Back To Normality (ish)
Back to normality after a month of living on a bus with a load of hairy arsed blokes (not that I was looking) half of whom managed to get ill or sustain an injury or both. There was a lot of vomiting, pooing, bloodshed, coughing, wheezing, head banging (not to music) and general unpleasantness that you really don’t want when you’re all living together in a big metal box. Fish is calling it the Purple Heart tour and with good reason.
Best moment was the immense gig at the Paradiso in Amsterdam, and the worst was the charity gig at the Indigo2 when our backline guy had tuned my guitar strings to the wrong notes. I bounded onstage all confident and charged up cos everything had sounded great in soundcheck and there were loads of press and industry and celebrities there and we were gonna rock the place. Slung on my guitar and hit the first chord – “Klaaaangggg!!” Precisely the wrong gig for this to happen. We were only doing 3 tunes and a blow like that stays with you for at least 10 minutes before your confidence returns. Added to this was the weird monitoring that had completely changed since soundcheck and was so shrill and toppy that it was a struggle not to keep wincing. A shame really. We didn’t get to show all those people how good we can be.
The photo above is outside the Citadel in Plymouth looking out to sea. The benches each have a memorial plaques commemorating someone who has died but in life really enjoyed that particular view. It made me think of a story where on certain evenings as the sun goes down the apparitions of the deceased shimmer into view, each on their own dedicated bench, forced to sit next to each other for eternity. And they don’t quite get on! They bicker about whose bench is best and whose relatives have most recently visited and if they left flowers. The seagulls tend favour one of the benches to poo on, much to the annoyance of its powerless tenant and the amusement of the others. There’s even spaces in the second row of benches where you can tell they’ve left room for more benches to be added – perfect for adding more characters in the second series!
Just one of those stray tour thoughts…
Anyway I’m back in York now and planning the recording of the album. Need a band name first off. That takes ages. Every band I’ve ever been in has struggled with its naming. The best I can come up with so far is BadFace or The Whatever-The-Fucks, both of which sound like pub rock. We were always gonna beThe Snivelling Shitz but we’re not very punk anymore. I was once in an irish folk rock band and argued for months to be called The Potatoes or Bodhran Bodhran but the rest of the band voted me down and we ended up as The Malones. Boring!
I go into a craze looking at objects around me all day long thinking any of them could be the band name:Toe, Coney St, The Drain, Pylon, BillBoard, The Trousers, Telltale Stain, Noisy Vagrant…all rubbish(“…why do you ask, Two-Dogs-Shagging…”). And any discussion with other people quickly descends into band names with ‘arse’ in them.
The search continues.
www.chris-johnson.info
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