Summer 2009

The final straw for my band was the tour we had booked. We did a bunch of random dates, spread across the UK, booked independently in small venues as some attempt to make it look like the band had some traction and was going places, but most importantly, it was the drummer's final major project for his course work (apparently). The drummer's my brother, so I was helping him out finish his course work effectively.

We pretty much played to empty rooms most nights. We'd support or open for bands from the towns we were visiting, but it really didn't matter, the music scene in the UK is a bit all or nothing - in that people who really dig a band all come as an army to really get behind an act, or you're just a nobody - sadly we're at the nobody/nothing end of the scale despite our best efforts to promote these gigs.

The tour came to a dramatic end as the piece of shit van we hired died (from a "friend of a friend, who knows a friend" scenario). The first signs were driving down the motorway, it started to rain heavily and we flipped the wipers on and, oh shit, the wipers didn't work! We were blindly driving 70mph down a motor way, in a van that probably hasn't ever passed an MOT test and most of the band members were in the back of the van with no seat belts as it was only a 3 seater! We pulled over.

Once the weather improved, we started onwards again. As we got into Plymouth, we hit the final snag with the van. The brakes stopped working. We were driving around busy, hilly roads with absolutely no fucking way to brake apart from engine breaking the van via the gears and hoping the handbrake would stop us. We had to run a set of red lights as the van just wouldn't stop, the chaos it caused, the hazards blinking like a little sigh for help when we were all in the van shitting ourselves.

Thankfully, our driver was super calm and successfully crashed the van at a very slow pace into the car park of the venue. No damage to the venue thankfully, and we explained what happened and all good. Weirdly, this was a really busy, sold out gig, one of the better nights on tour, sadly dogearred by a van completely falling apart with no real sure way to get home.

…

This was a riff that had been hanging about for ages in my head, could never quite figure out where to take it, but eventually found its way into this song. The song was used for a tech conference in Brighton, which I always felt was odd as it's such a brutal tune, but there ya go. Tech people!