Friday, May 15, 2009

ZURICH, BOLOGNA, LINZ, MUNICH, TOULOUSE

Cameron here, doing my share of the blog-duties. The show in Zurich was amazing, heaps of people arrived early enough to see us, Look!


We had nowhere to stay tonight so we made a desperate looking sign and dangled it around the merch desk like bait.


It worked! We met two sweet gents, Niko and Thomas, who were nice/drunk enough to take us in for the night. We partied with their dogs and misunderstood each other….Susie even threw up. 

Zurich is the best place to be hungover ever. Everything is made of gold or marble or chocolate Louis Vuitton and they have sausage vendors…….well we found this sausage vendor who looked like he was straight out ot Rattatouie. We then snacked the shit out of that sausage, all that we could afford with our pooled per diems:



The Rakes were kind enough to let us hang out in their turbo-tour-bus for the day. Chris – the captain and semi-professional Frisbee player – cooked us a hearty feed. Thanks George Forman grill.

 


The drive to Italy was incredible.  Snowy Alps and lakes like marble. Here is an informative interview with documentarian, tour guide and human tilt train Mirko Vogel.

 

Strangely enough, we found Italy the most difficult place so far to order a coffee. At one point Susie ended up with a quarter strength ice break poured into a glass, while Matt and I got tepid milk. We’ve quickly learned from experience that coffee is best served black, and Cappuccinos are pretty fail-safe.

The crowd in Bologna was awesome/slightly mental.  We had to check that they weren’t heckling us. At one point they started a soccer chant to one of our tunes, before stealing Susie’s drumsticks and demanding we buy them back.  Hilarious. We also invented a game called “Frisball” which is basically throwing a Frisbee and kicking a soccer ball simultaneously. Sounds like it would be good for ones hand-eye coordination, but really it just makes you feel like you don’t have any.

Next was Linz, Austria, at a club called Posthof, which was gigantic and awesome.  It even had cushions at the back if you felt like a bit of R&R between bands.

 

 

After the show, some friendly locals took us to a Drum ‘n Bass club where the strobes made up for our two left feet……reach for the lasers.  I took this hilarious video but this Mac isn't "Cameron-compatible" at the moment.....we will post it later, as it is wicked worth it.

The venue in Munich was really cool, it looked like a Bunnings with a ‘rock’ section. Get it? There were plants and gardening equipment everywhere. The show was sweet and afterwards we found this l girl with a I Heart Hamburg bag which we now think we should sell as merch?

 

We met up with a friendly Brisbane ex-pat, Erin, who we then kicked out of her own home for the night. Thanks again Erin! To kill some time and to really sink our teeth into the Munchen way of life, Erin took us to the Lowenbrau brewery where we drank our weight in wheat beer and wrestled giant pretzels.

Then we drove to Toulouse which took a really really long time. I think 15 hours or something. Actually I'm getting cabin fever thinking about it so here's Matt..

Cello!

Here comes the bright side. Le Bikini was the best venue in the history of mankind. The food was endless and amazing, the staff sarcastic, kind and hilarious, and the wine fresher than sat on flowers. Well, very recently sat on flowers. I had a pair of fresh-making swims in the freezing pool, and strolled around like a millionaire on holiday. 



The show was ridiculously massive, and we stayed in a lovely apartment care of a wonderfully generous Toulousian, Elsa.

I shall continue this story when I have the necessary visual aids at hand. I'm signing off like a successful businessman now, and we will have more for you sooner than you can possibly comprehend! Bam.

Wednesday, May 6, 2009

Gent, Dusseldorf, Frankfurt and Stuttgart

Welcome to our tour blog! This is a place where you can feel like you can hug us even though we are really far away.

We landed in Frankfurt on Friday night with no hassles and left the next morning in our turbo-awesome-super-box Van en route to Belgium to a) pick up gear and b) to hang with our tour managers buddy Chris. Driving in Germany is fucking weird at first.....you have to get used to driving on the right hand side of the road and then you have to comprehend going 150km/hr on the Autobahn and still have crazy people fly past you. It took a lot of getting used to. The journeys have been really nice; short and picturesque. Here is a sweet photo I took from the van:


 

Gent is a really fucking cool city. When we got there it felt like everyone was just hanging out, at bars, or in coffee shops around the castle, walking their dogs along the river or chilling in a guided tour boat. That night we went to the craziest bar..........there were 250 types of beers that it sold, one of which was called Quacks. It was served in the most horrendously massive glass and in order to collect you drink you needed to hand over a shoe....as collateral. 




Apparently a lot of glasses go missing. Drinking ONE of these made us all very fuzzy and made us need beds stat.

The next day we drove to Dusseldorf to play our first show at a club called "Zakk". We met The Rakes all of whom we're lovely, dressed well and smelt like roses on a Spring morning. They have this bad-ass tour bus which we are very jealous of....I haven't taken a photo yet but I will. They asked us where our tourbus was....we shrugged and looked at the ground coyly. 

The show was really fun and the crowd receptive. As you may know, I talk a lot of nonsense in between songs at shows, and I was scared that I didn't have this security blanket on this tour as noone would understand me, but so far people have understood us for the most part. That night we stayed with two rad girls Kristina and Doro. We met them through the wonderful world of Myspace....it really is a place for friends. We listened to Telepathe, Hate Rock and Handsome Furs while drinking some highly recommended Dream Tea. It was a blissful night and we were so lucky to meet such lovely ladies (esp. me because being around boys all the time can be hard work).

The next day was back to Frankfurt where we played in Batschkapp. We played on a stage that had some pretty crazy predecessors: The Gun Club, Jesus & Mary Chain, Nirvana and our hometown legends The Go-Betweens to name a few. The show was amazing! We sparked TWO circle pits......TWO! I don't even know how that happened! We even had a german heckler = best! After the show our host took us to a bar in downtown Frankfurt, the inhouse DJ was amazing and super cliche, he was complete with beret and played the strangest array of music ranging from Midnight Oil to The Bloodhound gang. We stayed at a rad loft apartment with our new friend Annika and slept off our groggy heads.

this is too long isn't it? I've never been good at editing.

Last night was Stuttgart in this fucking awesome underground venue called "Rohre". It was made up of all these crazy tunnels and was really damp and weird. Our manager had told us that when he was there in the nineties with Regurgitator a bunch of kids took too much acid and ecstacy and got lost in the maze of tunnels! We played it safe and layed of the hallucinogens. 

Ok this will do for now. We will write again soon......i'll get the boys to do a blog or two so you don't get bored with my inane ramblings, k?

Big lurve.

Susie IHH