Letting The Snakes Crinkle Their Heads to Death [by Joe Wilson]
	North America, Winter 2002 [by David Westlake] David USA Diary. Off again we go... America, land of the free. What a piece of work. We are filling in some of the gaps we left on our last visit here, doing the Eastern side of the country from Chicago to Florida via Canada. At Heathrow the band and crew gather like criminals summoned for a job and have a pre-flight drink to break the ice. Steve, our new Tour Manager has two pieces of good news: he has blagged us an upgrade and Toploader have been axed. Now I don't usually relish another band's demise but this is the single most positive piece of news to have come out of the otherwise moribund British music industry for years. The clock ticks over into afternoon and we drink a toast. Drink is crucial to most aspects of our professional lives, but never is it so important as when getting on a plane. We fly so often that we go in phases between confidence and fear. The more we travel, the more the probability rate tips into the red and booze is our way of putting it out of our minds. :::Chicago On our first night in a snowy Chicago we go out to a seafood place that offers the added bonus of live jazz. We are, as ever after a long flight, hallucinating with tiredness. To hear such jazz-fusion crimes in the home-town of Herbie Hancock is enough to make a man weep. Food was a bit rubbish too. People are slurping at each others faces (they call it kissing) and singing. Oh well, there’s always insomnia to look forward to. We wake up to Thanksgiving weekend and venture out looking for thrills in Chicago. We find very little as everyone is at home forcing turkey and goodwill into their relatives. The only food we can find is in an English Pub of all things and we reluctantly go there for breakfast. To think we’d come this far, across oceans and mountain ranges and then find ourselves sitting in The Elephant and Castle. The faux cockney décor sits uncomfortably with the grinning automaton waitress who brings us our eggs. In the real Elephant and Castle things would be quite different. We would get beaten up. We wander about and I buy some trainers. Chris buys earmuffs. In the evening we go for Thai food. It is very good. Tell me if I’m boring you. Suitably rejuvenated we wake up bright and early for our first gig day. It’s just so cold. After a stroll we locate our bus and introduce ourselves to Calvin the driver. Bus is good, interesting lighting options and satellite TV to keep us from killing each other. The gig is in a cool part of town but don’t ask me what it’s called ‘cos I don’t know (the travelogue element of this journal is sadly deficient). Suffice to say it’s where all the thrift stores and independent boutiques are and we bankrupt ourselves on clothes and trainers. As ever, none of our equipment is working. Our crew are gathered around some box or other, scratching their heads. They really are beginning to hate us, they are always pleading with us to replace bits and pieces and we always forget. But, hey, what does it matter? If something doesn’t work we’ll do it a different way. Gig is good. :::Detroit Can it get any colder? The snow is thick on the ground now, and Detroit, like every other time we’ve visited, is deserted. We go en masse to get breakfast and much hilarity ensues. It’s got to be said Americans aren’t much cop at making tea. They think hot tea is a dubious sub-species of Lipton Ice. Like drinking microwaved 7 Up. In fact, to be pedantic, the needless use of the word ‘hot’ in conjunction with ‘tea’ suggests a vast missing of the point. I’m sure they won’t lose any sleep over this criticism. And then Chris tries to order Earl Grey... The show is fun. Afterwards Caroline organises fans into an orderly line and we parade up and down it signing shirts and having our photos taken. It is a strangely structured moment, like a politician's baby-kissing photo opportunity. We remember it was in this club that we first discovered our incompatibility with the Devil’s Drink, Jaegermeister. We drank too much and Liam fell out of a window on to the pavement below and damaged himself. Actually we all damaged ourselves that night in different ways and since then I can’t even look at the logo without feeling waves of nausea. We manage to avoid it tonight, opting instead for a cheap sparkling wine that erodes anything with which it comes into contact. We trudge out through the blizzards and get all snug on the bus. It already feels like we’ve been away for weeks. :::Columbus, Ohio A huge shopping mall, the inescapable, nauseating smell of cinnamon, oversized porky legs bursting out of lycra, we are in a labyrinth of shops, drenched in artificial light. A mechanised piano sits proudly at the centre of the mall eerily playing jazzed up Christmas carols, its moving keys the only clue that it is the source of the muzak. There is terraced seating around it like a scaled- down colloseum and people sit stuffing enormous sandwiches and buckets of coffee into their faces watching the piano, watching as an invisible chip presses and releases its keys in a sequence determined months, possibly years earlier on a computer far, far away. Outside the streets are worryingly empty, there is nothing. No people, no dogs, no rubbish, no graffiti, no dirt. Might have seen a pigeon but it wasn’t doing much. There are, we've been told, 60,000 students here somewhere... In spite of the promoter’s best efforts the gig is a bit of a let down. He’d been looking after us very nicely all day, and everyone in the place was at pains to state how busy it would be, how many tickets had been sold. Everyone we see, sound engineers and lampies, caretakers and bartenders, stop us and gush "Tonight’s gonna be wild, man, the phones haven’t stopped ringing, the whole town is talking about it." As the day progressed we started to see cracks appearing in their stories. Normally promoters don’t say much. People grinning this much can only make a person suspicious. And then we met a man with such dramatic trousers as to take the breath away. :::Toronto Ahh, Canada. Never quite sure what to make of it but I think, on the whole, they are good people. One thing's for sure, they know how to do vegan food. Oh yeah. Now, slow down, I’m not getting ‘new age’ on you, that’s not going to happen. I am an unreconstructed omnivore but after a week of eating American food it feels good to eat something that looks like it came from the ground or a tree. Chris and I order healthy food and gorge on it, feeling the colour return to our cheeks, the vitality racing though our systems, repairing those mutating cells. It's just too damn cold outside to do anything and I spend the afternoon painting the 'Bloodsport face' on my bass drum head. It's reached the point where arts and crafts are required to alleviate the boredom. :::Montreal Still freezing we set out to find clothes and misadventure. Joe is on a mission to buy a sailors’ jacket. We’ve been here before (figuratively as well as actually) and yet again his plans are unsuccessful. He’s noticeably disappointed. I buy loads of sew on patches. We have a quick look at the Museum of Modern Art which is alright if you like that sort of thing. At the gig I take a dislike to an unnecessarily grumpy lighting engineer who seems reluctant to allow us to show our projections. After the show we all go to some party ‘only three blocks’ up the street. Half an hour later, with one eyelid frozen shut, I find myself in a strange club where the dj is trying some funny business with records from the eighties. Drinks flow and we meet a few people but we are so tired from seven nights getting drunk that we retire early. :::Quebec City What a strange place. Was it built yesterday? We can’t work it out. The architectural style is Post-Rapunzel, with turrets and twee little niches. A bit like Disneyworld. The deep snow only serves to heighten the fairy tale effect. Joe and I wonder about, kicking our heels wondering what to do with ourselves, a familiar kind of blankness. We enter a tourist shop and experience the most threatening bit of spoon-playing I’ve ever seen. A guy who looks like he spends too much time at one with nature is clacking two wooden spoons together in time to what we assume to be Quebecois folk music. Rrrrickety-pickety-rickety-pickety. He doesn’t take his eyes off us. I had a friend at college who used to play guitar at you in the same way. He’d come into your room, uninvited, and play some Simon and Garfunkel while staring disconcertingly into your eyes. I didn’t like it then and I don’t like it now. At the soundcheck everything starts to break down. We have a small but growing pile of equipment that has stopped working and at each gig we add to it. The plan is that if the crew get a spare minute they will start fixing things but each day something new breaks and they never get a chance. By the end of the tour we imagine we will be doing just acoustic sets, chris on guitar, Joe on Harmonica and me with the bass drum on my back and cymbals strapped to my knees. This time it is my sampler that has gone down and we try everything we can think of to get it working again. We fail. :::Brooklyn We wake up in Brooklyn. Outside the gig. It is a beautiful, crisp day. I’m excited to be here as a tourist. My guide book tells me that if Brooklyn were counted as a separate city it would be the fourth largest in the U.S. This is my fact of the day, I repeat it ad nauseum to everyone I meet. I fail to meet anyone who is impressed by it. Joe and I go for some Mexican food for breakfast. It’s great, we are happy. Joe reminds me of a row we had had the night before. I have no recollection of it but it sounded like fun. We then walk ourselves into the ground, the thawing snow seeping into our boots. At the gig we have a special guest star, Fernando, a fan who is celebrating his birthday. Chris drags him on to the stage and he dances like a man possessed. Happy Birthday! :::Jersey City [Day Off] Somehow, through a managerial oversight Joe and I have been put in the Presidential Suite in the hotel. The suite is big enough to run around in. Joe and I run around. The sitting room is furnished with all mod cons including a telescope with which to enjoy the panoramic views of Manhattan just across the river. I fail at voyeurism, no exhibitionists undressing by their windows, no murderers furtively destroying evidence, just the city, silent from this distance, with its plumes of smoke and steam and the massive nothing where there used to be two big towers. It’s a crisp winters day, a Sunday and I set out to explore Jersey City. Joe has gone across to Manhattan but I want to find out what makes this place tick. I find nothing. Absolutely nothing. I walk for 45 minutes without seeing a living soul. I thought I saw an old lady, but she vaporised before I could focus my failing, booze addled eyes. I call home and talk to my family and get attacked by forty thousand angry pigeons who want to eat my hair. This is not turning out quite as expected. Then just as I start to regret not accompanying Joe I come across a place so bizarre looking that I have to go inside. All around me are stubby high rise buildings from the 80s and 90s, corporate hotels and lazily conceived office blocks that could have been built in any city in the world, and nestled in the middle of all this conspicuous growth is a wooden shack called the Harbour Casino. I stand, dithering on its doorstep for about four minutes trying to summon the courage to step inside. On the one hand I think the scratchy, handwritten advertisements for crabs and shellfish are a sure sign of its credentials, its staunch resistance to the pre-fabricated tower blocks that overshadow it. But on the other hand I cannot get past the threats of four simultaneous televised football games and the fact that it has a reinforced steel door. I step inside and take a seat at the bar, thankfully going unnoticed by the clientele. An ancient old woman, Annie, comes over and serves me a beer. She has the oldest face ever, her white hair yellowing, her eyebrows are painted on in black. I get some crab cakes and try to start a conversation but her hearing is even worse than mine. Next to me at the bar is Joey, fortyish, overweight. He works with cars and doesn’t stop talking. This place has been here for as long as he can remember, he used to play here as a kid. He used to get the ferry over to the World Trade Centre and play in the elevators when they were brand new, bating the security guards and playing hide and seek in the stairwells. It seems strange now to think of those massive towers as playgrounds for local kids. Talk unavoidably turns to 9/11 and he becomes agitated, the beer glass in his hand shaking as he vows vengeance on ‘their country’. I ask which country and he looks blank for a second then answers questioningly "Iraq?" It turns out the Harbour Casino has only a couple of months left. It is to be demolished, the site redeveloped. Joey says he’ll have no need to visit this part of town any more. :::Washington DC No offence to its citizens but I don’t much like this town. On an earlier tour we were made to endure a couple of days off here. Trying to find the ‘happening’ part of the city we were directed to Georgetown, a humourless culture-vacuum populated by the worst kind of smug, preppy, Gap wearing, good-for-nothings I’ve ever had the misfortune of drinking near. All those dreadful, dreadful haircuts and cable knit sweaters complacently sipping Californian wines while less than a mile away there are ghettos so degrading and suffering such blatant inequality as to make D.C. the murder capital of the United States (as it was then). There is always a silver lining of course. The more conservative and unimaginative a place is, the more vociferous and passionate its alternative culture becomes. So it is that we enjoy vodka shots till the early hours with our marvellous hosts from the 9.30 Club. :::Hoboken A weird bit of routing sees us heading North again. We are in Hoboken New Jersey, birthplace of Frank Sinatra. We find an amazing record shop run by a withered old man who has all the stuff we’ve never been able to find. I buy a video of Miles Davis playing in 1974, Joe finds a copy of the Rolling Stones film, Cocksucker Blues. The proprietor was a rock’n’ roll photographer who had toured with Roxy Music, he told us stories. Maxwells is a great gig to play. There is no dressing room so we are forced to take the stage by wondering through the crowd. The temptation is to stay mingling with them and have a drink or two but they have paid money so we have no option. We have to play them some songs. It turns out to be fun. :::Atlanta This sounds terrible but I have no recollection of anything happening here. We watched some movies on the bus. We did the gig. We had drinks afterwards with a few people. Other than that I just can’t remember. Oh, wait a minute...we did some laundry in the hotel...that was good. It meant that our bus would no longer smell like a pet shop. :::Fort Lauderdale We are approaching the end and Calvin takes us on a long ride from Atlanta to the Southern tip of Florida. It’s Calvin’s home state and he has perked up somewhat. When we leave the bus we are surprised to feel the heat. The problem is it’s not sunny, it’s overcast and humid. We go for a swim in the hotel pool and before long it starts raining heavily. I float on my back staring at the vanishing point of the rain as it hits my face. I feel that feeling when you know you are going to remember a moment for as long as you live. It’s a strange gig. The kids are got up in a strange mix of Nosferatu and Miami Vice. The stage is so high up all we can see is a collection of disembodied asymmetrical haircuts bobboing in time. These strangely dressed people seem oddly pissed off. Which proves contagious. :::Orlando Here we are, the last day of the tour, we’ve made it. We were expecting sunshine, we had imagined ourselves on a beach hanging out, playing volleyball, but it’s overcast and an icy wind whistles through the deserted streets. We wander about. It’s a Saturday but everything is shut. I’ve got dollars to spend. C’mon America, I wanna spend some money... I’ll buy anything... Our bus has no satellite reception so we can’t watch movies. This is going nowhere. We retire to our hotel and gaze at the TV. From across the way we can hear some performance going on. I go and have a look. On a covered stage like a mini Hollywood Bowl children dressed in tin foil are performing Christmas carols and readings with a gospel choir. Rivalling this is the noise from the hotel bar, which appears to be hosting a corporate event. The corridors are filled with the sounds of drunken office workers whooping, high-fiving and trying to get off with each other. We feel thoroughly miserable. It’s gig time so we wander up the hill with our spirits at low ebb, wandering why the ends of tours are always anti-climactic. As we approach the gig we see a long line of people snaking around the block. It takes a while for it to dawn on us that they are queuing to see us, it seems somehow unlikely. We take to the stage to a sea of people cheering and shouting. We are genuinely surprised. No matter how long one does this job there are still gigs that are totally unexpected, that leave you grinning uncontrollably like a fool. This was one of those. Afterwards we make a lot of new friends and drink. Then it’s straight on to the bus where we all dance and hug and wave bottles of champagne around, falling out when we make it to the hotel and continuing in the foyer. Caroline is as drunk as we’ve ever seen her and the crew are mooning us from the elevators. It could have been worse. It could have been the other way around. We stay up until the booze runs out and then we collapse.
	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]