredibly iconic and sacred about this venue.

Our crowds all look the same. Subdued and mournful, unsure of us but interested enough to come. People are starting to quietly mouth the words.

My friend and incredible writer/poet Naomi Morris comes to the show. We talk for ages about art and the Tories and how difficult it’s been to find jobs. Fittingly, I slip her a free T-shirt with my melting face on.

The filmmaker, musician and poet Sean Lìonadh tells us he loves our band and he and his friend often randomly sing the word “legs” from Avalanche as a joke, like we do! Naomi tells me he’s the guy who made the really moving short film for the BBC we watched recently. It feels strange to know we are remote fans of each other, viewing each other’s work without ever knowing the other is doing so. Synchronicity.

It feels weird to know other people are in on the “legs” joke, too.

06/02/19 — McHugh’s Bar — Belfast, Ireland

There’s increased traffic control at the entrance to the airport, which is anxiety-inducing. It’s the day of the Stansted 15 sentencing.

On the plane, I listen to Kikagaku Moyo. I’ve been told Ireland is very green and looking out the window, I don’t know if I’m thinking it now just because I’ve been told it.

Up here, I can see the roads that connect villages, and the way traffic ebbs and flows like a centipede’s body. I can see the way clouds flatten at the top as if hitting an invisible ceiling until eventually, they bubble into popcorn. Glassy lakes look like shards of a broken mirror that have laid there for centuries, well-rounded now, eroded by time.

McHugh’s bar is the oldest pub in Ireland and it’s a labyrinth, a maze of hidden rooms and meandering stairwells. My microphone tastes of alkaline and sweat.

07/02/19 — Whelan’s —Dublin, Ireland

I wake up to the relieving news that the Stansted 15 walked free and a horrible itch in my throat. My cold is turning into a cough, a death sentence for singing.

Everyone else drives to swim in the Irish sea. It’s so cold, Jack tells me later he stopped breathing.

We have a show tonight at Whelan’s. Past gig posters litter the walls; Sparklehorse, Kurt Vile, Grimes, even Jeff Buckley played here twenty years ago. I feel the strongest sense of imposter syndrome I’ve ever felt.

A fan tries to take a photo with us and accidentally opens up to a picture of him in his boxers. He apologises and says he’s trying to lose weight. That kind of stuff always happens to me, so I laugh.

08/02/19 — Still Ireland, day off

We all lay on memory foam bean-bags at Dublin’s Science and Art gallery watching two music videos on repeat by The Blaze. They’re really good — Territory is my favourite. The scene where the family all sleep in one room hits me the hardest, and how he sits next to his family on a prayer mat, not praying with them. Him hugging his mother, dancing on rooftops, crying openly. Max points out the director’s attention to detail with the woman in a green dress standing above ivy.

11/02/19 — YES — Manchester, England

I wake up at 4am feeling like I am on fire. We have slept in what seems to be an old GP’s office converted into an air B and B. Manchester’s show is sold out though, so it needs to go ahead.

I try and lift my spirits for the gang but it’s really hard. I’m sat on the bottom floor of the bar thinking about everyone at home. Maybe they’re hanging out tonight, a lot of them say they’re working too much and they’re stressed. I think about my flatmates making food together and feel my body suffuse with a horrible dull ache.

As I stand up to go on stage, my head is engulfed by a hanging ivy plant. It weirdly makes me feel better. It’s so easy to disconnect from nature on tour, always in a van looking out at what looks like plastic model trees. If you never stand in the fields you’re driving through, you start to think they’re not real.

I’m really glad I held out for this gig — the crowd are teething with excitement and they’re singing the lyrics back to us. I say ‘wow’ into the microphone and tell them it’s the first time it has happened. They’re so loud, the band can’t hear me singing. I’m really glad we didn’t cancel this gig.

A friend from school says hello even though I’m hiding behind the sound-desk. I didn’t even know he’d moved to Manchester. I remember thinking he would end up in a band one day, one of those cool boys who’d spend hours on the guitar after school. I think about why I never imagined it for myself, always transferring my own dreams and ideals onto boys I admired instead.

13/02/19 —The Hare And Hounds—Birmingham, England

I have a chest infection. People are telling me I risk vocal damage. I’m coerced to go and see a laryngologist with my last bit of savings. I think of the futility of art as I realise you can’t strike your own health.

I’ve never been to a private hospital before. It’s evening, and I’m standing in front of the ugliest thing I’ve ever seen; a victorian, pristinely painted egg-white manor house, and for the first time I understand the concept of burning a building down by entering another one without even touching fire.

I’m offered tea and coffee. I look at the receptionist in disbelief. There are elderly couples arguing about lazy Thursday afternoons, “cricket or crochet?”, men living out of business suits discussing giving up their PHD because they couldn’t live off their student loans and people who, like me, sit in silence.

I grew up thinking healthcare was a human right and that England was good and fair, a first world country as all my primary school teachers bragged. But England is a country that, like the rest of the world, was never fair, that was always just an intricate art gallery of smoke and mirrors. If you tapped on the glass or took a picture with flash, you’d easily see through the thin veils and ruin the facades of freedom. So people simply stopped taking pictures and stopped tapping.

The last time I was in a hospital, I sat next to a girl who looked very, very sick. She was throwing up blood into a cardboard saucer and waited for an hour to be wheeled back out again cradling another kind of red bile, the words ‘no doctors are available today’.

I worry that my hospital might be burning a hundred and forty miles away as a result of my actions. This doctor looks me up and down disapprovingly when I answer his question,

‘Why did it take nine months to get treatment there?’.

‘Nine months is better than nothing’.

Silence.

He thinks because I’m in front of him, I can afford it. He thinks his words are reassuring. He doesn’t know that I’m using the last of my savings meant for if I can’t make rent for one month. He thinks this isn’t my first time. I talk like him. I’m from the same kind of place he’s from, so he thinks I’m like him.

Everyone watched me walk in and wondered, ‘cricket or crochet?’. He thinks I’m safe to laugh about the NHS with. He examines me, then says something about my vocal cords being like a guitar string that could break at any second, even while healthy, then discharges me as he writes a bill, his handwriting looping just like our primary school teachers taught us.

I race back to the gig and manage to catch the end of one of my favourite artists, Imogen, who I personally requested to support us. She’s sublime. When we perform, there is another man in his fifties standing alone at the front.

His mouth is opening and closing like a goldfish. For a minute, I see the doctor’s guttural words come out until I realise he’s shouting the words to Apple Tree, a song about a childhood friend of mine who got bullied for speaking to daffodils, I guess because it was considered too ‘effeminate’. A middle-aged man is shouting the lyrics of a twenty-four-year-old woman. I tell myself to hang onto the small victories. I tell myself this is better than a business suit.

I remind myself it’s a lesson in not treating people as a monolith of their demographic.

14/02/19 — Still Birmingham, day off

The streets of Birmingham are faded old friends, welcoming me with a brief handshake and a frown. I remember vague parts but neither me nor the city are sure we ever knew each other.

We’re go-karting today. All the warning signs inform us they’re not responsible if we die. Christy is in his element, Max is smashing into everything that moves and Naomi and Jack are neck and neck. I tentatively press the accelerator.

We have to give ourselves character names. A dude with a very bored girlfriend called ‘The Stig’ wins every time. The flagman calls out “and in last place, The Destroyer”. I loudly cheer for myself, much to everyone’s amusement. I think it’s important to celebrate failure.

15/02/19 — Rock City Basement — Nottingham, England

Nottingham is a city of hill-starts and spiralling staircases on the back of houses. I’m not allowed to talk anymore and have to be on voice rest. A BBC interviewer, Dean, is the first person I’ve met proud of where they live in England, and I can see why. He tells us lace was invented here, and Boots, so women outnumbered men six to one for a while. I think to myself about how little women I’ve seen employed in music on this tour. He tells us to visit ye olde trip to Jerusalem — the oldest pub in England built into a cave under the castle.

So we end up there. Naomi tells us about a dream where every room she entered looked like a church and I try and picture an England of churches, but I end up picturing the private hospital and feel sick and sad again.

We arrive at Rock City to learn that Buckcherry is playing upstairs, the guy who wrote, “hey, you’re a crazy bitch, but you fuck so good I’m on top of it”. We’ve been playing the song ironically in the van, so this is a massive coincidence (or…fate?). Their fans flood through the door. Someone messages us after the show to say they just came down from Buckcherry for a drink but ended up staying in our gig instead. I wonder which song sold us to them (“LEGS”).

24/02/19 —Strings — Isle Of Wight, England

Isle of Wight today. Max points out an Estonian flag and Jack tells us each day, the flag changes to a different country. I quietly find this beautiful. I’m still on voice rest, so I’m listening to everything intently. I actually prefer it this way.

We meet Jack’s parents and head for Sandown beach. I watch everyone throw stones into the sea and think of Jack as his larger-than-life eighteen-year-old self, running into the ocean at four in the morning, longboarding and building bonfires.

I wish I had grown up with beaches. I try to learn to skip stones.

25/02/19 —The Heartbreakers—Southampton, England

We find out Mark Hollis is dead while eating in Nando’s, courtesy of our second-hand black card, so the irony of performing at ‘The Heartbreakers’ feels very real.

The venue is cold, like all the other venues, which are beginning to blur into one. There are five black flies swimming above the school-like battons of lights which have been sharpied red.

Flovwers support us tonight. They saw us supporting Laurel back in November in Portsmouth and it’s great to see them again.

We play Laughing Stock on the P.A in the changeover before our set. On the way home, driving through the pitch black, I listen to The Colour Of Spring, but there are no spirits apparating over the van tonight.

26/02/19 — Komedia — Brighton, England

I got to sleep at four am. Naomi hasn’t slept well in three days. We conk out in the van after we remind ourselves the worst thing you can do about insomnia is panic.

I wake up just as we drive past Brighton pier. This is my favourite city in the U.K. The sea is ardently teeming with salt and life and people are populating the rock beach, soaking up the rare sun. It feels like spring but it shouldn’t just yet.

One of my favourite bands are supporting us tonight, Leyendekker, and I manage to hear my favourite song ‘Thankless’ before I have to go upstairs to curb a coughing fit. Their dampened music still serenades me through the ceiling, as if I’m underwater, which feels like exactly where I’ve been throughout this entire tour.

I cough through this gig so much our managers decide to cancel Cambridge tomorrow to save my voice for our London headline show.

(photo by Alice Levigne)

28/02/19 — Rich Mix — London, England

The crowd swells as if it’s one creature, people joining in with one another’s excitement — they seem to have some kind of knowledge the show will go okay. I really hope it does.

“It’s so full!” we exclaim. This makes me more nervous. I tell myself it’s okay to fail. I can’t help having a chest infection. It sucks that I’m about to fail, but failure in life is inevitable. It sucks that it’s our headline show, but there is literally nothing I can do.

I am showered by both the crowd’s adrenaline and my own. I’m so fucking happy. I don’t cough once. The crowd shouts Chillers back to us louder than I sing it.

Annie Mac puts us on her gram. Our manager Theo tells us that someone at the back’s boyfriend tugged on their sleeve, asking her to leave, and she said, “no, they haven’t played it yet”. She was talking about Avalanche.

02/03/19 — Home

I wake up exhausted. My housemate Daisy blasts The Japanese House through my floorboards and I realise how much I’ve missed her. Life on tour feels like constantly staying afloat at sea and losing sight of islands, but friends drift in and out like passing vessels.

I‘ve made it through.