Monday 1 December 2008

smoke problems tour

last week we were on tour with two really amazing bands; smoke or fire and fake problems.
here is some shit that went down... (documented by my shitty camera phone and shitty memory)

the first show was at the windmill in brixton, pugs came with us so that was cool. we stopped at a garage just outside swansea to pump up the tyres, we got back in the van to set off but it wouldn't start. luckily pugs added just enough muscle to the rhys, miles and tim cocktail to build up enough momentum to bump start it


we hit a shit load of traffic on our way into bristol (to pick up jenks) becuase some lorry driver had managed to flip his lorry at the junction for the m32, how considerate of him. we hit all the same traffic getting back onto the m4 so that was nice.
from that point onwards 'traffic' was the name of the game, it took fucking forever to get to the windmill, something along the lines of 7 hours - it should usually take about 4!
because we were so late getting there we literally had to get out of the van and play straight away. this felt a bit weird. for the first couple of songs we were all pretty spaced out and nothing sounded right but about 3 songs in it started going good and was fun.

hussy from attack! vipers! came to the show, while we were playing him and pugs made cock and ball style masks out of arteries and atom bomb stickers, that was cool...

punktastic reviwed the show and gave us a 9/10! check it out here.

the next show that we played was in norwich,
guess what? norwich is really fucking far away! this drive also took the best part of 7 hours, it would have been less but the traffic was shitty by birmingham.

greg and jugs did a great job with the food and beer (thanks guys) at the show so it was well worth the drive. we also had a cool description on the flyer;

it was a good time, the people were friendly and everyone seemed to have fun. after the show jugs took us to some really weird club, we didn't stay long, it was weird, seriously.
oh yeah, some guy was getting his face split open by bouncers when we were leaving - man, i hate bouncers!

the next moring we left for leeds. we had to pull over to fill the van up with vegitable oil, it runs cheaper than disel and it's a good way to stick it to the man. we did that right next to some horses which was nice ;)

the drive took a far while but it was mainly our fault, we kept stopping for stuff like this...

and this...

the leeds show was cool, there were a load of people there and some of them were our friends which was really nice. i cut my finger open during our set and covered my bass in blood, it looked cool, the only down side was that derek from fake problems was planning on using it after me and i thought it would gross him out. it turns out that he didn't give a shit, at one point during their set he even licked his fingers... nice!



at one point thier merch looked like this

after the show it was really fucking cold. we stayed with our friends al and paul, sean was there too so that was cool, he gave me a sneaking listen to the unmixed and unmastered plight debut album - it rocked!

we stayed up drinkng and playing buzz, the t.v. game show on the PS2, it was fun and warm

their housemate nat had a really fluffy rabit



the next show was in bristol, some of our friends from swansea came up to the show so it was great to see them, the show went well we managed to get a bunch of booze somehow and went back to jenks' house to party. during the night one of his housemates fucked with tim and pugs using eggs and shaving foam. that kind of stuff is usually funny, but it is also usually your friends that are fucking with you - we didn't even know this guy. in the morning we decided to seek revenge in the form of brown sauce in a shoe, baked beans under a pillow, vasaline on his door handle, egg on his bike and pugs stole all his beer... duh!

after that we set off to southampton, playing was fun, fake problems and smoke or fire were really awesome - they are even better people than they are bands, it was really cool to become friends with everyone and it sucked to say bye.




thanks to lil for the hook up with the shows