Blaenavon – CRAZY TOUR STORIES

In this Crazy Tour Stories segment, the alternative band, Blaenavon, talk about some of their crazy moments from touring. You can check out the feature, after the break.

It was the end of February and getting towards the end of our grueling European stint with Two Door Cinema Club. We were down to one clean pair of underwear to share between us. The first delay in our 12-hour pilgrimage to Zurich came in the form of a flat tire. We pulled over in one of Europe’s many ‘pay to piss’ service stations to take care of the problem like men after reapplying our moisturizer and taking a picture of ourselves for the band socials. Luckily Frank is a dab hand with a spanner and had whipped a new wheel on in a flash. With the problem taken care of, all we had to do was enjoy an endless stream of ‘would you rather’ jokes and soak the Alps into our eyeballs from the comfort of our stinking sweatbox for the next 8 hours. We were going to make soundcheck.

The Swiss Border. A sharp tap on the window. A mustachioed officer of the law broke in upon our collective dreams of wives and children, fresh vegetables and sobriety. We slopped out of the van into the sunshine, happy to stretch our legs and share the meager remains of our tobacco pouch whilst they poked around and asked the usual questions of ‘business or leisure’. Luckily Ben had sufficient German skills to counter their regional Swiss. He vehemently denied there was anything illegal in his roll-up and made a point of showing him the thick wooly filter he’d plugged it with. Somewhere along the line, there must have been a miscommunication. We were taken aside. Perhaps due to this offensive cigarette, perhaps due to the 90s punk appearance of our sound engineer, Rich, or perhaps because of their unholy boredom. Who can say?

Surrounded by four mustache wielding policemen we were told to unpack the neat Tetris of our van and lay it all out on the floor. It seemed every member of border staff had abandoned their posts to get a glimpse at the secret rig behind the Blaenavon sound (Jackhammer and tuner). Holiday makers and wanted criminals alike were passing into Switzerland unchecked behind their backs.

Mustache #1 snapped on a pair of blue rubber gloves. We all clenched with anticipation. Fortunately, all that was searched was our pockets and nothing was found except receipts for pretzels and dusty condoms. They eyed the vitamin C supplements with some suspicion, decided it was fair game and then ushered us into a corner.

Weeks of daytime drinking and bodily defeat had rendered us giggling insensible messes and so we stood there trying to hold it together. When Moustache #2 headed towards Frank’s dirty underwear bag this became increasingly difficult. He rummaged around up to his elbows for a while and looked upset that his endeavor hadn’t revealed anything more potent than soiled cotton. Next came the dogs. When Callum pointed out that three of its paws were covered with little booties we gave up trying to respect the situation. We all felt for that dog with the keen smell and one cold foot. When it tripped up over a pedal board they decided it had done enough and replaced it with a dog with four boots on. A seemingly endless stream of dogs with different combinations of boots entered the room over the next hour like some dystopian form of Crufts. More were brought in and ushered into the back seat of the van. By this time we’d all been sent outside for laughing and so we watched from afar as our transport rocked with Alsatians and soundcheck slipped further and further from possibility.

Eventually, they gave up. They told us to repack our van, mustaches twitching in vexation. They led the dogs back to the kennels and took themselves back to their outposts, most likely cursing us as another disappointing band full of gluten freegans and transcendentalists. We made our soundcheck and felt like we’d trumped Hannibal in our passage across the Alps. We sold our two t-shirts that night and headed back to Germany with a tidy €30.

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(Photo credit: Scott Witt)