Regular readers, please excuse us for a week or two of nothingness. The blog was down due to a change of server (blablabla…).
Some Flunk news to tell you about, if you haven’t already checked out our ‘official Flunk site’: We’re playing the Chill Out Festival 2006 in Istanbul, Turkey on Sunday September 10. Really, really looking forward to it, don’t know much about the festival itself, but playing in such an exotic city appeals to us in any case!
We’re also finally doing a show in Oslo again. It will happen on Saturday September 30, the venue is a great, little café called Pavilion.
It might not be up there with The Rolling Stones, but we do feel we’ve been ‘touring’ a lot this year. Our man Vidar at our record label, Beatservice, did recently utter a remark about us being slightly lazy, ‘what other reason could there be for us not touring more frequently’… Well, perhaps we should do more gigs, and maybe we are a little bit lazy, but we insist on taking it a bit cool. We like to concentrate on making records, that’s our standing on the touring issue. Touring eats a lot of time and energy, which we generally prefer to spend on creating new stuff.
That said; we’re always overwhelmed by the reception we get on tour. You’re all amazing, and make us feel like a decent band!
The Guardian ran a story on the down sides of touring last Friday, talking to various bands, present and past, who told more or less amusing stories from life on the road. I guess, of all people, Francis Rossi of (really) old metall band Status Quo said one of the funniest things:
“We do 125 gigs a year and one of the reasons we work so much is because we know if we don’t play for two weeks we’ve got to bloody rehearse – and we’ve always hated rehearsals. If you do that many gigs the machine keeps nicely oiled, whereas the longer you stop the more it feels like putting a whole new bloody engine in.”
But Andy Partridge (the genius of the truly great UK band XTC) was speaking from a point of view, and experience, I can relate to:
“I was sick of the same orange hotel rooms and looking at the same piece of corporate art for 30 days. I’d also started to drift off during gigs. Unwittingly, from the age of 13 I’d been addicted to valium because that’s what they did in those days if you were unhappy. One night my ex-wife flushed the tablets down the toilet. It’s the only time I’ve ever smashed up a hotel room. For a while I lost my memory. I’d get nervous before gigs, throwing up. It came to a head in Paris. I threw the guitar down and ran off. I never toured again. It felt like I’d woken up. Because we didn’t tour we made better records. Giving up touring was probably a good career move.”
Well, I can relate to the last sentence, in any case!
