Slow Burn Winter Tour part 1: And I haven't even left Auckland yet

For the duration of the NZ album release tour, I'm doing a sort of a tour blog for New Zealand Musician over on their site here - here's the first post from that series:

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There's probably a lot of reasons why you might go on tour if you're a musician.  Undoubtedly some people do it for fun, and I'm sure there are people who find the money attractive.  There are all sorts of promotional benefits and so on also, but the main reason I go on tour is so that I have stuff to write about on my blog.  I'm not sure what it is about touring, but for some reason things just seem to happen more when you're charging around different parts of the world trying to play shows. Maybe it's the momentum; when things happen on tour they happen harder because you're moving faster than you normally would.  They also usually turn out to be funnier, these things that happen, I suppose because most things are funny with hindsight and when you're touring you move around a lot, so everything is hindsight.

I haven't left Auckland yet - that's going to happen at an ungodly hour tomorrow morning, by bus, of which no doubt more later - but already things are happening on this tour.  I should make it clear here that when I say 'happening' I tend to mean 'going wrong,' often with reportable consequences.  The main thing that's happened so far - and obviously, given that the tour hasn't properly started yet, it's early days - is that when I sent an email to the crew at the Wunderbar after this last round of aftershocks to say 'hope you guys are all sweet and stuff and also are you still, you know, open?' Debs replied pretty smartly saying essentially no, they aren't still open, because these plate tectonics just won't quit and this last hit has knocked them back into February.  I cannot imagine what that must feel like for them.

The Wunderbar is hands down my favourite venue in the South Island. I was pretty excited when they re-opened after the last quake, I knew it was a big deal for Lyttelton to have iconic venues popping back up.  I was even more excited when I found out that they had a free Saturday right when the Slow Burn Winter Tour featuring Rosy Tin Teacaddy and Bond Street Bridge Bringing Their New Albums To Life For The People Of New Zealand was planning to be in the neighbourhood, so of course I booked a show there. With the Wunderbar now closed for the duration, we now find ourselves casting around for a new venue.  This is ten days out from the show, in a town where most places have already shut up shop.

I've found over the past few years that if I ever have any kind of Christchurch-related touring problem, I adopt one and only one problem-solving strategy.  I continue to resort to this strategy because it is very simple, and it works every time.  The strategy is this:  When something goes wrong, get in touch with The Eastern, tell them your problem, and they will solve it.  Have you accidentally double-booked yourself with The Feelers in the front bar of some horrendous meat-market downtown?  Call the Eastern, tell them your problem, and they will take you down the road to the Media Club where there is an audience of nice people who actually want to hear music.  Have you written off your car at the Sockburn roundabout, seven hours out from a show in Oamaru that is looking less and less likely to happen now as you sit on the side of the road nursing whiplash and surrounded by cracked guitar cases?  Call the Eastern, and they will arrive at the roadside, wait with you for the towtruck, then lend you their van for the rest of your tour.  Has the venue you were going to play at been stickered off the road?  You know what to do.

So at press time,  Adam McGrath is stomping around Lyttelton trying to find a venue for the show next weekend, and I must say I like his chances.  I'm pretty confident that if a venue is to be found in that town, he's the guy to find it, and a fine venue it will be as well.  For now, though, we have a bit of anticipation and tension happening, which I think is healthy.

Once I heard from Adam that he was on the case, I started to relax a bit.  Then my phone beeped, and it turned out that Mr Nigel Wright, who is supposed to be adding his layers of sonic wizardry to the Bond Street shows in Wellington this weekend, is in line to get his flight down there pretty severely delayed or even canceled by this apocalyptic airplane-eating ash cloud we seem to be having on top of everything else.  It may even turn out that he can't play one of the shows, which is very sad because he makes everything sound awesome and St Peter's Hall at Paekakariki would have worked a treat.  I'm not too worried though - I called Adam again and he's having a word to the volcano, so it should all be sweet.

Spring Summer Awesome Winter Cover Art

One day soon I'm going to release a new album, the second long player from this thing I call Bond Street Bridge. That day will be the 20th of June 2011, which is why I said 'soon.' I've been working on it on and off for a quite a while, in between things like sleeping in, feeding the cat, and cleaning out the fishtank, which keep me quite busy. It's going to be nice to have it out in the world, or at least out of the house.

The album, as I may have mentioned before, is called Spring Summer Awesome Winter.  If I told you in the past that it was going to be called something else, it's only because I tend to just say things out loud as they occur to me and often they turn out to not be correct.  Fortunately things don't occur to me that often, or I would talk even more than I do, and I don't think we need that.  Anyway, I think you'll agree that Spring Summer Awesome Winter is a better name than whatever I might have said before - the only problem was trying to think of something to put in the press release about why it's called that, because people will ask.  I can't remember what I said on that front, but the real reason is that it sounds cool.  The rest is just hype.

Making albums.  Really the best thing about making albums is that you get cover art, and if you need cover art the best person to go to is Ms. Millicent Crow.  She's supposed to be writing a thesis at the moment, which you will probably be aware is reasonably time-consuming, but we have invented a machine that makes a couple more hours in the day. (We called them 12a and 12b o'clock, in case you were wondering.  The best thing about these extra hours is that phone never rings during them, and the only other people on the internet seem to be experimental physicists).  We use one of those hours for general relaxing, and the other one is for things like making awesome cover art for albums.  Here's what Ms. Crow came up with for this one, using watercolours, ink and gouache:

This is the front cover. The red leaf has a halo because of how awesome it is. 

This is the inside, the bit you see when you open it up. Each picture illustrates something from one of the songs, so for example one song has a line about a cigarette lighter, and one has a line about a feather and so on and so on.  Incidentally, not many of the songs make a lot of sense now that I come to listen to them, but that will probably not come as a massive surprise to regular readers of this blog. People sometimes ask whether, given that the songs don't make a lot of sense in themselves, perhaps the things like feathers and cigarette lighters and so on might be metaphors for other things?  Possibly more sort of significant things, like beauty or truth or the nature of love?  The answer is no, they usually aren't.  They're only in there because they sound cool.  The rest is just hype.

This is the inside of the booklet that you pull out and have a look at while you're standing at the merch table in a dimly-lit bar after a show, trying to figure out whether I will shut the hell up and stop talking at you if you just give me the twenty bucks for the album, or whether that would only encourage me.  The answer is almost certainly the latter, but you should buy it anyway because of the awesome cover art.

 

This here is the back of the album (on the left) and the bit that goes under the tray that the cd sits in (on the right).  Now would be good time to reflect on how good the layouts are, which I think is this: pretty good. And I would say that, because I did them.  I don't think they're necessarily so good that you'd be surprised that I did them, but I also think that they're just about good enough that you'd wonder whether maybe I did about half a semester of design school part-time at one stage and then realised that it was too much work and dropped out. Which is pretty good, cos I didn't even. Look, there's even crop marks and a 3mm bleed and stuff, cripes.  If you pay me, I will do the layouts for your next record.  You will probably not even need to pay me very much; for somebody who has spent such an inordinately long time getting educated it is amazing how little I will work for.

Big World

My friend Tim Guy has just finished a new video.  It's really good, and you'll probably like it; I know I do.   He shot the video, I'm pretty sure he said, while he was on tour around New Zealand in the summertime. If you've ever been on tour around New Zealand in the summertime I urge you to have a look at it - you'll recognise a lot of the places you drove hundreds of ks on windy roads to play shows at.  There's that sweet gig you can do at Milford Sound where they take you out on their boat in the morning, and then on the way home you can listen to Kashmir the way it was meant to be heard - in a van full of amplifiers driving through the Homer Tunnel, which looks very much like it was hewn by Dwarves with two-handed axes.  There's the pass at the top of the Cardrona road, which isn't the quickest route to Queenstown, but if you have to play there you might as well go the pretty way.  There's someone's house near Invercargill or somewhere with a cat and a dog, where you had a ridiculous party after a show where the drummer in the support band was probably dressed like a pirate and you woke up on the couch. Then there's the Wellington motorway just before you get to the ferry to play what is often the most hilarious set of the tour: 10 a.m in a fake Irish bar on a half-empty boat crossing one of the most notoriously choppy stretches of water in the Southern Hemisphere.

I like this video it because I've been on tour with Tim, and being on tour with Tim was pretty special. He didn't do any of the driving - I can't remember why - but it was cool with me because I like to drive.  He would be in the back of the car, often keeping quiet, and he shot videos on his camera.  Sometimes I'd sneak a look at them and there was something about each of them that made them better that the videos that people often shoot on their cameras from the backs of cars, like he would have noticed the way all of the windmills were turning at the same speed as they came over the horizon, or he'd be mumbling something hilarious and barely audible into the mic.   When we were in Paris we walked for a couple of hours from where we were staying at the confluence of the Marne and the Seine, along the banks of the river and all the way into the city.  I can't remember what we talked about but we talked the whole way, and when we got into the city we found just about the most expensive bar they had and got tall glasses of beer for around ten euros each.

In Berlin we stayed with my friends in a room with white walls and concrete everything, on the ground floor of a building that seemed pretty old.  It was a good room with a big oak table and mostly we just sat around listening to the way our guitars sounded in the room.  In Hamburg the show was just off the the Reeperbahn and Tim was looking for the ghosts of where the Beatles put in their ten thousand hours or whatever it was, but all we found were packs of Englishmen with loud voices and lots of hookers who frankly terrified me.  In the countryside outside of Stuttgart we spent some nights in a barn made of stone in a compound on an old vineyard, and everything was solar-powered because the people who lived there were photovoltag engineers at the solar plant down the road.  Power was supplied by a complex web of cables connected to a bank of batteries hooked up to solar panels in various stages of brokenness, and the lightswitch in the room where we slept was nowhere to be found as far as we could tell. We didn't want to bother anyone at night and during the day we would forget to ask about it, so we slept two nights with the fluorescents on.

The whole time, I listened to Tim play his songs most nights and sometimes we'd do some songs together because his songs are a lot of fun to play on.  A lot of people's songs you'd get sick of after hearing them night after night, but Tim's just grew on me.  When he came through Auckland a month or so ago it was a good feeling to sit down and play some of his songs together, and I got that feeling again when I saw his video just now.  Go on, have a look: