The Airborne Toxic Event swept across the UK in 2008 with 30 shows in 30 days.
By Glen and Julie
We are so thrilled to announce the UK news we’ve been threatening for about a month now: we will be playing 30 shows in 30 days in the UK, every single night in November. We’ll be playing all over the island: from big cities like Manchester, Liverpool, Glasgow to tiny towns like Fife and Hayle (not to mention a month-long, four-show residency in London at the infamous Dublin Castle).
We don’t plan on sleeping much.[i]
By the fall of 2008, The Airborne Toxic Event were seasoned veterans of the club circuit, having toured relentlessly for two years – most recently as openers for the Fratellis.[ii] It wasn’t so much the plan as it was just the way things had unfolded.
“It’s as if someone picked you up at your house at 4 p.m. and you asked when you’d be home, and he said, ‘It could be 7, or it could be a year and a half from now,'” jokes Mikel Jollett.[iii]
With every gig their following grew, prompting a ceaseless cycle of demand and supply. And yet, however ambitious their schedule had been in the preceding 24 months, The Airborne Toxic Event outdid even themselves with the outrageous scheme they dreamed up for November 2008: a 30 Shows in 30 Days barnstorming tour of the UK that would see them play seemingly every dive and concert hall (and everything in between) from one end of the country to the other.
Stoke-on-Trent, Yeovil, Barrow-in-Furnace… towns so tiny that even most British bands can’t be bothered with them.[iv] But no nook or cranny of England, Wales or Scotland would be too insignificant for The Airborne Toxic Event, hawking their melodic wares to anyone who would listen. Along the way, they would blog their experience for NME, an endeavor that included both written and video components.[v]
The band made landfall just in time to enjoy an English Halloween. “We’ve arrived in the U.K. safely and spent Halloween night in the city of Derby (which we learned is pronounced ‘Dar-bee’),” they wrote in an e-mail to fans. “It’s slightly drizzly and damn cold here, but as admitted anglophiles, we’re excited to be back on this side of the pond. Tonight, we’ll be kicking off our marathon 30-day tour at the Royal. Tomorrow night, York, then Birmingham, London, and so on… We miss you, we love you, we wish we’d brought warmer clothes.”[vi]
Day 1: Hello United Kingdom. We are the Airborne Toxic Event, a new band from the East Side of Los Angeles and we’ll be spending the next month in your country, playing a show every night in November. We did this because we are a live band and we don’t really believe in watching music on the internet. See it live.
We’re probably playing in your city and we’d be happy if you’d join us one evening. Come to a show, have a beer, jump around like a banshee. That’s an Airborne show.
Our first day was spent in Derby (November 2nd) we’ll be in York. By Tuesday (November 4), it’ll be London at Dublin Castle in Camden. We’ll be posting about the tour every day this month, right here.
So nice to meet you United Kingdom, we’ll see you at the show…
“The whole thing started with the idea of doing a residency (playing one night a week for a month) in London,” explains Steven Chen, “and then we thought that it would be such a waste to be in the UK for one month and play only four shows. So someone came up with the idea of playing every night of the week, traveling to other cities on non-residency nights.”[vii]
“Our thing is that we’re a live band and our record is a shoddy recreation of our live show and it’s not really the other way around,” adds Jollett. “Since the record was coming out on one of those tiny labels, we could really only afford to do one country at a time. We knew the record was going to come out in the UK so we figured the best way to deal with that is to just go and play in every single city we could find.[viii] We wanted to prove a point that instead of doing a TV show or huge Internet campaign, we were going to let people know who we are and go to every bar. The first two weeks we thought, ‘It’s not working and people don’t get this,’ but by the end, we were really committed and people understood.”[ix]
Day 2: Day two of our tour was spent driving from Derby to York where we played Fibbers. We are adjusting to the rain and meeting people along the way. We sleep off hangovers, we check amps, we dream of faraway lands… “When you go through dark times, let them disfigure you and use it to make art.”
Day 3 – Girls Allowed: We spent day three of our 30 day tour in Birmingham, looking for curry, drinking vodka in the van, and otherwise preparing for our show at Bar Academy. It was a windy and rainy night (typical, so we’re told) and the sound engineer was a woman named Becky. She was rad in all ways.
It got us thinking about what it’s like to be a girl in the rock and roll boys’ club. In the video blog Anna (Bulbrook) discusses her inside track to what guys think about, her classical background, learning to use a distortion pedal with a viola and what it’s like to be onstage with the boys…
It wasn’t the first time the band had made the trip across the pond, having already visited on a couple of occasions. In fact, their budding reputation preceded them, thanks to some wild nights in the recent past. Jollett recalls a gig in Leeds that left its mark – in the form of a shiner around his right eye.
“We decided during the encore it was a good idea to invite people on stage,” the singer remembers. “So there were, like, 30 people on stage for our last song, singing the lyrics with us. One guy was kind of head banging particularly hard. I guess he was really into it. He kind of rammed the back of his head into my face, pow! Like I felt this impact, and I was like ‘Ow!’ And I kind of looked at him and he looked back and he smiled and I smiled. Then I started bleeding. I finished the set with this blood running down my face.”[x]
Day 4 – Could Life Ever Be Sane Again? After three days of wandering the streets of unfamiliar English towns, we finally make it into London. We were last here in July, and it feels surprisingly easy and familiar, as if we’d never left. The city’s similar to Manhattan, except it’s massive, sort of like New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Boston and Los Angeles rolled into a single, circuitous mega-city with a logic-defying number of places to get drunk.
It’s the first night of our month-long residency at Dublin Castle in Camden, a perfect little place for drinking and mayhem that’s not nearly the dungeon its website suggests. We meet the other bands playing with us — all incredibly nice people: Bear Hands, from Brooklyn, the Boat People, from Melbourne, and the Race, from Reading.
At 7:00, the place is already buzzing, and everyone feels good about the night. Even so, it’s Election Day in the States, and all day we’ve been fretting about the stakes, hoping for the best (Obama), bracing for the worst (McCain). It’s Noah who keeps frightening the rest of the band, telling us: “I have a bad feeling about this.” We all try to ignore him and drink some more pints.
In any case, the show goes off really well, and we’re kind of amazed to find people singing along. Later, in our hotel room, we’re glued the television. Sometime after 4:00 a.m., Obama wins. Everyone’s dead tired, but ecstatic. All is well with the world. No relocating to Canada necessary.
Four and a half weeks in England gave the band ample opportunity to become acquainted with the difference between the British and American music scenes. “There’s a real sense of rock and roll pageantry about the UK,” observes Jollett, “and sure it can be bitchy and incestuous sometimes but they’re believers. Nobody seems to believe in music so much as UK music fans do.”[xi]
“I think the audiences are pretty similar,” he continues. “It’s the press that’s different. The US sees Indie music as an underground music scene. The press in the UK want you to fit into a type; everyone is all about the aesthetic rather than your songs. I think they are out of touch with what people like – you’re supposed to be like this person and that person, but we’re just not doing a ‘thing’. We have met some great journalists here in the UK, but the question always is whether you fit into the mould or not. How good are you at being Oasis? Well it’s just not who we are!”[xii]
Day 5: It is a good day to be an American overseas. Everywhere we go people are shaking our hands, giving the high sign, acting like our country’s wayward foreign policy didn’t just fuck up the world in the past eight years. It’s not so much that all is forgiven, more that people seem to remember why they loved America in the first place.
It’s odd how much the focus over here is on Obama’s race. I guess we’ve been living with the race (and gender) question in this election for so long, it’s been eclipsed by other things: leadership ability, political organization, questions about the economy and war and just how we’re going to drag ourselves out of the mess we’re in. Race seemed almost irrelevant.
Then it suddenly was again. Images of Jesse Jackson crying or Obama being hugged by his recently-deceased white grandmother crowd TV screens. It’s a feeling that he is the son of the American idea: a rare person whose life story is interwoven with the questions of immigrants, patriots, Midwestern values, Northeastern education and the uniquely American experience with race.
And now he’s going to be president. It’s almost as if we forgot all of this race business because none of it would have mattered if Obama hadn’t been such an incredibly astute politician. They’re still catching up with that idea over here, and it is true that of the two reasons to be inspired by an Obama win, it is the less interesting one.
But for those of us who are accustomed to our ideas being ignored, to watching our country deteriorate amid a mindless rush of nationalism and greed, to standing helplessly as a portion of our country embraces a willfully ignorant and morally bankrupt philosophy — after eight years of that shit, it almost doesn’t matter that Obama is black. It’s more important that he is right.
And what a great feeling to wake up in the morning, for the first time in eight years, without mixed feelings about our country.
By its very design, the tour was characterized by wild swings in audience size. On some nights the group played for ravenous crowds many hundreds strong; other times the rhythm section could count the attendance on their four hands. It gave the musicians some valuable perspective.
“You have to play the show you’re playing and not the show you wish you were playing,” says Jollett. “Whether you’re playing for five people or five thousand. Sometimes when you’re playing for five thousand you wanna play for five, you know? Every room is different. Something has to happen. If something doesn’t happen it’s not rock ‘n’ roll. It’s visceral engagement. It’s this sense that it might go horribly wrong or the fucking building might burn down or… who knows, there might be a fucking riot! That’s what makes it rock ‘n’ roll. That whole energy is the key to it – we don’t even care if we play in key half the time![xiii] Music has this weird commonality where everyone in the same room kind of gets on the same ride. I always think of it as a sort of drum circle. You know you just start repeating these drums. We’ve had shows like that, where there were literally 20 people in the room, but those 20 people and us, we were communing man!”[xiv]
For Chen and his bandmates, it was a valuable growth experience. “Oddly enough, we sort of felt much more comfortable once we found ourselves,” he says. “Like, for the club NME stuff, those crowds were just massive; those were some of the biggest shows we’d ever played, and we just sort of worked better on a bigger stage. Everyone was much more comfortable; I actually was more relaxed. When we play smaller stages, I didn’t realize how much we crammed together. It was really not as scary as I thought it was going to be. I think we learned a lot about how each other deals with pressure, and it turns out everyone deals with it fine.”[xv]
Day 7 – “It was bigger than 18 inches…” So we were driving south heading towards Cornwall and casually looked out the window and saw one of the most famous sites in the entire world [Stonehenge]. From a distance, it looks like a does in the movies. Up close, it’s much windier.
So we stopped for a few minutes to take in the history, the engineering achievement, the sheep.
We don’t get to do much tourist stuff on this tour with a show to play every night, but 20 minutes in front of this stack of enormous rocks gave us our fill.
Day 9: We’re starting to get adjusted to life on the road. It’s a bit like being in the army, without all the bullets and bombs and clean clothes. You spend a lot of time being cold, eating and sleeping when and where you can. There’s quite a bit of moving equipment and the food is mostly made from potatoes. At least here.
We’ve all grown quite fond of the United Kingdom. Leicester, Northampton, Derby, Hayle…all these towns half a world away from our home that are beginning to feel rather familiar with their small shops, town centres, the ever-present beat of the rain. It’s easy to see how such things contribute to a national character.
Precipitation invites wit. I think Wordsworth said that.
We’d like to thank all of you who’ve been to so kind to us at shows, with all the clapping and the handshakes, the odd signing of a copy of White Noise. We feel most welcome.
We’ll be in London again on Tuesday night at Dublin Castle. Should be quite a night. See you then. Oh, and we’re totally lying about that Wordsworth thing.
Playing out-of-the way hovels made the band something of a curiosity: when you’re the only game in town, you’re bound to draw some attention. Of a gig in Yeovil, Bulbrook says, “They really appreciated it. They treated us like specimens.”[xvi]
“We were on the front page of the local paper in Barrow-in-Furness,” Jollett laughs. “That was an amazing show, actually, the people there were really pleased that an American band bothered to come.[xvii] Some of the most obscure places were the most fun – Hayle [Cornwall], Yeovil, Cardiff. Those crowds were more appreciative and they were really glad that we took the effort to drive there because no one goes through their towns.[xviii] And Hayle in Cornwall was insane. It was a tent on the beach – us five huddled together for warmth, having had no clue gigs happened on beaches in November.[xix] There was a windstorm going on and the sides of the tents were flapping.”
Daren Taylor interjects, “I thought it was going to collapse in on us!”
Jollett: “It was really loud, and then when we started playing, we were louder than the wind.”
Taylor: “And then the wind would fight back and we would fight the wind.”
Jollett: “The crowd was really into it. Everybody got a little drunk. It just ended up being really fun.”[xx]
Like much of what had happened in the preceding two years, it all struck Jollett as more than a little surreal. “I thought: We’re on an indie label. We’re 5,000 miles from home, our record isn’t even out yet and people love us.[xxi] A lot of the time on tour is quite monotonous but certainly not the shows. We have had some great times in some of the smaller cities and places like Brighton and Nottingham and Cornwall of all places. We want to make those experiences last longer and learn more about the places and the people.[xxii]
“I’m a rabid Anglophile,” he adds. “I knew a lot of life is waiting in your out-of-the-way towns.”[xxiii]
Day 10: We’re now halfway through our residency—not halfway through the tour, though, mind you. It feels simultaneously disconcerting to find ourselves still so early on in this adventure and amazing that we haven’t imploded yet after 11 consecutive days of driving, performing, consuming massive quantities of alcohol, and sleeping in dodgy hotels. Normal life is forcing itself back into our wayward schedules, and so upon our return to London, we set out to do mundane things—shop, eat, call friends, sit… After so many days, you get the hang of it and learn how to mimic normal living, as much as you can.
It only lasted for a few hours, though, and then we were off to sound check at Dublin Castle in Camden. We held an impromptu drum competition (you learn to get creative with things to do while waiting for sound people to arrive) and then headed next door to Toasted, a living room of a Toastie shop co-owned by the proprietors of the Dublin Castle. In addition to toasties (which we learned are sandwich pockets that can contain anything from cheese and peanut butter to cat food), you can get custom-made t-shirts. We continued our afternoon wind-down there, well into the evening, then headed off for Vietnamese food with some friends living in London. Normal living never felt so good.
When we returned to the Castle, we found the place even more crowded than it was last week. Little Death, friends of ours through Los Angeles connections, shared the bill with us. They were fantastic. More friends appeared, and then, we finally took the stage for a particularly loud and sweaty set. In all, our night lasted until four in the morning, when we gradually lost track of each other. We fully expect to be raving mad by week 4.
As the midpoint loomed, the madness of what The Airborne Toxic Event had undertaken began to set in. Asked how the tour was going, Jollett responded with tongue in cheek (we think): “It’s been actually, oh, it’s… horrible. It’s the worst fucking thing we ever had in our entire fucking lives.”
Chen swiftly stepped in to clarify: “It’s simultaneously impressive that we’ve lasted this long, but we can’t believe that we’re not even half way through it yet.”[xxiv]
Day 11: Sunshine is rare in this benighted land. Though we do believe it invites wit. The most one can reasonably wish for is a light drizzle to accompany the ubiquitous grey skies. Instead of torrent. Though that has its advantages too, as we discovered in Hayle the other night, playing inside an enormous white tent while the wind raged against the side walls. The amps were plugged in anyway. Ale was consumed, the flash of bodies moving together in time while the storm wailed on lent a certain air to the evening — that of people huddling close against a great abyss.
As Californians we are not accustomed to the emotional influence of weather.
We have, however become quite accustomed to the emotional influences of late-night post-pub fare: kebabs, jacket potatoes, fish, chips.
We’ve also been heartened at our reception here, which has been beyond our reckoning. We went to dinner tonight with Sean and Steph who we met on our first UK tour over a year ago.. Today’s blog is about them.
The touring continues. We still have 18 shows to go. Friday night we play Manchester at Moho Live then Sunday it’s Leeds at Rocket then Oxford on Monday then London again on Tuesday back at the Dublin Castle.
We’ve so enjoyed meeting all of you at the shows. We’d like to thank you for your enthusiasm and propensity to clap.
Weather and ludicrous schedule aside, the band members thoroughly enjoyed soaking up the culture and people of the UK. “We’ve all been charmed by this country,” admitted Jollett from the road. “When you’re a foreigner coming in, there’s an English wit. We grew up in California, and there’s this sense that England’s this faraway place that has all this culture and these bands. When I was in high school, I listened to The Stone Roses and nobody else listened to The Stone Roses. I had 2 friends who listened to The Stone Roses. We started to really worship all this great music – The Smiths, The Cure, Josef K, Orange Juice, and David Bowie. You think of England as a place where they really know their music and they really live for it. In this way, it doesn’t happen as much in the States. To be over here playing shows, it sounds cliché to say, but it really is a privilege. If all of this were to go away tomorrow, we would cherish the time that we had to do this.”[xxv]
They did have some reservations about the food, however. “Honestly… I hate it,” confesses Jollett. “It’s just too salty. ‘England! Less salt on everything!’ You guys put on about four times as much salt than it needs – what the fuck is up with that?! It’s like ‘less salt!’ and we’d like some healthy food. Like broccoli! Have you ever heard of broccoli?! Or salad without mayonnaise?! What they do in the States is they have lettuce and they don’t dump a can of fucking mayonnaise in it! They just actually just put the vegetables in it – you eat it and it’s really good. You should try it!”[xxvi]
Day 13 – A Day in the Life: Naturally, a few of us started humming and singing Beatles songs as soon as we got to Liverpool, so someone came up with the idea to do a “Day in the Life” blog about what a typical day has been like on this exhaustive (and exhausting) tour, titled after the song. We readily admit that we’d set ourselves up for a terribly boring entry, but still, thought it would help encapsulate—for anyone who cared—the simultaneous tedium and rush of a band on tour.
Like most days, we started the day off by checking out of our Travelodge. Having passed through the UK a few times before, and now well into our 30 Shows in 30 Days tour, we’ve become quite the connoisseurs of England’s various Travelodges. We give Liverpool’s a 4.5—not as nice as Leeds’, but miles beyond Birmingham’s, which seems on the verge of collapse. Depending on what time our load-in is for the next gig and how far we have to drive, we either: a) grab some food, then leave immediately; b) grab food, stick around and explore the city, and then leave; or c) hit the road as soon as possible. Luckily, England’s fairly driveable, unlike the States, and we can usually find time to bum around town.
In Liverpool, we had a nice English breakfast (for lunch), then took some time to visit a war memorial and an art gallery before heading off to Carlisle in our bulky, cozy van. Van life involves laptops, DVDs, books, and some music programming here and there—some of it serious, and some of it purely for our own amusement. Usually, it’s Noah huddled over his Macbook, composing classical scores or cheesy techno.
It’s amazing how early it’s been getting dark here. By 5:00, it’s pitch black outside, which was the case when we finally arrived in Carlisle and unloaded all of our gear. After sound check, a few of us sneaked out for some Italian food before returning to a good-sized crowd at the Brickyard—a nice, if chilly venue resembling an old church. The audience was great and seemed to have a fine time. After loading out—an arduous process, especially when you’re dead tired from a show and going on very little sleep—we drove to the local Travelodge and checked in. This one wasn’t bad: a 7.0, at least.
The English audiences quickly discovered what their American counterparts already knew: that a TATE show is, as their name would imply, an Event with a capital ‘E.’ Even as the tour advanced into its second half and the band began to feel the strain of two-plus weeks on stage, when the lights went down, they gave it everything they had for however many people happened to be in the room that night.
“I feel like when we’re standing on stage, screaming and jumping, hollering, it’s easy to get caught up in it – everyone gets caught up in the same thing,” says Jollett. “It makes it fun. There’s a lot of jumping and energy on the stage. It’s a bruising affair. There’s also a lot of singing along. We’ve all been in other bands before and sometimes you just played, there wasn’t anything exciting going on. Now, we just really get into the show, then when more people started coming to the shows, it kind of catches on and everybody feels it.”[xxvii]
“We’re doing sort of this cathartic thing where our whole band is just this art project. As far as performance art goes, half the time there’s the audience on the stage or we’re in the audience, on the crowd, on our backs singing or hanging from something or we’re throwing shit into the audience, and they’re playing along. We’re just trying to see how far we can go with this. I wish I had a bunch of trumpets—just throw them out to people, and they can play along on the trumpet. Everybody’s there together man, just fucking play music!”[xxviii]
Years later, the philosophy hasn’t changed. “You know,” the singer muses, “a great show is like the last night on Earth. That’s what I’m going for. If your excitement and engagement could be measured in light, and you can get a whole room full of people filled with that, it’d be a light that you could see from space. It’s like you’re up in space, right, and you’re looking down at the Earth, and you see this place over here in Kenya that’s all lit up, and there’s another one in Poland, all lit up, and then there’s this club in San Francisco. All lit up. They’re alive with excitement and engagement and energy. That’s a good show, and that’s the goal every night.”[xxix]
Day 15: We’ve been to Manchester, Hull, and Leeds now, acquiring quite the scenic tour of this country. We’re excited that we’ve passed the halfway point intact, while gaining an appreciation for the towns we’ve only heard about from Smiths songs or episodes of The Office. Just another 14 days to go before it’s officially the longest any of us have gone without taking a night off.
It’s what you would expect: fast-paced and thrilling at times, and tedious and incredibly draining at others. We’re meeting tons of people and becoming experts at roadside eating establishments like Little Chef and Welcome Break. We try for any chance to partake in “normal” activities, like shopping and strolling. We try to read books. We watch a lot of DVD’s. We decided to take this opportunity to talk about our first (or favorite) concerts. It’s not a mind-blowing topic, but an important one nonetheless that makes us marvel at our younger selves—how they might be intrigued at our current undertaking. Primus, Mike Watt, R.E.M., Sonic Youth, U2, the Sugarcubes, Public Enemy, The Cure—the range is pretty amusing.
For now, it’s starting to hit us that we might actually survive this thing, and we’d be lying if we said there wasn’t a hint of sadness at the prospect of putting this tour behind us.
As the grind continued, performance highs mixed with alcohol, weariness and a palpable sense of home sickness to produce a weird alchemy of emotion, a simultaneous suspicion that it may never end and a wistfulness that it yet may. But there were no regrets.
“Of course, it was exhausting and we hit a few walls along the way,” acknowledged Chen, stating the obvious. “But it was one of those experiences I’ll never forget. We played cities most British bands never play—like Barrow in Furness, Hull, Cornwall, and Stoke on Trent, and the audiences were great. We consider ourselves a live band, first and foremost, so it’s important for us to connect with audiences as much as possible, and we definitely feel that sense of community at our U.K. shows now. It’s become like a second home for us, and ideally we can keep doing that sort of thing all over Europe, Asia, Latin America, wherever.”[xxx]
Day 19: We are quite convinced that this entire country runs on potatoes. Not nuclear, solar, geothermal, coal or natural gas. Potatoes. Chips, they call them here. (Instead of fries.) They come in many varieties. There are curry chips, garlic chips, chips with salt and vinegar, bangers and mash, garlic mash, mash and gravy, jacket potatoes, plain fried potatoes, hash browns and of course, crisps (we call them potato chips) — of which the best varieties are “prawn” and “Szechuan spice.” One is never want of carbohydrate in this gilded land.
Today is day 19 of our 30/30 UK tour and it is true that we have officially begun to lose our minds. We’d like to thank all of you who joined us in doing so last night for our sold out show at the Dublin Castle in London.
Our first UK single “Gasoline” came out this week. [xxxi]
Heading into the home stretch, the band could be excused for losing their minds. “I am not quite sure what the thinking behind the whole 30 gigs in 30 nights tour was,” Jollett joked as they passed Day 20. “If we knew what it would be like, we may not have even done it.”[xxxii]
It was all part of the job, though. “Mostly, it’s been amazing. We see ourselves as a travelling troupe of musicians who really want to interact with the audiences.[xxxiii] One reason we formed was to be a travelling art experience: to show that, in the days of MySpace, you can still communicate in a visceral, sexy, rock and roll way.”[xxxiv]
Day 24: Tonight we play in Bristol for the 24th show in our 30/30 UK tour. Last night in Cardiff was absolutely amazing. The Welsh really bring it and we consider it one of the best nights we’ve ever had as a band. Wow. Thank you.
So we’re over three weeks into this thing and we have officially lost our minds. We breathe. We sleep. We load. We unload. We play. We drink. Wash. Rinse. Repeat. We find ourselves saying, “Where are we again? Did I say that aloud?”
Aloud? Oh, quite sorry. Cheers.
Tomorrow will also be the final night of our London residency at Dublin Castle. Last week was sold out, so we highly recommend you arrive early. As we are currently quite mad, we simply cannot be held responsible for what may happen.
Day 24, and the reviews were as rave as they were back on Day 1:
So, last night and exactly a week before that, I managed to see my ‘new favourite band’ live. These gigs have been in small, intimate venues, in front of crowds of between twenty to forty people, and there is a good deal of truth in the words of Josh from Fleet Foxes when he said on Radio One last night (as I was driving home) that really the best way to see a band is when the space and the crowd are small enough that the band feel they can form a connection with every single member of the audience.
They were great, they tore the place up on night 24 of their 30 consecutive UK dates, even though they barely knew where they were anymore, even though only fifty people came out to see them… The little, cute, blonde stood next to me, called Steph was a good benchmark of crowd response; when they played ‘Sometime around Midnight’ she was visibly vibrating with joy, as was I truth be told.[xxxvi]
The group’s absolute commitment to give each audience their money’s worth obscured the fact that they felt as though they had been run over by the tour bus. The closest they came to showing it was in Hull. “We were still hungover from London, it was mid-way through the tour,” sighs Jollett. “Our fault – the one gig we didn’t want to be there.”[xxxvii]
Nevertheless, Jollett claims he would “unquestioningly” play 30 gigs in 30 nights again. Chen, on the other hand, is ever so slightly more realistic. “Next time, we’re taking it easy. Ten shows in 15 days.”[xxxviii]
Post-Tour: We’ve just returned from our 30 shows in 30 days UK tour and are off for two days here on the East Coast before heading for a handful of shows around the U.S. between now and Christmas. It’s nice to be home again. The UK tour was exhilarating, exhausting, exciting and exceptionally gratifying. We love it there and we miss the pubs already. [xxxix]
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Notes:
[i] The Airborne Toxic Event Band Mailing, Sept. 29, 2008.
[ii] “The Airborne Toxic Event,” Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Airborne_Toxic_Event.
[iii] Vanessa Hua, “In Tune with Toxic,” Stanford Alumni, http://alumni.stanford.edu/get/page/magazine/article/?article_id=29729.
[iv] “The Airborne Toxic Event Biography,” Artist Direct, http://www.artistdirect.com/artist/bio/airborne-toxic-event/4207575.
[v] The TATE tour diary was hosted on NME.com, but is no longer available on the site. The video entries can still be found on YouTube. Excerpts from this diary are presented throughout this article.
[vi] The Airborne Toxic Event Band Mailing, Nov. 1, 2008.
[vii] “Interview with Steven Chen,” Officially A Yuppie, (May 4, 2009), http://salvatorebono.blogspot.com/2009/05/exclusive-airborne-toxic-event-intv.html.
[viii] Alexia Kapranos, “Interviews: The Airborne Toxic Event,” This Is Fake DIY (Feb. 1, 2009).
[ix] Kellie Hwang, “5/19: The Airborne Toxic Event,” The Arizona Republic, (May 12, 2009), http://www.azcentral.com/thingstodo/music/articles/2009/05/12/20090512airbornetoxicevent.html.
[x] Alan Sculley, “Nothing stops the Airborne Toxic Event,” Idaho Statesman, (April 10, 2009).
[xi] Dom Gourlay, “One Night in Paris with The Airborne Toxic Event,” Drowned in Sound, (Mar. 14, 2011), http://drownedinsound.com/in_depth/4142108-one-night-in-paris-with-the-airborne-toxic-event.
[xii] “eGigs talks to The Airborne Toxic Event’s Mikel Jollett before he jets over to the UK,” eGigs, (May 11, 2009).
[xiii] Interview with Mikel Jollett, The Music Fix, (June 7, 2009).
[xiv] Tina Benitez, “The Airborne Toxic Event sell out New York,” NY Rock Music Examiner, (Oct. 13, 2009).
[xv] Interview, Menace Attic, http://www.menaceattic.com/INTERVIEWS/theairbornetoxicevent.mp3.
[xvi] Dave Simpson, “Every toxic cloud has a silver lining,” The Guardian, (Jan. 22, 2009), http://www.theguardian.com/music/2009/jan/23/mikel-jollett-airborne-toxic-event.
[xvii] John Earls, “Mikel Jollett – If I never see another chip, it’ll be too soon,” Planet Sound, (Nov. 27, 2008).
[xviii] Kapranos, “Interviews.”
[xix] Earls, “Mikel Jollett.”
[xx] Kapranos, “Interviews.”
[xxi] Simpson, “Every toxic cloud has a silver lining.”
[xxii] “Interview: Mikel Jollett of The Toxic Airborne Event (sic),” The Citizen, (Nov. 21, 2008).
[xxiii] Earls, “Mikel Jollett.”
[xxiv] “The Airborne Toxic Event Live at the Aftershow,” MOHOLIVE, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KH4TKnQ-BiE.
[xxv] Kapranos, “Interviews.”
[xxvi] Kapranos, “Interviews.”
[xxvii] “Interview: Mikel Jollett (The Airborne Toxic Event),” Sonic Dissonance, (Aug. 26, 2009).
[xxviii] Benitez, “The Airborne Toxic Event sell out New York.”
[xxix] Cornel Bonca, “The Sob in the Spine: Mikel Jollett’s Rock ’n’ Roll Alchemy,” Los Angeles Review of Books, (Oct. 24, 2014), http://lareviewofbooks.org/essay/sob-spine.
[xxx] “Interview with Steven Chen,” With This I Think I’m Officially A Yuppie, (May 4, 2009), http://salvatorebono.blogspot.com/2009/05/exclusive-airborne-toxic-event-intv.html.
[xxxi] The Airborne Toxic Event Band Mailing, Nov. 19, 2008.
[xxxii] “Interview: Mikel Jollett of The Toxic Airborne Event (sic).”
[xxxiii] “Interview: Mikel Jollett of The Toxic Airborne Event (sic).”
[xxxiv] Earls, “Mikel Jollett.”
[xxxv] The Airborne Toxic Event Band Mailing, Nov. 24, 2008.
[xxxvi] Maleghast, “The Airborne Toxic Event,” TechnoMage, (Nov. 25, 2008), http://www.techno-mage.co.uk/blog/blog/2008/11/25/the-airborne-toxic-event/.
[xxxvii] Earls, “Mikel Jollett.”
[xxxviii] Simpson, “Every toxic cloud has a silver lining.”
[xxxix] The Airborne Toxic Event Band Mailing, Dec. 4, 2008.
Along with writing regularly for This Is Nowhere, Julie publishes musingsfromboston.com, a music blog with the bipolar personality of wannabe philosopher and charlatan music critic, where she is just as likely to review the audience as she is the band. Her first Airborne show was at a lingerie party hosted by WFNX at an Irish-Mexican bar in Boston’s financial district. She does her best to live by the motto “only one who attempts the absurd can achieve the impossible.”
Glen is the founder and editor of This Is Nowhere. He’s grateful for an understanding wife and kids who indulge his silly compulsion to chase a band all over the Pacific Northwest (and occasionally beyond) every time the opportunity arises.