The big, bacteria carrying claws that this past weekend sank into the tender flesh of my ego are starting to withdraw, and that can only mean one thing. It's BLOG TIME!

To get things off to an appropriately snide and bitter start, I'd like to heap some venom on our old pals sl-Easyjet.

"Not our problem, shithead. Ha ha ha ha!!!!"

I had a flight booked for 10:25 in the evening last Thursday, so being a paranoid traveller I caught the train out to BCN International nice and early. When I arrived at terminal C it was jammed tighter than a nuns' proverbial (or "cunt" in laymans terms). There was two poor, stressed assholes working the desk, trying to check in what appeared to be roughly a thousand hot, angry people.

Two spontanious fistfights had erupted in the crowd by the time I got to the front of my line (2 hours later) due I assume to snakey cut-in  style behavior from anti-social fucks trying to beat the system.

File image. The brawls I saw involved at least 6 people 

pinned by security in a space filled to capacity,

but you get the drift. 

But due to the effects of some marijuana ingested before entering the building I found myself in a philosophical mood, while watching my chances of getting a boarding pass in time evaporate like backpacker piss from my Calle Avinyo doorstep.

Christ, this is going to be retchingly epic, I'll have to sum the rest of the horse-shit up snappy-like.

1. Flight overbooked. Put on "waiting list" and issued a provisional boarding pass.
2. Flight delayed. Wait 3 hours in boarding lounge.
3. Told there is no seat for me. Go back through security and wait 1 hour for luggage to turn up.
4. Wait in line for 1 hour to re-book flight.
5. Catch taxi home at 3am and go to Las Cuevas to get horrificly drunk.
6. Return to airport following afternoon.
7. Flight delayed. Arrive at Aarons shithole in Dalston at 4am.
8. Say fuck alot. Fuck, fuck,fuck.
9. Sleep.

So much for that.

But if I thought that the Fuck Fuck Fuck part of my trip was over, I was quickly disabused of that fatuous notion.

"Shoreditch, innit. We love a good wank 'round 'ere".

Our first gig was at a club in Shoreditch (innit) called 333. We were performing in a small basement room that looked more or less like the loading dock of a Safeway. But shit, I am a seasoned veteran of shitty venues and wasn't phased in the slightest. What phased me was the fact that not only were we playing for no fee, but we also had NO FUCKING RIDER!!! SWEET BABY JESUS!!!

Emergency crews respond to the scene after 

Civil Civic learn there is no free beer.

The net result was that after soundcheck we went across the street to the "off license" and bought some cans of Holsten for a furious bout of street drinking before we played. We met some young local drunks and made conversation until about 20 minutes before we were due on stage, and that's when the real fun began.

This gig was an "aftershow" linked to the 1234 Festival that was held in a nearbye park that day. The festival website and literature was explicit about the fact that entry to the aftershow was free to festival goers, but some greed crazed fucknuckle had decided to throw on a 5 pound door charge at the last minute, so the line that had formed outside for the gig quickly dispersed in a cloud of mass disgust.

Then when we tried to enter the club to, like, y'know, FUCKING PLAY TO NOBODY we had to argue with a hideously obese, ugly, shockingly arrogant middle aged woman with a walkie talkie for half a fucking hour to AVOID PAYING THE DOOR CHARGE for this FREE GIG!!!!

Let's recap.
1. Agree to play for free
2. Blow 50 pounds in cab fare to get shit to and from venue.
3. Don't get a single fucking beer and be forced to drink on the street.
4. Play to 15 people because some shiteating greed-head decided to log some more bank
5. Spend 30 minutes arguing with a ball-shrivelling she-troll to avoid paying entry to OWN GIG.
6. Play in a Safeway loading dock (with no toilets).

Rock, rock, rock, in the loa-ding dock.

In my petty, confused little mind the crowning insult was the t-shirts worn by the 333 staff that said "Paid To Be Here" in big block letters on the back. I'm glad someone fucking was.

Was there anything positive in this experience? Yes my friends, there was.
Aaron befriended infamous Berlin tastemaster and ecentric label owner Steve Morell, who was deejaying in the loading dock between acts. He made some nice noises about booking us at HIS festival (which just HAS to be awesome).

There was also the 333 house engineer, a no-bullshit, calm-as-the-ocean Italian guy who was a complete breeze to deal with and knew his rig backwards.
Thankyou God.

Yes, these things are sent to try us, motherfucker! I'll hopefully be able to log back in after this coming weekends gigs with some nice, sunny, upbeat news and views. Pray for us, brethren.

.
Anyone could be excused for assuming that a tour diary should end in a snappy fashion after the last gig has been documented and a few pithy lines have been spat out in summary.

Well fuck that.

There was one more interesting human situation (and a neat little coda) on the last travel day and I'd be remiss to leave it undocumented.

Right. Let's talk about catching the ferry to Dover.

So we rolled up to the ferry terminal with plenty of time to spare before our 6pm passage, and took our place in the big, gridded cue of vehicles waiting to board. If you haven't taken a car on a ferry before, this part is basically like hanging out in a car-park for an hour and a half.
After 5 minutes or so we became aware that every second vehicle in the line was some sort of heavily souped up 4 cylinder nightmare, with 40,000 DC and Red Bull stickers all-over it.

If you are over sixteen and you are still plastering soft-porn centrefolds on your property, join the fucking Army and jerk your friends off in the shower. Neither pretty girls nor civilian society have any use for you.

Many bonnets were popped open, revealing heavily worked "donks" with generous helpings of chrome and every so often one of these things would fire up with that drowning-giant gurgle that says "My car is fucking fast and I have a very small penis/brain".

I have chosen to express my rugged individualism by pinning a Crazy Frog doll to the front of my modified BMW.....and you?

Was ist los?
Turns out we were sharing the ferry with the dregs of British society. There had been a massive street-car rally somewhere in France and around two hundred flat-brimmed-cap wearing knuckleheads where on the return trip to England with their souped-up sleds and their dead-eyed, oppressed girlfriends, innit.

I was in my usual travelling attire (a white linen suit, SPD sandals and felt fedora) so I was drawing spontaneous chants of "Fa-ggot, fa-ggot, fa-ggot" wherever I went. Having had my fedora thrown out a window in the terminal building while waiting to use the snack machine I started to get tense and ducked into the toilets for a breather in a vacant stall.
It was like being back at Charnwood High and I was beginning to hyper-ventilate.

After reciting the Litany Against Fear a few times my vision wandered to the toilet-paper dispenser, and after staring at it blankly for a moment or two I realized it's curved top panel was covered in cocaine, about ten times the amount of spillage you'd expect from even the most hasty toilet stall schnoz-session.
What happened next, children? Did Ben...

A) Organize this little snow-drift with a Paris parking card and do some swift schnozzeling work of his own?

B) Shake his head sadly at the folly of youth and brush it onto the urine soaked floor?

C) Go and circulate among the rev-heads to find the messy schnozzer and scold him for wasting valuable commodities.

D) Scoop it into a small piece of paper and sell it to another rev-head for 20 pounds.

I'm not saying, but I went back to the car with a more confident outlook. Fuck the fedora, it doesn't suit me anyway.

It was imperative to find a quiet corner to ship in once we boarded the ferry, because these coked up car-hoodlums accounted for about half the passenger manifest and they behaved with the swaggering, abrasive stupidity you'd expect from this kind of scum when they're loaded and have weight of numbers. I wish I had gotten a photo of the short, ugly pig-boy wearing the home-made "My Cock + Your Pussy = Fun!" t-shirt.
It's impossible to imagine the kind of degraded, hope-starved female who would consent to be fucked by this brain-damaged little homunculus, but the world is a big place and I have seen so little of it.
Live and let die.

Ugly scenes of one sort or another seemed inevitable once these assholes hit the bar, but thankfully the pig-people stayed more or less in a herd, and it was possible to get some distance from them

It was also possible to get a neck and shoulder massage in your seat from a sickeningly chipper young American woman, employed by the ferry company, and "pay whatever you think it's worth".
I got the massage, thought it was priceless and paid 5 euros.
She said that was okay.
Gee whiz.

Between the complimentary "charlie" and the 5 Euro massage my circulation was excellent and I watched the chalky cliffs of Dover approaching with great satisfaction.

 Hammer of the Gods, will drive our ships to...urm...Dover, innit.

I depressed Aaron horribly by being chatty and friendly on the drive back to London and only started to flag once we pulled up, once more, at The Windmill, Brixton.

We were stopping off to pick up a pair of Technics 1200 copies I had found on top of a pile of garbage in an alley before our Windmill gig (I had left them sitting in a backroom).
But we got so much more...

We had arrived just after half-time in the Australia V Germany match and got to watch "our" boys being smacked around like ugly orphans by the Krauts while we were heckled viciously by Tim and a small knot of local beer-drunks who were obviously overjoyed by watching Australians get ground into hamburger on the field of sport. Final score - 4/0.
On a lighter note we were also pointed out the back, where the bulk of the pre-match barbecue remained uneaten, and we stuffed our faces gleefully under the steely glare of Ben (?), the big-fucking-dog who lives on the roof.

After a short parting jabber with Tim we then weaved through surprisingly sparse London traffic back to Aarons rat-hole, where we loaded the gear into the flat and hurled ourselves down on our pallets "in a swoon" as they say in the classics.
A darkness came over me, and I remember no more.

...and that, my friends, is the story of Civil Civics' first European tour.

THE END

In Conclusion.

My perverse enthusiasm about going on a short Euro-road-tour was richly rewarded. We beheld exotic landscapes, met "super-cool" people who spoke in strange tongues, "rocked out" and "got paid".
Baby.

Let us honour the peeps...

Evil Andy Inglis (pronounced Ingles) and Frid, his not-so-evil right-hand. Go to the Luminaire immediately. The music WILL be good, and they have Sierra Nevada in bottles.

Hannah Gould, media assassin, Minister Of Information.

Tim and The Windmill dogs. Thanks for the burgers when we got back. Life-saving shit!

The Hafenklang folks. Awesome venue, awesome built-in hostel.

The un-dampable Louis, promoter of TrashPop, and Mary, bar manager at Charlies. Mwah!

Mighty Magnus and the Radio Nova folk. Thanks for the B'day wishes, Mr. Berg.

Jonk The Man from Alleycat Records and his novia, Julia. Promise we'll shell out for a hotel next time.

Fucking Werewolf Asso!! ....are AWESOME!!!!

Sara Shakarchi from Halleluja Artistboknig. Think over the marriage/kids/country-house thing.

Jonas and his posse, and the Debaser P.A (and the chef!!!). Sorry about the getting-your-name-wrong thing. Still friends? Your club is astounding.

The bass guy and the guitar guy from Ganglians. Youse nice dudes. Catch you on the flip-side.

Ollie, Manuela and Andy (Scene-Chick No.1). They be our homies in Cologne. Literally.

Benoit, Pierre, Clement and the Internationalle. We headline Neveu Casino next, yeah?

All well-wishers, merch-buyers and people who clapped at the end of songs.

Anyone who approached us to pump our egos or just bum a cigarette.

That guy at the Internationalle who yelled out "Fucking awesome!!" in a thick Aussie accent at the end of our set. You know who you are, you troublemaker.

Big love.

...and finally you, the reader. Our whole ability to book a tour was heavily dependent on young, good-looking, discerning webernet users like your own self who blogged-up and boosted and generally gave wind to our debut cassette single. We smother your sweet faces with slobbery dog-kisses.

Stay tuned, because we have some London shows coming up, and with a little luck they'll have some postable happenings attached to them. Freeeooowww!

 So yeah, this morning it struck me...

"I was writing a tour diary, wasn't I?"

Yes, Ben, you were. Better polish that shit off before all that Spanish sun and those cheap painkillers turn your brains to slush.
Anyone who has read more than one of these posts would be hip to the fact that I have been writing them more or less at my leasure. The tour was over some weeks ago and I arrived back in the BCN in time to get sucked into the druggy, techy mayhem of Sonar and it's various spin-off parties. It was the last fucking thing I needed, but I made the most of it and in the end I lost only sleep, money and a tooth.
Maybe a few friends too. But shit, easy come, easy go, eh?
All that guff is another, non-Civic related tale.

What concerns us now is an accurate, impartial overview of the final show in our debut Euro Tour.

That tale must begin in Cologne, where, as I mentioned earlier, Manu from Tsunami gave us a hang-over quashing breakfast of eggs, many cheeses and stout Deutscher brot.
Thus fueled we loaded the ATV and blew town, after teary farewells and exchange of emails ect.

I have no clear recollection of the drive. I remember stopping for "Travel Pussy" and Dunkelbrot at a service station before we hit the border, and later begging Aaron to take the exit to the Asterix theme park, but the rest is fuzzy.

I dont know what Euro touring was like before they

invented Travel Pussy, and I don't want to know.

What I do remember very clearly is the nerve-shredding, horn-honking carnage of hitting Paris at peak hour on a Friday, two hours before kick off in the France/Paraguay game.

These people had a hole-plugging, hyper aggressive driving style that frankly shocked me. Any sign of indecision or weakness on our part was swiftly and brutally seized upon and we were getting boxed in, cut off and generally walked allover. It was like being attacked by a school of pirahnas.

I lost count of the number of massive intersections we got stranded in after the lights had changed.
Then we would sit, blocking the whole fucking road, with hundreds of hot, hate-crazed Parisians driving directly at us, swerving at the last minute, leaning on their horns and screaming curses. I think I lost about 5 kilos from when we came off the freeway to when we finally found our hotel. Stress is slimming, they say.

Anyway, we had a night free, so once my hands stopped trembling I went for a stroll and a bad Vietnamese meal, while Aaron went down to the Eiffel tower to watch the football with 10,000 other people, on a screen roughly the size of a football pitch.

Aaron managed to snap this lovely shot, before

heading down to watch the match and do whatever it

was that got him covered in blood.

He still won't tell me what happened down there, but when I got up around dawn for a piss I found his shirt in the bathroom sink soaked in blood and something that smelled like amonia. There was also a crushed fistfull of Czech currency and a pair of very expensive Italian ladies shoes, half covered by that stinking, gory rag.
When I threw one of the shoes at Aarons' head and demanded to be told "the Story" he just giggled like a little girl and pulled his blanket over his face, peek-a-boo style.

That Aaron is such a scamp. He really makes his own fun, wherever he goes, I'll say that for the guy.

Our day then proceded along very standard lines for a pair of young Australian males in Paris. Coffee, crossoints, sightseeing, strip-clubs, scoring weed from Algerians with no arms, making fun of French people and their hilarious accents, losing money at a cockfight, falling asleep in the park in the afternoon on piles of garbage and dog-shit. You know the drill.

With our free time brutally killed we headed down to the Internationalle, our rock dive, for soundcheck.
We were greeted by a tired and peeved looking guy called Pierre, who turned out be a local lighting operator who was serving as a kind of point man for the promoter, Benoit, who was elsewhere.
Pierres' frown was mirrored by most of the staff at first, but I wrote it off as a manifestation of the infamous Parisian "Attitude" and busied myself with routine tasks. Later it was revealed that they were all sleep-deprived and crushingly hung-over, but once the "froth got blown off a few" they all turned out to be love-able goofs. Pierre in particular proved to be a disarmingly affable gentlleman.

Once Benoit graced the scene (he too proved to be, like, a super nice guy!) we dined with the other acts in a local cous-cous joint. Communication was patchy, due to our pathetic mono-linguality, but the whole crew seemed pretty good humored. They were just a bunch of young arty fuck-ups with giant brains, cool clothes and no cash, so naturally we considered them excellent company and fine human beings.

Having eaten and drunk some, we returned to the would be scene-of-the-crime for more drink and bad noise.
By the time we were due onstage the room was packed with Parisian hipster types (being all hip and French and shit) so I was pretty intimidated. Aaron must have noticed, because he gave me a quick, hard slap in the face while I was tuning up. I thought he had finally turned on me, and dropped into a fighting crouch, but he just grinned at me spastically and dug a thick fake-moustache out of his pocket and rammed it onto my face. Then, before I could react, he stomped the little footswitch which starts The Box.

Rockin' the false 'stache, how could I fail to COOK!

A long lost member of Radiohead stares wistfully into the distance.

No wait, right, it´s just Aaron. Phew.

...And we played with balls, if I do say (despite the 100 db ceiling), and got a pretty warm reception from the crowd. I delivered a short speech (Google translated into French and read off a piece of paper) praising the Republic, and this also seemed to amuse the Frenchies (I learned after the show that Google had fucked the grammar up in just the right way to make my toadying rant chuckle-worthy, so I was well satisfied).

After we cleared our crap off stage I went and hung out on the street with the other smokers and 30 or so people who couldn't get into the club. I got in a conversation with a young lady called ???? Flavie, who claimed to be John Zorns' illegitimate daughter and complimented our noise by saying we sounded just like Ceramic Dog. I don't hear it, personally, but ears are funny things.

She bought a t-shirt from us and got us to sign it with lipstick, so as far as I'm concerned she can say we sound like Wham if that's what comes into her head. That's fine.

I actually put the lipstick on my lips and kissed the shirt!

That thing will be worth MILLIONS!!

Once the gig started winding down I ran into a French guy I know from Barcelona who had blundered into our show by accident while on a trip to visit relatives. He was loaded and keen to hit the Modular Records party across tow, so he took me into the filthy toilets to shnort some cocaine. I was open to the idea of the Modular thing, since I was vaugely curious as to what sort of shit Van She deejay, but it was not to be.

Pierre and Benoit had other plans, and hustled us around the corner and into a big, ritzy club full of models and drug dealers and fat, sleazy men with expensive watches. Benoit promoted nights at this den of sin, so we copped some drinks and tried to fit in, but the crowd were too well-heeled. I felt like a hobo who had somehow dodged the security and was about to start hustling for change and pissing in the pot-plants.

So we bowed out after an hour or so of staring at tits and nursing our cocktails and walked up the hill into Belville, to a flat where we were expected to stay the night.

The resident turned out to be another club-promoter type by the name of Clemence. She was tired but never-the-less charming and generous and she turned over her room to us so that we could collapse in our own stink for a few hours, before rising and driving to Dunkirque for the ferry back to England.

That ferry trip has it's own special story, but I'll leave that for next post, when I will also post all our reciepts and invoices in the hope that someone will email and tell us how much money we lost.

In the meantime I'll spare a line to say a big, fat, greasy THANKS to Benoit, Pierre and Clemence for a fine show and great hospitality in the City of Lights. I´ll put a few Travel Pussies in the mail.

It's July 5th. Which means our latest good-times, genre-snubbing, strident but reflective, disciplined but often in detention, double B-Side 7" smash is 'OFFICIALLY RELEASED'.

And, after you stop applauding at your computer screen in an impulsive fit of hysteria, you may ask aloud 'so what!? I've had this on my iPod for over a month!'. Well, good, well done. BUT, now you can direct your unenlightened friends to the safe havens of iTunes or Emusic or Amazon and many other a respectable e-shoppe to purchase our racket with the attribution of a comforting and officious Recommended Retail Price.

Of course you could still send them to our own dusty corner store to get it for what ever price they choose (including nada) if hanging about in an ungentrified area of town does not offend them.

Also, it will turn up on Spotify whenever those highly-enlightened, super-hip, but somewhat slack-as-shit Swedes decide to add it to their library. Stay tuned civilians....

Goddmanit. I just GOTSTA re-post this nifty animated gif from over on the Monocultured blog.

Left, Aaron - Centre L.H.S.H.N.G. -  Right, Benjy.

Lone Hooded Swedish Head Nodding Guy...we salute you!

If my memory serves me (a million to one shot, I admit), that LHSHNG is the screamer from Fucking Werewolf Asso. Il est grand honneur!

The guy from the monocultured blog quite rightly scolded me for failing to mention the small clutch of ten-rad dudes and dudettes who "copped" our "merch" that night, thus helping to finance our Hubris Induced Vanity Excercise (tour, in laymans terms).

I´m fucked if I remember your names, soldiers, but you are the pride of Sweden. Vi älskar dig.