| Tour Stories...."You ain't from round these parts, is you boy?"
Here is a somewhat lackadaisical, half-assedly put together, lazily written account of the most amusing day of the tour. Please bare with me as I veer, with wanton carelessness, between tenses simply because I can't be bothered changing it now. Forgive me, I just got back from tour.
So, our gig in Truro gets moved to Bodmin (weird town) and we turn up a couple of hours early in order to relax and get something to eat before the soundcheck. Turns out the place is like the set of the beginning of "American Werewolf in London", I'm telling you.... The Beatles are yet to reach Bodmin, so Alamos and ourselves stuck out like the proverbial "sore thumb" with our oh-so subversive personal appearances (let's face it, Shandy from Alamos isn't going to be winning any inconspicuousness awards). Anyway, with the infamous 'Deliverance' banjo music playing in our heads we put on a brave face and went to look for some hospitality, a warm drink and a hearty meal. We agree on some homely, cosy looking greasy-spoon cafe named "Pots" which looks to specialise in fare of the 'comfort-eating' variety. On taking our seats the locals immediately utilised their powers, as higher primates, of expressing emotions facially to make us aware that they did not care much for our appearance and certainly did not feel our presence in their local eatery was a good thing. "There's witches round here, aye, out on the moors" was one private conversation a member of our party overheard. Nevertheless, tired and hungry as we were, we persisted. This seemed like a bad idea when the waitress welcomed us with the line, delivered with beautiful nonchalance, "You're not wanting anything to eat are you?". Even though the uneasiness in our guts was increasing exponentially we did order and eat the food, which was decent (although it did cross my mind that we may have been eating the last band that strayed into this darkest part of Cornwall).
After what was, quite frankly, the most terrifying meal I have ever eaten (the adjective 'terrifying' and the noun 'meal' do not, should not belong together) we walked down to the venue. On the way, a man in a car threw an egg at me. Yes, you read that correctly, a man in a car threw an egg at me. What the fuck?! I'm telling you, Bodmin was beginning to seem like the town in that quasi-entertaining Cunt Ruffle non-event movie where his wife gets nicked by a trucker.
No sooner had the sentence "We should just get the fuck out of Dodge" been simultaneously spoken by at least four members of our party we arrived at the venue to find that the only band playing that night were some local funk covers band (with a very bad name which escapes me at the minute, they should have been called Deus Ex Machina).
So, we got the fuck out of Dodge.
We dropped into a supermarket, loaded up on whisky, vodka and beer and made our way back to the travel lodge with the concrete intention of getting fucking pasted and laughing about our Bodmin experience. A few hours, a bottle of whisky, a bottle of vodka, countless beers and no small quantity of drugs later all of MTS and Alamos were extremely "happy", some pornographic magazines had miraculously appeared, Kris Alamos had nearly been knocked out after smacking his head on the ceiling and our non-smoking room kind of looked like a coal fuelled power station. The only thing stopping the alarm going off was a sock which had been skilfully wrapped around the sensing part of the device. Around 4am, possibly due to his head injury, Kris decided that a good game to play would be "Try to knock the sock off the fire alarm by kicking a football at it". The rest of us, no head injuries to excuse us, agreed. Twenty minutes later 400 people have been evacuated from the travel lodge and the fire brigade are on their way. 392 of these people are standing in the freezing cold car park, in their dressing gowns or pyjamas (some with small children) staring at 8 guys, also in the freezing cold car park but fully clothed and visibly drunk.
Next morning, tails between our legs, into van, getting the fuck out of dodge for the second time in 24 hours.
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If Schrodinger had a cat, it would definitely be dead by now. | 
