On Tour’s End Tour is almost at an end. The feelings ebb, expand, explode. I’m feeling all of the feelings. Exhaustion. The tickle of UK hayfever. A modicum of happiness, a smidgen of pride, a genuine desire to stop lugging my over-sized cymbal case out of the car, on to stage, off-stage, in to the car. We’ve been talking about the tour as the tour unfolds. We’ve been talking about the tour since at least this time last year. We’ll keep talking about the tour for the rest of the tour, the rest of the year, the rest of our lives. It’s been a bloody delight, an insurmountable challenge, a test, the best of times. The general vibe I’ve caught from most band members is that it’s been fun. The general vibe is that we would do it again. That we thought it was a great use of three weeks. That we are ready for a little break before I coax them back into the rehearsal room for the next thing. Continue reading “On Tour’s End”
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.
On Low Points Every tour has a low point. I’ve been asking the band for the last two weeks if they think we’ve hit the low point, first as a joke, then as a gauge of everyone’s energy, now with the hope that they’ll assuage my fears and say it’s all up from here. I hope our low point was Sunday morning. We played a show in London, a blurry late night blast of local ales (terrible), local pub food (excellent) and local experiences (mixed). Our tour has neatly lined up with the UEFA tournament, and England was in the quarter finals playing against Switzerland on the night of our gig. We stayed at a hostel in bustling Brixton. When we arrived they were busy fitting a new set of giant TV screens into the beer garden in anticipation of the night’s crowd. We tried to get in to the beer garden to watch the game but they were already at capacity, even when we told them we were sleeping upstairs and could literally see the screens from our window. We rolled on to a double decker bus and through the suburbs to Clapham where we were playing. When we got to our venue the game was on. First quarter, no points. We order meals, had some beers, watched the game. I’m not invested in sports unless it’s going for solo runs around the park, but it was fun to scream at the TV with a couple hundred Londoners. Continue reading “On Low Points”
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”
On Moving Parts I dream of emails. I dream of emails with signed contracts, with confirmed itineraries, with tentative set-times, with the tag line ‘yep, lock it in’. For the last eight months I’ve been working on one of the biggest juggling acts of my career – lining up a fifteen show, seven person Gusto tour of the UK. I’ll do a bigger post in the near future, once the full tour dates have been announced, once the real big thing I’ve been working on can be put out in to the world, but for now I talk about moving parts. Organising a tour of this scale is a series of ever-increasing hurdles. First there’s the band availability – figuring out exactly when seven people are available to tour, how to juggle everyone’s calendars to minimise time off work, how much imposition I can put on the band’s day to day life. Then, into that ever-shrinking window where everyone says they’re free, I sketch out a rough itinerary – where do we want to go? where can we afford to go? what actually makes sense for a seven piece band from Melbourne to do on their debut Europe tour? Continue reading “On Moving Parts”