from the mundane to the mundane and back again

Hamburg, Germany
I’m a douchebag. When we first started touring (which doesn’t seem so long ago) it was a really big deal to make a collect call home, now I get bent out of shape when the Internet connection is slow at a club. In the dressing room at Grosse Freiheit and Garrett is playing around on his phone, I think he has an app called “sounds to annoy the shit out of Tim”, a collection of honks and beeps an whistles that is not constant, there is just enough time between them to think “maybe that’s the last one……..No, shit!” We play in Germany around the end of the year quite a lot and for years I kept seeing posters for big “Silvester parties”. At first I thought they were big disco parties named (and incorrectly spelled) after gay disco icon Sylvester, (his big song “you make me feel (mighty real)” ). And I was amazed at the bits of American culture that the Germans latched onto, like the almost national obsession with the tv show Married With Children in the nineties. Then I found out that “Silvester parties” we’re just new years eve parties. D’oh.

The lighting desk at Grosse Freiheit.

Glasgow, Scotland
After a 30+ hour drive from Karlsruhe Germany we are here, and it’s thanksgiving. I don’t think they use turkeys for food over here. I was told that most turkeys are used to pull milk carts and coal wagons. So I guess it’ll be Indian food, which is alright with me. A highlight of the tour so far is finding the Alan Partridge autobiography. Fun fact: Glasgow provides the rest of the British Isles with grime.

Berlin, Germany
Had a nice day off in Berlin yesterday. Went to the C/O Berlin photography museum, it’s a cool place located in an old post office. The exhibit was about terrorism, it was solidly depressing. All the usual suspects (so to speak) were there : 1972 Olympics, check. Patty Hearst, check. Horrifying South American political unrest, check. 9/11, check. Just when I thought it couldn’t get any grimmer, the last room had a bunch of candid shots of terror victims. Game,set,match. Then I went to the Ramones museum as a sort of mental palette cleaner, it was great. Today we’re at Huxley’s an old giant cavernous room that we’ve played before. The show that stands out the most was when we played with Union Carbide Productions (1995?). They weren’t going over that well and their singer Ebbot, who at the time looked like sandbox era Brian Wilson, stripped down to his union jack briefs and dragged a giant biker type heckler from the crowd and preceded to dry hump him over one of the front monitors. It won over the jaded Berlin crowd, huzzah!