chrisg's Tour Diary

I hate being sick, especially when I can't just crawl into my bed and ignore the rest of the world for a day. Being on tour doesn't really work with sickness. After all, your living room is a tour van, and your bed consists of the various floors, cushions and couches of the kind people you meet along the way. I'm also worried about getting anyone else in the band sick, which seems inevitable given our close quarters.

And this morning, as we're all hanging out at George's place as he makes us a most delicious breakfast, I'm wishing that I could be better company. I focus all of my energy into smiling, and voraciously accept a cup of stove-top espresso cooked up by Elsa. We watch an episode of a program called 'Brass Eye' that is really funny, and then hit the road for Sheffield.

The show is in a pub called 'The Cricketers Arms', which begs the question - What exactly do a cricketer's arms look like? With those sweaters on, I am unable to tell. Are they sinewy and muscular? Bruised? Scraped up? In any case, we are playing in a carpeted upstairs room above the pub. Seems a bit weird (and hot) at first, but as people show up it becomes less bizarre and seems more like any other room we've played. Matt and Craig kindly feed us some pitta (two tees in England) and hummous along with a bunch of chips and other stuff. We meet Decibully, who are from Wisconsin and are on tour as well. Adrienne and I saw them over a year ago at this warehouse party in Austin, but I couldn't remember their name afterwards. It was bizarre to see them in Sheffield, and it took my brain a lot longer to figure out how I recognized them, but once that was over, we sat around and shared various tour stories (highlights and horrors). They had a lot of stuff stolen while they were staying at a squat in a former monastery in Amsterdam, which makes me even more cautious about leaving stuff in our van.

I have my worst performance of the entire tour. The sound setup is just a PA in front of us (no monitors), which always makes me sing louder than normal. That, combined with a flu, completely destroys my voice over the course of the set. Perhaps due to various drugs (or lack of proper ones), I mess up on my bass and the keyboard as well. Let me just say that the daytime flu medicine offered by Boots holds nothing against Dayquil. Is this some wacked result of a national health system? Or perhaps everyone in England is just used to having some sort of respiratory illness due to the climate here. I just know that I want to get better, and quickly.

Downstairs, a man is DJing metal songs. He is a spitting image of Hagrid, and super smiley. Dan, Adrienne and I rest out butts against this cloth-upholstered buttrest against the wall, and enjoy some Yes tunes.