Oh California. I’m never happier than when I get to wander around in sunglasses, surviving solely on avocado, surrounded by palm trees. Should I miss the British sea side towns, there’s always the beaches of San Diego, filled with the same tourist crap and arcades. Should I miss Sweden… well, there’s a lot of raw fish at least.

California – our name in the lights

San Diego: we seem to be going places – last time we played here, it was at the Casbah, a dive bar that is so close to the Lindbergh airport that the planes almost touch the roof of the venue when they’re landing. This time, we are playing at a luxury spa and golf hotel. Trying to leave after the show, we literally get lost in the maze of perfectly manicured shrubbery lining the endless, eerily quaint paths between the luxury chalets. Playing in a ballroom through a rehearsal space sized PA makes me feel I’m in something like a cross between Twin Peaks and the Shining.

We’re playing the next night at the same spa hotel, and again lost in the maze afterwards, we come across an outdoor jacuzzi overlooking the golf course. Naturally, we get in and end up hanging out the rest of the night there. I reiterate my wishes to move to California. Our manager is with us for this particular stretch of the tour, and wonders what all the fuss was about on the last tour – life on the road is easy!

Of course all this is about change. The night after our LA show I wake up sick as a dog, throwing up every half hour, cursing the fact that this is the first day of the tour we have a substantial drive to do. The drive to San Francisco is the journey from hell, and I spend it curled up in the back seat, like a vomiting clockwork promptly getting out my empty Amoeba Records plastic bag every half hour, while the rest of the band merrily spend the drive playing word games.

It luckily turns out to be a 24-hour stomach bug, and I’m fine in time for the next show. But over the next days the virus jumps first to Amos, then Cathy, who bookends our show in Seattle with a frantic dash to the bathroom. At this moment, we are still waiting to see where the killer will strike next, hoping we will somehow get through the rest of the shows without cancelling. Ride that luck dragon!

Us by the Twin Peaks falls

On the way out from Seattle we can’t resist stopping off for a visit to the Twin Peaks shooting location. It’s not the first visit for some of the others, but the falls are as mesmerising as ever. I’ve never seen waterfalls before, and could have happily spent a few hours just staring at them had we not had a soundcheck to go to in Spokane. At the diner, I sadly had to give the cherry pie a miss to give way for actual food, but that mushroom burger was damn fine. Unlike the coffee, which like at every American diner is just brown water. I think agent Cooper’s only flaw is possibly his taste in coffee.

Love,
Simon

By a highway in Montana

No doubt about it, we were thrilled to be returning home after our “character building” foray through Europe. Seizing the opportunity to spend a night in their own beds, Cathy and Simon jumped ship upon arrival at Heathrow airport, while the rest of us, including tour manager Nolly, flew to Manchester, where we were greeted with the news that Cathy and Simon’s instruments had been removed from the connecting flight since the owners weren’t travelling with them and that constituted a security risk. We got them back a day later in time for our first engagement: a live session for Marc Riley’s radio show on BBC 6 Music. After our last session in autumn, Marc had put us in touch with a lady called Bernie who offers bands playing in the area an affordable alternative to the ruthless cycle of hotel-venue-motorway. Add to that home cooked food, friendly conversation and her cat Sooty and you’ll understand why Bill Callahan, Women, Jens Lekman and Sufjan Stevens and countless other artists have all stopped by, and why, when Bernie and her family emigrate to Canada, Manchester will lose one of it’s unsung heroes.

Weekend at Bernie’s

Our five date mini-tour officially began onboard the Thekla, a fifty year old, permanently moored ship in Bristol’s Mud Dock. Here we met our touring buddies, Race Horses, who played a blinding show of fuzzy-pop-choral-noise-psych, while our performance was punctuated with technicals gremlins, but it did make for an odd, fun show.

The first time we played in Birmingham it was at the LG Arena. The second time a lot less people showed up, the third time we were in Alabama, so we had high hopes for a fourth Birmingham show, which, though midweek with the threat of snow, had a superb turnout. Thanks y’all…oh wait, wrong Birmingham.

Our last UK tour had concluded at the Brudenell Social Club. However, this return visit to our favourite venue in Leeds would be as a quintet. Our chosen set, which we’d been tweaking since Europe featured “Tuesday (You Come When We Call),” the b-side to our first single, which we’d only ever played once before in the UK in 2008 and even then that was acoustically.

Justin sucked in by Bejeweled’s tractor beam

And then, London, home! Time to offload the accumulated Euros, Swiss Francs, Danish and Swedish Kronas and pick up the boots I’d left by my front door, which I thought about every single day I was treading in snow. At ULU, we were reunited with friends, family and the Freelance Whales, the band we’d criss-crossed the States with last year. High spirits all round, almost celebratory in atmosphere tinged with nerves. The gig itself went without hitch, though I’m still unsure what people think of our Fleetwood Mac cover. It’s hardly an obscure choice since the album Tusk sold 300,000 copies in the UK (I looked that up) but unfortunately none of the people who had bought the album were at our show.

The following day, in the van enroute to Brighton, Leon enquired to what we’d eaten for breakfast. His response? “Tinned pineapple chunks. It was all I could find to eat in my kitchen.” At least the motorway service station food was of a palatable quality in the UK. The final gig was a suitably early one for a Saturday night by the seaside. It was the reverse of yesterday’s show – intimate and sweaty. Race Horses bid us farewell and wished us the best of luck for our next mission: an appearance on The Late Show with David Letterman.

Photo finish with Race Horses in Brighton

Valentine’s Day was spent in an aeroplane. After my regular meeting with the US Customs and Border Police and JFK airport’s lost luggage counter (my snare drum, clothes bag and a miscellaneous ‘band’ bag full of essential eqpt decided not to travel to NYC with us), we had four hours of sleep before our load in to the Ed Sullivan Theater at 7am. Four hours later we were given a callback time for soundcheck and we jumped into a cab to get clothes shopping, since I was still wearing the same clothes I’d travelled to NYC in…

Wide awake at 6.59am, 219 West 53rd St, NYC.

…and that’s probably not the done thing when you’re about to appear on US telly for the first time.

Amos

I promised myself that I wouldn’t moan too much about our recent means of transportation in this blog. We hired a crappy van, get over it, I thought. People don’t want to hear about you having to travel through wintry blizzards huddled shivering in a draughty bucket of bolts, feet frozen to the icy puddle that is the floor, musty patches of damp extending across peeling grey panelling, and butt-numblingly hard seats. Don’t bore people with tales of multiple flat tyres, batteries that have to be removed at night to stop them being flat by morning, rear bumpers falling off, and doors that don’t close properly. So I won’t.

Caught with a flat, well, how about that…

Instead, I’ll talk about some of the happier times we’ve had on this, our first real European tour. Taking up the blog baton post-Berlin, it’s fair to say both Cologne and Munich shows were a success. Specifics fail me, however I was left with a general impression of enthusiastic audiences and all-round good vibes. Next up was Switzerland and a ridiculously quaint town called Vevey. A thick blanket of snow completed the picturesque alpine splendour of the place, so we holed ourselves up in the dressing room, hooked up to the wi-fi and grazed on hummus and cashew nuts. Not bad turnout for a small town none of us had previously heard of. Nice to know we’re making inroads into the more obscure crevices of Europe. The following day was Zurich, and again a pretty into-it crowd though nothing major to report.

Making the most of the second flat tyre incident

The next show was Brussels, playing in the Duyster festival. The set up seemed to be one large room, one small room, and close to 2,000 people milling about. As nice as it is to hear that shit loads of people were queuing and vying to cram in to see us play, the fact that the small room (in which we were playing) held no more than 300, it was inevitable most people would be disappointed. And despite Cathy vanishing before the show and having to start without her, it was a great gig, and one of the most enthusiastic calls for an encore we’ve had in a long time.

It was then back to Germany to play to a room full of Hamburgers. Side-stepping the obvious puns, Hamburg was another good show to a packed-out venue. What most sticks in my mind, however, was the absurd cornucopia of foodstuffs that constituted our rider. Not that I’m complaining, I love a good spread. But dozens of packets of jellied sweets were probably not required.

Fanfarlo in frankfurter form

Denmark was a new country for me, I didn’t know what to expect, especially from the weird quasi-independent pseudo-new age enclave of Christiania in Copenhagen, where it turns out we were playing our next show. We were met at the venue by thick clouds of hash smoke and graffiti scrawled on every available surface. Trudging around the area post-soundcheck people were out in the snow, huddled around flaming oil drums, a few stalls offering several varieties of cannabis resin, a shop selling Christiania t-shirts and other tourist tat…anyway, show was another good’un, job done, bishbashbosh.

Next stop Sweden, Gothenburg first, which was all good despite the stage being a massive bass trap that caused everything to vibrate so much pedals were literally jumping into the air. Actually the sound was a bit rubbish, and the place turned into a cheese fest of a club within two minutes of the set finishing. Stockholm was better, large crowd and party atmosphere. Club after seemed pretty cool too, and the queue outside composed of an absurdly good-looking crowd. However, exhaustion had set in, and our hotel was a long drive away, and turned out to be 20km longer when we missed the motorway exit…suppose we couldn’t blame the shitty van for that…could we?

Leon

Our first journey into Europe for some time comes in the form of a three week tour. This was a big change for us. Not just because it feels like we’ve been constantly travelling from one side of the States to the other but because Fanfarlo have decided to become a five piece. After one year and five different guitarists we had a feeling we could work better as just the five of us. After two weeks of rehearsal that produced some awesome re-workings of old songs and a rather self indulgent Fleetwood Mac cover our suspicions were proved correct and we were all pretty excited to get on the road.

Lawrence and I in Paris.

Leon at Popschutz in Berlin

Tour started with a Rough Trade East in-store that was a bunch of fun followed by an overnight drive to Amsterdam that included an absurd trip on a P&O ferry that most of us had forgotten even existed. Sold Out shows in Amsterdam and Paris supported by the awesome NZ band Lawrence Arabia. This was followed by three great gigs in Germany and fun in Popschutz studio in Berlin to record a future 7’’ single that includes a brand new version of an old song and the very same Fleetwood Mac cover previously mentioned.

Somewhere in Germany at a service station

Studio time at Popschutz in Berlin.

After the snow related debacle we had in the Mid West of the States we really thought we’d had our share of extreme weather for one cycle. Sadly not. Arctic conditions in Berlin caused our less than adequate transportation to malfunction and our journey across Western Europe to be a slow and frustrating one.

Providing we don’t freeze to death in the remaining ten days as we head north to Scandinavia, we hope to see you soon.

Justin

Well hello two thousand and ten. London is almost paralysed by a stinky wet blanket of coldness, but we are working away like galley slaves in our little rehearsal shack, preparing for a another mammoth three months or so of constantly driving, eating shit food and meeting amazing new people every night… There’s no heating in our studio but we’ve sped up all our songs to keep us warm. And there’s a pipe above the front door spewing dirty shower water on you if you’re unlucky enough to step out at the wrong time, but we do a little anti-rain dance and hope to not be soaked this time. God knows where in the innards of the ex-piano factory that is Omega Works the shower water is coming from.

I find it kind of hard to fathom that we came out alive on the other side of the tour just gone, with its completely ridiculous snow storms, passport thefts and general hell, not to mention the 12,000 miles we had to drive. Fucking cold as well. That’s it, never doing a winter tour again. Actually come to think of it, maybe we should only tour in warm, conveniently located places. Or how about from bed, is that possible? Surely there is some way of hooking us up with video link. Fanfarlo 2011 Horizontal Tour.

Actually it was kind of fun sometimes as well. And the grand finale at Webster Hall was epic, as those of you who were there know…

Wish we could do this for every show. (Thanks for the photo Casey.)

So in a week or so we are off again. Europe is first up, which will take us to Cathy’s beloved Brussels and my dear Gothenburg… then we are off to America for a few shows, then back to the UK, then back to the US again for south by south west… blah blah. But what’s really crazy about this is that we are going out on the road for the first time as a five piece. Scary for me as I now actually need to know what I’m doing when it comes to electric guitars, amps and pedals… but I’m getting there. I’ll make you proud I promise.

Peace and love,
Simon

Well, we’ve done shed loads since the last update, so I’ll mostly gloss over all the great shows, excellent fun and all-round good times we’ve been having and focus on the moments of exasperation and near disaster.

Rooting around my feeble memory banks I can’t recall much of note from the Seattle show, apart from Amos being charged $3 for a single tomato in the adjoining pizzeria. Oh, and that that fine set of singing beards better known as the Fleet Foxes came down to watch us play.

Next was our first Canadian show, Vancouver to be precise. The border crossing went pretty smoothly despite our tour manager getting flagged up as belonging to a white supremacist movement. But hey, nobody’s perfect. (This actually allegedly related to an abuse of power by a border guard many years ago when his travelling companion kicked off after being refused entry…at least that’s his story and he’s sticking to it). Anyway, Vancouver gig was easily one of the best so far, due mainly to the incredibly enthusiastic/hammered crowd.

Portland was the next port of call (see what I did there?) and the place we were playing was the Doug Fir hotel, venue, restaurant complex. Our van got broken into and Simon’s laptop and passport were stolen. I had a nice piece of trout.

Justin presents a compelling counter-argument

It was always going to be right old shlep to Reno, but after getting the grumblings out of the way we hunkered down for the 14-hour drive. The semi-arid Oregon expanse soon segued into the Nevada winter wonderland of blanket snow and fir trees. The atmosphere was upbeat, enough even for an impromptu snowball fight (in which a perfectly aimed headshot from Cameron almost blinded our driver).

However, conditions gradually deteriorated as night fell and our vehicle was soon struggling to climb the slippery roads. We might have been ok if we weren’t dragging along a trailer the size of a London bus, but it was too much and before long found ourselves churning snow, and sliding worryingly backwards. The band jumped out and managed to push the van enough to get it moving in the right direction again, but after a little while we were stuck again, properly, unmoveably immobile. Even the whole band sitting on the back seat of the van synchronised bouncing didn’t afford enough traction, though did provide some welcome comic relief. Thankfully before too long a highway patrol came to our rescue with spade-loads of grit, which did the job nicely, the grit lorry even escorting us for the next mile up the road.

The combined might of Fanfarlo

We limped to the nearest service station, little more than a shack stuffed with cured sausage and confectionery, glad to be on the move again but uncertain as to the journey ahead. However, some local enforcement officers in tight kaki and cluttered utility belts warned us that the next pass to Reno was even more treacherous, and advised us against attempting it. So that was that. Sorry Reno, we did our best, but it wasn’t meant to be.

Leon x

Leaving a band member at a service station is one of those tour clichés you think is too ridiculous to really happen. I mean, how the hell can you not notice that you are a person short and pull away into the night and only actually realise the person is missing half an hour later when they call you…? Our only defence for leaving Amos in the middle of nowhere, clutching two bananas and having to deflect the amorous advances of the (male) petrol attendant, is it was the middle of the night, we were very sleepy, Cathy mistook a bundle of blankets for our drummer, and we mistakenly asked Justin if Amos was in the van…

Suffice to say Nolan, our tour manager/driver/soundman/heavy, was more than a little galled at having to drive another ten miles before finding an exit to turn back, adding over an hour to an already soul-sappingly long night-drive (which included having to crawl through a snow blizzard of biblical proportions for several hours).

Amos nursed after trauma of abandonment

Anyway, Salt Lake City turned out to be a nice enough town, though being the capital of Mormonism did bring out my innate and deeply rooted suspicion of anyone with religious convictions and many of the townsfolk appeared to have the vapid serenity of doomsday cult members. This may have been a projection born from irrational prejudice, however.

Salt Lake City was our first show as a five piece and it went pretty well, though Justin felt a bit lonely by himself stage left. A clutch of very drunk women whooping and gyrating right in front of the stage was also a little distracting. I’m guessing they weren’t Mormons.

Next was a little known (to me) town called Boise. The venue turned out to be pretty big and the stage looked particularly impressive once bunted up and clad with our illuminated festoonery. After the show we were transformed into a bunch of cooing idiots upon sighting a racoon in a small tree. Despite warnings it would chew our faces off given half a chance, we hounded it with flashes bulbs for several minutes until it tired of us and disappeared into the night. Possibly blind.

Would have made a lovely hat

Leon x

When does one trip turn into the next? Technically our first week on the road, even though for me there was never any time between this tour and coming back from the last trip. I never even unpacked my suitcase. However my new zen-like travelling self seems content staring out of windows for hours, never being able to tell what time of day it is, much less what day of the week. We work out new songs in the back seat, bury our noses in books and in Facebook, and occasionally glance at the scenery of mindblowingly beautiful mountains on one side and endless factories on the other.

After a shambolic warehouse show in London with Connan Mockasin and an intense night in Paris, we arrived in Chicago last Sunday in time for the show next day. We have yet to get used to the slightly surreal feeling of arriving to a new place where you’ve never set foot before and be welcomed by a sold out venue where people know your songs.

It’s certainly a different deal every night. Couple of nights later we’re playing in Englewood, Colorado. We rock up and realise we’re playing a barbecue joint. The air was thick with meat fumes and the good vegetarian in me had a good mind to go Morrissey and proclaim I would not play in the SMELL OF BURNING FLESH. Nevertheless, it was a good show in the end, albeit one member short for this particular stretch of the tour and having to make shit up.

For some reason, the US haven’t quite understood splitter vans (half storage, half seats) yet, so we are driving round in a van with a trailer the size of a house behind us. It’s not the prettiest thing, especially not after we had to literally tape the thing together since a gust of wind tore the metal panelling and rather heavy lock off the side door. The sheer size of the thing seems to impress people at gas stations though. Hey, maybe it was the only one the hire company had left, I don’t know. Either way I can tell you it’s no fun when you’re doing a 13 hour overnight drive between Denver and Salt Lake City in a snow blizzard. Every few hours we saw someone go into a ditch or passed a crashed lorry. At one point we hit an ice patch and had a little scary swerve, but we arrived in one piece somehow.

We had our first snowball fight yesterday, in the morning sun at some truck stop in the middle of nowhere. It’s cold round these parts. Tomorrow we’re playing in Boise, Idaho and then I hope we’re heading somewhere slightly warmer, because I bought a foldable bike off some woman outside Minneapolis and so far it’s been so cold that it’s just been sitting there in the dark, lonely trailer.

Simon x