Mary, now officially the drummer for Jenny Hoyston on her European tour, flew in to Oakland from Portland and Jenny met her at the airport. We had rehearsals in the LESBIANS practice space in San Francisco for one day and had to learn about five more songs to fill out the set in a matter of hours. Mary tried to lower the stress level by practicing in her underpants.
Jenny, now officially the boss, was impressed and relieved at the resulting set list. Mary finished her tour edition comic book while Jenny made final arrangements online and burned her limited edition tour CD. Both of us were excited and nervous and curious about how the trip would go. To give a proper, well-fed sendoff, Tara Jepsen threw a lovely dinner party at her home, at which Kitty, Brent, Michelle Tea, and Mary Elizabeth were in attendance. Everybody packed away some meatloaf (except for Mary and the cat- we decided the cat must be vegetarian too,) and shared some hugs since Jenny was going to be gone for over a month once again. Mary was still recovering from her annual winter bronchitis bout, almost falling asleep on Jenny right at the dinner table, then most definitely passing out cold on Tara's couch after eating.
Sadie (the adorable dog) is staying at home with a dog nanny and a new dog friend for the next month. Mary had separation anxiety that luckily could be slightly eased by looking at photos of Sadie eating from her bowl and doing other cute things, which she did every few hours. “Jenny, look at Sadie on the couch,” she would coo while flipping through photos on her digital camera, “Oh, look at her sitting on the ground, how cute.” Etc.
OVERSEAS FLIGHT
We crammed all of our luggage and gear into Jenny’s roommate’s car and first flew from SFO to LA before boarding our flight to London. We made use of Jenny’s trusted method to avoid jet lag - take an Ativan when dinner is served and it will quickly get absorbed into your system as you eat. When you are finished with dinner you are soooo sleepy that you sleep until breakfast is served. Before our meal was served we watched several episodes of an amazing sitcom with Tina Fey called “30 Rock.” Mary’s favorite part is when Tracy Morgen is being slapped with a paternity suit but exclaims incredulously, “That’s impossible! I never got all the way out of my car, and she never got all the way out of her tollbooth!”
The booking agency failed to file our working papers so Jenny’s label, Southern Records, had to pay a bunch of extra cash so we could get into the UK. Our visas weren’t in the system yet when we landed at Heathrow Airport so we waited in limbo at Immigration for an hour while calls were made. Things turned out fine and we were so happy to find that our luggage and Jenny’s guitars were still in the bag claim area when we were finally admitted.
Day One: London
We took the subway from Heathrow Airport to Paddington Station, which was a short walk from the hotel we had reserved. We had plans to check in, have a nice dinner and a walk and retire early for the one day off before a non-stop 2 week tour. The socially ungifted manager at the Ascot Hyde Park Hotel refused to accept the online booking Jenny had paid for (long, annoying story - never stay there!). We found another hotel a few blocks away. The room was exactly two feet wider than the double bed that was in it. It wasn’t pretty but it was ours and we were so happy to have a place to be sheltered and to put our stuff.
After we settled into our room we walked up the street for Indian food. We sat in a secluded part of the restaurant where the lights weren’t working overhead so the table was candle lit. The waiter suggested a vegetarian combination and we had a wonderful time eating and talking about the days to come. Afterward we walked around the Hyde Park neighborhood and had half pints at a pub where they were blasting smooth jazz from an internet jukebox (including Herb Alpert, Chuck Mangione and the elevator version of “Beat It-“ Jenny sang along) before heading back to the hotel for the night.
Day Two: Sheffield
Valentine’s Day!!! Free breakfast in hotels in the UK is a lot better than the coffee-and-danish of the States. Our little London joint, located on a street that had hotel after hotel, spread out an enormous buffet in the morning from which we devoured fruit, hardboiled eggs, yogurt and granola, tea, toast, croissants, juice, and cereal. Mary wanted to stay eating in the breakfast room forever, but eventually gave in to guilt brought on by small children pressing their faces to the glass of the packed dining room, waiting for a table.
Mary found a place to make copies of her comic book while Jenny made a grocery store run and changed money. We met our driver, a cool German punk guy named Christian, for the first time, and also met the van, which is a huge box on wheels and exactly the size of our London hotel room. We loaded our luggage and gear inside (the rental "backline," a drum kit and guitar amp, were already in the van) and hit the highway for our first of many days in the van. While on the road, we got really into checking out the fun names of British snacks at the gas stations, which inspired a little streak of performance art in the aisles as we acted out the personas of various packaged goods.
Couples hung all over Sheffield’s Red House Pub. There were a few cute lesbian pairs making out in corners and sending out comforting “rainbow” vibes, which was really a nice way for a couple of aging lesbians to start out tour. We unpacked our rental drums and amp and spend much of this first show getting used to them and making adjustments. Mary wouldn't even eat dinner until she had screwed around with every piece of her new hardware, not able to rest until she had mastered its little complications. We played with 3 other acts this night, including Vile Vile Creatures.
Jenny met the women from this band last year in Leeds at an Erase Errata show and ran into them again in Amsterdam on that same tour.
Later that night, Jenny and Mary crashed out at Cara’s house to an awesome old Melanie 8-track.
Day Three: Nottingham
Christian and Jenny had food at a vegan café called Blue Moon or something while Mary went to a café with wifi and had a walk to try and get some “space” because it was already a little bizarre for her, a hermit, to be on tour and surrounded by people at all times.
The drive to Nottingham was really short and we arrived in town an hour before our scheduled load in so we went inside a bar to get warm and had tea and coke while we waited. There were several children hanging out, playing around the bar while their mother sat on a stool getting “pissed” (means drunk here) and ranting to some old guys. Christian told Jenny about how he learned in college that there was a whole syndrome of behaviors associated with bar dwelling children, like they’re too friendly and learn to talk to drunk people all the time. Or something.
This was the night we met our “doppelbander,” Pifco a.k.a. Stephen and Mary.
This fun show was at The Maze and promoted by Matt and Neil from Damn You! It was awesome to stay at their house, because it was like being transported to the DC of England, with all the Nation of Ulysses posters and such on the walls. The guys treated us to an incredible breakfast in the morning, Brit style, with baked beans, huge veggie sausages, eggs, toast, potatoes, veggie bacon, and tea.Day Four: Oxford
Mary loved Oxford, because she has a university fetish and because the streets are small and walking-friendly without too many cars. The two of us checked in at the Wheatsheaf, a pub chock full of wasted dudes in the late afternoon, and after loading in we went for a walk. Christ Church is closed but we managed to find our way around the university grounds, a surprise dream world of vast green fields and rivers just a block away from the crammed city square. We strolled along a little riverbank and visited with geese, and even see a baby deer across the water! Mary wanted her picture taken in front of the school so she could pretend she graduated from there. Oh, the unaddressed shame of the high school dropout!
After soundcheck Tom, the promoter for the night, walked us to an amazing café called the Nosebag, which we both
thought was hilarious (it’s a British term for the feedbag farmers put on horses). We got some quiet time alone there, having tea and fancy chocolate deserts before walking back to play the show. It turned out to be a night of noise bands, which was cool, and especially interesting given that the club was decorated with Grateful Dead posters. Jenny loved those.Day Five: Leeds
Our promoter, Tom, was so nice to us in both cities he organized. Here in Leeds we played at the Brunedell Social Club. It was the second show with our sister band, Pifco. We joked about Stephen and Mary being our “doppelbander” because there are two of them with Mary on drums and because Jenny’s parents had once planned to name her Stephen. (photo)
Two other great dance bands played this night- one called Beards, a trio with medieval armor-like costumes made out of rainbow cloth (photo,) and Jenny’s friend Andy’s laptop dance music project that had videos and a hit song that went “my neck hurts, my back hurts, my butt hurts, my butt hurts,” about loading equipment in and out of shows.
Day Six: London (again)
Jenny’s friends Holly, Sharp, (former Erase Errata merch lady) Charlotte and people from Southern Records came out tonight, along with some writers and photographers for interviews (photo), and a couple of superfans. Jenny went for a brief business meeting and did some catching up with Sharp.
Mary did yoga (with earplugs in!) after soundcheck on the venue floor in front of the soundbooth. After an hour, she was so zoned out that she barely noticed the doors had opened and people were standing around waiting for the show to start.
Our show was really good tonight, and the venue was crowded. It was promoted by Upset The Rhythm, who bring a lot of noise and experimental bands over from the states. Mary looked at the flyer for upcoming shows and noted that many of the bands were coming from Portland.
We really got into our between-song comedy routine here, with a little skit about two sighing ladies searching for the perfect turquoise belt, Mary pretending to be God but from Texas (“I made barbeque, Jenny, and we have in up here in the big Texas in the sky,”) and a little accapella industrial duet while Jenny tuned.
Right after the show, we piled into the van and headed for the ferry to France. (photos) We were all very sleepy and ended up crashing out in chairs once we got on the boat, but noticed a lot of people trying to stay awake by partying hard. The ferry had a bar and a bunch of gambling machines, stores, a whole food deck- it was huge. The first thing Mary noticed about leaving the UK was suddenly the men were all smarmy and checking us out, like immediately on the ferry.
Day Seven: Nantes
Nantes, the Portland of France! Sofy Girard from Wonderground and her girlfriend Emilie expertly promoted our first show on the continent. It was so crowded! Sofy made two different kinds of huge posters, one of which featured this gory girl smoking a cigarette while her eye falls off (photo,) and she had secured an article about Jenny in a local music magazine. Sofy blew our mind with her collection of show flyers and her knowledge of U.S. bands and even U.S. lesbian news. She filled us in on things we didn’t even know about Portland bands, who’s dating who, etc. It is a small, small world.
Emilie was also making a documentary about women drummers, and had a camera crew onstage filming Mary's beats. Jenny worried that it would make Mary nervous and forget her parts, but it actually made her feel fancy and important which probably made her playing even better! Later at their amazing lesbian palace (three extra bedrooms for guests!) we looked at some info about the film and saw that Emilie had already shot footage of a lot of bands including the Gossip. We told them they should come finish the film in Portland because there are like ten women drummers there, at LEAST.
The show was awesome and there were lots of women there, including a really drunk and funny lady who kept playing Mary's drums with her hands after the show, like bongos, while her fancy purse kept falling off her arm onto the floor tom. Mary learned an exciting new word as well- Battreuse, which basically means female drummer. For two more days she said "Je suis un battreuse" every hour or so. Christian and Jenny knew a little French, but Mary only knew some German and was totally lost in France language-wise. But she found it kind of nice to be free from conversation.
We were pretty late arriving because the over night ferry and drive from London left everyone “boat-lagged.” Mary especially felt the brunt of our missed night of sleep, and had a minor depression that caused her to cry like a little baby in the van. But we managed to do some laundry in Nantes before getting on the road and that made everything better!
Day Eight: Paris
The club in Paris was a huge complex, an old school or something with rooms on every floor for films, meetings, rehearsal spaces, and even a giant gymnasium. We were excited to meet Rocky Volotano, from Seattle, and to have a sort of west coast U.S. convergence on Paris. Also, Christian made a friend- Rocky’s driver, who was also German. But we secretly made fun of the Rocky tour van because they didn’t have the decency to give their GPS system a name- what monsters! How inhumane! We had christened ours “Gretchen” at the start of tour and decided that she was Christian’s girlfriend because she always sounded like she was flirting with him in her breathy instructional voice.
It was nice not to be the headliner for one night, because that meant we could finish early and drink wine and fancy beer, which Jenny and Mary proceeded to do. There was a fun hour after the show where the bands and crew clustered around the one table in the building at which you could get a wireless signal (Wifi is so hard to come by on the road!). Our tipsy asses were very persistent in attempts to email home and watch “Britney Spears on drugs” and “bad Kung Fu movie auditions” on You Tube.
Later we had hijinks figuring out which people from which bands would share which hotel rooms, and of course the ladies ran off to claim our own space and have a 1AM dance party to Lesbians On Ecstasy. Mary also thought it would be fun to draw big dyke power symbols on the room’s mirrors with soap, exclaiming that if you don’t mess up a hotel room while on tour at least once in your life, then you’re not a real “rocker.” Or something, we don’t really remember. The hotel was our third “Etap Hotel,” which is this really cheap chain that one of the Rocky crew guys dubbed Hotel Playskool because the rooms are made out of plastic. It had come to the point where we heard the word Etap and everyone groaned. Christian started singing in his Amy Winehouse voice, “They tried to make me go to Etap but I said No, No, No,” which made us hysterical. We couldn’t stop singing it for two days after.
Day Nine: Lyon
Oh my God! We arrived in Lyon and Gretchen the GPS system started to really lose it. She and Christian had their very first fight, but Jenny and Mary mediated and soon they were in love once again. Turned out the reason the venue was so hard to find was because it was a BOAT!!! Wow!
The Sonic is a floating indie rock/punk club on the river Seine. We all got really giddy and high off the fact that we were playing on a boat, and then got even more psyched when the promoter brought out three massive casserole dishes full of vegetarian lasagna. It had greens, broccoli, veggie sausage, even some kind of veggie turkey thing- and we immediately voted it one of the top tour meals we’d had.
Later there were a lot of vibes due to the full moon. Jenny and Mary tried to channel all of the energetic intensity while onstage, with some free experimentation and some “connecting” and some yogic breathing. Then God had a little Texan Talk with Jenny about her recreational activities. Mary hoped it was OK to talk about certain, um, green grasses onstage because hopefully not that many people even understood what we were saying. But generally, people at clubs speak some English, so she may have let loose a little too much personal info there. Oh well.
Mary and Jenny took a really lovely, though somewhat exhausted, walk through the Lyon Old Town. We got “un the et un café” at a little arty place that made us fill out a membership card before we bought anything. Then we found the amazing puppet museum! (photo) You could press a button to make Harry Potter and friends come alive in the window. Totally creepy and cool.
Jenny wandered off along the river, checking out the houseboats and inspecting the docks. She loved the Cathedral Ste Jean. Mary tried to find more boussons chauds (hot drinks) but ended up finding this Buffy poster in French and getting excited (photo). Good taste in TV is universal.
Strangely coincidental, we ran into a girl we had met in Portland named Elisa, who was at our first show together at Dunes. Turns out she actually lives in Lyon and we just never knew that, and she happened to be at our boat show as well!
Stefan, the promoter, lived in a beautiful apartment in Old Lyon in a building with the world’s smallest elevator (photo.) It fit one person at a time. His walls were covered with posters from all the shows he’s put on, and we recognized a lot of faces from home, like Chris Sutton, Tara Jane O’Neil and Black Ice and there was a really cute Erase Errata flyer that had the girls dressed up as astronauts in a spaceship (photos.) In the morning we were treated to croissants and more of the addictive lasagna, and Mary got so croissant-crazy that she went walking around the neighborhood looking for more, but they were all sold out of the patisseries by that hour of the morning.
Lyon was one of the coolest cities we went to, so far. It is so beautiful with castles looming in the hills above the city, all of the old apartment buildings with their gargoyles and terraces, and all kinds of arty anarchist stuff happening. We learned that it was the home of Guignol puppetry, and saw puppet theatre after puppet theatre. We also got really excited about Lyon’s free bicycle system (photo) in which the bike stations are all over the city, so you can just “rent” one and then drop it off at your destination. So cool! If only we had it in the States…
Day Ten: St. Gallen, Switzerland
In the van on the way out of Lyon, we were obsessed with the new Britney Spears song and kept changing the lyrics to “gimme gimme tour, gimme tour, gimme gimme tour.” The club was enormous, a big converted theatre, with our favorite backstage room up to this point. They had beds up there, and even little bottles of rescue remedy! Mary was psyched to take homeopathic flower essences and do yoga again while the other band got dressed and primped. And, she got to practice a little of Sie Deutsch mit dem Swiss. In the van every day, she worked on her book "German the Fast and Fun Way," and was really excited about finally having some time to try speaking.
We had a great dinner this night with tofu balls and great salad. The opening band was a Chicks On Speed/Le Tigre kind of act with cool visuals and day glo make-up (photo). We stayed with Ana the promoter in her flat by the rail station. Ana had a great collection of vinyl and was a big Fall fan.
I think this was the night we didn't even sell a single piece of merch, which was really wierd because we'd been selling a ton of cd's and comic books everywhere else. Jenny and Mary also had a fight due to spending 24 hours together for over a week, and in general we decided that Switzerland had some bad vibes that night.
Day Eleven: Brescia, Italy
On the way to Italy we stop at Heidiland, a giant gas station/restaurant/rest stop with goats you can pet. Jenny was having one of those tired of being on tour days and was particularly uplifted by the friendship of a little black goat she named Thelma and a larger billy with an overbite and beard she named Rasputin. (photo) Heidiland was, as the name suggests themed around the children’s story of Heidi, which Christian gave us a refresher course about. It’s actually pretty depressing. The weather was gorgeous and we were surrounded by the Swiss Alps so Jenny and Mary ate outside and lingered for almost 2 hours before getting back in the van.
The venue in Brescia is gorgeous. You can tell they put so much thought and time and money into perfecting it acoustically and aesthetically. At meal time, we’re served what the promoter Adrien tells us was described at the worst pizza in Italy by a magazine review. We think this is funny and take bites (it’s still good!) but mostly eat our own food – carrots, hummus, oranges.
Mary talked for a long time with the soundguy, who told her all about Brescia and the local people. Some of Brescia's fascinating facts included it's being the home of gun manufacturer Beretta, and that you can take gun factory tours! But mostly Brescia is industrial, like iron foundries and stuff, and wealthy people. They said that a lot of artists and muscians go to Brescia to get funding, from rich people and banks and businesses.
We played with a really great solo guitar guy, kind of a romantic troubadour type who's apparently very famous there... except we can't remember his name. At first we thought no one liked us, because though the place was crowded everyone stood near the back while we played. Later, all these people came up with compliments and bought records and wanted to take pictures with us, and the promoter explained that crowds there never go near the stage unless they are asked to by the band. Whoops!
After the show, the entire club transformed into a crazy disco, with a big crowd dancing around in smoke and strobe lights. Mary thought the DJ was really good and kind of wanted to stay and dance but we were all exhausted and finally made it to the hotel, a nice converted farmhouse out in a field, by 2:30am.
