Snow Patrol radio festival dates supporting Eyes Open, out now on A&M Records.
day one: saturday 2nd dec...Gary Lightbody
the journey from the little island to the big country
in the belly of the big metal bird again hanging over the atlantic...again. this is our umpteenth trip to the states in this year 2006. pried out of our uk tour to play the end of year US radio shows. as in 2004 when four dates into that uk tour we bounced across the big sea to the big country to do the same. the musical accompaniment to this flight and these words being typed is 'robbers and cowards' by Cold War Kids which is the sound of insanity buttered and boxed and is as glorious as it unhinged; also 'be he me' by Annuals which is no less willful but has a more sinister darkness lurking in it's giant and often elegant beauty. two records i love so much i want to listen to them at the same time and have been so conflicted by their jousting majesty five minutes sometimes passes before i realize i've been rolling between them on my ipod simply unable to decide. decision made i'm cloaked in wild noise and in my element so not afraid to fly. without music i would flip right out on flights. bananas i tells ya! postal at 40,000 feet! as it is i'm calm enough. foot and keyboard being tapped in unison and head on straight.
america has loomed large in our heads and hearts from the beginning of this record. we wrote 'eyes open' on the south west tip of ireland and the house we lived in for those six weeks was perched on a cliff side looking out onto the frosty atlantic. and a few thousand miles in a straight line from our front door lay the east coast of america. granted that's a long way but it is really just a body of water and the idea of leviathan land somewhere in front of us. america became a romantic idea again to me. an idea untarnished by the current administration's policies home and abroad. just the sense of size and freedom that nurtured the great american music of the last half of the last century. i will always be critical of bush and his thuggish team but that shouldn't have any effect on my love of all the great things about the US: music, art, literature and movies that have shaped my life as much as any american born kid. this idea of america wasn't the only factor in our sonic ambition being more thirsty but it played a much bigger part than ever before.
touched down in la. still to get to portland. still to collect our bags. still to recheck in. still to get through passport control. and therein lies the greatest problem with traveling to america. not the ten hour journey (although that sure sucked) but the cheery welcome upon arrival. ha. the staff at the gates of your country couldn't be less helpful if they tried. hang on, if they tried they may actually help someone somehow, even by accident. they could, for example, trip over one or both of their floor scraping arms and careen into you knocking you through to baggage claim. as it is the most you can hope for is a grunt and a point, or if they get very excited at you they may bark incoherent yet impatient orders at you, which if you've not experienced such demands before is a potent combination resulting only in confusion and more often than not me ending up in an even longer queue watching people i know i got off the plane before collecting their bags while i watch from 40 people back.
suspicion reigns supreme at all american borders. everyone is a potential terrorist now. innocent til proven guilty has been abandoned for "fuck you guys trying to blow up my usa, in the words of our glorious commander-in-chief "not on my watch" ." the bush administration is very fond of having a go at the french, well you know what other legal system is based on guilty til proven innocent? yep, the french one. even worse is that after a while paranoia starts to grip me and i'm convinced i've packed a load of guns and nitroglycerin in my hand luggage and there'll be something flagged on my passport and i'll be ushered forcibly into a dank room with one light bulb hanging from the ceiling swinging ominously from the draft of the opened door and i'll be living inside franz kafka's 'the trial' for the rest of my short life....deep breath gary..... an hour and a half of imagined scenarios such as these and mopping the cold sweat from my furrowed brow i'm at the desk. only one question "what's your occupation" the answer "musician" (i have a visa. try getting in with that answer without one i dare ya!). i'm through to the other side. that was easy. just getting to another terminal and checking in for the flight to portland. oh, and we've only an hour.
race over and we're on the flight to portland. a hop skip and a jump later and we touch down on schedule as gentle as a yawn.
hotel. bed. out like a snuffed candle.
Dec 03 - Portland, OR @ Crystal Ballroom
day 2: 3rd dec, show day, portland...Gary Lightbody
it's six am. i'm awake. it's two in the afternoon back home in ireland and my body seems vigorously aware of this. my mind on the other hand is quite willing to accept the hour as read on the little innocent looking but all too complicit alarm clock by my head. oh yes my mind is sleeping. sleeping that is until my toe is abruptly stubbed on the wee jutty bit that runs along the entrance to the toilet. my mind is woken as the pain seems to hit my head first, then my toe which throbs like a police siren. cursing i forget why i'm in the toilet. i remember later and go back. fear not.
breakfast is taken. actually it's takin' ages. when it arrives it's all wrong but we're too hungry to care. an hour and half for breakfast to arrive and five minutes to eat it like a pack of wild dogs eating out of the trash cans in your back garden. oh, i've made it personal now. then out into portland, one of our favourite places in the states. not just because there's no sales tax although that is sweet. it's got something about it that i'm drawn to. although it's cold. cold like inuit tears or as cold that teacher that didn't like me because he could see right into my slacking heart and it terrified me. below freezing is the worst kind of below but it's a blessed reversal of the summer tour we did in the states this year in the unrelenting heat. irish and heat mix like soup. human broth.
we go to the apple store for christmas presents. think i can get away with saying that as i'm sure my folks and sister won't be reading this blog, no offense to amplifier but my family aren't your target audience. ipods for all. ha. not quite but i'm sure it wouldn't be a rarity for family's of ipods to be wrapped up warm and cute under trees the length and breadth of this land and many other lands besides. more shops, some coffee, more shops, a guy juggling, cold lips, cold ears, frozen eyes, book shops, can't feel my hands, the same guy juggling, oops we're going in circles, where's the fucking hotel, i thought you said you knew the way, don't shout at me you prick, i'm not shouting i'm just so cold my ears have frozen and i need to speak up to hear what i'm saying, bollocks, what, nothing....
sound-check at the crystal ballroom. the stage is vibrating with bass so much my teeth are sore. an ominous thought goes into my mind like a ninja and then is out in a flash. ninjas can do that. my throat is tight and i suddenly feel like i've got the cold. god damn ninja must have had the cold. i thought those guys were super-fit. am singing through an internal balaclava now. shit. my tongue feels like soap and/or cheese somehow. not fun singing with
the cold. fucking hell though iggy used to sing while cutting himself to ribbons so a wee cold isn't gonna destroy me.
dinner. sushi. i have miso soup and leave before the raw fish arrives as i'm talking like my mouth is full of moth balls now and it's a psychological hindrance to my health. back to the hotel. listen to some music: beirut, field music, jonny cash, CSS and a little funkadelic which cheers me up.
show time. we're on stage about half ten. my voice is hoarse with cold but most of the notes go in the right order and place until near the end when it seems that my brain and voice have fallen out completely and one is determined to fuck the other over at my expense. thanks to the crowd for being great and next time i promise to bring spare vocal chords or a bag of various musical notes.
hotel. bed. out like three strikes.
day 3. day off. portland. this time with pictures...Gary Lightbody
oh the feel of an american paperback in my hands. bending the pliable pulpy paper til it rattles and burps. if one inanimate object can arouse me it's an unread book. the pristine promise of it is too exciting. they don't print paperbacks in the same way in the uk and it's our loss. when i'm in the states i spend hours in book stores. just picking up volumes and flicking through. the new book covers as far as the eye can see are all signposts to some
kind of knowledge. some of them wrong turns right enough but unbought books all are innocent until........... i buy some books too i'm not that much of a weirdo. portland has one of the best bookstores in america, powell's books, and it's two blocks from our hotel. i spent the early evening there but i've lept ahead of myself. the day began at ten o'clock.....
ten am and i've found my sleeping pattern i think. although tonight's slumber, or otherwise, may decide otherwise. fresh and rested i head off into the alphabet district of the city. having never been i'm imagining a sesame street/carnival atmosphere down there and i'm hungry to find out. as it turns out it's full of lovely wee boutiques, record stores and tea rooms. that there's no big bird is of course disappointing at first but i get over it and we go for lunch in a wee place recommended to us the previous night called papa haydn's. the food is the best i've had in the states. simple and delicious. just like me. the entrée is followed by the waiter showing me the desert menu with a wicked grin i'm not sure about until i see the list of puddings. oh sweet jesus. a galaxy of cakes much further than the stomach could travel in this lifetime without adult onset diabetes. i'm tempted, he can see that and like an expert torturer reckoning he can catch more flies with sugar he reels me in with talk of 'just a little piece' and 'you really have to try the...'. i'm woozy just reading the menu but somehow i hear myself say 'that one' and when i look down i'm pointing at something i'd not have been able to pronounce anyway. it arrives like a sad birthday cake and i instantly start sweating. it tastes like ferrero roche and god's candy floss hair.
full of sugar and big ideas we find a great music store, millennium music, and spend the best part of an hour in there. i go about off-loading all my PD's for the whole tour (given to me not three hours before by our tour manager, neil, saying with scolding glee not to spend it all in the one place. well it won't be the first, or last, time i've ignored his advice). they have a plethora of listening posts heaving with gloriously odd music and i try before i buy. i end the spree with twenty new records the best of which are: ray lamontagne 'til the sun turns black'; joanna newsom 'Ys'; two gallants 'what the toll tells'; hellogoodbye 'zombies! aliens! vampires! dinosaurs!' and the roots 'game theory'. although when i listen through the rest properly i'm sure i'll love them all in my own way.
the guys in the shop were friendly and helpful and got us a cab back to the hotel. after throwing my records onto my bed i leave the hotel into the crisp evening darkness and set off on the short journey to powell's books...
i need to buy another bag to carry all this shit but hey.
hotel. bed. out like a.... we'll see...
Dec 05 - Denver, CO @ Fillmore Auditorium
day 4. show day in denver...Gary Lightbody
there's a wail of feedback in my dream...... a dream in which there's an army of me, like in that bjork song, and we're trying to get past this one old lady on the street taking her sweet time but we can't pass her for some reason but we're in a hurry because we're on our way to see my chemical romance and we've not got tickets and there's an army of us and there's probably not gonna be enough tickets left to accommodate us in our entirety and if we can't all go then we're not going. the old lady is pissing me/us off but we're too polite and thus we're all like 'eh, excuse me, pardon us, would you mind, we're in a terrible hurry' and then i/we make the mistake of touching her shoulder and she turns around in a violent whirl and it's not an old lady but Faith Hill and she's screaming at us like she was at the camera at the cma's when she didn't win that award and was in NO way 'JOKING' and we're terrified as she's not screaming words, it's more like a tornado/klaxon/airplane/lion/feedback.... and i'm bumped awake by airplane tires hurting the denver runway. i feel upside down and reprimanded. like going to school in a washing machine.
the journey from the airport into denver is breathtaking. the sky is gigantic. the bold blue ripped in two by the gold of the late afternoon sun and painted with clouds fat, happy and delicious. i want to bite them and they look close enough to do just that. they would taste like sugar and laughter i'll bet. the rocky mountains frame this scene like distant ragged teeth and it's like we're being swallowed slowly - too slowly to even realize - by the world.
darkness falls before we're even at the venue in a soft but swift collapse.
sound-check is difficult as the sound in the room bounces back and forth like whale song and we look at each other in the noise all thinking the exact same thing but not needing to do anything more than raise our eye brows to express it: "mad fucking sound, eh?!" and i reply to the facial expressions with one of my own that simply
says: "yeah".
mexican food tonight and i learn something. i was always under the impression, having never been to mexico (we go in march of 2007), that fajitas are mexican food. i open the menu, having already decided what i want (fajitas! obviously), for a respectful perusal of said carte and to my horror i find no fajitas. surely some mistake i assume. the waitress arrives with the libations and i inquire with polite indignation "excuse me, where's the fajitas?" "i'm sorry sir" she says with a mix of school mistressy consolation and amused pity "you'll only find traditional mexican food on the menu here, fajitas are tex-mex." TEX-MEX?! i feel like someone hit my reset button. i am aware of the reference of course, i have been to texas, but i've also eaten in restaurants all over the world that proudly claimed they served mexican food and they all had fajitas on the menu. am i alone in my ignorance? is this something everyone was aware of and laughed behind my back about for all these years "you know that lanky streak of piss from that band with that song about 'laying' somewhere or something?" "yeah" "well, get this, he thought that fajitas were mexican food" "hahahahahah". i thought my palette was adventurous and my mind open and i had some sense of the world at large. ah well.
my cold has not yet abated and so my singing voice is a little weak still but the gig goes well apart from the cruel sonic bounce of the room as experienced at sound-check. i tell an ill-fated anecdote about john denver not actually being from the denver, rather from new mexico, and the gust of wind from the collective shrug of the crowd almost knocks me over. i thought it would be at the very least amusing but no i think i just took a butter-knife to a scared cow and only the thunderous noise of jonny's kit kicking back in saves me from myself.
tonight back at the hotel i receive an email from an old friend from scotland now spending his days in the bake of the australian sun shine. it seems he's started managing a young singer songwriter called laura jean and he sent me the myspace link. i then spend the best part of half an hour listening and re-listening to one of her wonderful songs on the site called 'i'm a rabbit, i'm a fox'. i encourage you to do the same:
www.myspace.com/edenland.
bed. out like bell-bottoms.
day 5, denver to seattle, travel day...Gary Lightbody
early start again. gotta love em. we're boarding a plane with a killer whale painted on the tail. i can't work out whether this is good or bad luck. i mean whales are cool but i've seen the discovery channel, killer whales aren't inappropriately named. they is nasty! a thousand more thoughts go through my head most of them some variation of being torn to pieces by a combination of killer whales, sharks and clowns for some reason. surely we're all frightened of clowns. long before stephen king's 'it' gave me good reason to fear them i still had my reservations. i think it was due to an incident at a friends fifth birthday party when an over-zealous clown burst a balloon during a particularly intricate balloon-animal attempt (it could of been a monkey or a t-rex maybe) and all the children started crying. a combination, i'm sure, of the noise and the fact an animal had just exploded in front of us, albeit an inflatable one. i was still crying at the sad ballet of the water going down the plug-hole at that stage of my life probably, so of course i'm gonna have squirted a few.
on the plane there's more to vex me. the stewardess is old. i've nothing against old people but she's grandma old. old enough that if something happens I'LL be helping HER off the plane. this is a phenomenon native only to the U.S as far as i've experienced: old ladies as stewardesses. i'm perhaps laboring this point but how can this be the safest option. i want someone with both strength and vitality tending flights i'm on. someone able to throw me over their shoulder whilst kicking the emergency exit door open AND spraying fire retardant wildly with their free hand. not someone who's answer to impending doom stretches no further than the offer of a boiled sweet and an empathetic demeanor. jesus i hate flying. jesus would hate flying too i'm sure although he'd probably survive ok, what with pa and all. although his dad didn't intervene when those romans got a hold of him....
we land in one piece and without the need for a superhero / superdeity to save us from a burning fuselage.
seattle is the spark that lit the fuse on the stick of musical dynamite inside me. i've spoken at great length and on many occasions about my love of nirvana, mudhoney, soundgarden and so many other bands from here or near here that i'll not retrace those steps of teenage adulation. i will say though it means a lot to me, to us, to come here and do well. to play shows in the places those guys played in. it makes me feel part of a great continuance. a lineage.
after leaving our worldly goods in our hotel rooms nathan and i go off in search of a cinema to see the new bond film. cinema found we buy our snacks. something else that is different in the states from the UK is popcorn. or rather the choice of condiment to marry to it. in the UK we have sweet and salted. they have two glass bins, one of each, that they scoop from and you can even just point at your preferred choice if you like. here in the states your popcorn is handed to you unfettered. naked and warm. you then can choose to add a little/alot/hyper-cardiac of salt or lace it with butter. hold up! butter?! butter is wet. it's wet. you know it's wet right. eew! butter!? the only moisture that may fall on my corn is either great galloping tears of sadness, or, hearty tears/spit/dribble of laughter. OR, maybe if you forced me to sit through van helsing again, you're blood. or if you were big, my blood, because one of us is dying there and then. this new bond movie, however, is excellent. a bond movie with heart. maybe the first of it's kind. daniel craig is already my favourite bond. those who doubted him because of his HAIR COLOUR will not go hungry this winter, what with all the humble pie they'll have stocked up. craig has been a stunning in many films (layer-cake, enduring love, munich, sylvia) and it's about time he broke out as a dynamic hollywood leading man. i've also recently found out he may be playing lord asriel in the film adaptation of philip pullman's 'his dark materials' and i'm vibrating with excitement about that.
afterwards we join the rest of the band and crew for dinner in our favourite restaurant in seattle, the pink door. don't worry it's much more gay than it sounds. laughter and tiredness combine to make the dinner conversation bolt rodeo-like through many a crazy cowboy story. not that we actually have any cowboy stories although i did go to a birthday party (another fucking birthday party, woop-de-do) dressed as a cowboy once to find out it wasn't fancy dress. there may have been tears that day too.
i duck out early as i've got the new field music album to listen to and i'm pulsating at the thought. when i get to hear it it's even better than their 2005 eponymous debut. the new album is FIELD MUSIC 'write your own history', total genius. do sample. it will not disappoint.
bed. out like your cat probably is.
Dec 07 - Seattle, WA @ Key Arena (Seattle Center)
Dec 10 - Universal City, CA @ Gibson Amphitheatre
###
http://www.snowpatrol.net
Buy Album from CD Universe
