Have spent most of this week in bed riding the waves of Swedish Flu. Hazy orange head-flames followed by violet shivers and back again. Charley and Rachel also have it, and so do Niklas and Ylva from Friday Bridge. Get well soon, everyone.
The GP prescribed a temporary inhaler to help me breathe more easily at night. Always thought I’d be given one of those at some point in life, given my tendency to come down with things. My first little L-shaped plastic blue puffing device. Except I have to attach it to this big oval plastic funnel called a – wince – Volumatic. With a little ‘TM’ after the name, as if it were a character from Transformers. Other than that, it’s the usual routine: paracetemol, Vit C, staying in bed, keeping away from others. I’m all too experienced in those last two, but at least I have an alibi. I’d prefer to be fit and well. Honest.
***
In the post office yesterday: man in front of me filling out a form to claim half-price bus fares with Income Support. He is wearing stripey leggings, a velvet jacket, and a floppy hat with a cardboard-cut out photo of the singer Grace Jones stuck in the brim.
***
Let’s get that second half of the tour set down before it fades any more.
FRIDAY – LUND
8.45AM. Breakfast in the Karlstad hotel with a queasy hangover, trying to work out which milk cartons are which. Rachel and Charley read my previous diary entry and point out that (a) they DO like both of the new songs we recorded yesterday, they just have different favourites, and (b) the observation about the Back To The Future-like square outside was Charley’s. ‘Credit where credit’s due’ – one of this tour’s Mike Leigh-ish catchphrases. Others are ‘Don’t stand on ceremony’, and ‘I like fun, I don’t know about you.’
10AM. As is the way in most Swedish hotels, the lift doors open outwards onto the floor in question and must be pushed or pulled by hand. I’m in the lift with my suitcase and am about to push the door as it arrives at the lobby, when I see it’s obstructed by an ambulance stretcher. An elderly woman is tucked in the blankets, moaning in pain as paramedics busy around her. Had I shoved the lift door open without looking first, I might have well have knocked both stretcher and patient onto the floor. In which case the rest of the day would have been immediately upstaged.
12 noon or so. Another close call. We stop outside the record label’s distributor in an industrial estate on the outskirts of Gothenburg. Rachel is tying her shoelaces when a huge chunk of ice plummets from the top of the warehouse roof and hits the ground with an almighty bang. It misses her by a few feet.
The ice is melting conspicuously everywhere we go now. Were this a novel, bored GCSE students would be forced to comment on what it all means. ‘At this point, do you think the author is using the melting ice to reflect what’s going on in the protagonist’s personality? Is it just a normal description of the weather, or is there something more going on…?’
‘No, sir. It’s just a normal description of the weather…’
(This was how I used to play cheeky games with my English teacher, deliberately answering his ‘Is it… Or…’ questions with the duller option, knowing full well such ‘questions’ were just gentle nudges along the right lines. It’s like blurbs on the back of books along the lines of ‘Will Harry Potter Save The Day? Answer: Yes. Yes, he will.)
At a service station, there’s a steady dripping along one side of the pumps’ canopy, but not the other. Asks Charley, ‘Why is it only raining on the left?’ Symbolism for a more politically-based novel, perhaps.
2PM. The van stops for lunch. We haven’t the time to venture into city centres, and the only eatery that presents itself is a branch of McDonalds attached to the back of an Ikea-type furniture superstore. Thankfully, Rachel (who once supported the McLibel protest) finds a near-empty Twinings-like tea shop among the other outlets, and it does mozzarella rolls.
Evening: finally reach Lund after spending the best part of the day in the van. The venue turns out to be the same one Fosca played in 2002, with the same sound engineer. It’s the student union building, on the local campus. All I can remember about that previous gig is that our accommodation consisted of ancient bunk beds in the one room in the basement, with a loud late-night indie club next door keeping us awake.
This time – thank heavens – we have the plushest hotel of the tour: Hotel Lundia in the centre of town. My room turns out to have a faulty radiator, and I am upgraded to a slightly plusher one down the corridor. I compare notes afterwards with my bandmates; for me, the highlight of my upgrade is a free pen. Everyone else thinks this is funny. Still, it IS an elegant rollerball in black and silver, as opposed to the more flimsy printed Biros offered by the other establishments. Definitely the best hotel pen on the tour.
Pause for…
MR DICKON’S ALL-DANCING HOTEL PEN REVIEW
Stockholm: Crystal Plaza.
Retractable ballpoint in see-through green perspex with twist mechanism. Hotel name and logo in white. Pretty, but clip breaks off too easily. 3/5
Gothenburg: Spar Hotel.
Another twist-operated ballpoint, this time in ugly opaque white with black lettering and red logo. Sturdy clip, but loses marks for wilful cheapness of design. Too Travelodgey. 2/5
Lund: Hotel Lundia.
See above. A serious player in the field of hotel ballpoints. Even makes a more expensive-sounding clunk when dropped on a desk. Pop-out retractable action, fat rubber grip along neck, lettering in confident and stylish silver on black. The kind of hotel pen you can take home to meet your mother. 5/5
Karlsberg: Savoy (Best Western)
No pen in room. Forgot to ask at reception. I just can’t follow any idea through properly, can I? Nice bath, though.
Back to Lund, where our dressing room is the infamous bunk bed basement of six years ago. The walls include not one, but two Secret Shine posters. As in the Sarah Records band, one of whom I once shared a Bristol house with. They’re back, it seems. Who isn’t?
Gig goes okay – lots of drunken students. A few books signed. More people than Karlstad, not as many as Stockholm. Sound quality better than Stockholm, not as good as Karlstad. But enough people to hear the lyrics being sung along with. Always nice, that.
***
SATURDAY – GOTHENBURG
Hungover once again, plus have developed a sore throat and slight cough (which develops into flu once I’m back in London). We have to make a diversion to a chemist’s purely to pick up Strepsils – in Sweden cough sweets are considered too pharmaceutical for corner shops and convenience stores.
Music in the van includes Kylie Minogue’s latest album, and Nico, who insists on being dead but – as is the wont of record labels – always manages to put out new releases. It’s the most recent Marble Index / Desertshore re-issue, with requisite lovely repackaging and booklet. Perfect for sleepily soundtracking Swedish motorway vistas.
Gothenburg’s local Metro newspaper has a little photo of me on the cover, plus a small interview inside. In the afternoon, we play an acoustic set in the Blenda record shop in town, and sign a few CDs and books afterwards. Not exactly JK Rowling-style queues around the block, but enough to make it worthwhile. I like signing things. It’s fun. (‘I like fun, I don’t know about you.’)
Acoustic set includes world premiere of ‘My Diogenes Heart’. Then I’m interviewed in the record shop office (many thanks to the Blenda staff, by the way). Surrounded by tottering boxes of other people’s records and CDs, I talk about just why I’ve deigned to foist another record on a saturated market. Why bother? What’s the point? And so on. I wave my fingers dramatically around the stockroom and say things like, ‘All these records, and not one of them contains a song called It Only Matters To Those To Whom It Matters! Someone has to do it. Might as well be us…’
Driving up to the venue in town, a boy with a huge Goth – or possibly Emo – backcombed hairdo crosses the road in front of us. His fringe is stretched so far over his eyes, I doubt he can see where he’s going. The suspicion is confirmed – he bumps straight into a building, missing the door he was aiming for.
We’d been singing songs from ‘Cabaret’ on the way, and I find myself altering the words to ‘Mein Herr’:
Bye bye my Emo hair
Farewell my Emo hair
It was a fine affair
But now it’s longer
It’s really hard to dance
To My Chemical Romance
You’re better off without
Emo hair
Maybe I should send it to Half Man Half Biscuit.
(Fave HMHB lyric in my head right now:
‘There is nothing greater in life / Than writing on the sole of a slipper with a biro.’
HMHB on Proustian joy via morphic resonance. I wonder if they still make those biro-baiting slippers?)
Charley’s favourite showtune is ‘People Will Say We’re In Love’ from Oklahoma.
Venue is called Stars ‘N’ Bars: a touristy sports bar by day, an indiepop venue by night. A larger than actual size fibreglass statue of Michael Jordan (I’ve asked) is in one corner, complete with basketball, while little sculptured figurines of the Blues Brothers flank the exit. You can never have too many figurines of the Blues Brothers flanking your exit, I find.
We soundcheck alongside some football match on a screen (Man U v oh, as if I’d remember… oh Rachel says it’s Aston Villa – score 4-0 she says). As we pack away, I notice the clientele has changed entirely. Gone are the white baseball caps and lone men on barstools of a certain glower. In their place are smiling girls and boys with nice coats and button badges. It’s a venue with a less butch life outside hours, like a weekend transvestite.
Except when we take to the stage, they’re anything but less butch. It’s our biggest crowd on the tour, the venue is packed, there’s more than one incident of stage diving, and it all ends in a full-on stage invasion. People are jumping all around us. My main thoughts are less ‘isn’t this an incredible response’, and more ‘I hope no one gets hurt and nothing gets broken.’ I’m all for stage invasions, they just have to be, as the Alan Partridge line goes, properly policed. No pint glasses of water near open power sockets, as there were here. No chance of anything being unplugged. Towards the end of our second encore (!), the drum track from ‘The Millionaire Of Your Own Hair’ disappears entirely. Presumably someone has tripped on a cable and pulled it out. So we finish doing a drum-less version, and retire from the proceedings dazed, but pleased. No one was hurt, nothing was broken.
Throughout the show, the crowd sing along with all the words, and even sing along with the lead synth and guitar lines. It’s a truly incredible response, and the best received gig I think I’ve ever played. Thank you, Gothenburg.
***
SUNDAY – RETURN HOME
Clocks have gone forward, plus we didn’t get back till about 5AM. I sleep through my alarm to noon, missing breakfast entirely. I’d like to say the seven hours of sleep leave me feeling fully refreshed, but not a bit of it. I’m typing this at Gothenburg Airport feeling like I’d been in a wrestling match with several large and slippery mammals. When does ‘feeling okay’ start? No wonder so many proper bands are ripped to the gills on amphetamines and sundry other narcotics – you do need something. Of course, later I realise this is the beginning of flu on top of a hangover.
Stansted – long taxi ride home where driver insists on using Sat Nav to get directions. Never a good sign. End up stuck in traffic throughout bits of North London.
Then: fall into fluey haze for five days.
So with all the flu and expense, with all the feeling like tired husks in vans and taxis and planes, with the lack of financial reward, was it worth it?
I look at my mental ‘Reasons Against Bothering’ column. Then at the ‘Reasons For’ side. Between the cheers of the audiences – particularly at Gothenburg and Stockholm – and the nice hotels (thank god!), the nice hotel pens, the comfort and the general looking-after provided by Niklas, Salle, Mats, Ylva and the promoters (Mattias, Gustav et al), Fosca felt loved.
I like feeling loved. I don’t know about you.
