This Town Needs Guns

Happy New Year everyone

If you’re at a loose end, I suggest you…

…listen to this band.

…watch this film.

That is all.

x

So if you’re a bit bored, here are some excellent bands I’ve been listening to recently:

Theo (Battles meets Explosions in the Sky)
Ankles (bass + bass + drums)
Humboldt (Dartz side project)
YouMeTheSwitch (Faraquetty type stuff)

Last thing before Christmas no doubt. A review of the Cats split just went up on Punktastic.com. It is nice.

http://www.punktastic.com/reviews/2755

So this is it. The last date of the tour It seems like only yesterday we were packing off to Bath to play the Porters and enjoyed one of the best cheese toasties ever ;-P

Things don’t get off to the best of starts. For some reason the traffic from work is horrendous. It takes me 15 minutes to drive 200 metres down the road. It is another 30 minutes before I finally step through the front door. It seems like doing the early shift at work was almost completely pointless. We finally leave the house at 5. This is the last time Lil will be driving us and it is the shortest distance of the whole tour; Weston-on-the-green, just off the A34. This 10 mile stretch is just so she can swap with Dan who is going to drive us all the way to Manchester. We say our goodbyes to Lil as she heads back to Oxford with Dan’s car. It’s weird without Lillums in the van, but the tour has taken it’s toll on all of us and Lil has done more than enough. The only thing that makes us do this is that we get to play a gig at the end of it. I can’t imagine where Lil found the motivation to drive all that way (each night for nearly a week), so she could sit behind the merch table. Thank you Lil.

Anyway….M40, M6 and assorted minor (and a few more major) roads later we’re in Manchester. We have destroyed a rotisserie chicken and 2 baguettes by picking them apart with our hands and experienced a few near misses with large trucks, but we’ve made it. We played the Roadhouse last month with Pinback and it was great. I think we’re all pretty excited to be there again. The venue is quite similar to the old downstairs at the Oxford Zodiac. I like it.

It’s not long before the first band The Honeymoon Suite start playing and they hop and jump around the stage from beginning to end of their set. They’re super tight and play very well together. During their set my old uni friend Laura and boyfriend John arrive. I miss the latter half of the bands set while taking a bit of time to catch up with her.

We’re up next. I won’t say it was our best set of the tour, but I think we were all happy with how it went. We play ‘…Belle & Sebastian’, in payment for ‘Laser Eyes’ in Sheffield. That’s about all I can remember. The crowd were really attentive and we got a good reaction between each song. The night really does seem like a total blur to me now.

Dartz are on form again tonight. They play an ace set, full of energy and despite Will’s claims of a sore throat, his vocals are excellent. It was a great set to go out on.

It’s a sad time after the gig. I don’t think any of us want the tour to end. It has been a great (but tiring) week and it all seems to have ended too soon. We say our goodbyes and head back to Oxford via Stafford services (rip off). Get back for 3:30. So tired. Leave for work in 4 hours. Going to see Jonquil tomorrow night. That’ll be nice. Sleep.

Review:
music-dash.co.uk

Thankyou: Lil, Nico, Andy and Joe (the driver/merch crew), BSM/Xtra-Mile, Secondsmile, Pennines, Frank Turner, Chris T-T, Tellison, Blakfish, OnDryLand, Quickfix, Joal, Not Shy of the DIY, Hopewood, A Declaration, The Honeymoon Suite, everyone who came to a gig, everyone who listened to the compilation CD when they got home and didn’t throw it away and last but by no means least…..a very big thank you to Dartz (especially Henry “you know you’re the best really” Carden) .

Merry Christmas!

We’ve all been at work today and you can tell. Everyone is shattered after a long weekend and no-one really wants to drive for 3 hours, so we can do it all over again a few hours later….but, we do it anyway. We leave Oxford at 6 and arrive in Sheffield around 9. The Red House is tiny. It is really nice though. When we arrive it’s difficult to move. Around 60 people have been rammed into the smallest of spaces. It’s great. I love playing small gigs like this. It’s like being a member of the audience witnessing your own gig.

We turn up just in time to see the first band Hopewood. Unfortunately though I didn’t get to see much of their set as I was too busy helping Lil and Dan set up merch in a seperate room, but what I heard from a distance sounded good. Cameron of Two Ducks Disco fame, has made the trip from Leeds to come see us tonight. It’s always nice to meet up with Cam, he is one of the nicest people we’ve met through all this band stuff so it was good to catch up.

Tonight is our last night playing with Secondsmile so it is fitting that they play the best they have all tour. Everything sounds great. The crowd are digging it and they seem to be feeding off their energy. One guy with ginger dreads (who from now on will be known unimaginatively as Newton), is going nuts thrusting his arms in the air. DIY shows like this really are what it’s all about.

Once Secondsmile finish their set, we have to go get our stuff from the van (there was no room to bring our stuff in earlier). Setup takes no time at all, but all our cold instruments have attracted large amounts of condensation from the small and sweaty room. Condensation is literally dripping from our amps and instruments by the time we start the set, which is pretty bad. There are a few screw ups in the first couple of songs courtesy of Tim’s fingers slipping on the fret board and for some reason nothing seems to come together for us tonight. It’s dissapointing, but that’s the way it happens sometimes. We had hoped to play ‘Belle & Sebastian’ tonight as well (we made a pact with Phil Dartz, that if we played B&S, they would play ‘Laser Eyes’), but we run out of time

Having said that though, people are pretty complimentary after the gig and judging by sales at the merch stand, we couldn’t have been that bad. Sometimes we can be our own worst critics

Dartz play a great set tonight (including ‘Lazer Eyes’, thanks Phil). Even Henry has started bopping around. Tonight’s crowd are the first since London to really get into the whole stage banter thing and it makes all the difference between songs. Newton has gone completely crazy and is flicking his dreads all over the place. I think he tried to create some kind of mosh pit, but the other people in the audience weren’t having any of it. Shame. That would’ve been pretty funny/incredibly dangerous.

After the gig we say our thank-yous and goodbyes to the Secondsmile chaps. It’s a long drive back to Oxford. Lil is driving us and we have to stop a couple of times to get some food. We make an excellent service station discovery on the M1, where you don’t get ripped off for a sandwich and when we stop again at Tamworth services on the M42, Tim finds a packet of Ox flavoured crisps. They taste like saltier Beef flavoured crisps, in case you’re interested. We get home really late tonight. The house is freezing. I have the morning off tomorrow and no gig tomorrow night, so it is a good chance to get the best nights sleep in a week.

Day after tomorrow Manchester :-S

Lie in this morning. Yes! The Collis’ and I have camped in Henry’s dining room while Dan and Lil get the spare bedroom. This is a particularly comfortable floor to sleep on. There have certainly been far worse in the past. After a few hours of drifting in and out of conciousness, I pluck up the courage to introduce myself to Henry’s parents. They are both lovely and treat us all to numerous cups of tea and a rather lavish display for lunch. It was great to know we wouldn’t have to rely on some greasy fast food place/service station, for at least one of the day’s meals.

We say our goodbyes around 3 and start the journey back down south to Birmingham. Everyone seems a little more upbeat today after a good nights sleep. Tim and Chris continue the new van game they devised the previous evening. It involves replacing lyrics to the Dartz song ‘Latin & Greek’ i.e.

“I am a Butcher, of various meats”

“I play Warcraft, I’m a level 5 geek”

“I am a Grocer, of cabbage and leeks”

The list goes on. If you know the song (and you should. It is one of their best), it was pretty fun.

We arrive at tonights venue (The Flapper and Firkin) around 6. No-one is there, so we park up and go to find some food. We don’t get back to the venue until 7:30. Blakfish have already set up and we’re informed that doors are in 2 minutes. Oooops. Even bigger oops is that the promoter was kind enough to make food for all the bands as well :-S

The venue starts to fill up quite nicely by the time Blakfish start their set (for a Sunday night in Birmingham we’re all surprised to see up to 50 people in tonight). They struggle with technical difficulties, but manage to pull off an incredibly intense live show. They play harder and faster than any other band I’ve seen recently. If you get the chance, make sure you see them on their tour with MMiSL next year. They will rock your socks!

Secondsmile play well again, although the vocals seem to be a lot higher in the mix than usual. Good set.

All manner of crap goes wrong for us. One of my leads has broken. None of us can hear Tim’s guitar on stage for the first half of the set and then all we can hear is his guitar for the second half. We only have enough time for 4 songs as we’re on stage at 9:30 and the curfew for tonight is 10:30 People still seemed to be fairly impressed though and are very complimentary after we’re done.

Little did we know that around the time we were playing in Birmingham, our ‘friends’ Hootie and Dale were back in Oxford playing a set at Vacuous Pop’s Christmas party. From what I’ve been told their set consisted of Hootie getting drunk and the two of them playing a series of covers by Hreda and Jonquil, with content for spoken word lyrics provided by this very website. That’s right, Hootie was reading out the first entry of our tour diary from Bath. Apparently the section about ‘cheese toasties’ went down a treat. Bastards!

Meanwhile back in Birmingham Dartz have time for 5 songs and its another great performance, albeit more than a little too brief.

Pack van. Say goodbyes. Head for home. Sleep. Work tomorrow

x

Sound As Language have voted our release with Cats and Cats and Cats as being the 12th best EP of the year. Go us!

You can see the full lineup here.

Early start this morning. Despite it being the first day we haven’t had to work after a gig in what feels like ages, we have a long drive ahead. Fortunately, we’ve decided to break it up a little with a stop in Leicester for a photo shoot with the lovely Amy Brammall. She’d contacted us a few weeks back asking if she could take photos of us and as we were heading past Leicester anyway, we thought “why not?!”. We really liked the photos she’d done of MaybeSheWill, and Johnny Foreigner. So after saying our ’see you laters’ to Dartz and the Pennines boys and a quick dash up the M40, we were in Leicester doing this:

So one job down and we’re back on the road to ‘boro and we spend the first hour listening to Tim and Mike Kinsella do a radio interview with some guy on Chicago local radio. I’d heard it before, but it was fun to listen back to it again. If you’re a Kinsella fan, it is totally worth a listen. Unfortunately though, after that it started to go down hill. It dawned on me how incredibly dull the van is. For those that don’t know, we drive around this isle of ours in a small LDV 200 Pilot. ‘Truckasaurus’ as she has been monikered is great, but at the same time not the most comfortable of places to be and certainly not one of the most exciting. On this tour it seems as though we’ve adopted the following positions. The Collis brothers and I sit in the back three seats, with Dan and Lil sitting up front. It is absolutely freezing in the back and we’ve had to cover ourselves in numerous blankets/sleeping bags to try and stay warm. Most journey’s consist of Dan and Lil chatting or listening to music upfront (where it is a bit warmer) and me sitting relatively quietly in the back while Tim and Chris asleep. It’s pretty mind numbing, so it’s great when we finally reach Middlesbrough a very long 3 hours after leaving Leicester.

Dr Browns is quite a big pub, with a bunch of regulars downstairs and a tiny room upstairs where tonights gig will take place. Tristan and Henry (Pennines) have made the trip up north as well and Tristan is crapping himself after being there a mere 30 minutes. Apparently the first thing anyone said to him when he walked through the front door was “the spazzy toilets are in tha corner mate” and he was duly pointed in the direction of the disabled toilets. Nice! Gruff local welcomes aside though, the venue is nice and I didn’t experience any problems. Infact, everyone we meet at the gig is really nice. Sound check complete (a bit of a novelty, we don’t really do sound checks) and pizza arrives courtesy of the promoter (Henry Dartz), before we head downstairs to play a game of one-handed pool. It gets a few funny stares from local onlookers, but then I suppose it should do.

We’re first on tonight and we play to a packed audience of about 50 (the room really is THAT small). Everyone is a bit too polite though. After each song, all we get back from the audience is applause followed by complete silence. You could literally hear a pin drop. It was really weird! I think we played well. Henry Pennines is on the front row ‘getting down with his bad self’ throughout the set. ‘New song’ is a treat!

Secondsmile play a blinder and sound a lot fuller now they are joined by their new guitarist Tom. Regain is actually the coolest bass player ever.

Tellison are fun. I keep watching Benji, their guitarist/keyboard player/percussionist/all round smiley man. He’s on the only thing in this venue that can be considered a stage and he is just fun to watch. He just looks totally excited to be there.

Dartz play their best set so far on this tour tonight. They’re full of energy and the crowd finally seem to have loosened up a bit. Will’s family are here tonight and they appear to enjoy every minute of it

After we pack everything up, we are treated to a jazz apple or two and head into boro town centre for a night on the tiles. I’m kind of getting bored of writing this now though (well done if you’ve got this far) so I’ll try and bullet point the rest:

• Guest list que at the Onyx Rooms.
• Big fight outside the Onyx Rooms.
• Play Twister and Buckaroo.
• Have a dance.
• Drink.
• Fair well to the Pennines boys.
• Leave Onyx Rooms.
• Dan gets started on for eating a mystery meat pie and peas.
• MY NAME IS IAN!
• Witness a police man getting headbutted and knocked to the ground.
• Nico, Phil and Chloe introduce me to one of these:

Then it was back to Henry’s for water and sleep.

Tomorrow Birmingham and a surprise appearance in Oxford.

x

Tonight is a home town gig, which means we don’t have to worry about turning up late (or so we think). We arrive at 6:30 and load in to the news that touring bands usually turn up at 4:30 for soundcheck and that Joal the soundman has been sat twiddling his thumbs for the last two hours :-S I immediately feel terrible as it was entirely my fault. I thought bands couldn’t drive down the High Street in Oxford until 6:30 (when traffic is permitted). Consequently only two bands get to soundcheck tonight. The first; Secondsmile, set up and crack on with minimal fuss and everything seems to be cracking along nicely. Unforunately only half of the first band on tonight have arrived (with the other half not due until 8 o’clock) and we also discover that the opening time of 8:30 was a bit ambitious. It should have been more like 7:45 (unaware was I at the time of promoting the gig that there was an 11 o’clock curfew on Fridays). So everything gets pushed back and there are people eagerly queing at the door.

Thanks to Joal however, we are saved. Tonight he is a complete legend. He always has been whenever we’ve played there, but tonight he really excels himself. He sorts out the curfew so we can now go on till 11:30 and when the rest of Pennines finally arrive and suffer a variety of unfortunate technical problems whilst setting up, Joal is a trooper and with great patience and understanding sorts everything out

People start to come in. Lots of people. What strikes me most about tonights audience is that I don’t really know that many of them. Usually home town audiences are made up of a large portion of friends, but what with all the various Christmas parties going on tonight, I barely know anyone here (with the odd exception).

Pennines are ace! There is no denying it. Tonight is their third gig and aside from their obvious nerves between songs, you wouldn’t have guessed. The musicianship is excellent. The drumming compliments the delicate guitars perfectly and stand out as a real highlight. Great band and lovely guys.

Tonight is the first time we get to see Secondsmile on this tour and they play really well. Tom (their newest recruit and third guitarist) is still absent, but the new stuff they play tonight still sounds great.

We’ve decided to try and mix things up in the set tonight. I think it works well. We only have time for 5 songs, so we drop Belle & Sebastian and play the new one instead. Everything sounds great tonight and playing is sooo much fun. By the time we get to ‘26′ it felt asthough we’d only just started. On announcing the title of the song, one guy near the front started singing the words and so Dan challenges him to ‘come up and have a go’. After a bit of ‘to-ing and fro-ing’ he calls our bluff and accepts and we are joined on stage by a fifth (rather excited) member. I have no idea how it sounded out front, but it didn’t really matter to us onstage. We were having too much fun to care. Our new friend Max (who tells us is in band called Collisions and Consequences) is bounding around, growling the lyrics and I can’t remember seeing anyone in the band without a big smile on their faces.

Dartz don’t appear to be on top form tonight, but they still play a great set. Unfortunately there is only time for 5 or 6 songs and it seems like it’s all over before it really began.

All in all though, a great night and I think most people went away happy. Big thanks to Joal and Lee Christian (Quickfix promotions) for helping out and generally just being total gems!

After the gig, Dartz and two of the guys from Pennines (Henry and Tristan) head back to our place and we catch the end of ‘Species’ and watch one of the best/worst films any of us have ever seen; Phantasm 2. It’s one of those horrors that at the time of release probably scared the crap out of anyone watching but with a bit of time, now seems really dated and just funny. Click on the cover to see one of the funniest clips on youtube. The whole thing was hilariously funny, but if you can skip to about 5:30 you’re in for a treat.

Bed time. Dreams consist of crazed midgets sticking out of girls backs :-S

Middlesbrough tomorrow.

It is the morning after the night before and my brain feels like it is going to dribble out of my ear. Still, there is a days work ahead of me and some pancakes and a can of coke (my first in months) are helping to shake the cobwebs off and make me feel human again.

Last night got off to a good start. We left Oxford EARLY (something of a minor miracle). We filled the van up with some of the most expensive diesel ever and replaced one of the head lamps. I was very impressed. We were behaving like some sort of well oiled machine.

Unfortunately, it isn’t long before the peace and tranquility is destroyed. Flashing signs on the M40 tell us that the road has been closed and we’re being diverted to the M4. This was not something we had prepared for :-S

Numerous diversions, map ‘tweaks’, nail bites and some rather questionable driving maneuvers from Lil later and we arrive at the Luminaire, with just enough time to set up immediately and start playing. I hate rushing! I was gagging to use the loo for about an hour and a half and nearly broke the van door trying to get out.

We play a pretty good set. Tim was a bit annoyed that his fingers were cold (finger tapping opens up a whole new world of difficulty when your fingers are freezing), but we all enjoy ourselves. I couldn’t really see anyone because of the bright lighting and so had no idea how many people we were playing to, or whether anyone was enjoying it. Everything had been such a rush when we got there I hadn’t had time to see whether anyone was there at all. Judging from the applause I think there were a fair few people there

Didn’t get to play the ‘new song’ last night. Maybe it’ll get an airing in Oxford though.

After our set we saw a whole bunch of familiar faces and got to meet a few new ones. It was great. We enjoyed sets from Dartz and Frank Turner and I drank what could be considered to be a little too much. Still, I’m pretty sure I didn’t embarass myself……too much.

The drive home was a speedy affair. It was pretty sobering though as we passed the destruction on the other side of the M4O. That crash must’ve been something pretty spectacular judging by the wreck of cars and mangled steel that lay strewn across the motorway. Early night tonight. In bed by 1.

Pictures:

Review:
NoiseMakesEnemies.co.uk
RockMidgets.com

Oxford tonight.

Stu x