On Tour The tour is passing in a blur. We played across the bottom of the country, a slow run from Glastonbury to Bath to Bristol to Exeter, a couple of days off in ‘Bideford’ (pronounced Biddy-fuhd according to the pundits on Tiktok) then rolling through London with a car break-in and a mad-cap run north to Liverpool to stay in an abandoned pub. Last night we played ‘a venue the Arctic Monkeys played when they were just getting started’. We’ve also played at ‘the pub where Coldplay had their first gig’, and ‘on the same stage as Muse’ and I briefly had a tinkle on ‘a piano that Elton John played’. Each time someone drops a famous name I remind myself that a) these are just names and b) every band has a starting point. Correlation vs Causation, playing the same stages as wildly famous but fundamentally different bands to us doesn’t mean much. I don’t see a recording contract with Universal in our future, or Grammy Awards, or private jets. But hey, we’ve made it to this point. We’re touring the UK! We’ve played Glastonbury! We’ve almost sold out of t-shirts! Last night I gave a free badge to a guy who said we were the best thing he’s seen all year, and maybe that’s enough. The little personal connections are the thing that make this music work, that have always made touring work. I’ve got friends in country towns in Australia who I met ten years ago through bands that no longer exist. I’ve got multiple personas from folk singer-songwriter to banjo player to drummer in an esoteric instrumental dance band, but the personal connections are the bit that remains. … I’ve been having a real fun time on tour. It’s great to be out of Melbourne, to be somewhere new, to be meeting new people, to get to play music every night. I think its great for the band too. The band expands on tour. The songs re-arrange themselves. The mid-set banter gets refined. We take more risks. I remind myself every time we tour that we should try and record AFTER we tour because that’s when the songs have finally found themselves, but of course we record albums so that we can tour and it’s a never-ending cycle. It’s also great to see different people come in to their own on tour – personal relationships evolve, little bits get developed between band members mid-set, the whole band grows in ways I couldn’t have predicted when I started booking this tour this time last year. I love being in a band where the show evolves as we go. I love being in a band where everything is a little bit silly. I love being in a band where instrumental music dreamed up on my Mum’s old piano in a garage in West Preston resonates with audiences across the world. I love being in a band where we leave it all on the bandstand, no notes left, a sweaty sodden mess. I love playing music.
Glastonbury (part 3) I am drinking gin and kombucha from a straw wheat cup. I am floating in a hammock in a forest glade near Totnes. I am feeling calm and clear and happy. We have reached the ‘hippie commune’ part of our UK tour. I am eating a giant bowl of vegan mac and cheese, deliciously irreverent mac and cheese accompanied by a side of crispy onions and garnished with a handful of brilliant orange flowers picked from the hedge behind the tent. The meal is served by a giant Italian man who appears to be mostly naked. He scampers over to deposit the food on the table in front of me and bold curls of chest hair erupt around the top and sides of the skimpy apron he wears. When he turns to walk back to the kitchen his bare arses winks at me in the British sunshine. I’m tempted to ask if he was wearing pants when he prepared the food, but hygiene standards be damned, this food is delicious and its got veggies in it, unlike any of the food I’ve eaten in the past week. … We left Glastonbury in a rush, up at 7 am to disassemble our tents and roll up the hill to the carpark in stages. Each person is overloaded, carrying gear first from the tent to the inside of Pedestrian Gate B, then carrying the gear out through the gate and dropping it on the other side of security, getting a pass back into the festival to pick up a second round of gear. It takes us over an hour to get from the campsite to the gate, then another hour to get from the gate to the car park. When I finally sit down in the car I’m a sweaty sodden mess, ready for a break, ready for tour to be over, ready for anything really, except another day of festival. The festival was grand. More people than you could ever imagine, crammed into a farm, forced to battle the elements, the sound, the dust, the sun. I had a great time, but it was a lot. We sit in the car with the airconditioning running and agree that it’s quite nice to be out of there, but then we have to navigate British country lanes. Most of the roads within ten miles of the festival have been blocked off for the weekend. It’s a complex network of one lane roads, where no-one is really sure who has right of way. Someone at the festival drunkenly walked us through the etiquette, ‘if you have a bigger car you have right of way, but if you’re going down a hill you should concede, that said always make space for the milkman, and tractors…’ This all goes out the window when we’re actually driving, because it turns out no-one else knows the rules either. The sides of the lane are giant hedges, stretching up above the height of the car, and every mile or so there is a little slip lane cut out to let people pass. You can reach out either window and drag your hand along the hedges as you pass. We manage to get caught in the middle of a section, headbutting up against a car coming the other way until eventually they conceded and reverse, pulling backwards down a country lane for five minutes while we ashamedly give them thumbs up through the front windscreen. We arrive at our next ‘festival’, a much smaller affair on a farm near Totnes, where a handful of people sit around on rugs in a field. It’s a stark contrast to Glastonbury. I assume everyone here knows everyone else by name. We play a loose set. A very loose set. Up until now we’ve been crafting sets, trying to figure out a flow that will catch the Glastonbury crowds walking past, draw them into our tent, keep them engaged. This festival is small enough that everyone is already in the room with us, so we pass it to Maddi our bass player and tell them to call out whatever songs they want to play. I’m finally feeling well again, after a week of battling a cough, and i’m in a silly mood, so I spontaneously shift feels in the middle of songs. Oom-pah becomes reggae. Funk becomes reggae. Rock becomes reggae. Everything becomes reggae, until the last song where I try to make the shift into reggae and Sam and Maddi side-eye me back into the original feel. The crowd is surprisingly excited for whatever we throw at them. We invite an audience member up on stage to rap over one of our songs. Meg takes a bongo solo. Everything is nice and loose, a cathartic release from the last week of shows.
Glastonbury (part 2) The festival passes in a fever dream. A literal fever dream for some of us. Sam gets heat stroke and merrily projectile vomits across the festival. The medical tent gives him some rehydration salts and we set his air mattress up in the shade of a wall of fluoro plastic tubs labelled TOILET WASTE. Someone taps on the tubs and assures everyone they’re empty. For now. In the process of moving Sam I stumbled into a patch of stinging nettles. The entire side of my arm goes numb and tingly. Oh yeah, it does that, our neighbour tells me, and suggests I rub yoghurt on it, but we’re in a field in the middle of nowhere and that sounds like a messy solution. Our sets are fun. People have really left their inhibitions at the gate, and are ready to dance. The thing that really gets me is how each little stage is its own self-contained world. But the worlds are jammed in next to each other. At our second gig we can hear the stage across the road from us over top of our own soundcheck. It’s absurdly loud, and people walking through the site are bombarded with music from three or four different areas at once. No-one seems fazed though. Continue reading “Glastonbury (part 2)”
Glastonbury (part 1) I get triaged by a lovely nurse who writes my name down as Natan. The doctor calls me Martin and tells me I’ll be fine onstage cause adrenalin is a wonder drug, but prescribes me some antibiotics for the yellow phlegm I’ve been coughing up all week. The pharmacist hesitantly calls out Martha Power, and when no-one goes up to the window I wander up to see if it’s me she’s waiting on. Oh, is that what it says? She asks, and then hands me a couple of packet of horse pills. They’re absurdly large, so much bigger than the pills I’m used to taking in Australia, but they do the job and in a couple of days I’m fighting fit again. It’s been a week of highs and lows. No mud, but a couple of days of heat in a field with no shade has turned the band into a sweaty mess, not to mention the hours of walking between stages. The festival is mammoth. A much larger scale than anything I’ve ever experienced. I guess there’s a reason everyone keeps saying it’s the biggest festival in the world. Continue reading “Glastonbury (part 1)”
On Glastonbury Festival Gusto Gusto are going to Glastonbury Festival. Yeeeeeep. This little band that came out of 2021’s lockdown bubble and played our first gig in May of 2022 is getting ready to jet overseas next month and play arguably the biggest festival in the world. It’s truly absurd that in 2 short years we’ve gone from our first gig at Thornbury’s Café Gummo to playing Glastonbury. I start to write our Grammy’s acceptance speech… “Gusto, from Gummo to Glasto…” Then I remind myself that we’re still going to be the smallest band at Glastonbury – we’re no Elton John or Arctic Monkeys or Rolling Stones. We’re not playing the main stages. We’ll be down the bottom end of the official poster (if they remember to put us on at all lol). BUT we’ll be there. And we’ll play a bunch of shows. And we’ll play our arses off, because we’ve been working hard. In the last 24 months we’ve played 76 shows. Released two EPs. Toured the country three times. We’ve sold out shows in a handful of places, and in the process had a lot of fun and met a lot of people. Continue reading “On Glastonbury Festival”