098/ Tour notes #2
On Saturday we did Gigantic, a heritage indie all-dayer in Bristol, maybe three thousand people in a warehouse. Like a smaller Shiiine On without the chalets.
It was Jim’s second year in a row, re-booked by bona fide popular demand. We’d smashed it to bits last time. This year they’ve moved to a new venue but kept the same ‘single stage’ set-up indoors, with a range of food and booze stalls outside.
There’s a cheese on toast stall, which surely can only be disappointing once you’ve shelled out, because we can all make cheese on toast exactly how we most love it, at home for about 50p.
We almost lost our gig before it started: Ben had an emergency, so we needed a late notice stand-in drummer. My kneejerk recommendation was for Jim to just strip it back to a solo acoustic show, but (rightly) he wasn’t up for that. It would’ve been the wrong approach, given all the other acts were rocking out. Also, the rest of us would’ve all lost the adventure and income. Instead, Jim and Marc found Dave Morgan from Creation Records legends The Loft and The Weather Prophets and luckily Dave quickly nailed down our hour-long festival setlist. He did his homework with a rehearsal tape, but still only got a single play-through with the band, ahead of show day. Literally just one tilt at each song in a short rehearsal. Didn’t put a stick wrong. A supremely experienced indie drummer.
After an unchanged lineup for more than half a decade, it’s the second time in six weeks we’ve had a dep, since Charley Stone stood in for Jen on two shows of the UK tour, while Jen slummed it at the Royal Albert Hall with My Bloody Valentine. Lol, my laptop predictive text just amended ‘Valentine’ to ‘Vaseline’. Ew.
Personally I’ll admit I’ve found the lineup shifts discombobulating, though they played great and they’re both proper lovely people, who are easy to get on with. I already knew Charley, though not Dave. But, accidentally, it sort of underlines to me — injects direct into my subconscious — the ‘job’ aspect of gigging, beyond simply playing music with one’s chosen family. The “show must go on” vibe, I guess, at the expense of the fantasy that I’m dicking around in a gang of mates. In onstage moments performing, I find that feeling hard to shake off. Probably why I’m not a session pro.
Luckily, mostly piano is embellishment, not backbone. A bit of unsettled status rear stage-left doesn’t impact anyone else.
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After infuriating backstage and tech struggles in Skegness not so long ago, Gigantic’s house crew are excellent, totally on the ball. We’re a complex band to get up and running: a six piece with two keyboard setups (and Jon has three different keyboards) plus an effects-heavy lead guitar and four backing vocals. As I’ve banged on about before, no in-ear monitoring, nothing on tape. Things can go awry fast if we aren’t on it. We’re very efficient now ourselves though: we’ll hit a tight changeover target, as long as the crew has looked at the plot and can do a line-check without drama. This Bristol mob were brilliant. Brisk without being brusque is basically perfect. Gigantic had been running about ten minutes behind schedule after previous band Bluetones came off (not their fault, I think it was House Of Love over-ran earlier on) but after Jim’s show we walked off at exactly the moment we’d been originally programmed to finish, i.e. leaving the whole event back on time. I mean, maybe some songs were a touch fast…
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So basically: lush crowd, Jim on fire, in great voice, perhaps pushing it a little far fantasising out loud about Nigel F*r*ge being hung up on a lamppost like a flag. Huge cheer.
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I drove the van for this trip, which adds a frisson of personal nerves. Last trip but one, we got hit by a very expensive pheasant. Our usual driver/sound engineer, also a Dave, who knows everyone and has lived everywhere, was booked up, though in the end he was around to do our front-of-house sound. Anyway, that meant I picked up the splitter van the day before, on Saturday morning collected Zinz who lives in Hove, drove us up to Crystal Palace to load out (carrying and rolling our gear through the middle of Palace’s iconic Saturday food market) then piled across Greater London and out west to Bristol for about four.
You may remember in the olden days, when hiring a car required two paper ‘proofs of address’, household bills or letters from the council or NHS or whatever, with your address on, dated within the past 90 days. Well, I learned that some niche vans still need all that shiz to hire them. But none of our household stuff is in my name. My bank and mortgage are the same company, nobody from the government has written to me since at least January. Argh. I could not for the life of me find a second piece of paperwork. Two days before the hire I find myself absolutely panicking, searching around to locate / acquire something viable. Finally, in the end, a workaround: I asked HMRC to remind me of my national insurance number. Their system instantly generated an email reply, in a letter format that conformed to the online system’s hire requirements. Thank fuck.
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Gigantic’s backstage layout included a long reverse up a drive and then a backwards swing into the loading bay. I had to do it twice, because we couldn’t leave the van there. It wasn’t tricky but doing it in front of loads of wandering punters, with a dramatic line of security staff to hold gates temporarily shut, was a recipe for intense self-awareness.
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When I drive a hire vehicle, I’ll have bad dreams before and after. They’re never about a horrible crash, or injuries, or anything like that. They’re always about just failing to break in time and slowly crunching into something precious in front of me. It’s always a gentle collision. Rarely people, just other cars or buildings. A couple of weeks ago I described this dream to someone and they immediately said: ‘so they’re all about you getting in trouble.’
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Anyway, a great thing about this trip. Somewhere near Swindon, Jim struck gold: a Travelodge with an actual hotel bar, and it did a breakfast. I can’t remember the last time we were in a Travelodge with a bar. This one has horrible reviews online that got read out in the van, but it must’ve been renovated, because it was fine. We ditched Gigantic after The Wonderstuff, just as Roger Cook — sorry, Peter Hook — was about to walk onstage, got back to the hotel ahead of last orders. Sunday morning breakfast was almost, almost, as decent as a Premier Inn buffet. Though some hotel staff whose shift only finished around midnight were up doing the breakfasts. Brutal.
Our band has professionalised a great deal in the past few years. While that does make everything easier, and has been natural and necessary, as gigs have gotten bigger, it comes at the cost of something subtle and intangible on the social side, though we’re all still real friends — comrades not colleagues. For Gigantic, Marc and Mr Spoons drove separately to get onsite by 12noon to sell merch. So I only saw them briefly the whole day.
Theoretically, I had the van til Tuesday morning. I was tempted to use it for some shopping, or to visit friends. But parking is pricey and tricky in Brighton. In the end I just took it back on Sunday afternoon, as soon as we arrived home.
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In the aftermath, a bunch of Jim’s fans are reminiscing online about the years after Carter (and during the reform era) when they saw Jim play solo in very small venues, performing sometimes to just a few dozen people. I was there too. It’s so different now. It’s been twelve years since the final Carter USM reunion show in 2014 (now a significantly longer gap than between their original split and reform). It’s also been a decade since the 2016 solo tour where his audience re-emerged and remarkably quickly those small venues were too small, sold out, and shows upgraded to bigger spaces. Now he can sell out Shepherds Bush Empire and we regularly play to between 400 and a thousand people in cities around the UK. It’s unequivocally a far better experience, especially in the current climate — Jim is resolutely bucking trends in live music. It’s been five albums since Covid, most charted in the proper charts, he’s had a number one hit 10” EP (I’ve got the pink and blue plastic UK Chart #1 award on my bookshelf to show for it).
A new 10” EP is on the way and almost sold out.
But we feel the world changing, all the way there, all the way back.
Next confirmed Jim Bob action is late autumn, in London and also on tour for a few shows supporting the Undertones on their fiftieth anniversary run, then a mad one-off dash to Athens just before Chr**tmas.
Paid to be in Greece in December, what the actual fuck.
God Is In The TV reviewed all the acts at Gigantic.
icymi —
• Olivia Rodrigo debuts ‘Begged’ on SNL.
Nothing’s quite enough when I know that to get it I begged.
• The YouTube algorithm fed me this and it’s stunning, from 2009: PJ Harvey and John Parish play ‘Black Hearted Love’ on Letterman.
• Beautifully written career reflection essay by musician turned manager, turned musician again, Julian Deane of Raygun (and Toploader, and now Woodchester Piano Company). Some rich Luke Sital-Singh content in here.
• I’ve been listening to a bunch of Veronica Swift lately, the astonishing jazz singer journeywoman, Hod O’Brien’s kid prodigy now in her early thirties. Swift did a session at Emmet’s Place a couple of weeks ago and even in those slightly smug surroundings (drowning in piano trills) she brings bloody, fierce majesty. Adding her plaintive, almost harsh tone to flawless pitch and rhythm, with relentless energy, a Gaga vibe, though really this Swift’s singing — and her scatting — is just ludicrously brilliant, on a par with jazz legends. Annoyingly, she’s also formed a (so far) mediocre-to-awful pomp rock outfit called Dame with the bloke from Dresden Dolls, which suggests a taste issue and maybe ambition for the wrong kind of stardom. But basically everything else she’s got is perfect.
This whole post fills me with affection for you (even more than usual).
Awesome about Dave Morgan - when The Loft played in Notts last year he sat in with the support band without much more than a soundcheck. I guess some people just love to play drums!