Bringing us up to date on their latest shenanigans on the road through Europe with 65daysofstatic is Alex from Sydney's sleepmakeswaves. From Belgium through to Germany, catch up on the tour in Part Two of their epic tour diary series below!
WEEK 2
Friday 27 September – Ghent, Belgium
We’re all woken up at 5:45am by tour manager Rob and ushered off the bus, out into the bowels of the P&O ferry that is taking us across the channel. For some reason, it’s compulsory to be off your vehicle while the boat’s on the water. Hypothesis: this is so you’re forced to spend money on their overpriced food. On the plus side, we have a chance to see the dawn break over Dover’s receding white cliffs, breathing fresh salty air. Still, everyone is under-slept, undernourished, feeling flat; the first few tendrils of tour fatigue are creeping in.
Allowed back on our beloved bus when the ferry hits Calais, everyone returns to his bunk and snatches another couple of hours before we to a stop in Ghent. We’ve been to Belgium before, but not to Ghent. It’s a gorgeous, idyllic place that’s partly old Norman-style architecture (cathedrals and castles) and partly stylish European modernism (the venue, Handelsbeurs). A still, clean canal runs next to the venue and bisects the town centre. Wandering around, we manage to find some fresh salad baguettes, pizza slices, chocolate waffles and the first decent cup of coffee in about 10 days. For me, the latter is something of a revelation and, after England, this incredibly good, simple food has a restorative effect on band vibes as a whole.
All this is obviously a welcome change for the better. But I haven’t even started on the venue, which is easily one of the best sleepmakeswaves has ever seen the inside of. Handelsbeurs is a converted old-timey hall. The stage is massive and modern, the PA is festival-quality and the dressing rooms and quiet and spacious. There is one just for us, and they have fulfilled almost all our rider requests including a bottle of white and a bottle of scotch. Europeans are well-known for extending wonderful hospitality to musicians, but all of this feels even a step above.
A portrait of me at the girl who drew it in Ghent
Sound check is easy and now we are the only support we can leave all our gear just as we like it before we play. We’re then ushered into the venue’s pricey-looking restaurant (yeah, this is a thing in Europe) where we’re given the most amazing complimentary of fine Continental mains, soup and Belgian wheat beer.
Time to play. I’m a few beers and a couple of scotch-shots deep and am feeling good.
INTERLUDE: ALEX’S BOOZY GIG ALGORITHM - Draw a graph, naming the horizontal axis ‘blood alcohol’ and the vertical ‘performance quality’. Then describe a curve that gently rises to a peak, briefly and then rapidly collapses. This general rule is relative to body size/tolerance but has been confirmed through years of rigorous self-testing and empirical observation of others. If you can teeter on the peak then you are free of nerves and fatigue while still being limber enough in mind and body to play well. Trust me on this.
The show goes swimmingly. Big stage, epic sound, we’re in our element. The crowd is big and wonderfully appreciative which we feed off in a big way. At the end of the show, we transition out of one of our song’s huge climaxes into a wash of reverberant noise which fades into hushed ambience. By this point the stage is black and I’ve hunched into a little ball in front of my pedal board to focus things on Otto and Kid’s delay-pedal wrangling. The stage is black and the crowd is suspended in attentive silence. No coughs, no murmurs, just the music. What a special, cool thing.
After 65 play, we are swamped at the merch desk by members of this crowd. Almost everyone wants a sleepmakeswaves CD or vinyl signed and there is a kind of joyous frenzy involved in making sure everyone gets their scribble on each album while at the same time trying to take time to get each punter’s name and make them feel welcomed and appreciated. I get a slightly left-field request to be sketched by a young lady, who takes portraits of musicians she sees live. Way cool. Belgian people are almost uniformly generous, cheerful and enthusiastic (and I must say, stylish and very attractive, the men and women both). And while doing good business at the merch desk is great for any band, feeling like you actually connected with a crowd, both as a whole and as individuals is priceless. Real feeling is what, more than anything else, keeps us rolling from one show to the next.
Saturday 28 September – Hamburg, Germany (Off Day)
Another day, another hangover. Last night got reasonably festive once the bus started rolling out of Ghent and thems the breaks. Tim and Kid are also getting sick, having contracted a cold or flu of some kind.
We have the day off today – 65 are making an appearance at a Hamburg festival, Reeperbahn, to which we have not been invited. The festival is one of those inner-city multi-venue dealios, coming across like SXSW, The Great Escape or Laneway back home. Not having passes to see the festival (and being to broke to spring for them) we’re kinda stumped for things to do. Our bus is parked next to the street, Reeperbahn, which I take to be Hamburg’s Red Light District. There’s a club right near the bus called Indra, which is where the Beatles transformed from Liverpool nobodies into a tight band that would take over the world. Pretty cool to check out. While the other guys take it easy, Brett and I cruise around the city and ride the subway but can’t find much. Perhaps we are just too poor/tired/lazy to look effectively, and we are discinclined to avail ourselves of the numerous strip clubs and brothels right near the bus. 65’s drummer Rob, sums it up pretty well: the place smells like wet dreams and wipe-down surfaces. Not exactly sexy. Our bus driver Bryan takes our lack of participation in the world’s oldest profession as almost a personal affront, having given us sincere advice on how to solicit hookers in the Red Light District without getting fleeced, infected or bait n’ switched by a six-foot-something German tranny.
Instead I read and get owned in M:TG by Otto, while Kid and Brett play Fifa on the bus’ PS3. Tim has an incredible ability to sleep at will, anytime, anyplace, and does this with gusto, occasionally emerging for a piss and smoko. Being a bit flat and sick, we all decide to turn in early and be fresh for the next run of about a dozen shows before the next off day.
Off days can be really hard – they are physically restorative, but bad for the touring soul. Like, I’m sure Hamburg is a cool place, but as exhausted itinerants we had no way to crack it. We’re here to play shows and feel lost and useless without a gig to give shape to the day. As exhausting as back-to-back days are, they have a forward motion to them; without this, the mind gives way against it’s own better judgment and falls in a heap.
Sunday 29 & Monday 30 - Bielerfeld & Koln, Germany
By this stage, we are well into the repetitiveness of the tour grind. A pattern has been established which plays out over these couple of days, as I’m sure it will over many others.
Wake.
Forage for food.
Load into venue.
Kill time, mostly on venue WiFi.
Maybe there’s something interesting in town?
Nah, let’s just start drinking.
Soundcheck.
Drinking.
Forage for food.
Play.
Sell merch, try to talk to any cute girls
Well, that failed. Shit.
Drinking.
Load out of venue.
Drinking.
Drinking.
Sleeeeeeep.
These two German shows have been lovely, though. Both in smaller-sized venues, but they’ve gone quite well. Highlights include the amazing spread of food at the venue in Bielerfeld and an absolutely beautiful catherdral Otto and I took a visit too in Koln. Then we got Berliner jam doughnuts. Yay.
Tuesday 1 October - Frankfurt, Germany
I have this thing where hangovers rouse me unconscionably early. Like my brain is saying, “Fuck you Alex, I’ll pay you back for this!”. So at 8am, on a few hours of sleep, I find myself wandering around Frankfurt looking for a toilet to do my morning business (as I may have mentioned earlier, #2 is forbidden on the bus). A painful two hours later and all I’ve dredged up is a broken coin-op WC and two locked public toilets (what is the point of public facilities if they aren’t fucking functional?) before Good Mate Tour Manager Brett rescues me and finds a pub with a cup of coffee and long-overdue gastric relief.
After loading into the venue, I don’t really feel up for any sightseeing so I bust out the laptop and do some pre-production work on our next album for a few hours. The venue here warrants a mention in and of itself. It’s called Batschkapp. After sound check Otto, who like me is a massive Metallica nut, figured out that Metallica played this exact same stage back in 1986. He’s gonna be on the Cliff Burton (RIP) side while I’m in the middle where Hetfield would have been. Even with so much history here, Brett finds out that they are planning on demolishing the venue and taking the business somewhere else in town. It’s a shame, because it feels like music has lived in these walls.
The show goes well. I know I sound like I’m writing that all the time, but overall we’ve been really happy with how we’ve been playing. After 3 years playing these songs, we’ve come to know them so well and have ironed out the technical difficulties that we face as a rock band using significant electronic backing. Still, no complacency - you never know when the next disaster is around the corner.
The kids in this town are really lovely. Merch desk times: A nice girl promises to make us all vegan chocolate when we come back to Frankfurt. Yes please. Some dude dubs my beard ‘god-like’. Thanks bro. We also bump into a fan who saw us for the first time in Warzawa, Poland in our 2012 van tour of Europe (it was pure DIY filth compared to this bus luxury). She now lives in Germany and is beyond stoked when we offer to put her and her man on the door for the show in Stuttgart. It’s great when you can do these things for people; not much to you but a lot to them.
I do a bit of loadout and then indulge in one of my favourite tour crimes: stealing the headlining band’s food. It’s always the perfect crime until you stupidly decide to write about it in a tour diary.
Wednesday 2 October - Amsterdam, Netherlands
I’ll tell you what: it doesn’t get much better than waking up on the edge of Amsterdam’s old town. As we often are, Brett and I are first up and go for a wander along the canals and boulevards, eventually scoring a good meal and nice coffee for a few Euros. I’m feeling that this might be the most gorgeous city so far – everywhere you turn your head, there’s a postcard-worthy vista. The other guys meet us back at the bus, which is parked in front of another tour bus.
Immediate suspicion: what are they doing at our venue?! A quick Google-bash later and it becomes apparent that the venue, Melkweg, has two rooms and that we are sharing the place with Olly Murs. I’d never heard of him before but he’s some Britsh X-Factor contestant with an acoustic guitar and your-mum-would-like-him good looks.
That explains why there is a gaggle of teenage Dutch girls lining up outside the venue. I thought they might have been here for… never mind. (These girls are also the cause of severe embarrassment for us. Walking into the venue means trying to open a front door handle that looks like it needs a turn, but you actually must pull. On four non-consecutive occasions, members of sleepmakeswaves turned when they should have pushed, walked away, only to be beckoned back by one of the girls who showed you how to do it properly while her friends laughed at you. It was like being in high school all over again. FML.)
Before load-in, we decide to get our education on. All of us go to check out the Museum of Torture, which is a compendium of medieval horrors like the Iron Maiden, the Spanish Horse and the Rack. It’s presented with a kind of grimly cynical humour, knowing that the brutality within will wear you down. On the way out, a plaque wonders aloud whether we have truly progressed so far. Given the recent spat about Mos Def’s decision to voluntarily undergo force-feeding as it is practiced in Guantanamo Bay, it definitely gets me thinking. Otto and I then wander on to the Rijks Museum, which is basically Dutch art running from the 1600s onwards. Otto loves the Rembrandt and I really enjoy the Modernism; Cobra, Constant, Le Corbusier, etc. Get some culcha up yas, aye.
Another sound check and restaurant meal later (love ya work, Europe!), we hit the stage. Couldn’t have asked for a better first show in Amsterdam, as the crowd is both plentiful and super-keen. I feel like we match their enthusiasm. After the show we do the usual routine down by the merch desk. Meet some cool people, including a Dutch mate of ours called Gilson, who plays in a dark post-metal band on our label called Atlantis. We bump into some lovely kids from Bristol, of all places, who are back at the show tonight. I share a Withnail and I-sized Camberwell Carrot rolled with primo Amsterdam hashish with these diamond geezers. The buzz is, it must be said, exquisite and makes the routine late-night loadout both fun and hilarious. For me, at least. After that, we hit the town for a few drinks. We lose 65 somewhere along the way, and drummer Timbo and I are the last men standing late into the evening.
Thursday 3 October - Groningen, Netherlands
Rolling into this place, we load in and go and have a guernsey around the town. Like Ghent and Amsterdam, this place is gorgeous in that idyllic, Flemish way that feels faintly familiar even though it’s your first time here. Everyone is riding well-worn bicycles, which are lined up by the hundreds along cobbled footpaths. A beautiful sight that would be a sensitive Instagrammer’s wet dream. But what we’re really looking for is a dollar shop where we can buy a power strip to run our laptop rig. These are the kind of boring tour chores you sometimes need to waste time on when you’d rather be soaking up the atmosphere. Le sigh.
The show is a pretty smooth run for us. The crowd is a bit smaller than usual, but that’s okay, 'cause I get the sense that they enjoyed the music. What really warrants a mention here is the venue itself, Vera. It’s run almost entirely by volunteers and dubs itself the venue of “The International Pop Underground”. If like, us, you’re from the English-speaking world, volunteer-run venues probably bring to mind some pokey hole-in-the-wall run on a shoestring budget, half-falling apart but kept going on the hard work of grizzled true believers and some romantic punk-rock values. Totally a necessary part of the musical landscape, but in some ways a bit of a struggle, logistically.
The thing about Vera is that it would put most of the commercially-run venues in our hometown of Sydney (and Australia, for that matter) to shame. The place is massive, the backstage is extensive, the rig is high quality and the hospitality is off the charts. The quality of the acts that have passed through the place speaks for itself, the walls plastered with the names of everyone from Nirvana to U2 to Jesus Lizard to Henry Rollins to At The Drive-In to the White Stripes to Jon Spencer Blues Explosion. There’s a guy working at the place. He’s been there since it was a squat decades ago and is one of those incredibly crusty skinheads covered in facial tattoos, metalwork and camo. He grins as he runs Brett through his favourite jacket patches: a black star for anarcho-communism, the SHARP (Skinheads Against Racial Prejudice) helmet emblem and, to round it all off, the US Flag. Just so people don’t take him too seriously. Wicked nice dude to boot.
In case you missed it: Volunteer. Run. Venue. At the risk of sounding like a cultural-cringer, this is precisely the kind of mentality we back home could learn from with our live music. That’s not to put down the people running venues in Oz – they work hard and do what they can. But talking to a guy that works behind the bar, the conversation turns quickly from mutual beard admiration to the way the Dutch Government supports the musical underground financially and ensures that the correct zoning and licensing laws are in place to keep places like this afloat for years to come. The love for the venue and what it represents clearly comes from somewhere high up.
They do music differently here. Sometimes you can just feel it around you.
Friday 4 October - Berlin, Germany
Like London, this is another big cheese show for the tour. Berlin’s one of those places that has such a musical and cultural mythos behind it that you can’t help feel some sense of anticipation as you roll up the venue, in this case a place called Lido in the hip district of Kreutzberg.
Music isn’t the only thing here, however. Just five minutes from the venue is all that remains of the Berlin Wall. We go and check it out. These days it’s covered in all kinds of writing and colour: peace messages, lover’s names in contain in hearts, random splashings of art and hodgepodge graffiti. Everyone seems to want to ride on the coattails of this old concrete. Personally, I find my first visit to this place contemplative and more than a little disturbing. Seeing the fall of the Wall on TV when I was about three years old is one of my earliest memories. Despite the Wall’s vibrant new paint-job, it’s hard not to feel a deep vein of suffering that lies like embers. This kind of encroaching history of pain is hard to escape in many places in Europe. I always find myself coming back to this idea: that my Australian origins have blinded me, for better or worse, to a kind of grim and cold reality in the European air. They have fought for more than I could ever imagine. You need to try and tap into this to really understand the place.
Anyway, here we are. Berlin, a place of so much cultural innovation, where so many relocate hoping to soak in the artistic ferment. I’m feeling the pressure a bit – like London, you get the vibe that this might be a tough crowd to please. They are hardly short on options when it comes to good music. Combine this with the existential conundra raised by Berlin Wall observation and just some basic tour fatigue (feel like I’m hitting hump #1 of this long tour, anticipating a few) it’s a running on empty kind of day. Mostly I just do the standard tour chores, try to stay fed and keep to myself before show time.
When the show comes it, as usual, gives some context to everything. Here we are. Playing a show in Berlin, mahfuggers. Seeing a fat crowd assembled for us in one of music’s big cities is an awesome thrill. The stage is big, the sound is good and the crowd have the rapt, intense appreciation for our unconventional music that makes Germans such awesome people to play for.