Letting The Snakes Crinkle Their Heads to Death [by Joe Wilson]
	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] "What do most people die of in the wilderness? They die of shame." And so it felt in Macclesfield. Ever been to Macclesfield? Ever been to Northampton, Dresden, Offenbach? Nope. We’ve just spent our night on the bus watching Anthony Hopkins fight a giant bear in David first Mamet’s "The Edge." What a movie. Man fights bear in the wilderness. What a man’s movie. Multi-billionaire battles his inner demons (and a huge bear) in a remote forest. He eats the bear and wears his pelt for warmth and fashions rudimentary jewellery from its claws and teeth. It’s like a lesson I must have missed in Being A Man, like a text book. He even saves his betrayer, bless him. He is a wise, brave, strong man. A forgiving man. A BIG MAN. He is rich, has an encyclopaedic memory for detail, and a pioneering spirit. No situation can get the better of him. He fights a bear and wins. He wins with dignity and magnanimity for he is a truly great man. But there is pain beneath his craggy face, for he is flawed and brittle and his victory is hollow. We, however, are touring Europe in a band. We will spend the majority of our time stuck on this bus gazing out of the windows or sulking in our bunks. For about one hour in each day we will experience the thrill and excitement of being on stage. The other twenty-three will be filled with journeys that make you want to shriek "Are we there yet?" to the driver. Or beg for a toilet stop. It’s no wonder people in bands act like children. We are conditioned that way. We are in a service station off the autobahn somewhere outside Offenbach. It’s our second service station in what promises to be a tour full of them. German service stations are like toy shops for the easily distracted or suicidal, you can buy petrol and beer and hard liquor simultaneously and then drive off into the night unhindered by speed restrictions. The vast array of porn is openly displayed, unashamedly catering for every taste imaginable. Boys, girls, leather, lace, animals. In Britain this could never happen, we would blush and worry for the children. But this is our wilderness and the rules are different. We must adapt. There is an unhealthy amount of American truckers paraphernalia for sale. Baseball caps, confederate flags, white trash titty figurines, 18 wheeler models, cowboy hats and cheap blue jeans. (It’s like when Camden Town tried to appropriate country and western music and gingham flowed freely. Dress trashy and keep it real). We sit here and watch people arrive and leave, and we count the hours. This is not a real place. This is a place in between places. No population, no life. As tourists we might visit here and imagine that the whole of Germany is like this, it’s so easy to fall into generalisations. I’m sure most Germans are as puzzled by this stuff as we were. Imagine if England was judged on its service station range, we would be pegged as line dancing fanatics chomping on boiled sweets or dainty fruit salads, queuing up with arms full of Roy Chubby Brown cassettes and Kendall Mint Cake. The deal with the venues on this tour is that we cannot gain access until 3pm which means we will have to wake every day for five weeks in service stations similar to this one and kill time. Day two and the reality of this situation is dawning on us. We will visit some of the most beautiful cities in the world, alive and vital with culture but sadly we will be forced to wait outside the city limits in truck stops waiting for the shame to come. Waiting for the desperation and the panic. Waiting for the wind to change. At least we’re not in London any more. Played Dresden last night, our first gig with Placebo. A night of soap opera, a night of coming through against the odds, of wresting victory from the jaws of defeat. Our MOST IMPORTANT MACHINE broke down in soundcheck, spewing forth chaos music and random noises and sending us apoplectic with fear. The crowd didn’t realise it but we were as frightened going on stage as we’ve ever been, facing certain humiliation at the hands of technology. We finished Kiro TV, the first in the set and after an agonising pause the audience exploded into cheers and whoops. It felt like rain after a drought, it felt like a rites of passage movie from the 80’s. Ah, the old magic... We are only ever as good as the last gig we did...so today we rock. We stand astride the world like a colossus. After Macclesfield we felt grim. (It was a wilderness and shame came for us with a huge knife, skinned us and wore our hides as a hat). When the crowd doesn’t cheer you find it impossible that they ever will again, you start to doubt everything. When they do it’s total vindication. I am personally not much of a cheerer. I find shouting to be too much exertion. But I am glad that others enjoy doing it because on tour, away from home, it’s like oxygen. We need it for survival. PYLONS. Beautiful pylons. Huge gay robots strutting across the landscape. Don’t you just love them? No? What do you mean, no? They are the best. I just can’t explain, they’re great! I love these pylons. All these pylons walking towards me, I just can’t get enough. Like a line of locals passing buckets to a barn fire in a Victorian romantic novel but huge and made of metal. What more do you want from a view? Fields are just fields, nothing more. But stick a row of pylons in one, or string them across a forest, or a river godammit, and we’ve got ourselves a view. Something we can play with. They should design hats for them too. Pylon hats. Nylon pylon hats. Actually Joe and I share a thing for them and we are often to be heard cooing at them distractedly out of the window. They give you a proper idea of your size in relation to the world (as when you fly on Nippon airlines and they have the camera pointing at the ground on take off so that you can experience the flight as if you have been strapped to the bottom of the fuselage. At first you don’t quite get what’s going on, it’s like they’re showing footage of some gravel but then the earth rushes away from you and the sense of vertigo and smallness is all rollercoastery. It’s like they actually want you to be frightened, like fear is what they want for their passengers). Better still are wind farms, massive windmills united in their task, stoic, determined and elegant. If a swan was a robot it would look like a windmill. Some people complain about them, think they ruin the view or try to pedantically suggest the gentle sound they make is noise pollution. Me, I would pay to have them nearby. I could gaze at them all day long...Maybe I could live in one. And I would fill my house with little scale models of them, all moving as one. Europe seems to have embraced its wind farms in a way that the moaning, sandal wearing Brits would find unacceptable, like Europe embraces new architecture and grown up licensing laws. I’d like to see a skyscraper built on the top of a mountain too but are there any? Are there? Of course not. I’d like to see the whole of the countryside paved, hills and all. Or covered in astroturf. Or that stuff they make Olympic race tracks from, like rubbery red gravel. Why won’t they do it? Are they so frightened of change? I’m sending my suggestions to the Countryside Alliance. I’m sure it would make hunting more practical, the horses wouldn’t slip so easily.Heading into Paris, the sun is coming out and it’s a day off. Aaahh, Paris. Aaaahh, France...Let’s go have fun. Can’t believe it. My hair has turned to worms. Little vermicelli worms like a fussy Medusa. I knew I shouldn’t have come on this tour. My mood is index linked to my hair performance. My hair performance depends entirely on how well I sleep on it. How well I sleep depends on my mood. It is these circular frustrations that make life almost unliveable. I must go drink now... Haven’t written for a few days because we’ve been having such a riot on the service station forecourts of Europe. Gadding about in foreign climes. It’s sunny now. We are driving a long drive across Portugal/Spain on our way to Barcelona. The sun is low in the sky and we are contented little bunnies having spent the day making little gasps and chortles at the landscape. "Look at that castle!" "Look at that huge cardboard bull!" "Look, a ravine with a river and a single line railway overlooked on both sides by rock formations affording hiding places for snipers or bandits...BANDITS I SAY!!" "Go on, Joe. Have a look...Knock yourself out!" Joe stares intently ahead. Joe has inner vision and thus has no need for external stimulation. To recap: We played Paris for two nights in an enormous tent built for 6000 people, then onwards to Bilbao where we caught the first glimpse of sunshine and were treated like stars by our loyal fans for whom we scribbled on tiny chits of paper, then to Madrid for our own show and then to Lisbon which had the best audience yet. They were leaping about like salmon before we even got on stage. They even did that clapping in unison thing to the huge beat on 6 Underground before they knew what tune it was. It still feels new when people cheer and scream. "That look on my face was surprise!" Joe and I allowed ourselves the dubious pleasure of diving headlong into the bar and it’s neighbouring streets for an extended autograph session. When morale reaches low ebb it provides a boost to our idiot egos. I met more people there than I have in six years of living in London, but I guess conversation was limited to a sleazy "Who’s it to, love?" Scribble, scribble, scribble...Shame, Shame, Shame. ... Still driving. Barcelona is full, there is no room at the inn. So we are driving around the resort towns nearby looking for a hotel or a beach with some bars we could park near. Cabin fever setting in. The bus is a jail. Found myself in a brothel the other night. Now, there’s a first for me. It all sort of happened by accident. We were parked somewhere outside Barcelona in a sleepy little village with a beautiful, ancient church and one bar. The "Club for Men." I should have gone to bed early like the rest of the band, all snuggly and dreaming of synthesisers, but instead I took a trip to the dark side with the crew. It could have gone one of two ways judging by its name. "Club for Men." We were either looking at a gay bar or some kind of lap dancing joint. As it happened it was just a room with four women in tiny clothes, trying to have sex with us for money. They must have thought it was Christmas when they saw our bus rolling into town. "Look, a bus full of men, they look like they’ve been away from home for a while, they’re a weird looking bunch these English, but their money’s as good as anyone’s." We got ourselves a beer and stood there. Me, Gaz (our guitar tech, he’s made of granite and knows eight ways of killing a man silently), Mark (monitor engineer, Brummie ,cheeky chappie), Andy (our put upon tour manager. He thinks we’re only here to send him over the edge) and Lloyd (our driver, the enigma. A man who shaves his head completely bald but buys beautifully crafted blonde wigs). One of the girls comes up to me (maybe I looked the most desperate). "Fuckie?" "Er...sorry?" "Fuckie, fuckie?" "Erm, no...thanks" "No fuckie?" "Er...no...really...no money...I’m just here for a drink..." "Fuckie, fuckie? No money, no fuckie, no money, no fuckie, ha ha ha, just drink English man...ha ha ha." They must have wondered why we had bothered coming in if we weren’t going to avail ourselves of the services. We looked like teases. Whore teases, a futile hobby...They totally stiffed us on the drinks and we got out of there. Their man, Greasy Pedro, stared single mindedly at us the whole time without saying a word. I’m sure if we had gone in to the back room with any of them, he would have very quickly appeared, snooker ball in a sock, and taken every last penny we had. Insomnia comes visiting. I’m sharing a room with Joe and he’s sleeping soundly, the occasional grunt or parp breaking the endless silence. Wake up you bastard, I can’t sleep, I’m bored to hell. There is an imaginary tap dripping somewhere. The air conditioning in this building was installed by children. Time grinds on. I need water, a saline drip. I have the insatiable thirst of the drunkard. I walk into the village, it’s 6.30 am and I am the only person up. There is a small market setting up with strange garments from yesteryear. Huge knickers, cheap socks and T-shirts with arbitrary phrases plastered across them in English. "SMOKING LONG AFRICA!" "I WANT YOU SMOKE YEAH YEAH" Empty pockets so I can’t even get a coffee. Ho hum...tick tock. Nice view though...Brain meltdown. My head is like raclette. So all chronology has gone out of the window. I was in some town somewhere, oh, I don’t know, Portugal, Spain, Italy, somewhere sunny and a man sidles up carrying a photograph album. He speaks no English but proceeds to flip mechanically, dispassionately through the pages as if he were a carpet salesman with a book of swatches. He points at each photo, pausing to look me dead in the eye for reaction. They are shots of him shaking hands with a vast range of people in the public eye. I don’t click at first because some of his victims were locally, but not internationally famous, so I have no idea who they are. As he flips through to the more famous faces he starts mumbling their names at me. "Mick Jagger, Yitzak Rabin, Julio Iglesias, Jacqus Chirac, Prince Andrew, Michael Stipe, Nana Vasconceles, Al Pacino, Tom O’Connor, Henry Kelly, George Bush, Mikhail Gorbachev, Kevin Costner, Steve Tyler, Nelson Mandela, Michael Barrymore, Cameron Diaz, Allan Holdsworth...." He shakes his camera at me as if he expects it to make a noise like maracas. This is a ritual he has played out to world leaders and movie stars alike and now he wants me in his book, the guy from the band he’s never heard of. When he shuts the book there’ll be my pudgy face pressed up against Spike Lee’s. Tom Cruise on my back. My grubby face being presented to others in the future. And then when he shows it to others I will be one of the nameless ones, the forgotten. I imagine he’ll flip past me rather quickly. See Naples and die, huh? You’re not kidding there. With interminable drizzle and psychotic taxi drivers there is little option. I’m getting a distinct sense of the wilderness. We have rolled up to the gig and have been mercifully allowed to park in the venue early as it is, apparently, " rough as fuck ‘round here." I claw back a curtain and find that we are playing in a circus tent surrounded by broken down cars and caravans. There is panic in the ranks as Liam has just got on to the bus quite pale with horror stories about the toilets here. We head through the rain into the town and gaze at the fog behind which lies Vesuvius. Only one thing can save me. A brand new Italian suit. In the back streets we find a cosy little tailors shop where my existing clothes are mocked by the proprietor. My flares, my pride and joy, are dismissed with "It’s...er, how you say...ELEPHANT, no? Elephant not the mode in, er, Italia." He mocks me with his little laugh and then he fits me with a beautiful suit, a la Dean Martin in the early sixties. Check me out! After the show I watch as the security guards mob Brian Placebo, begging for his autograph. One of them comes to me afterwards, clutching a scrap of paper. "Who is he? What is his name?" "Brian." I reply. "Does he sing?" "Yes." The whole idea of autographs is becoming more absurd with each day of this tour. Last night was a very odd night indeed. We’ve crossed the half way point of the tour and nerves are rattled. We played a sports centre in Perugia, Italy and things went very wrong indeed. The crowd broke the barrier at the front and Placebo were forced to leave the stage while the local crew tried some very unconvincing attempts at shoring it up with bits of wood and handkerchiefs. The crowd went full on ‘nut job’ and started lobbing anything they could find, bottles, coins, stones, at the stage. We were warned backstage that if the gig was pulled, we should get out because the crowd would turn very nasty, lynch us and smash our teeth in. Stuck for things to do, and with the germs of aggression floating on the air, Chris and I found an Olympic-style wrestling mat and threw each other around for ten minutes. In my mind’s eye it was like "Women in Love" with the heady mix of charging testosterone and none too subtle homo-erotic underpinnings. I’m sure it looked quite different. There were actually a couple of fans who had snuck through the Italian "security" and started taking photos. I’m sure that far from looking like Alan Bates and Ollie Reed it looked more like an ant trying to attack a doughnut. My vast weight bludgeoning little Corner into submission. Come on Hopkins, where’s the bear, let me at him. It felt very much like I would imagine those "REDISCOVER YOUR MASCULINITY" classes would feel. Beating drums in a forest with bare-chested stockbrokers. Throttling squirrels with bare hands and spit roasting them. It was at once violent and intimate. Simple and refreshing. Utterly unintellectual. Like being a kid again. Maybe if I was the kind of person who enjoyed hitting people I would be more in touch with my inner child. Maybe I need to start getting lairy with strangers in bars. "I was trying to connect with my inner child, your Honour." The night then disintegrated into total nonsense but instead of arguments there was laughter. Desperate, edgy laughter. Now it’s getting interesting. We are heading into uncharted territory. The Pimps have never been to Eastern Europe before (that’s not even true, I dunno why I’m saying it. We played in Prague once). But this is interesting because there is a slight frisson of danger on going into the former Yugoslavia. Lloyds, our insurers, have said that they are not prepared to cover us while we are there so there is a chance we will not be allowed into the country unless we can buy insurance from a local person at the border. It’s just a technicality really but it’s given the bus a little edge, as if we are John Simpson or Kate Adie heading into a war zone. What we didn’t expect was just how friendly the people would be in Zagreb, or how beautiful the city would be. Joe and I spend the day wandering around shops and bars, enjoying the sunshine and the atmosphere. The gig itself is strangely under-populated and we take to the stage thinking the reaction might be a little damp but instead the people let out a small roar. Then we all get drunk and laugh. The shame is fading... I don’t want to sound like a cliché here but isn’t Prague just the best? I love coming here. Today was a weird day though as moods were a little grubby. Joe has the look of a killer as I greet him in the morning, interrupting his repetitive, cyclical trudge up and down the street. We are parked at some kind of building site outside "Sky Club Bromlovka" so Liam, Joe and I get a cab into town (Chris being fast asleep for a good few hours yet). Liam’s wife is visiting so we go to her hotel to rouse her. It is overcast but still the narrow, cobbled streets are brimming with romance and magic. Today we are free to wander, unhindered and unrecognised through ancient streets, weaving our way through troops of middle class American tourists. Just as our mood is lifting we take a wrong turn and literally bump in to our manager. "Thank God I’ve found you! You’re not gonna like this... I’m afraid there’s press. We have to hurry back. Sorry, should have told you before." There’s nothing worse than surprise press. Back at the venue we find our dressing room is also the catering prep room so we spend the day with Paul, Jo and Suzie who feed and keep us happy on a daily basis. We have a piano to keep us entertained. Before the show, in a rare moment of camaraderie, we have what can only be described as a ‘sing song round the old piana’ with all four of us banging away at a tune we first sang years ago in America: "There’s gonna be a show tonight, It’s gonna be a real humdinger!" It’s from the unfinished Broadway musical we add to on each tour, ‘SNEAKER PIMPS: THE SHOW!’ It charts the meteoric rise of four simple small-town boys, their trials and tribulations in the evil world of music, the business we call Show. The gig itself is a blast, a hoot, and we all agree it is the best yet. If we carry on like this there’s a danger we might end up having fun. Poland, stuck by the road side. Our bus has popped it’s little clogs. Lloyd, the driver, was forced to break suddenly when some vodka soaked truck driver cut him up. I almost hurtle headlong through the front lounge, being on one foot at the time wrestling with a sock, but I am saved by Gaz who manages to pluck me out of my trajectory with one granite hand. The sudden stop burst a compressed air pipe which Lloyd calmly explains is crucial to the suspension, steering and braking side of things. As soon as we find a lay-by we pull over and Gaz sets to work patching it up. This was sent to test us, this will sort the men from the boys. Hopkins, where are you now with your encyclopaedic knowledge of the wilderness and compressed air pipes? "Fire from ice? Come on, man, fire from ice? THINK DAMMIT!" This is definitely bear country. Joe and I go for a walk in the deserted woods and try to assess the situation, ever ready to make a drama out of a crisis. We quickly realise we have no booze and no food and would quickly lose daylight. Things take a worse turn when Gaz’s efforts explode in his face with a massive pneumatic pop. We are doomed to stay here in this forest forever. A few bleak hours later and we’re limping into the outskirts of Warsaw like an episode of "Das Boot." A single drop of sweat glistens on Gaz’s vast brow as we all wait for the red light of disaster to appear on the dash board. This was to have been one of our only days off. A day with a proper shower and the chance to amble about Warsaw. Instead we make it to "Hotel Eden" for 9pm where the friendly tuba playing barman shows us Polish hospitality by force feeding us frozen vodka which hits the nerves at the back of the eyes. The walls are covered in furs. So, we don’t get to see any of Warsaw but spend our time doing press instead. First question: "So your album Becoming X was not a success and then Splinter was even less of one. How does it feel to be so unsuccessful?" I take a deep breath and start talking... The gig was a mad affair. The audience were crammed so tightly into the room as to become one huge liquid mass, surging and breaking like waves, spitting little indie girls out into the pit beneath us where they’d be picked up by security and carried out. "This means nothing to me...Aaaah, Vienna!" Indeed. But it means something to me, Midge, for it is the home of the greatest vintage clothing shop known to man. A shop so fantastic its owners haven’t even bothered naming it. A shop that sells dreams. I had never bought a suit in my whole tawdry life until this tour and now I have two. The Dean Martin from Napoli and this one, an unworn 1970s black flared suit, in pristine condition, factory fresh. A perfect fit. God has smiled down on me and repaid my good behaviour on earth with this suit. Joe and I were minding our own business, strolling around this enormous funfair near the gig, when we stumbled upon a little shop where an old lady and her older father (obviously...) have gathered hundreds of shoes, shirts, suits, ties, pairs of jeans and coats from the 60s and 70s. All still in original packaging, untouched by human hand. Not only that but the saintly proprietors are prepared to sort through their stock for us, finding sizes and waiting on us hand and foot. They would be heroes in Camden Town. There would be a statue of them outside the tube station and roads would bear their names. If only we had more time, we could have replaced our entire wardrobes, which at this point on the tour, would be welcome for I smell like a dog basket. We have played eighteen gigs so far on this tour but you might not realise it from reading this. There is not much to say about a gig. I could go on ad nauseum about my snare lugs constantly loosening or the fact that I’ve cracked my favourite cymbal but I have come to realise from people’s expressions when I talk about such things that it is a desperately boring topic. I suppose I could tell you something about the experience of playing in a room full of 7000 people, you know, how it actually feels. Well, it’s umm, nice. And it’s frightening. I always experience nausea when taking to the stage and I always feel disappointed to be leaving one. It’s one of the days where we break away from the Placebo circus to play our own gig at the Rotunda in Brussels, a weird one to play. It’s kind of tiny and has the feel of a lecture hall or recital room. Although it’s a beautiful room one can imagine the terrible crimes committed here in the name of performance art over the years. We have the pleasure of having our every move filmed by our sponsors who are visiting from America, camcorders permanently on. I hate cameras so this makes the day difficult. They are filming our sound check and we sit around a little bored while Gaz and Mark line-check all the instruments and iron out any technical creases that appear. Then we take to the stage and play individually so that Andy can get the best sound from each instrument. Now, there is one argument we keep having on this tour and it concerns Liam’s peculiar talent for disappearing at exactly the wrong time. It’s uncanny. He is present up until the second he is needed and then he vanishes. As I was checking the drums Liam was there, in the stalls, keeping half an ear on the sound. Then Andy shouts "Okay, Liam, a bit of keyboards please." and he is nowhere. We carry on without him and our sponsors keep filming. Someone else does his keyboards and half an hour later it is time to play through a tune. We start whispering "Where the hell has he gone this time?" so as to keep the veneer of unity for the cameras but with our sound check time ebbing away we soon enough start turning the air blue with expletives. He has switched his phone off. In the end, after every room in the building has been checked I run back to the bus and find him sitting there with a glass of wine and the lap top, quite oblivious. Another day another row. They pass the time and clear the air. After the show, which was strangely intimate and informal, we are taken by our old friend, Dis, to a bar where we drink with a group of teenagers who appear to be co-ordinated by a Robert Downey Jr. lookalike. All right. Now this is a hangover. Wake up in a hotel room fully clothed in my suit with a head full of poison. Don’t remember coming back here. Don’t remember much. Oh hang on, it’s coming back to me... in stroboscopic flashes. There was a club, a cordoned off guest area...tequila... Steve Placebo pouring drinks whilst laughing like Satan’s helper. Spinning out of control. Nausea. Need fresh air...must walk. Can’t walk. Legs don’t work. Steve pouring another shot, bellowing out a huge guffaw. This is Luxembourg. It’s Easter Sunday. Memory is returning. I came off stage feeling ill, as if coming down with a cold. Shaky and weak with the sponsors’ cameras still trained on our every move. I wanted to sleep but was persuaded instead to drink through it. "Go on Dave, you know it’s the only way you’re gonna make the last few days of the tour. If you stop now it’s all over." "I can’t, I have no strength. It tastes like poison" Glug, glug. We were taken from the show in a people carrier on a diversion to avoid the fans waiting outside. We drove through them, around the block and then back to the club next door to the venue putting all but the most determined of them off the scent. Inside Steve became the Tequila Tormentor. I grew dizzy and crawled back here to the hotel. Bourges. Two days left. Three if you count the last travel day. The end is near and it’s apparent from the way we look, sitting in this bar, gazing at the rapidly depleting pile of money in the centre of the round table. None of it is mine. The banks have conspired against me, twice spitting my card back at me, goading me into trying a third, risky attempt. We are drinking with Gaz and Mark’s money in this bar on some ornamental civic space designed in the eighties. The entire town is shut for Easter and as part of the celebrations there is a collection of crusties in the square playing instruments and bickering about their drinks. We are silently scowling as we watch their little spats develop and subside, as they clutch their beer cans to their chest defensively. The symmetry here is a little discomforting and might go some way towards explaining our unanimous contempt for them. There’s such a fine line between our different alternative lifestyles. Our own conversation is pretty much exhausted. Five weeks, ten people, one bus. We are bonded by mutual experience but have little to say. Still, we laugh and things aren’t so bad. There’s no animosity, no anything. This close to the end there is greater danger of any exchanges descending into argument as there is progressively less need to maintain the equilibrium. Joe is away somewhere with Andy and I imagine they are getting drunk, like us but with more bile. Our manager, Caroline, is off somewhere skipping and gambolling about in her own way. As long as the money lasts we’ll be fine. We have always suffered from audience ambivalence on the last date of any tour. No matter how successful the previous fifty dates might have been, the last show always sees the audience gazing confusedly at us as if we are somehow in the way of something. We have begun to see it as a curse of sorts. In Dublin, on the closing date of our wildly successful U.K. tour for the Splinter album, we were met with total silence from a crowd who seemed to resent having had to leave their homes that night. The disappointment we feel stems from our inability to realise that the audience hasn’t been along for the ride the whole time. We feel like pleading with them "Don’t you realise how big this is for us? Don’t you understand that this is the night when everything gets tied up. Where we achieve some kind of CLOSURE. When we were screaming abuse at each other in Dumfries, or when we were broken down in the middle of nowhere for a whole day, or out of our minds in Lisbon, this is the gig that is supposed to put a lid on things. Why are you just standing there looking at us funny?" Although we are too superstitious to say so out loud I believe that we are all aware of the last night curse as we pad out our day with nonsense. If anyone had mentioned it they would have been punched by the other three. Chris and I do some press. An interview for the French paper, Liberation. We have been asked to comment on the music of Bob Marley for an article marking the twentieth anniversary of his death. We know nothing about Bob Marley. In fact we pretty much hate reggae if truth be told but after weighing up the pros and cons we decide to give it a shot if only to kill a bit of time. While we wait for the journalist we scrabble about looking for possible answers. I suggest something along the lines of "Well it’s the songwriting that stands out, it transcends any genre, let’s just go on about that for a bit" First question: "Chris, just what is it that draws you to Bob Marley?" "Well, I’d say it is the songwriting more than anything. It just transcends any genre" The interviewer turns to me. "And David, what attracts you to Bob Marley’s music?" "Well...I’d have to agree with Chris on that one. It’s the songwriting, it seems to transcend any genre." "What is it about the song writing that does this?" "Ummm... the, er, general...quality of it." "The quality?" "Yes" "Which of his songs do you like the best?" "Redemption Song" She turns to Chris. "And you? Which songs do you like?" "Well, Redemption Song." "Any others?" "Erm, No Woman, No Cry, and umm...." The sentence peters out. "So let’s move on to Marley, the Man. Has his life proved an inspiration to you?" "Well, of course. I mean he had such charisma, he was a very handsome man and he wrote such...wonderful songs." "Wasn’t he good at football?" "Yes, that’s it. He was a good footballer. And of course he died." "Yes, yes he died." I can laugh about it now, but at the time it was terrible. So, on to the show. There is such a warm feeling the whole day between the bands and crew and the fans who had gathered at the gates. The Freestylers, who we met in Paris, come along and give Chris a bottle of wine to drink on stage. Then Steve Placebo wanders round to our dressing room to invite us to play an extended set to mark the last night of the tour. By the time the gates are opened there is a tangible sense of occasion as the crowds run in screaming. As we wait in the wings it becomes clear that tonight’s show will break the curse. Tonight there will be that rare, magical element that will infuse the whole room (well, tent). The music works, the crowds cheer and dance and scream and we leave the stage elated. After Placebo finish their show we gather for drinks and photos in their dressing room. We only have a little time before we have to drive and our respective tour managers are circling us like sheep dogs to keep us from disappearing to the nearest bar. There are hugs, kisses and bouquets and then we are ushered on to the bus for the drive to Calais. Everyone cheers when we see the white cliffs of Dover. As they gradually become visible through the grey fug of the English Channel it is suddenly clear that we are home. Home. Home for us is symbolised by these white cliffs, a seemingly perfect white band which, as you get nearer, becomes stained and knackered and filthy. I remember as a child being disappointed whenever I saw them. People would beamingly describe them, sing old wartime songs about them, choke back patriotic tears for this stone curtain staunchly defending us from outsiders. But then the reality never quite lived up to the image. Especially now, after being away for so long. It’s like getting home and being struck by how grubby your house looks, all overgrown borders and peeling paint. "Mmmm, must remember to re-paint the guttering." And the next thing you see are the compounds where asylum seekers and political refugees are kept while the nation argues about what to do with them. It’s a shame most people enter England through Dover as it appears to me the most bleakly unwelcoming town in England. The drive from Dover to London has never been fun. I only associate it with vast hangovers and the ending of things. We are going home. Going home to sit in silence, flick channels or stare into space. The crew seem excited (in a slightly impatient way) to be going home and as if some switch has been flicked. We do what we always do on this journey, we start the process of acclimatisation (through food). "Ooh, fish and chips!" "Nooh, curry and chips." A dreamy look descends upon us. "Mmmm, no a proper curry, Brick Lane, Jalfrezi." Appreciative gurgles, then back to silence. Chris shouts at the big chair on Deptford High Street. "Where’s the big chair? Have we missed it? The big chair? There it is: THE BIG CHAIR!!" (There is a big chair chained up outside an antiques shop near to where Chris used to live and its sheer size appears to have made a big impression on little him. It really is very big and we always cheer it whenever we drive by). As soon as we see the Big Chair we know it’s time to get our stuff together. After five weeks our belongings are scattered throughout the bus. Stuff we had forgotten all about. Random garments from distant thrift stores, footballs, frisbees and trinkets. We always get off the bus, or ‘de-bus’, with plastic carrier bags of clutter and rubbish straining at the handles and bursting out on to the street. The end of any tour sees me on my doorstep scrabbling though eight bags of crap trying to find the keys I last used five weeks previously, dirty underwear and Belgian chocolates spilling into the gutter. Where are the squealers now, Mr Pop Star? Now that you’re scraping about in the dust. Where are the crowds? The beautiful public? What’s the use, huh, you petty, desperate fool? Shame!
	Diary Abajo del Pueblos [by Joe Wilson]
	The Hum of Plastic [by Joe Wilson]
	What We Do [by David Westlake]