Touring for me generally involves getting on a National Express coach, arriving
in an unfamiliar city, drinking two pints and eating a meal in a pub, finding
the venue, playing the gig, making sure I take all my gear with me, then working
out where I'm going to stay for the night.
(As I get to the outskirts of the city centre, or near the venue I often find
myself eyeing up the graffiti and piss-riddled fibreglass structures in nearby
kids' playgrounds, and weighing up the pros and cons of using them for makeshift
accommodation.) Thankfully I've never had to resort to these extreme measures.
Touring like this is all a bit haphazard, and I like it that way. It throws up all kinds of situations that you wouldn't normally get from playing your local every month. (Although I do that as well, just for good measure). You get to play to different audiences, see different bands, meet new people, forge firm friendships, and get to have experience of different cities. Alan asked me to come up with some tales of my touring adventures, so here they are. Names of people and cities have been omitted to protect the guilty.
Arriving at the venue, the thin young songwriter narrowly avoids a kicking from massive Russians, after the gung-ho pro-music landlord demands the Russians turn the football off on the TV so we can set up. It is a sign for how the night will turn out. It's a real taste of the Baltic, as the only heating in the venue comes from two plug-in oil heaters. It's winter. The audience shiver in their coats, and the songwriters have to go on a complex stealth mission to sneak a heater away from some men in their 50's who have been drinking since 11am, so they can get their freezing hands warm enough to play. The first person who kicks off the night's proceedings is blinded by a mirror ball and swirling light, probably best reserved for more energetic bands, not a songwriter sat singing gently picked songs. Outside, at 12am I'm confronted by two tanked up beefy blokes who, seeing my guitar, ask what music I've been playing. 'Oasis covers, mate', I reply. It's always the best thing to say…
All the bands having soundchecked, the guitar player from the first band on asks if he can borrow my tuner. 'Yeah' I say. He tunes his guitar, and I point out that all his strings are still a little out of tune. 'It's close enough for jazz', comes the response. 'Well, do you want the tuner on stage, so you can adjust the tuning while you're on?' I say. 'Close enough for jazz' comes the response again. He wanders off. Ten minutes later his takes his place on the stage. As the band start their first song, his guitar has de-tuned further under the hot lights, and everyone is grimacing as his guitar is a whole half step out. Hearing the discordant sound for himself he is now frantically motioning to me for the tuner. It's too late-I'm stuck at the bar hemmed in by four rows of people. I mime a trumpet solo to him, smile and shout across the room: 'Close enough for jazz!'
After a gig in the deep North, I'm miles from home. Two lads of nineteen who've watched me play, kindly offer to put me up for the night. When we get home, one of them gets cold feet. It's his sister's boyfriend's house and he's worried that I'm going to nick the stereo, TV, CDs and everything else. I explain it's going to be hard to get all this back to Birmingham on the coach while I'm carrying a backpack and guitar. The would be criminal Ben Calvert ends up looking after both of them while they're sick, putting them to bed with iced water by the bedside, tidying up the night's mess of beer cans and overflowing ashtrays, then doing the washing up. I leave them a thank you note and complimentary CD's before leaving. Rock. And. Roll.
Nearing the end of a tour of back to back dates, the other members of the band both had to return home, leaving me to play the last two dates solo. On the first of these gigs, I took to the stage. The nerves of playing on my own again suddenly hit me. Seconds later the five days of booze, travel, late nights, sleeping on floors, sniff, and playing every night hit me, and I found myself feeling sick and shaky with the mother of all hangovers. Without my band mates, I suddenly felt alone. I started to sweat. Loads. I'm blinded by sweat dripping from my soaking hair into my eyes. It's now on my guitar and my hands. It drips down to the floor where it touches my guitar lead and-BANG! Seconds later a voice comes from behind the mixing desk: 'He's blown the PA!'
We've just played a gig in Bath, and the drummer and I drop off our guitarist a ten minute walk away from his home on the Worcestershire/Birmingham boundary. It's the countryside. It's 1am, and deserted. The next day we pick him up to drive to a gig in London. He tells us that last night he got stopped and searched. The police found a piece of hash on him the size of a fingernail. He's been told he'll have to go to court. We travel down to London and play the gig. We drive back, and drop him off at the same place. Again, it's the countryside. It's 1am, and deserted. The next time we see him he tells us that that night he was caught by the police for pissing in the street, the only witness to the crime being two police officers, and he's got to go to court…
Where ever I am, people hearing my accent as not being a local one will ask where I'm from. I'll reply "Birmingham". The stock response is to repeat back to me "Birmingham" in the inaccurately Brummie tones of Howard Brown from those annoying Halifax adverts. It's a reflex action. This is not strictly a London thing, though Londoners are the main offenders. It happens everywhere. Apart from Oxford. God bless Oxford. Dreaming spires, The Workhouse, Wychwood ales and The Port Mahon.
Still, strange things happen at home as well. Bohemian Jukebox runs every week at The Bull's Head, Moseley, Birmingham. Songwriters, acoustic bands, comedians, and poets play. I play every 2nd week, as my residency, and we have three other booked acts play on the night. The idea was originally that we'd record every Bohemian Jukebox. I wish we had. The element of the unplanned sometimes creeps in, and gives the night a surreal slant. A documentary maker who recently got lamped by a pop star, for selling pictures to a tabloid of the pop star taking drugs, asked if he could do an impromptu rap. Carl, (Bo-Ju promoter) said he could. We got a drum 'n' bass backing track playing for him, and he started up. What followed was a rant about the pop star who hit him, how much the paper paid him for the photos, and how he's got pictures of a waif super model friend of the pop star's snorting coke on his 'phone. Mobile phones with all their gadgetry are great. I've got most of his speech recorded on mine. Soon available as an mp3 download from bencalvert.com?
Written by Ben March/April 2005
Ben's new EP, "Love; Defenestrated" is released May 2005 on Bearos
records