Hello. We are sleepmakeswaves. We make instrumental rock music. Some people call it ‘post-rock’, we prefer to call it ‘love songs about delay pedals’. We are embarking on a tour of Europe with a band called 65daysofstatic. They sound kinda like us, but are slightly older, probably a little better and British. It will be the biggest, and hopefully the best, tour we have ever done to date.
Four are we: I am Alex; I play bass and work the laptop blips and glitches. Kid and Otto play guitar. Tim likes to hit things with wooden sticks. We have also taken along our live engineer Brett, who makes us sound better than we are and ensures that we are fed and in a state to play on tour.
We are not very good at coke-addled benders or throwing TVs out of hotel windows, but boy, can we carry amplifiers! We also like a sneaky drink.
I hope you enjoy reading.
WEEK 1
SUNDAY 22 SEPTEMBER – EDINBURGH, SCOTLAND
7:00am and I wake up groggily in a Sheffield hotel room to an insistent mobile phone alarm. While my bandmate Kid snoozes in the next bed over, soundman/tour manager Brett comes in to tell us all shops are closed this Sundee morning, meaning no milk for coffee or breakfast. Shit. But at least the last remnants of Sydney-to-London jetlag are evaporating. We’ve passed the last three days in this northern town emptying pints of fine cask ale and waiting for the tour bus to start rolling. And today is the day.
Bleary-eyed but quietly excited, we grab our stuff – backpacks, four pedal cases, six guitars, many boxes and bags of merch and cabling – and slide into three cabs which take us to a redbrick Sheffield backstreet adorned with industrial wreckage. This is where 65daysofstatic, the band that we are supporting on this tour, are loading their massive stash of instruments, amps and merch into the bus trailer.
We’ve spent time with these guys before and it’s good to see some familiar faces. When we last played together it was for a handful of Australian shows. This time, we’re joining them as they promote their new record in just over a dozen countries. 37 gigs. 40 days. Once we’re on the bus, they let us know it’s been a while since they’ve been on the road for this long. For us, it’s simply unprecedented. We’re equal parts totally amped and utterly shitscared.
The bus, however, is stupidly awesome and distracts us temporarily from the gravity of what we are undertaking. There is custom colour cheesy mood lighting in every room, shiny wood panelling and a retractable TV/PS3 screen in the main lounge and a digital aquarium in the loo. Swag abounds, even if the low bunk I pull is clearly not designed for six-foot-something types such as myself.
Once the bus starts moving, we talk shop, read, play cards (M:TG, just in case you were wondering – Otto) and snooze for five hours until the bus hits Scotland. In the meantime the glary Sheffield light has transformed into a wonderfully clear blue sky.
Pulling into a quaint Scotland border town (Jedburgh) we’re greeted by people walking sheepdogs among verdant greenery, a bubbling brook and beautiful centuries-old church ruin. 65 and crew comment that they let Scotland know ahead of time that we were coming so the A+ Scottishness was laid out for our arrival. Right on.
Arriving into Edinburgh, there is already another tour bus parked outside the venue, Liquid Room. We have to park parallel and shanghai the gear out on to the footpath while twenty or thirty cars are impatiently backed up behind us. Turns out a disorganized American band from the night before were not aware that there was another bus coming.
We load into the room and check all our gear, which is thankfully working without issues. We mill around while 65 soundcheck, sampling this Scottish soda called IRN-BRU, which is kinda like the forbidden lovechild of Fanta and Dr. Pepper. The night’s running late and we miss our scheduled soundcheck, rushing on stage just before we play.
“Hi. We’re sleepmakeswaves from Australia. This is our first time in Scotland; thanks so much for coming out”. Despite not really being able to hear each other on stage, we’re playing to just short of about 300 Scots punters, who despite probably not knowing who the hell we are when we start, give us a big grateful round of applause when we finish. Not bad for the first show of the tour.
After 65 play, we shower, pack up and drag our stuff up Liquid Room’s stone steps and cobblestone ramps, which are picturesque but unforgiving pathways for our roadcases. After a quick feed and a reccie of Edinburgh Castle we call it a night.
MONDAY 23 SEPTEMBER – MANCHESTER, ENGLAND
I rouse myself and stumble out onto a British servo, snarfing a BLT and some OJ before jumping back on the bus as it rolls into Manchester around mid-morning. We’re parked in front of a venue called Sound Control, next to the main drag and part of a little enclave of cool clubs and pubs with wonderfully British names like ‘The Thirsty Scholar’. We smoke some cigarettes and pull into a café to enjoy some hot brekkies.
The sky is grey and the buildings are all made of red bricks, bringing to life a kind of urban Britishness I’d know only from books and TV. Rob, 65’s tour manager, mentioned to me in passing that Manchester is a bit like the UK’s Melbourne – the second biggest city boasting a great arts scene and alleyway surprises.
There’s not really a great deal to do until the load in begins, then not a great deal to do after it finishes and 65 soundcheck. I wander around the venue (the sticky floor makes us nostalgic for the Annandale back home) and kill time until we get set up stage. Time is still a bit tight on the soundchecks, but better than the night before.
While my bandmates mill around the merch desk downstairs I watch The Physics House Band, who are the openers on this UK leg and doing a damn fine job of it. A three piece that revolve bass, keyboards and guitars around some monstrously virtuosic drumming, they bring the stage to life with a fairly relentless but still pretty danceable cavalcade that brings to mind the best bits of Battles, Tortoise and Don Caballero. Right up my alley, and they are lovely dudes to boot. Worth a listen.
By the time we take the stage, the room has filled up nicely. A couple of punters down the front are wearing sleepmakeswaves shirts, which is a nice feeling. The show goes well overall with some great energy, but for me personally it’s a bit rough. Whatever bass volume was there at soundcheck dropped out almost completely. Unable to hear myself, I thrash away from memory. A weird feeling but sometimes you just need to get the job done.
After the show we bump into some friends of ours from Australia who, completely unknown to us, had relocated to Manchester earlier this year. Chris(py) plays guitar in Osaka Punch, formerly the Kidney Thieves, and is gigging around the UK. We’d played with his old band back in Queensland, Hazards of Swimming Naked, back in the early days of sleepmakeswaves around 2007. It’s wicked to catch up and we hit a pub with 65 and crew, working through some beers and whiskies.
Sometime around midnight I turn 27 – yay. A nice way to have a birthday and everyone buys me drinks. But now I gotta find a good way to die within the next 12 months. Think of the record sales.
TUESDAY 24 SEPTEMBER – NOTTINGHAM, ENGLAND
Wake up in Nottingham and cruise around for a bit – as Australian cafe snobs we’re on the Great British Tolerable Cup of Coffee Hunt, which on the whole has been a failed expedition marked by disappointment and burnt tongues. Nottingham is ‘nice’ but nothing to write home about, at least if you are just wandering for a couple of hours. One watery and bitter cup later and I’m back by the bus for an early load-in to the venue around 1pm.
The sun’s stuck behind grey clouds. It’s hot and bright, the overall effect is like being stuck under the world’s biggest fluorescent light. In this, we roll amps down a steep and narrow half-k footpath that separates our trailer from the venue, Rescue Rooms. Inside, the venue is large and spacious. PA sounds great and the amp signals travel nicely off the stage and into the room. Because of the early load-in everyone gets plenty of time to set up and soundcheck. There’s a support dressing room with showers, couches and a TV. After a few shows of nothing but beer and water on the ride, we go positively mental for a tub of hummus, cheap pita bread, a bag of carrot batons and shortbread fingers. UK promoters, take note: support bands will be overjoyed for < five pound worth of food. Show time rolls around. We’re plagued by none of the sound issues of the night before and I feel we play a really solid show. Good vibes and energy on stage and I feel that the crowd is definitely appreciating us by the end of the set. Highlight for me was watching Kid almost fall off the stage only to one-hand bounce himself back from a monitor wedge to keep rocking out. Smooth. 65 play a killer show, some of the kids down the front watching them go pretty wild.
There’s a thing when you’re touring called the ‘disco load-out’. Clubs try to slot rock bands in ahead of big club nights for a bit of extra cash, but the main game for them is often the DJ/dancefloor angle, where the most money is made on drinks. Tonight was, by all accounts, the disco load-out from hell. Rescue Rooms is right next to the U. of Trent Nottingham and I think it was wk. 1 of semester or something. Accordingly, the place was trying to get what looked like about 3,000 18-year old kids into the same place that 15 bearded and tattoo’d musos and crew were trying to roll about 1.5 tonnes of gear out of. Then up that fucking hill.
To give you an idea of this utter chaos: You have a backpack full of leads, the drum rug rolled under one arm and a guitar in each hand. You’ve already had to fight your way past a security guard to prove you can go back in to get your shit. With your gear in your hands and on your backs, you sherpa your way through a dense crowd of skimpily-attired youth; guys and girls who look like they should be on Geordie Shore. The air is squalid with sweat and nothing but elbows and irritation will part the sea of writhing young British flesh.
Walking back up that steep hill towards the bus you navigate past teetering toga’d boys. Young ladies passed out with paramedics and concerned friends perched over them. Fatherly cops sternly admonishing stone-faced jocks. That one dickhead that wanted to start shit because they drunkenly bumped into you and dropped their vodka bottle. You make it to the trailer, dump your stuff, take a quick breather. Head back into the fray. Rinse. Repeat five or six times.
This is rock n’ roll.
WEDNESDAY 25 SEPTEMBER – LONDON, ENGLAND
London. The big cheese gig of the UK leg. The day’s not off to a great start though. We’re camped out at a ‘services’ (servo in ‘Strayan) 10k out of town on the M4. It’s a debauched place. Brett walks in some indoor public chav fellatio just across from a Costa’s coffee and Burger King. Kid, trying to use the WC, is rudely interrupted by a finger poking inquisitively through a glory hole. Grim stuff indeed.
Tonight’s show is at the Scala, an upscale venue on Pentonville Road. Big bands have played here (Foo Fighters, Outkast) and the place is going to be sold out. We couldn’t have asked for a better joint to play our first show in one of music’s most important cities.
But the day’s off to a pretty bad start. Looking around the Scala after we’ve loaded in, I can’t find my rented bass amp. It’s not in the venue. It’s not in the trailer. We conclude it must be back at the venue in Nottingham, left behind in the helter-skelter of that hellish disco load-out. Brett gets in touch with the venue, who can’t find it anywhere in the place. Now we really start to despair.
This is very bad news. For me personally, I’ve lost a massive part of my on-stage sound. While the hire place was kind enough to provide us with a free backup amp, it’s a model that’s not on the level of what I normally play through and I’ve struggled to pull a good sound with it in the past. More broadly, this is about 2,000 pound worth of missing amp. Now that it’s gone, we can say goodbye to any notion of making back money on merch sales this tour.
Despondent, we pull into a greasy spoon across the road to talk it over. I’m fairly gutted but some chips, peas, bacon and gravy helps a bit. Just as we’re finishing up the meal Brett gets a call. Bass amp found – someone had hidden it away in a cupboard in an obscure part of last night’s venue. God knows why, but the important thing is it’s there. Even better, the guy who owns the Nottingham place also owns the Bristol venue we are hitting tomorrow night and has offered to drive it over for us.
Crisis averted. And when showtime comes, it comes with a vengeance because this is easily the best show of the tour so far. The venue sounds wicked and there is plenty of room on stage and we are playing to a packed house. I’ve heard London crowds can be notoriously hard on unknown bands like us, but hearing the riotous cheer that comes after my final “thank you” to the crowd feels pretty damn good. A night that could have gone very bad comes incredibly good.
We get down to some pretty serious drinking afterwards to celebrate and are fairly swamped by lovely London folk at the merch desk. I have a good time shooting the shit with them, taking photos and signing records. After load-out, we head onto the bus. 65 packed Scala out, played incredibly well and are in high spirits too. So there is some pretty thorough on-bus partying until about 4am. It climaxes (for me at least) with our drummer Tim and Joe, guitarist from 65, eyes and voices locked, drunkenly belting out, note for note, the guitar solo from “Hotel California”.
THURSDAY 27 SEPTEMBER – BRISTOL, ENGLAND
This morning I feel rrrrrrough. Not the only one. A full English and some sugary, milky builder’s tea does a bit to help (O, fried bread, where have you been all my life?!). The bus is already parked outside the venue, Thekla. It’s a literally a boat, moored near the town centre, with the bottom of the hull holding a decent-sized band room and the upper levels a couple of bars and a beer garden. It’s got epic novelty factor and I am told by a UK buddy Fred, who’s tagging along for the shows, that it is somewhat of a town institution and ‘gurt lush’ (Bristolian for ‘very good).
None of us are in much of a state to do anything too active in Bristol beyond the normal routine of loading in, setting up merch and killing time until soundcheck. Tonight’s show will be a little tough since the stage is kinda on the small side. Each show we’re playing in front of 65’s stuff (standard tour practice) and being an epic electro-rock juggernaut they aren’t exactly short on gear. Truth be told, neither are we. Once the jungle of drums, amps, laptops, keyboards and pedals go down, it’s looking a little dire. Kid is stuck behind a PA stack and I am wedged up the front, rooted to the spot. A big part of out live show is getting physical and moving around, but we’ll just have to make it happen tonight. This won’t be the only time on the tour we’ll be playing on a cosy stage either.
Showtime: despite us being fairly static, Brett pulls some wicked sound and we get a good vibe from the crowd. I can never quite shake the feeling that we could have given them a bit more had we been able to move, but you can’t win ‘em all.
Scouting for a post-show feed, we wind up at a burger joint called Quiqley’s. Never go there. Ever. British food can be pretty touch and go, but this shit is simply horrendous. Half-cooked and verging on inedible, it briefly sends us into spirals of depression. A band, like an army, marches on its stomach. Rob, the tour manager, warns us that it’s going to be an early one tomorrow morning (5:45am) due to a ferry crossing into Calais, so we turn in pretty early.
Home sweet lower bunk, I’m growing rather fond of you. Even if I can’t bend my knees and bump my head on your plywood ceiling at least three times a night.
