Tour Diary

Melbourne August 2005
Saturday August 20 2005

I meet Adam ‘T-Bone’ Taylor at Sydney Airport around 1:30pm. I'm running late but he doesn’t say it. Boney and I discuss odours as we wait to go on board. Sleep a little, 30,000 ft in the air. I hear Boney discussing life with the lady next to him. He hasn’t got his preferred window seat, I wonder how he is coping? Melbourne is cold and windy. "Its winter therefore it’s freezing".

We catch the airport bus to the city, hop a tram and see Billy Gibson. I say hi and he doesn’t recognize me. Hey, at least he is honest about it! He is down here with the Pyramidiacs supporting the brilliant Teenage Fanclub. Nice fella. We get off the tram around Fitzroy and start walking. I am blessed with T-Bone beside me. He is a walking compass. We look for a decent bar, and almost find a nice one until I am told what the rainbow means (not that there’s anything wrong with that) before entering a classy little watering hole somewhere along Brunswick Street. We sit, rest and drink. Hop another tram and get to the Empress Hotel around 6:30pm.

Have a birthday dinner for CC of Go You Huskies / webgal fame with her hubby Shayne and his brother and a host of people. I go the nachos. Very tasty. Meet Laura, Chris and a bunch of others.

Go You Huskies play acoustically. They do a Postal Service cover. They're coming up to play our album launch in a few weeks in full band mode. I say hi to M.J. Taylor, T-Bone’s older brother. I haven’t seen him for ... I don’t know how long but many, many years. I am pleased to say not only does he look the same but he is as cool, friendly, enthusiastic and quirky as ever.

We play. It is a weird one for me. I felt like we were struggling but afterwards we had nothing but kind words spoken to us. The set was:
Breakdown
Night For Remembrance
Until Sunrise
The Moon and the Stars
Scotty Come Home
Wyoming
Out of the Question
House Near Bridge (with ‘Hercules’ interlude)
Boy’s Don’t Cry (The Cure).

On the way home we realised we had left out Goofy even though it was on the setlist. I meet some lovely people right afterwards who really make me smile and make the doubts one sometimes have disappear. It was the highlight of my trip. I sell some new albums.

I talk with Laura for a long time, which is thoroughly cool as always. I talk to M.J. Taylor and T-Bone for a long time. This is another highlight for me, hanging with M.J. He was the first one of the brothers (there are three) I became friends with and like I wrote above, I hadn’t seen him for the longest time. He is such a passionate individual and always has been. We laugh lots. Drink some Melbourne beer. We farewell M.J. outside. He rode his push bike to the show and tells us all about the benefits of its use.

CC drives Shayne, Bone and myself back to their place; a nice new house I haven’t been to. It is suburban, big and warm. I have some whiskey because I have been told for months that they have been saving a new bottle especially for me. Shayne and I get onto Gin and Tonic too. Bone makes me giggle by asking for a cup of tea. We watch some Simpsons and Saturday Night Live, then some English Premier League. We have a go on Shayne’s new treadmill which is highly amusing.

Bone and I have separate bedrooms. Set our alarms for 6:30am. God help us.

Sunday August 21, 2005

Bone is already awake before me. Neither of us shower but as I wrote above, we have discussed odours and would be aware if we had one. It is freezing outside but kind of refreshing.

We get to the airport around 7:40am and check ourselves in on those new swanky auto-check-in machines. We line up for a sausage and egg thingy for a while, this place is packed. We go to get some coffee but realise we are cutting it fine as far as boarding the plane goes. We go through the security point and hear our names being paged! This is another highlight of the trip. We start running because we realise our terminal is way down the other end of where we are currently. We get there finally and the lady (the 'worry lady') at the gate canes us…”Get a move on guys”. We laugh silently and walk on board wondering if the whole plane had been waiting for us. It’s hard to tell.

We have no one next to us which is kind of nice just ‘cause of space and all. We eat our food and I drink my juice. We discuss how lame the in-flight music is. Too safe. I tell Bone that we have been included on something similar for our song ‘Scotty Come Home’ but then declare that Branson won’t have the balls to play it.

Sydney. Home. Thanks to everyone who came along and helped us out.
Sam x