092/ Tour notes #1
Early days, but with some Jim Bob shows under our belts, here’s a splurge of things I’ve noticed.
The audience is more diverse — noticeably more young people, women and people of colour than on previous tours. Heartening. Actually, a little bit thrilling. I wonder if it’s down to the general resurgence of Gen Z / Alpha fandom for older alternative bands. I noticed it at the My Bloody Valentine arena show as well. It’s not like Jim has had a Tik Tok smash or gone mad viral or anything, but there are a ton more teens and twentysomethings, including down the front, scattered amongst the old baldies. They’ve customised their band tees and they know all the words.
Manager Marc and Jim got drummer Ben a caterpillar cake for his birthday. Whatever the Sainsbury’s knockoff of Colin is called. We hid it in the van, on the back shelf. Then all day, people kept mentioning caterpillar cakes. Someone was playing stand-up comedy off their phone and it was a bit about caterpillar cakes. In the dressing room, our rider randomly showed up with M&S Colin The Caterpillar napkins. When we revealed the cake with Ben’s age in candles on it, Ben assumed we’d been inspired by all the mentions. The audience sang a full-throated ‘happy birthday’ and as a special birthday gift, Jim took the piss out of Ben for quite a long while onstage.
This setlist is a belter. I don’t know about anyone else but I’m digging it bigly. Some of the more wayward freakout elements have tightened up, without losing energy. Occasionally, in the past, some bigger, heavier songs lost a measure of their internal seriousness, because they devolved into rocknroll wigouts — and (quite reasonably) we can’t resist leaning into that vibe. It’s still there, but now the intensity stays more in keeping with the song’s content. It’s a subtle thing but this, I adore.
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No surprise, nicest venue so far (easily) has been Leeds Brudenell, famously one of Britain’s best: they treat you very well (pie and mash for dinner) they know their shizzle — actually like music — and they’ve built into a proper hub for gig-goers in Leeds, which must help sell tickets for the more obscure stuff, because people trust their booking quality. Their list of the month’s shows is wonderfully varied. You know, it just feels like a properly run thing. Of course, I don’t know where the bodies are buried… but it’s bloody ace to show up and perform there. It’s been the fastest sellout on a couple of tours.
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Actually, I swear we’re playing better than we ever have. Well, I mean, that *ought* to be true, given we’ve been a band for 15 years, some of us have made music together for 30+ years (holy shit) and we’ve been backing Jim in this lineup for eight years now. But Jim doesn’t tour anywhere near as much as full-time road artists, so even with those shared decades behind us, still it feels remarkable we’re in such good sync.
That said, I will mention an unusual, weirdo loss of confidence I suffered on Night #1. As soon as we got on, something off-kilter lodged in my head. So when it comes to playing live, I’ve never had nerves, or needed to deal with performance anxiety, or imposter syndrome. Nothing like that. I make mistakes like everyone but I’m generally beyond confident, calm about performing, to the point of arrogance. But then during last year’s T-T reform, for the first time I had real nerves in warmup gigs and found myself struggling to get through certain songs.
Then, on the first night of this tour, a similar thing emerged: I was losing the thread in a kind of angsty way and having to mentally run to catch up to where I was meant to be. Not the newer songs, nor any difficult parts, literally a couple of the easiest, most long-serving songs, with straightforward piano passages, which have remained roughly the same for years. Through the set, I kept fighting my brain, to climb onboard again. It felt akin to an avalanche, or maybe being out-of-balance on a gymnastics beam — and it arrived with a side-order of punch-in-the-neck powerful self-doubt and loathing. Like, literally, for example, I lost control of the introduction to ‘Touchy Feely’ — and if you’re remotely familiar with Jim’s music, you’ll know we’ve played that song a thousand times and the intro doesn’t vary and is not difficult.
At the same time, the gig was going perfectly well, especially for a first date — overall — most folks were pretty happy as it unfolded into a rocking night. For me, a long dark night of the soul.
Thank the gods, looking back now after I’ve strung together a much, much better show, where I didn’t make significant mistakes and was on top of the little squidgy bits of multi-tasking (like triggering a sample while playing, etc etc.) the ick rapidly faded. So we’ll see. Could be a smasher of a month, if the A game stays around. But I’d love to know wtf was going on, psychologically.
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Best food so far: an excellent classic big brunch at a brand new looking American-style diner at, ahem, Ram Jam Services, A1 northbound. It’s not an OK Diner like most places, it’s a new mini-chain called Brightside. Also, the most spotlessly clean loos I’ve ever seen at a service station, though I did briefly get trapped inside by a stiff lock and held up the van leaving.
Today in live music, in-ear monitoring is so prevalent, including on the grass-roots circuit, it means conventional monitors (you know, the wedge-shaped speakers lining the front of the stage) aren’t used so constantly. In turn, this means venues sometimes have fewer of them, and/or they’re falling into disrepair. Sometimes (well, just very occasionally to be fair) house crews are irritated by the extra labour of having to set up conventional monitors, though for decades that was the bread and butter. Lots of acts with in-ear monitoring still use one or two traditional wedges — but not for everyone in the band.
I’ve mentioned before but currently the Jim Bob band doesn’t use any in-ear monitoring, so no click tracks, no pads or ‘augmented’ instruments, literally nothing is ‘on tape’ (ironically, given Carter USM’s infamous drum machine). Unless it’s a spoken sample between songs, every note you hear is being played in that moment by a musician onstage. You might be surprised how rare that is nowadays, including with rock, punk and indie outfits. It’s fantastic for us: makes things real and slippery. We flow, and things can go wildly wrong, it’s music without the safety net. You don’t get that separation (isolation) from the real space of the room that wearing earplugs inevitably brings. Yet also, our old-school approach is increasingly anachronistic as tech gets more affordable and ubiquitous. Soon, I imagine it’ll become near impossible to tour without in-ears, as the skillset and equipment in venues gradually dissipate.
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Each night Jim has debuted a new, explicitly ‘political’ solo acoustic song, and they’re stunning. He’d already been in a long purple patch of songwriting since the pandemic (which obviously I’d say deserves much wider recognition — including from the songcraft snobs who continue to stupidly overlook his work). But ‘Not All Men’ (Jim’s response to reading Virginia Giuffre’s memoir) and ‘Not Your President, Not My King’ are desolation row classics in the making. I’m in awe: it’s like being a beginner again, hearing Carter’s ferocious poetry for the first time.
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We’ve got enough tequila now to take it off the rider. I’m trying to think of something clever or unusual to add instead, but nothing comes to mind.
Each night, Marc’s merch stall is selling my 12” albums. They didn’t need to do that, it’s very kind, given I’m not actually playing as ‘me’. I’ve been asked to sign a couple and got confused about whether to sign ‘Chris T-T’ or ‘Chris Thorpe-Tracey’ or something else entirely. Just write something stupid. I was meant to make a flier to promote them but didn’t do it in time. Hopefully I’ll get one printed tomorrow.
Interrobang‽ doing an excellent job as support, in a duo format mixing live and backing tapes, heavy on stylish but unflinching political chicanery, super-smart incendiary lyrical work, chanted choruses and quite complex beats and synths underpinning it. They’ve got in-ear monitoring, by the way, which is a first for a Jim tour support. Even with the important (sometimes bleak) messaging, it’s very entertaining. If you’ve not seen Dunstan Bruce’s offbeat 2023 documentary film I Get Knocked Down, reckoning with Chumbawamba’s enormous global smash hit that made a bunch of Yorkshire anarchists briefly world superstars, and then left them to cope with the aftermath, it’s available to stream and comes highly recommended by me. I suspect the Interrobang‽ duo is dividing the crowd a bit, which is spot on in my book.
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Next: Southampton, Oxford, Nottingham.
icymi —
“It has come to my attention that the White House has used one of my songs on Tik Tok to incite violence and threaten war. Trying to make light of war is disgusting and inhumane. I absolutely do not approve of my music being used to promote violence. Love always trumps hate. This is the opposite of what I stand for. Also don’t let this distract us from the fact that criminal predator Donald Trump appears in the files over a million times.”
— Kesha
• Fugazi have released the long bootlegged alternate versions of In On The Kill Taker they recorded with Steve Albini in late 1992, as a download for charity via Bandcamp. The page also gives a good explanation of the session and addresses why it wasn’t used. You can listen to ‘Facet Squared’ and ‘Smallpox Champion’ and download the whole record for $10.
• You have to read Joel Gouveia’s widely discussed essay ‘The Death Of Spotify’ (on the great Jimmy Iovine’s recent pronouncement about the end of streaming services). Thanks to Mishkin Fitzgerald for reminding me I was going to share this.
• Turnstile cover Stone Roses’ ‘I Wanna Be Adored’ for Like A Version.
• Mitski does the Maria Bamford Questionnaire for Vulture.
• Stewart Lee interviews Sleaford Mods live at Rough Trade. I don’t know, I love them but it still grinds my gears that there’s never a glancing reference to Carter (Jason apparently dislikes it when fans mention them) because they’re so keen to trace the lineage directly to hip hop. Lee does a smart thing here, linking them to Gilbert & George, or even Beckett (he doesn’t name it but obviously Waiting For Godot), though Jason still leans hard into the rap connection.
• MJ Lenderman on the Adam Friedland Show throwing topics and references around until some of it’s like listening to a different language.
• Laufey and the BBC Concert Orchestra turn ‘Both Sides Now’ into what sounds like the tentpole ballad from a fifties Broadway show. Gloriously wholesome, though I appreciate some folks may hate this. Her own new single ‘How I Get’, taped in the same setting, is safer territory.
• Fontaines DC cover Sinead O’Connor’s ‘Black Boys On Mopeds’ for Help(2).
I'm glad it's going so well (apart from your blip, for which I offer sympathy).
I'm sort of glad I wasn't going to be free to go to the Leeds show, because in the end I'd have missed it anyway because I had covid: I'd have been even more gutted to miss out if I'd ever thought I could go - if you see what I mean.
Lots of love and best wishes for the rest of the tour!