30 Nights of Bushweek - Episode 2

Last tour we had the dubious luxury of much downtime, which allowed me to blog the living snot out of every shameful, degrading episode along the way. But this tour is a much tighter, more muscular beast with not much time for fucking around with vanity projects.

Never-the-less, I still intend to post for every gig, and give you the deets on every time Baaron Von Nibbles loses his shit.

I might just run a bit behind, yeah? We're talking weeks here.

Anyway, I'll keep this one brief. It's not that our journey from London to Eindhoven was uneventful, or that the gig didn't involve many ugly confrontations and minor injuries, but I'm supposed to be on-stage for soundcheck in 10 minutes and the Baaron will whip me like a stepchild if I dally.

So here's a few happy snaps for you to ponder, with explanatory captioning. Let your foul imaginations fill in the yawning blanks.

Here is a happy image. It's me with the two university chicklettes we picked up on the road to Dover. They were participating in a UNICEF sponsored "Charity Hitch-hiking" competition and were desperate for us to smuggle them out of England. The Baaron and I felt that it was grossly irresponsible for an organisation like UNICEF to condone hitchhiking, so on the other side of the channel we raped, tortured and killed them, and then salted down slices of their flesh for…….

Sandwich meat! Mmmmmm....undergraduate goodness.

We spent the channel crossing drinking rum cocktails, snorting lines of paracetamol in the dunnies and playing "Buckhunter". Predictably the Baaron stomped my arse. I just don't have the killer instinct, and plus my eyes are too squinty for sharpshootery.

The venue was like a live-music shopping mall complex, with it's own staff cafeteria, many giant dressing rooms equipped with all manner of comforts, and two main band-rooms (one 1200 capacity and one 400). When it came time to play, I became hopelessly lost on the way down from our dressing room on the fifth floor and ended up in a boiler-room underneath the main stage. I had to call the Baaron be rescued by the stage manager because the boiler room door locked behind me. Just like the Tap. No shit.

This is the stage we played, seen here pre-us-being-awesome-on-it, and obviously pre heaps-of-Dutch-hipsters-going-bazonkers-over-our-shit.

We were playing on a bill with 65 Days Of Static, a successful British crescendo-rock outfit. No points for guessing who headlined.

The 65 DOS guys seemed like righteous bros' to begin with, but scuffles and cursing broke out between us when they refused to share their fruit-loaf. The Baaron gave their tour manager a savage wedgie, which actually drew crack-blood, but I just copped a stray elbow in the nose and had to be carried back inside crying.

In summary, it was a goode gigge. We kicked some ass, made some awful noises, had a short but brutal pillow fight back at the hotel and woke early next day ready to do it all again. Aaahhh, the sweet, sweet eccentricities of life in a travelling' band.

Call the state militia!

*BUSHWEEK - Australian colloquialism. An unreasonable demand or behavior.

"Don't eat all the fuckin' Twisties, Nathan, ya cunt. Whadaya think this is, bushweek?"