Our Johnny is the Only One Dancing in Time: Chapter 25
An occasional series of possibly true scenes from a perfectly normal life. Let's call it faction.
Chapter 25: It’s a Small World After All
(If you’re new to the book, you might want want to read the other chapters first. Links to each chapter are at the bottom)
Manso is unhappy.
We have arrived late at our Super 8 Motel on the outskirts of Austin, Texas, following an horrific transatlantic flight through heavy turbulence. To be exact, our planned arrival at 9pm has been delayed to 2am, not helped by the seemingly inevitable problems with entering the USA which seem to plague Furia. Something about his incredible polite demeanour riles up US Border Officials, and nine times out of ten he will be taken aside to a special room and asked pointedly what the hell he thinks he is doing here. On most of these occasions he will patiently show them his P1 Visa and his tour itinerary, and has been carefully pre-programmed to declare how his presence in the USA creates work opportunities for American venues, production teams and staff. Following words of guidance from Big Paul, he will then sprinkle a little icing on the cake by declaring his love for all things stateside then conclude by hoping that everyone in the room has a good day. He can crack though; confronted by a US Customs and Immigration Officer in Atlanta on his purpose for demanding entry he tries most versions of ‘it’s such a great country’ until finally he can carry on no longer. Responding to the suggestion that he had arrived solely with the purpose of taking up permanent residence and stealing the affections of local women, he inadvertently let’s out the truth with an exasperated cry of “What, in Atlanta? I live in Barcelona. Atlanta is a shit hole!” We waited five hours for him that time.
Weirdly, Furia is also cursed with a missing luggage virus. This happens so often he has taken to carrying an entire set of clothing with him in a plastic bag so that he will have something else to wear in the 48 hours it will inevitably take for the airline to find his bag and send it on to us. In turn, we eventually decide to manage the recurring lost clothes problem by programming no shows at all within 2 days of landing. Mainly because we don’t want a repeat of the show he played in Portland wearing swimming trunks and a dinner jacket; it was a particularly poor visit to the thrift store that morning.
Between 2004 and 2010, The Pinker Tones played something like 350 shows in the six continents of the world with significant numbers of people living on them. We probably would have played Antarctica too but nobody asked us. Along the way they had their trousers eaten by lions, found the Great Wall of China out the back of a restaurant, flew 1200 miles there and back across Australia for a gig that didn’t happen, spent some interesting time in the delightful company of a briefcase full of money and the Russian mafia, got upgraded to the seven bedroom master suite at Caesar’s Palace, downgraded to the floor of the front room of the ex-wife’s brother of the promoter of the show in St Petersburg, and spent two months on a bus playing 48 of the 50 states of the USA. We were treated sometimes like kings, sometimes deported, but it was never lacking in interesting possibilities and outcomes.
My English acquaintances will often hear me talking about this part of my life, the bit that I will accept is genuinely a little bit unusual, then wait a few minutes and remark that they’ve never heard of the band. There’s a very good reason for that. Any band that achieves a certain level of success on the European mainland will be able to tell you what it is: Playing in the UK really sucks.
The Pinker Tones achieved a mid-level of success that meant they were a financially viable going concern able to attract fees in the region of 2,000 to 20,000 euros a night in pretty much every corner of the world. Our standard agreement would include flights in and out, plus visa fees, and accommodation. That model applied from Kansas to Kazan, Sydney to Shanghai, Buenos Aires to Berlin. The only place it didn’t apply was Great Britain, a country with a fearsome reputation for launching artists and building careers, vital for its tastemaker role and its notoriously vicious press. A good review in a British publication had a worldwide impact that almost all artists recognised as being incredibly useful to create demand, but trying to get one came at a shocking economic cost that we just couldn’t justify. I tried a few times to do showcase events and get a bit of a buzz going in London, but the reality was that we would literally headline a show for 20,000 euros in front of 40,000 people, then the next day hop on a flight we were paying for ourselves to play a 200 capacity room in Camden a promoter had struggled to fill with enough people to warrant the £100 fee. Then drive ourselves in the car we paid for to the hotel we paid for to eat the pizza we paid for. The band couldn’t see the point in the end, and neither could I.
The basic economics of touring in the UK at starter level have never really made sense. Right back to the earliest days of the Beatles driving up and down the recently opened M1 motorway in a van with the windscreen missing, there’s a very British concept of ‘suffering for your art’ which has taken hold of the psyche of artists, audiences, venues and promoters and which everyone just accepts as the way things are done. I definitely had that in my mind as the way to do things, so it was quite a shock to the system to discover that shortly after taking the band on I was already able to demand hotel rooms, a good cooked meal, and a fee related to the number of performers on stage plus crew that actually made something like a living wage achievable for everyone involved. This was the minimum offer we received to play in pretty much every country in the world except Britain. There’s no £50 for the support band in Europe - well, there is, but it happens exclusively when a British band are playing. The opening act, playing in their home city and staying in their own homes, would expect something like 50 to 100 euros each, so fees of 200 to 400 euros are not unusual for absolute entry level artists.
This obsessive commitment to suffering for your art is still in full flow in the UK, long after our imagined musical superiority when it comes to all things pop music related is somewhat of a faded pipe dream. The country’s dedication to underpaying the start up touring artist and everyone around them, from their crew to the person operating the venue they play in, seems a remarkably anachronistic approach compared to the heavy investment into developing talent now in place in Europe, Canada, Australasia and even South America. Public funding for this type of grassroots touring equates to just 1% of the total budget to support touring in the UK. In France it is, and here you might want to sit down, 67%. Understandably, when confronted with the chance to play in Lille or Hull, we chose the hotel, three course meal, and 2000 euro option.
Since those years of touring, this situation has actually worsened when it comes to considering the UK as a touring opportunity to break a band. Brexit was obviously like watching someone punch themselves repeatedly in the face when it comes to the ability to export music and musicians, but even before we cut off our nose to see if we enjoyed the blood-letting experience the power of ‘the British are coming’ had already begun to fade from the minds of many promoters around the world. As a country, we are still punching significantly above our weight, mainly as an historical legacy, but artists are emerging from all corners of the globe now who do not feel the need to submit themselves to a national touring circuit that is, politely, excessively backward thinking in the way it treats artists, promoters, crew and venues. This diversification of artist nationality has been driven in large part by the emergence of rap music, which, after a few years of everyone thinking about it as something that should be admired for its ability to describe the black experience of living in the USA, became adopted as the sound of the individual languages and nations of the world in a manner it’s unlikely that Coke La Rock or the Sugarhill Gang imagined. Rap lyrics are an expression of a place and an experience to such an impressively diversified extent that even single city states can have a distinctive musical identity that doesn’t depend on a British artist to come along and help them out with it. Wait until you hear Liechtenstein rap, you’re in for a treat.
Never mind, Britain. Without once troubling the pages of NME or Melody Maker, we have become an internationally known act. This achievement has also freed the band from the standard musical straitjacket that goes with it, which they have decided to make the most of by not even attempting anything like an acceptable live set up featuring guitars, bass, keyboards and drums. Their weapons of choice are three turntables, some microphones, a stack of synths, some things they hit or roll about on, and one thing that produces magical noises if you wave your hands at it. They are untroubled by the need to seek journalistic approval for this live act, a carefree attitude towards the rich possibilities of music which has seeped itself over into their recorded output. I’m not even going to try to describe that adequately for you as it finds equal value in 1920s Berlin harmonies as it does in the more unlistenable bits of Aphex Twin.
This acrobatic approach to music making not only delivers significant recorded sales in some of the most distant parts of the world, it is wildly popular with incredibly bored music supervisors who have the difficult task of filling up hundreds of hours of advertising, TV, film and games. We have therefore developed a neat sideline, whenever we arrive in a location with a glut of movie studios, in doing acoustic appearances at lunch time for film directors and producers. At these the band will excel their already eccentric reputation by attempting to perform heavily electronic dance tracks from their albums on a djembe, acoustic guitar and a metallic tie that makes a noise like a washboard. In comparison to the opportunity to meet with another four white guys with guitars who have an album out that sounds a bit like all the other albums by all the other white guys with all the other guitars, we are an exciting and esoteric way to fill a midday spot. We get a lot of free lunches and a lot of film placements.
Touring parties have internal personal dynamics which settle into a natural way of doing things that is the most likely to keep everyone happy. Ours have divided along the lines of the three camps of approach to staying up late looking for mischief. Nino and Big Paul are firmly in the gang who will want to find the nearest bar and hope someone in it knows where all the strangest people are. Furia and me hover around the ages of this option, making a nightly decision that largely depends on what else has to be done and when. A 6am start for a radio interview will usually see us tucked under a duvet by 11pm, with the result that our paths will sometimes cross with the party crew staggering in from whichever nefarious establishment has decided to amuse them until the sun comes up.
Manso has taken the opposite approach to touring life, opting to maintain his sanity and his health by avoiding becoming embroiled in situations heavily fuelled by alcohol and reckless decisions. On days with no show he very much keeps himself to himself, a choice that we accommodate by allowing him to have the individual use of one room out of our three room party of five. He’s always impatient to get into this quiet space, so we always check him in as soon as we arrive. Even at 2am, when there’s a real possibility all the bars will have closed before we can find one. Big Paul rouses the Super 8 receptionist from their slumber in the back office, gets the key for his room, and Manso scuttles off happily. The rest of us decide we need a stiff drink or six and persuade the desk clerk to open the bar for us.
We are half way down our second can of warm lager when Manso reappears with his case in one hand and the room key in the other.
“I need to change rooms” he announces. “My room is disgusting.”
Our choice of hotel chains for touring runs the full gamut of possibly options, mainly dependent on who is paying. If the promoter is organising it, we will opt for a Holiday Inn or an Omni. Maybe even a Marriott. If the money is coming out of our own pockets, we tend towards Super 8s, Travelodges and Motel 6s. This budget end of the US accommodation market has two positive qualities on which we tend to focus, the presence of both beds and showers. To be honest, that’s pretty much where the positivity ends, because not only are Super 8s dismal hovels staffed entirely by people who would literally prefer to be doing anything else at all with their lives, they are also all exactly the same. That might not seem like too much of a challenge if this is the first time you have been asked to think about it. However, imagine yourself walking out of room 215 in Wisconsin, leaving behind two single beds with purple duvets and blue pillows, a table, one chair, small TV set, then driving for six hours to Detroit to check into room 215, walking in to find two single beds with purple duvets and blue pillows, a table, one chair, one small TV set. The ways these chains are managed means the layouts and the day-to-day management of them runs to a careful arranged and highly replicable model. When you turn the TV on, it’s always tuned to the same channel. The coffee cups and the kettle are always in the same place on the table. The towels are always in the same place. When they make your room up, they put everything back exactly as it was when you got there, every room, every hotel, every place. The regularity of it is probably fine if you stay in one single location, even for a week. But we often stay one night in each of twenty different ones, night after night, and by day five or six you do start to question your own sanity when you seem to be travelling great distances but effectively imprisoned in the same outcome.
This Kafkaesque model of the daily experience of life can play serious tricks with the balance of your mind. Rock stars have a poor relationship with reality for a very good reason; their experience of it is distorted through a prism of monotony which is a constant test of their mental stability. My theory is that the reason Keith Moon used to throw the TV set out of the window is at least it would then be in a different place than the last ten versions of the same TV set he saw in the last ten hotels. Look! That one is in a swimming pool.
As we are on a budget, we tend not to throw too many TVs out of too many windows, resorting instead to a certain amount of furniture rearrangement and the distribution of home comforts upon our arrival. It is while unpacking his own set of these adjustments from his case that Manso has become aware of a distinct smell in his room in the Austin Super 8, and it is this which he wishes to raise as an issue with the hotel.
“My room” he declares “stinks of cats”.
Our newly acquired best friend the hotel clerk, who has joined us on the sofa and is cuddling a can we have given him as an enticement to break the state laws on alcohol serving times, is puzzled by this. The hotel, he says firmly, does not have any cats. It is, he assures us, mainly for humans. Manso remains insistent; a party of pussies have been living it up in his room and he will need a new one. The weary, and by this point mildly inebriated, receptionist forces himself out of the comfort of the settee, pops behind the counter and plucks a new set of keys.
“Try this one” he offers, slapping them down on the desk. “Definitely no cats. Plus” he adds with a happy flourish “its nearer to the pool!”
Manso graciously collects the keys and heads off in the new, and opposite, direction.
Some five to ten minutes later, we are merrily pouring ourselves a shot, or possibly three or four, from a bottle of Mezcal, which has been grabbed at the airport by a forward thinking Big Paul while we waited for Furia’s extended border interrogation to conclude, when we hear the distinctive noise of suitcase wheels rolling back in our direction.
“That room” Manso announces tersely, slamming the keys on to the counter “also smells of cats”.
Our night manager friend throws us a look intended to suggest that he might need an answer to a shortly forthcoming question about the mental stability of our colleague. His eyebrows are doing a lot of work to save his fingers from making the international sign for ‘is this guy crazy’. But it’s a poorly paid job which, as I’ve mentioned, he doesn’t care too much about, and somewhere in the company book of mantras there’s a homily that says the customer is always right. He pops back behind the counter, pausing to pick up the newly discarded keys and sit them carefully next to the previously rejected ones, makes a fair attempt at a disco style 360 degree spin and, giggling, plants a third set on the desk.
“This one, room 103,” he says with a stare “is just there.” He points across the internal concourse to a door that is less than one hundred metres away and in full sight of where we are holding our late night discussion on whether someone should eat the worm or not. “Let us know straight away if you have any problems”.
The keys are snatched from their resting spot, accompanied by a sound you rarely get to hear a Spanish person attempt, a distinctly Wodehouse-esque “Harrumph”, and Manso trundles his case towards the new room. We all watch his progress, raising our glasses in preparation as he arrives at the new door. He inserts the key, turns it, then, with an exaggerated caution, gingerly nudges it open with his boot and plants the case into the opening as a door stop. He allows his nose several pronounced sniffs of the air emerging from within, then steps across the threshold and disappears inside. After a few minutes, obviously spent out of sight peering under beds and checking the bathroom for any feline inhabitants, he returns to the door, waves, pulls his case inside and closes it behind him.
We are midway through our celebration of having resolved his accommodation needs, a victory we have decided to acknowledge by abandoning glasses altogether and simply taking it in turns to stand on the table and glug back an unhealthy amount of the mildly dangerous, airport purchased, liquid when our triumphalism is interrupted by a loud bang. The door to Room 103 has been thrown open with force by a plainly enraged Profesor Manso. Abandoning his case entirely, he storms back across the pathway in a world beating time and hurls the keys to the ground.
“We will have to move hotels!” he declares. “This place isn’t fit for human habitation! That room” he points angrily back behind him in a sweeping gesture that covers most of the building “also smells of cats!”
It is at times like these that Big Paul’s indisputable abilities for calmness and passivity come to the fore. He takes him by the shoulders and nudges him gently to a seated position.
“Sit here” he says, with an under current of authority no sane artist would seek to question “and I will go and check this out for you.” I decide to tag along, mainly because I really don’t want to have to move hotels at what is now 3.30am, but also because I’m really keen to meet the feline invaders who have taken up residence without the desk clerk’s knowledge.
Big Paul opens the door to Room 103 and moves to step inside. Immediately we realise there is no need to do so, since the smell of cats emanating from within is so powerful as to make it almost impossible to enter. The room doesn’t just smell of cats. Cats can have a nice comforting smell. A warm cat in your lap gives off the smell of contentment. This room is not that. This room smells like all the moggies in the world have decided to have a party in it with the instruction that deodorant and cleanliness were optional extras. We hold our noses like we are in a five minute skit in Carry On Ponging and start to explore the room looking for the perpetrator.
There are no cats. There’s no fur, no bed, no scratching post. No lightly mauled toy, no freshly delivered offering of a half chewed mouse. There is no evidence at all that any cat has ever visited, but the reek of Mr Tiddles, and several dozen of his mates, hangs in the air like you had stuck your head in the litter tray. We wave back to the desk for our friend who represents the hotel to join us. He visibly pales as he enters. We try the air conditioning unit, that’s fine. We look in the fridge, down the back of the fridge, underneath the fridge, that is also fine. We move the bed to every part of the room it isn’t currently in, try sniffing the carpet, the curtains, the towels and even sticking our head into the plughole of the shower. No cats. The plughole actually smells slightly better than the room.
Finally we admit we will have to give up. The desk clerk offers a fourth room, but even he has to admit that the only reason the reception isn’t full of other guests demanding to know why their room smells like a cat festival is because there are only four other rooms in use and all the occupants are all currently passed out or still in a bar somewhere. Super 8s you see; not the home of anyone sober.
I get my phone out and start looking for an alternative hotel that might let us check in. Big Paul moves towards the bed to collect Manso’s case, which is lying open on top of it. It is as he seeks to close it that his head rears back, his eyes fill with irritated tears, and he stabs his finger towards the luggage.
“It’s in there!” he announces. We gather round the case, which, sure enough, is emitting a smell that would demand those wavy lines denoting fumes if this were a Tom & Jerry outing. We pluck through the contents, wary of disturbing whatever lies within, but there is nothing there. However, as each item of clothing, shoes and toiletries is dropped to the ground the smell increases. It also takes on a more refined air, a nuanced smell of feline activity which owes its perfume more clearly to the evacuation of kitty kidneys.
Profesor Manso, as per his epithet, translating literally as Professor Quiet, lives in a tranquil part of Barcelona just north of the main city, an area surrounded by trees and wildlife. His chosen abode features a small house in which, as a gesture of human kindness, he has decided to house an array of feline friends. Hearing of his latest departure overseas, one of these amigos has decided he would benefit greatly from a reminder to come home, that he was greatly missed, and sorely needed. This particular cat, whichever of the four or five that live with him it was, has decided to express it’s wish to not be forgotten with the gift of a long and generous piss in his bag.
The desk clerk initially finds this hilarious, then realises that he now has three rooms that have the distinctive odour of imported kitty urine. He, understandably, decides that these are the accommodations we should occupy for the night to fulfill our reservation.
Touring. There’s a wildly held perception that it’s all fans hanging on your every word celebrities clogging up the dressing room offering you parties, and wild wild times. Mostly it’s waiting for the Seven Eleven to open so you can buy up all their stock of air fresheners to try and drown out the smell of cat piss.
Read the previous chapters of Our Johnny is the Only One Dancing in Time here: