Roleplay by AnnaSat in Newcastle - Tour Update - Monday April the 29th 2013By Envy Pilgrim
The realities of tour. Like me, most of you probs thought that touring was all about getting drunk and hanging out on one of the sickest tour buses ever, with lasers, and couches and free booze everywhere. Right? Well the reality is quite different. I just went outside and took the picture you can see at the top of this page. That's what we are touring in. Six of us in there. Of course, Pilgrim and her have the front seats to sleep in. The rest of us are piled in the back. How did we come to sleep in this shit pile? (you can probably tell I'm tired and snippy) Well we got here, off course, with no arrangements at all for what we were going to do. Pil found a scrap yard and paid the guy who owns it 20 pounds for a van that we could travel in. It isn't road worthy. It's illegal in fact. And it smells of fire and piss. I have to shower at every highway rest stop I can find to forget the smell. It sucks!
Ugh. Ok, right now I'm in Newcastle in England. We spent the first....6 days (I think) since we got to the UK by travelling down through Scotland, and we crossed over the border into England last night. Scotland was....at times....fun. Some of the places we have played have been pretty cool and there have been fans who enjoyed our EP who turned up to listen to us, but in other places we've turned up in some absolute back alley shit of a bar and then set up, only for the one person in attendance to be the bar man. They told me that people in Scotland like to drink. Let me tell you, people in Perth don't like to drink on a Thursday night, because there were none of them around. You wanna know where we've played so far, and my analysis of each?
Aberdeen - The Moorings - Last Tuesday - This place was cool. We were riding of the fact that Pilgrim had tweeted that we were coming to Aberdeen two days earlier. There were like 20 people there to see us so it was quite nice. I enjoyed that show. I didn't stink of fire at the time either. It was nice. We got a good reaction, and Pil even fell on his ass when he tripped over a cable. So that was fun.
Dundee - Sam's Bar - Last Wednesday - This is probably the one that fucked me off most! Before we came I had been tweeted by like 7 or 8 people to say "come to Sam's Bar in Dundee, it's the best." So we went. Apparently like the Arctic Monkeys and Oasis or some shit have played there in the past. How the fuck are 8 people gonna tweet me to come to a bar and only 5 people show up? It was a stale night. Pil got fed up of no one being there, but we still played our damn hearts out. I think we performed well and a few people seemed to enjoy it.
Perth - Fortesque Roadhouse - Last Thursday - First of all, this pub is like a cave. I expected bin Laden to be hiding in the damn corner. It was so dark and shitty too. Only person there was the barman. We played like two songs and then Pilgrim threw his guitar at Jordan. Gave him quite a black eye too, poor guy. Anyway, we just stopped and then Pil, myself, her and Kim went and got absolutely fucked up on acid. Jordan, Landon and Jake stayed at the pub til we were done. Pil then drove while still having the visions. It was dangerous. We almost all got arrested, but in the end, only Pil got taken in. They let him out in the morning. I also had a shower during the night so I felt a lot damn better then. For a bit.
Edinburgh - World's End Pub - Last Friday - So we only came here because it was said that it was the scene of some famous murder case. They sell shirts and mugs to commemorate it. There's something sick about that. Awful. Pilgrim loved it....of course. He has one of those morbid shirts now. In reality, this turned out to be the best show of the tour so far. We decided that it would be cool to have a support band. And since no one would really support us, I played just as ENVY before we went on as Reckless Abandon. It was cool. Real cool. I got a good reaction covering some songs by Blondie, Siouxie, Hole and the Distillers. I posted a picture below from my performance. It's probably the only time on the tour I didn't look like a total wreck.
We had Saturday off. Of course. Who's going to let a band no one knows play on the busiest night of the week? It was a bit shitty for us though. We ended up getting drunk to biblical standards. I had a full bottle of Jágermesiter to myself. By this point I was feeling so awful that I just wanted to not feel like I was living in a crappy van. I drank it all in like 25 minutes and then danced to music only I could hear. I woke up on the roof of the van the next morning without my shoes. Like on the roof, outside. It was raining too. I suppose a shower's a shower. We then moved on. Pil was driving drunk again. Thankfully he didn't get caught this time.
Glasgow - Cathouse - Yesterday (Sunday) - OK so this one was wild. They let us play, telling us it was their quietest night of the weekend. I'd hate to see it on a busy night! The place was packed with students who love alternative music. I think we made a lot of new fans. This was like.....300 or 400 people. Best experience ever. We didn't play as well as we could, but it was still a brilliant thing to have the chance to play it. I loved it. Loved it. Got to play as support act again and then we got wasted with some new friends who were awesome. Dudes with long hair and beards who I thought would hate us were buying us drinks and stuff. It was the coolest.
So then, that's all the shows so far. We had to leave Scotland this morning. It's been an up and down sorta tour so far. At the moment it's down, because we all have bitching hangovers and we're sat in some highway stopover at Newcastle, where we play tonight. This is the first time we had internet all week, so I thought I should update you guys all as soon as I could. Here's a picture of me hungover this morning. This was just before I got internet...
Speak again soon,
Envy x 