Melbourne and area Oct 14 - 17

tall objects in a Melbourne garden

Oct 14 "Maple Syrup" showcase w/ The Trews and Final Flash at Ding Dong Lounge Melbourne

Both the other bands are great. The Trews are becoming somewhat of a household name in Canada, at least amongst families with indie rock cred. They require little introduction, and they are beginning what will likely be a great relationship with the land down under. Final Flash are entirely new to us. They've been together around 3 years, and have recently put out their new record, "homeless", which is really enjoyable, and was on the 2010 Polaris Prize long list. They have a 'prog rock' kind of sensibility, and are hot on the tail of the recent successes of other Montreal acts. I would describe them as a mix somewhere between the Besnard Lakes and Plants & Animals. As I write this (from Canada), Elliott BROOD just received an email from a new fan from this show raving about the performance, and commending our first EP "Tin Type", which she bought, and is unavailable otherwise in Australia. Thanks Kieren! Feedback like this makes everything worth it.

Sherwood Forest - Belgrave Victoria

Oct 15 Belgrave - in the mountains - radio interview through Sherwood Forest which I am comparing to the hilly drives through Mill Valley and Sausalito just North of San Francisco, if anyone has done that. The difference here is less real estate and more vegetation. Instead of California redwoods there are massive palmtrees, and open forest pervades still, as opposed to the impossibly hilly subdivisions you find in California. The road seems to be inviting development in a matter of time, though, and in some places this is already underway.

The club, "Ruby's", is inviting, with pleasant staff, but shortly we notice the signs. There is a repetitive posting that after 11PM the club will not serve redbull/vodka, shooters or pitchers. You must have your ID electronically scanned at the door. You cannot where a hat in the club, as the cameras can not accurately get your identity. What's wrong? Something serious must have happened here. I'm not going to ask.

Once our set is done at Ruby's, The Fumes kick up the intensity. It is around that said threshold hour of 11PM, and the freak flags begin to fly. It is a mountain town after all. We have such places in Canada too, but I don't think I've ever seen such a conglomerate of freaky dancers. There must be something in the water.

rain rain rain.... the rain storm has followed us to Melbourne from Brisbane it seems. Today the weather might best be described as 'shite'. So we stay inside all day at the Richmond Hill Hotel, and log on to internet, which is not particularly cheap.

Sat Oct 16 Melbourne - East Brunswick Hotel - what a great sounding club. This is where The Fumes are really hitting stride in the tour. We get to hear them in front of an urban audience and with great sound to boot. Great performances such as this one will happen again in Sydney (Notes Live), and Bulli, where we will end the tour.

Oct 12, 13 Adelaide - Mclaren Vale

Oct 13 We had one day off in McLaren Vale, and our Aussie manager (and Vale resident) Alistair had a plan: take the band to some local wineries for wine tasting. Mclaren Vale is one of Australia's finest growing regions, and to boot. Al's wife Sally works at Samuel's Gorge winery , so we check that and some others. Amongst the excellent varieties and blends, particularly memorable for me were a Grenache, and a 40 yr old sparkling red.

Wine is so funny the way it encourages snobbery. For awhile in the band, we had started taping pilot episodes of what could have become a steady lampooning of wine snobbery, in a show dubbed "Drifters with Snifters". In my pipedreams of creating viral video, this one would become a series of shorts where Casey and I sip "single digit" wines (under $10/bottle), in outrageous settings, and rate them accordingly with spontaneous vulgar wine terminology. Mark would occasionally appear in the shot looking for beer. Hilarious stuff, at least at times to our toursoaked minds, and indeed that's where it will likely stay.

PS BTW we played another Canadian Showcase that evening with The Trews and Final Flash. The three of us bands have not a great deal in common, however our sounds compliment one another, and everybody quickly became friends with much respect for each other's music. More of these bands in an upcoming blog from Melbourne.

*editors note - I admit that at this point in the tourblog it seems that I've lost focus on the music

Mclaren Vale wineries we attended:

http://www.primoestate.com.au/

http://www.gorge.com.au/index.html

http://www.thedieline.com/blog/2010/4/26/alpha-box-dice.html

Oct 9 - 11 Sunshine Coast

The Sunshine Coast

Mooloolaba, Caloundra, Brisbane, The FUMES, Crocodile Hunter.

After a warm introduction to the beaches in Perth, we were prepped for the Northern Australia beach culture, and maybe get in a bit more surfing. But that wasn't going to happen, as a subtropical storm raged through the region the whole time. In Caloundra, this was to our benefit, since 95 km/hr winds pushed the weekend festival event indoors, giving us a much better and closely packed audience. Both of our shows ended up in packed mid-size clubs as opposed to the nearby park at King's Beach, which would have had people spaced widely apart, free to lose their focus.

Amidst these festival dates we drove down to Brisbane for our first date with the FUMES, a super excellent guitar/drums duo. I will write more on them later.

Oct 11 due to the cyclone like torrential rains, there will be no surfing on Mooloolaba beach, and consequently there will also be no Monday show in Brisbane @ The Shire. The Shire is a tiny club that is half outdoors. The appeal is that live music plays while people spill out upon the sidewalk. They have a free live music event every Monday, but if it rains they must cancel. Double bad, as we had left Mooloolaba at 6:30 AM to race into Brisbane to get an editorial photo done for that day's MX commuter magazine promoting the show.

I sure hope all 200,000 readers didn't commence upon The Shire that night.

PS everyone, Nov 15 in Mooloolaba is Steve Irwin Day. Crikey, you better get ready!

Oct 6, 7, 8 - One Movement Festival - Perth

Perth is another seemingly laid back lazy city, kind of resembling Miami, but tempered with a bit of Victoria BC regalness. There are lots of construction cranes, which of course are evident of their booming economy. News just came on that the AU dollar went up another cent, and they have been adding jobs at a rate of roughly 50,000/month. Compare with US job losses of around 90,000/month. In your face America ! And of course, with things going so well here, you can pay $26 for a chicken caesar salad, and $16 for a cocktail. In our own face, Perth !

Spring break at Scarborough beach

We had the daytimes essentially free, so on the Friday we scooted over to Scarborough Beach, just North of Perth. It is one of the last days of Spring break, and a splend and cloudless 32' celcius to boot. This is the most crowded beach I have ever seen, It didn't take much for me to get into the water (with Mark in tow) and body surf the powerful waves.I was probably the oldest teen out there. We had also just ran into the Trews, who had been surfing with real surfboards amongst thousands of young people. Having been out there, I can't imagine where they would've found room to negotiate a board through the crowd. Besides, the surf was powerful enough that you could catch a wave without one. But to each their own.

And what's up with the high visibility outfits over here? It's as if there is a love affair with flourescent, so nearly every public worker now wears some kind of refective safety outfit. I took these photos within about 5 minutes of each other:

Oct 7 It's time to get down to business. We play the Canadian Showcase at One Movement w/ the Trews, Matthew Barber, Colin Moore, Final Flash, JP Hoe, and the next day in a Car Park with the incredible Melbourne based duo, Big Scary. check them out!

I should also point out that Perth is exactly 12 hours away from Toronto. Ya can't get much further from home than that. Hail the mighty Skype!

Oct 4 Sydney... let's wait

Cronulla Beach at low tide

Oct 4 land in Sydney

Having left Toronto at 10AM Saturday, we touched down in Sydney at approx 7:30 AM on Monday. Yes, two days later. In addition to 20 hrs in the air we had also flown over the international dateline (into tomorrow). In contrast, the return flight will only be seven hours (on paper), landing in the evening of the same day we leave, including a stop in San Fran.

We rent a white Subaru outback, which will become the given rental car for each of our stops on this tour (for some reason white also is very much the colour of choice in Australia). We have five internal flights, each of which we are saddened to learn also tag on approx. $500 in overage fees, and they like to stick to their rules. Note to Australia fliers: book your entire itinerary at one time with one airline because the condensed paperwork will allow your international overages free onto your internal flights (instead of paying each time). For us the penalty will equal approx $2000 in extra fees. Qantas is very happy to keep these details buried in the fine print of their own wallet, unless you the customer are very diligent.

As a nod to saving money, we are fortunate to stay at our agent Geoff's place in a tiny hamlet called Yowie Bay in the South Shire of Sydney. Geoff is an agent, indie label maven and club owner. All around good guy to know.Yowie Bay is a beautiful lazy little town on the shore, near Cronulla, where we have a gig (at Geoff's club) later in the tour. As it turns out, his house is rather giant and includes a recording studio, swimming pool, and a number of bedrooms. This night other guests at the house include Canada's Matthew Barber and The Trews. We will all do a Canada showcase together in Perth in a few days.

We need a day or two to recover from flying, and in addition to the general 'waiting' game, do some pre tour interviews, pick up our Australian-made Mountain Meadows cd's, and do some localised dining with Geoff, who went out of his way one night to smoke some fresh red snapper for us.Mmmm yummy red snapper.

Australia tour Oct 2010

waiting

Oct 2 Toronto - San Fran - Sydney.

"The road" for a band is paved with waiting. Let's add up a typical day on the road, when there is a show:

Soundcheck: 1 hr

Gig: 2 hrs

Meals: 3 hrs

Sleep: 8 hrs

Total: 14 hrs.

That leaves roughly 10 hours a day of pretty much waiting, whether it be travelling, or just waiting at some location. With no other real obligations, that's a lot of sitting around. One could write a book, or a bunch of songs, excercise or blog, but for many of us it means just simply sitting or standing like a turnip or some comparable vegetable. It's probably a miracle that we don't smoke.

During this flight, to add to the regular course of waiting, we had a ten hour layover in San Francisco. I could think of many worse cities to have such a predicament.

On this day, the SF Giants were playing the SD Padres, a tempting prospect especially for Mark, the band's biggest baseball fan. With a prohibitive pricepoint for tickets, especially at this point in the season (and our careers), we put down just $42, and rented a car (incl. complimentary AM/FM for baseball) and drove downtown. I convinced the boys to walk up around the Golden Gate Bridge itself, which was as usual covered in fog. Then we headed over to Twin Peaks, Mission and Castro districts, and finally settled for some mexican food before going back to the airport to wait some more.

BTW free internet at SF airport, yay! We will discover later that this is an incredible luxury, especially by Australian standards, where free internet is something you can only get when purchasing food at McDonald's.

Sept 10 End of the Road Festival - Larmer Tree Gardens, Dorset UK

This Euro tour started with a simple booking: an invitation to play the "End of the Road" festival in the county of Dorset, UK, not too far from Stonehenge. As is often the case with touring, you start with an "anchor date", then book everything else around it.

This anchor date is everything it was supposed to be and more. We get about 90 min SW of London, and the GPS begins to take us through smaller and smaller roads until it feels like we are practically on a bike path through a farmer's field (it turns out that we were). In the distance through the fields we would get glimpses of a massive blue tent, which we assumed was part of the festival, and indeed it even was the tent we would play under. Incredibly, those little farmer trails would have to accompany big tour buses as well, housing the likes of Modest Mouse, Wilco and several other big name headliners.

Like I mentioned, we were to play under the big blue tent that afternoon, a show which would ultimately be headlined that evening by fellow Canadians, New Pornographers. So here we were at our 'anchor date'. We hit the stage at around 5PM, and within a few songs the tent was pushing it's capacity, somewhere between 2500 - 3000 people (I wasn't exactly counting heads). The feeling coming back was tremendous. It kind of puts you on form when a large audience is conveying it's collective approval of your music.

As it turned out, the vibe here was quite sensational, and the event coordinators managed to commandeer the exquisite gardens into an interactive art/nature display as well, seemingly designed to enhance the expanding minds of some patrons. In the picture of us in that forest, Casey is donning a borrowed mohawk/viking helmet from one such patron. Fully enhancing! If you read any of my tweets (www.twitter.com/Doots_Mayhem) on the Pickathon Festival this past August in Portland OR, you will see that the End of the Road Festival is very much like that one, in it's use of nature and it's carefully selected artists.

So there. We have done our first big UK festival. For 2011 we hope for more. Green Man, Glastonbury, Reading, Isle of Man, Edinburgh ... look out, here we come !

After this fest we will play Paris FR and Middleburg NL (see below), then fly home only to immediately drive to Eastern Canada for some more festival and club dates. After one week off we will then head to Australia for the final leg of all touring for the Mountain Meadows album.

It will be high time after this to stay home for a few months, recoup and rekindle our home and family lives, and focus on another record, hopefully to be released sometime in the first half of 2011.

Thursday vs Saturday (or London vs Paris)

Sept 9 - London UK

Sept 11 - Paris FR

Sept 12 - Middleburg NL

Flanking the End of the Road Festival date (see blog entry above), were the little cities of London and Paris respectively. Not a bad way to close out the tour.

In the lobby of the Borderline in London, I was proud to see our poster up beside Blue Rodeo's. Anyone from Canada knows how huge Blue Rodeo are, and any fan would be excited to see that they were going to play in such a small and intimate venue here. Last time we played the Borderline (on a Saturday night) we sold it out. I'm sure Blue Rodeo will pack a lineup down the streets of Soho to see them.

It is a Thursday, and slightly before school season, so this time it was close, but not a complete sellout. That's ok, we'll do it again, and next time it will be with a few more UK festivals and a new album under our belt. I'd imagine we could even jam a bigger room.

Ok lets contrast that with the Saturday show in Paris. Last winter, we came to France and did about 12 winter festival dates around the country. That really helped us out there, and on our only French date this tour, we received some of the payback. This Sept 11, BROOD fans came to Paris from as far away as Zurich, Lyon, Dijon and Grenoble to see us. We pretty much oversold the show. I tweeted a couple pics (www.twitter.com/Doots_Mayhem), one that showed the opening band's drummer playing essentially my old suitcase kick, another reflecting a tasteless but timely defacement of our poster. The club was packed like sardines in a can, and shortly there was no dry stitch of clothing within the band. People were singing along to our songs, which I find really validating especially in far away places.

Lastly, I can't neglect to mention Middleburg NL, the friendly town in a slightly more conservative province of the Netherlands (ie no 'coffeeshops'). We ended the tour here on a Sunday night. Our host here, Doug was a super dude, as were the rest of the staff. This night was a bit of a challenge, being literally our 12th in a row, and the next two days brought a massive undertaking: teardown/return-the-gear/fly home/drive-straight-to-Eastern-Canada-all-within-two-days. We had just rocked Paris, and End of The Road Fest in the two nights previous. How could Middleburg compete? Good question. Anyways, we closed out the night with a couple of drinks down the way at the only open bar in town, with many of the same people who we hung out with last time in Middleburg, back in Feb '09. That in itself made the last date really fun, and underscored our oversees friendship with those folks.

Sept 6 Leeds UK Brundenell Social Club

Elliott BROOD --- Live at LEEDS !!

The GPS guides us once again through a largely Islamic section of town where the club is, like in Gent (and later Paris), It is a fairly run down neighborhood, reeking of deisel and oil, as there are many garages in the immediate vicinity. My favourite one is adjacent to the Brudenell Social Club and it is just a closed door with "Singz Garage" spraypainted roughly across it. Crude branding at it's free-market best. Once inside however, we take an immediate liking to the club, with it's great stage and sightlines, cozy atmosphere and good beers on tap.

The promoter here is Nathan, a early twenties former semi pro soccer player/coach. He has switched careers and to great effect, as he seems to live for promoting, putting his heart and soul into it. The man is always on facebook, and knows every band going right now. On the billboard out front are a certain bevy of Canadian talent: Black Mountain, Dan Mangan, Hot Hot Heat, Broken Social Scene, Woodpigeons. From the following night in Glasgow you can also add New Pornographers to that list, I feel as if there is a Canadian invasion going on here.

At one point, later in the evening our tourmanager Ryan joked that he could beat Nathan in a running race. The response was a challenging look that could have ended the race right there. "I'd F$%^& slaughter you!", or something similar came out of Nathan. All in jest, but also a great reflection of the truth, as our tourmanager was reduced back into his pack of cigarettes.

One more thing about Leeds. For dinner, Nathan said he knew of a pretty good place. He walked us around the corner to a little restaurant called 'Grove', Grove turns out to be a fantastic curry house, with traditional curries, and very friendly staff. I was beside myself, as I had been feeling a little under the weather and not really looking forward to a traditional English greasefest.

Sept 5 Winchester UK Railway SXSC

Oliver Gray. Say no more. This tour it seems is all about promoters. They make or break the show. In the absence of a national marketing campaign for the band, it is all about what kind of work the promoter does. Many times (especially in the UK), we stay at the promoter's personal house, all in the interest of keeping costs low. It can be done on the cheap, it just requires a certain amount the promoter's energy.

This is where Oliver comes in. He is a fantastic music enthusiast, and has carved his way through the business by writing about music, managing bands and promoting shows. Oliver's life is a case study of success through doing. Records of his developing years as a music impresario can be found in his autobiographical history "VOLUME", written under the pseudonym Gary Revilo (spell oliver backwards).

This year we found ourselves headlining the first annual SXSC festival,a day long event on two stages at the Railway Inn in Winchester. And once again we have absorbed the promoter's good will in regard to accommodation.

Thank you Oliver.

A somewhat surprised Oliver (centre) entertaining road managers Ryan and Rebecca at home