OK, so tour blog number two, and to add insult to injury, I typed one up yesterday only to have it wiped by fucking Hotmail as it sent... so it was a jaunty little thing about how great the UK shows were and how badly we ate for the entire time we were running up and down the country... permit me to paraphrase. Last show in Portsmouth: great! Bowel function after two weeks of chips and pizza: terrible.

continued...

That was about it for drama as it stood, we know these lands and these venues but were stoked day after day at the reception we were getting from kids who were probably very used to seeing us perform live by now... and it was all going great as we swung into Luxembourg and were greeted by an awesome meal and a flakey-at-best internet connection, hence the blog wipe.

And it would have been all smiles and sunshine too up to this point... until... well... until two things really. One was an ongoing but building problem - our poor bus driver Les has slowly but surely been getting more and more ill, to the point where other drivers were having to back him out of tight corners and the like, and eventually his health got the better of him and at 4 in the morning it turned into ambulance time in Luxembourg. Poor bugger, we wish him a speedy recovery. Now the very observant of you will have noticed that we were still in Luxembourg at 4, rather than starting our epic drive to Berlin... a mere 11 hours away, and are probably smelling a big fuckin rat.

Well, alas, hours before as we made to leave the venue, some nameless cretin got a little heavy handed with our delicate bus and the ignition barrel clean fell out of its casing, leaving us stranded in the dark with no power, no lights, no TV or heating on the bus and stuck miles and miles from our next destination. This issue wasn't resolved until the (to be fair extremely nice and heroic) owner of the bus flew from Blighty out to us and fixed the thing, then proceeded to get us under way, alas way too late for the Berlin show, a big fucking blow and a huge black cloud over what has so far been an awesome tour! Balls balls balls. We soldier on, hopefully the next report will be way cheerier.