Boston Manor – CRAZY TOUR STORIES

This crazy story from the road was written by the pop punk band, Boston Manor. You can check out their story, after the break.

We were on a short run of European shows last summer, we’d only got about 2 or 3 shows into the tour & we were on our way to play a show in Paris. We’d driven through the night & were just looking for a place to park the van to sleep for a few hours (which if you’ve ever been in Paris you’ll realise there are few). We somehow ended up on the motorway again when everything got super hot, super smokey and very broken down-y. Most of us had got leathered the previous night as well so breaking down in the rain whilst hungover as balls really sucked. We literally pulled to a halt right before a toll booth. We had to push the thing through the toll booth (and pay by the way) to a little car park just off it. We were phoning the insurance trying to get through, which we couldn’t.

After a while this dude with a tow truck turned up, took a look at it and basically told us using sign language that he had to tow us. We were super broke & couldn’t afford this so were trying to sign language “fuck off we don’t wanna be towed” at him. We eventually found some police who were just chilling, one of whom spoke English & we explained the situation to him. Turns out it’s pretty much illegal to be broken down on the motorway & we had to let him tow us or we’d be arrested. So we got in this tow truck with little red on the back (the van) & he drove us for what seemed like 3 hours to some tiny little village miles out of Paris. Again we didn’t speak French & no one spoke English so this proved to be pretty difficult. The people at the garage seemed pretty sound, they spent ages working out what was wrong & tried to explain & gave us a quote to fix it (which was astronomical & would have taken forever). We were flat broke & chances of hiring a van to finish the tour was out of the question. The insurance company were being super unhelpful & we ended up stranded in this village living in our van for like 2 days.

We had to walk for 30 minutes to some shitty McDonalds to get food & the insurance basically told us we were fucked. Eventually some pick up truck dude came at like 3am one night and towed us to a motel courtesy of the insurance, sick! We’re saved! Or so we thought. They wouldn’t cover us getting home with our gear or another night in the motel. So once again we were slightly more comfortable but equally stranded. We maxed out our cards staying in the motel for 2 more nights trying to figure out a way to get home. We couldn’t rent a van or a car, even if we wanted to, as it was Bastille day. We even called the British Embassy to ask for help. Eventually we got our mate Ste who had a van and was on tour at the time not too far away to come & pick us up. We had to leave poor little red in France with a bunch of our shit. All was not lost though. After many weeks of arguing with the AA we got her back & fixed! She would then go on to chew up two more engines after that, but she’s still going strong! She’s a dick but we love her.

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