Letting The Snakes Crinkle Their Heads to Death [by Joe Wilson] USA winter 2002 :::29th of November Well ahoy there. I realise I haven’t been very forthcoming in recent months, but time slips by like strawberry yoghurt being sucked through teeth. I haven’t even been really busy but well, its me not you, honestly. Anyway we just finished shooting a video for Loretta Young Silks and decided that it was time for another tour in the USA to begin. We meet at the airport, me David, Chris are the band once again, and crew are Stephen, Derek, Dan and a front of house engineer who we don’t meet till we reach Chicago. The manager will also meet us there. She says it is snowing in the city of Chicago. The tour manager has wrangled an upgrade so I get on the plane without the usual fear of crushed legs and the promise that my veins will clot and the resulting blob will stop my brain cold. I suspect that my brain already has got a whole series of roadblocks waiting to be employed by the brains equivalent of county Sheriff. It would be like the "dukes of hazard" in my skull, with corpuscles as Bo and Luke duke. We land and get a van to the hotel. Get drunk and go to a jazz club with a simply awful band but great prawns. The audience all kiss each other as the music rises. I go back to the hotel and put "masters of reality" to compensate. Walking back I misread a cinema sign as John Carpenter presents "the Fog". It actually reads; Jam presents "Tori Amos" and I take this, as an indication that is should go to bed. :::30th of November It is the day after thanksgiving and every thing is shut. We have a day off and it is freezing. It is cold enough to make ones brain hurt. The local Chicago people take it in their stride, but I am handling it badly. The only place open is any English theme pub called the "elephant and castle" It is just like a shit pub in London. Afterwards I go to a Footlocker and find an Adidas black leather tracksuit. It feels and looks fantastic but I look like someone who is trying to sell you used car parts or harvested body parts. I can’t carry it off, so I leave it hanging on its hanger. I am rubbish on days off. Me, Dave and Chris watch some terrible films in the hotel, but nothing really shakes the feeling of yet another Sunday. I miss my John Cale records. I want to be at home listening to "Paris 1919" in bed. :::1st of December The new tour bus turns up today. I have bought a blue and white striped scarf to commemorate. The driver is called Calvin. I ask him if he is a Calvinist, but he pretends not to hear. :::3rd of December We left Detroit last night. It was thick with snow, and I was thick with a cold. Every time I get on a plane I instantly pick up germs. I need a hermetically sealed bubble to travel in. in that way I would not need to speak to anyone or catch anything. I would be like Howard Hughes without the aeroplanes. We reached Columbus Ohio today. I wander for hours to find a payphone. I find a bar that resembles the bar from Steve Buscemi's "three tree bar" or whatever it was called, and over Canadian whiskey (see I do travel well) he tells me that there are no payphones or taxis in Columbus. Me and Del the guitar tech go and get some percussion bits and have a strange breakfast with a woman who says she knows Aerosmith. We try and find phone cards and taxis and fail to find either. A total stranger takes pity on us and drives us to the venue. The snow falls and so does my mood. Crap gig. :::4th of December Toronto. I have previously talked about border crossings and let me tell you this, passing between the USA and Canada and visa versa is one of the least pleasurable experiences. It usually takes hours and is humiliating. There is nothing good or life affirming about standing in the snow whilst some power crazed goof ball shouts at you. We are allowed in. Ol’ Dirty Bastard, Nashville Pussy, DMX and the Velvet Underground are the order of the day. I am failing to manage to make phone contact with my girlfriend in London. You need a different phone card in each state or country and so I leave a trail of half used useless phone cards in my wake. I can’t get the one I have just bought to work so I am standing in the freezing cold yelling at the phone box. I walk to the hotel to our day room and try and digest the crappy noodles I have just eaten. They looked extremely exciting in the plastic picture on the menu, but I guess a wipe clean menu just isn’t the signifier of quality that it used to be. The hotel is opposite "the shoe museum". I go in to have a nose about but the history of the shoe is not having the desired effect on me. I hoped it would raise my mood, stir my soul with soles, so to speak. We have not been to Canada for about five years, so it will be interesting to see what the gig tonight will be like. Night is falling and it just gets colder, time to brake out the extra pair of socks. :::5th of December Montreal. Last nights gig was very good with many people and many chuckles. In Montreal the weather is warmer but I am still wearing two pairs of socks. David has just made me laugh by referring to Chris’s moustache as a "lip slug". The venue is a very traditional theatre with lots of sub theatres in it. I realise this because I just walked on to a small stage full of toddlers. I thought I was going towards the bathroom, so all in all it could have been an infinitely more disturbing experience for both parties. Me and the boy David walk in to town to see the Sam Taylor Wood retrospective. It is as irritatingly smug and celebrity led as it looked in London and some pieces seem to resemble a sales demonstration of video projectors. However the museum is very pretty and certainly beats the shoe museum in Toronto in to a cocked hat. I try and buy some Christmas presents and continue my daily routine of shouting obscenities into public telephones. There are many fine and threatening army surplus shops here and I am glad to see such a wide range of chemical warfare suits. as war is only a shot away. I have met several terrifying people on this trip already who seem very keen on war and there really aren’t more stupid and bitter people than that. There is a particularly fetching piece of headgear, a clear yellow square hood with Velcro attachments for poison filters. Dave buys a small patch that reads, "I am great". I don’t think anyone would disagree with that. :::6th of December Quebec. The snow is thicker than I have ever seen. It is pure picture postcard and Quebec is all towering turrets and furry castles to compensate. People smile and say hello at you in the street. We have a day room in a very peculiar bed and breakfast style hotel. I can’t speak French and so the conversation to be let in the room is a disjointed affair with me miming air guitar to indicate my pro-am musician status. The bathroom is full of baby powder and it looks like a forensic team has been dusting for fingerprints. The musical equipment is beginning to fail and so are we. We all argue like troopers and apparently, I am a cunt. As we leave town the snow is falling fast and I loll my head out of the window at the back of the bus like a golden retriever on a hot day. I spit and the drops hit the ground frozen. :::7th of December Brooklyn. The place where Victoria and David Beckhams first child was conceived. I think some kind of pilgrimage is in order, but first some Mexican food with David to discuss what kind of cunt I am. The restaurant supplies coloured crayons with the food and I amuse myself with drawing on the tablecloth. If only all restaurant did this. We walk about Brooklyn and buy lots of records and go to a particularly feeble mall. You know, I really can’t remember what happened today. In the John Lennon/Michael Crawford film "How I Won the War" there is a line "I can’t write down my feelings, so write down what I see instead", this is my position today. :::8th of December Jersey City. Thank Christ a day off. By an error on the hotels part I have a presidential suite with amazing panoramic views of Manhattan. I will not complain. Me and Steven the tour manager walk down to get a ferry to Manhattan. The ferry arrives and we find we don’t have tickets. The ferryman says "don’t worry we will wait". We run to get tickets from a nearby booth and turn to see the ferry leave with laughing boatman. The guy in the booth is laughing too. "You cunts is all talking the piss". Finally we get into Manhattan and do some ambling about. I buy some lovely Adidas shoes and remember too late that on a Sunday one cannot purchase wine in Manhattan. I get the ferry back but I get on the wrong one and end up in Hoboken. I cannot remember the name of the hotel either and have to explain its location by saying "well its quite near the a big wheel, clock type thing". I get dumped near the Hudson river and strut through the snow to finish the rest of my day off in the warmth of my palatial room. :::9th of December Washington dc. I have always hated Washington. We once spent three days off here and I had to resort to self-harm to pass the time. However that was a long time ago and I am a different kind of bloke now. The gig is the 9 30 club and is by my reckoning one of the best gigs in the world with friendly and hip people running it. The gig is good but the afterwards is brilliant with the boss of the place buying us fantastic brands of vodka and not seemingly to be happy until we are sick in the gutter. The rest of the evening is a blur with much mewling and puking. :::10th of December Hoboken. We are back in Hoboken. The hangovers are in effect and nobody is moving too fast. David and me find a second hand record shop run by a guy who takes photographs of Roxy Music. The shop is filled with fantastic rarities and I get the rolling stones banned film "Cocksucker Blues", the lost Beach Boys record "smile" and some lovely rare John Cale stuff. I am ecstatic and sit at the back of bus watching the eighth generation pirate copy distort and puff its way through its process. I would give anything to look like Keith Richards in this period. The gig is good, a packed sweaty mess and all is well and god is in his heaven. Our friend Bruce is also here and he is Officially the Greatest Living American so everybody is very happy. The evening is soured slightly as I begin to feel very sick. I retire to the bus and lie down. :::11th of December Travel day. We have a monumental journey from Hoboken down to Atlanta. This means a day spent trying to hold in shit and not kill each other. In the night the bus decides to make itself as hot as possible and at about five in the morning a meet a rather surprised looking David in the back lounge, sweat pouring off his brow. We open all the windows and swear at the grotesque heat. We have a hotel tonight so can be free from motion for a while. Get to hotel, wash clothes and fall asleep. :::12th of December Atlanta. This used to be our drug pig town. Now its cold in every sense and I am a bit surprised to find myself tucked up at the back of the bus watching "Solaris" (the original not the George Clooney remake) with Chris. The film does us good and so I go to the front of the bus to write diary and listen to Beach Boys with a nice cup of tea. My hero Bill Drummond recommends cups of tea instead of coffee in his wonderful life-affirming book "How to Have A Number One" and so I am trying to avoid coffee. As I have previously mentioned, I would love to have looked like Keith Richards in 1971, but I would really have liked to look like Keith Richards but be Bill Drummond. I should also point out the Rolling Stones cease to be A Good Thing (except for C.Watts) at around the time of Mick Jagger and David Bowie murdering "Dancing in the Streets". I realise that it was a recording for charity but I still believe that is not an excuse for a crumblingly awful record. Anyway back to Bill Drummond. If you have not read one of his books or seen his art or heard his music then can I recommend "45" which has previously been the only thing to give me any hope about Art (whether music, film, writing, anything creative) Up to that point I felt that my years in art school and in making music were ultimately pointless. I felt that I could not quantify what was a success on any level. I could not tell whether what I had achieved was an achievement or not. Any hill I climbed suddenly ceased to be a hill, and even then I could not tell if the hill was in a direction that I wanted to travel. The only really smart thing living professional Mancunian mouth stretcher Anthony H. Wilson said, was something or other about "praxis", that is that "praxis" is the act of finding out somethings purpose by actively doing it. Well, in Bill Drummonds "45", he seems only to identify a purpose by the failures that become apparent after its completion. It is this combined with sense of knowing that there is some kind of urge to create but not necessarily a precise feeling of being able to say that you know what you are trying to achieve, that makes this book so helpful. I have never met him but I reliable informed that he is a very humane individual. I almost hope that I don’t ever meet him, as meeting your heroes is always a bad idea. The only hero I have met who wasn’t a real disappointment was Ian McCulloch who was fantastic and exactly as you might want him to be. Actually, thinking about it, the guitarist from Curve and briefly Echobelly, Debbie Smith I always thought was really cool and was brilliantly deranged in real life and very friendly. You really want to only meet people out of context, rather than "Hi, I am musician and, hey wow! You are a musician too! We should get on really well" :::13th of December Fort Lauderdale.The television on the bus is really dragging my mind in to the gutter. Normally I only live for lousy television and can express many ideas through the shoddy medium of cheap soaps and 70s TV. However in the USA there is no real equivalent of things such as "Man about the House" or "Dads Arm y". What there is, is hundreds of films in constant rotation, all of which are crap. I realise that I mentioned the greatness of "Solaris" earlier, but if you have read my usual ramblings you know I pride myself on my inconsistencies. Anyway if you are on a moving bus, the satellite loses signal for the TV every few seconds. This means you lose whole sections of sentences rendering many films unwatchable. The only film that has worked successfully in this manner was "Castaway" with Tom Hanks, which worked because there was virtually no dialogue. If his other companion had not been a deflated basketball I couldn’t have followed the plot. It is very humid and I am warm for the first time on this tour. However it is very cloudy with sporadic bursts of rain. I must be bored; all I write about is the weather. We have a very odd hotel, which is like most of Florida, seems to be filled with the very frail. Stephen the tour manager and me discuss the writing of a coffee table book entitled "Why it Might be OK. To Hate People, When They Can Be So Annoying". This is triggered by an eating event. Earlier in the day everybody in the bus ate at a restaurant called "Old Cracker Barrel". It was an absolute lesson in why I should never eat with more than two people. More than that number and the experience becomes vile. The main habits that I loath in other people reared their heads. First, not knowing what to order and secondly not remembering what you have ordered. I want to kill and kill again when a hassled waiter appears and is promptly asked a multitude of questions. "What would you recommend?" Why would you trust a complete stranger to tell you what to eat? They don’t care and will give you what they want to shift from the restaurant. Plus eating on the road is always a fucking empty culinary experience. The food is always rubbish and thus asking questions of quality, or the other irritaion, trying to alter the menus to your own fussy tastes, is merely an attempt to polish a turd. Wait till you are in a small local restaurant in Italy or France or with a man catching shellfish before your eyes on any coast in the world to ask questions, not in any restaurant 100 metres from a motorway. Food arrives and everybody looks blank as the various plates are described. The meal is crap and takes a lifetime. I will die with my head in flames. Back at the venue the decay of crew and equipment continues unabated, with a cannibal holocaust approach to synthesiser repair. Gig happens but isn’t really a fantastic experience. :::14th of December Orlando. Last gig of the tour. Orlando is completely deserted, the streets echo with the sound of my own footsteps. It is cold and nothing happens, I feel blank. Then a miracle, hundreds of people appear and the gig is a triumph. God bless the people, they did not let us down and we did not let them down. There is a party in the hotel but I cannot face it but everybody seems in high spirits. Tomorrow begins the horror show back to the UK. Take care everybody and try not to start any wars.
	North America, Winter 2002 [by David Westlake]
	Huddled Masses [by David Westlake]
	Joe's German Diary [by Joe Wilson]
	The Germ of Panic [by David Westlake]
	Clothes That Make You Cry [by Joe Wilson]
	Placebo Tour Diary [by Liam Howe]
	Shame [by David Westlake]
	Diary Abajo del Pueblos [by Joe Wilson]
	The Hum of Plastic [by Joe Wilson]
	What We Do [by David Westlake]