2013-06-19T23:20:29-04:00 Tim Thornton http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/author/index.php?author=tim-thornton Copyright 2008, HuffingtonPost.com, Inc. HuffingtonPost Blogger Feed for Tim Thornton Good old fashioned elbow grease. tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.2350490 2012-12-22T04:02:33-05:00 2013-02-20T05:12:02-05:00

Tim Thornton http://www.huffingtonpost.com/tim-thornton/
The Staves, who sensibly have about a tenth of the equipment we do, have already met Anuj and are chilling, smoking, drinking ice-cold water, looking very acclimatised. By contrast we bustle up, say our hellos and immediately start complaining about stuff. "Why don't they sell lighters?" "Any coffee around?" "Any beer around?" "I can't believe I forgot hand-sanitizer", etc. Sound man Robalicious hasn't even made it out of customs yet; his luggage has been left in London and this has clearly created something of a diplomatic crisis. Almost an hour later he appears, hot, sweaty and harried. "No one would listen to me!" he exclaims. We hesitate to point out this isn't an exactly new situation. But never mind, Rob. We're in India now.

We taxi to the hotel and briefly think we might have been taken to another airport by mistake; all our luggage (all twenty-two pieces of it) has to pass through an X-ray machine and each of us through a metal detector. But no, this is standard hotel security since the terrorist attacks on Mumbai in 2008, and a necessary pain in the arse. We check in, greet Argy our lighting chief who is freshly landed from a kite-surfing trip to Sri Lanka, already tanned as a bastard, then order some beers and a biryani (yes, they do make it hot) and gratefully retire to our beds. Mumbai, bring it on.

This has been said before, in many different ways, languages and levels of exasperation, but I'll reiterate: Mumbai is fucking crazy. Twelve and a half million people living on an island less than half the size of London. Astonishing extremes of rich and poor (on the shortish drive to the city centre, we drive past no less than five separate slum suburbs, right next to huge billboards advertising luxury cars and half-million pound condominiums). Enormous, filthy, dilapidated buildings with spanking new shopfronts crudely inserted into the ground floor. Thousands of cars, tuk-tuks, cabs and scarily dodgy looking trucks (but with beautifully coloured decorations) all tearing along bumpy streets and flyovers. Horns beeping constantly; but not, as we English might assume, in an angry, "Oy, watch it you facking idiot!" way, or even in an "Ayy! The lights have changed, you dumb-ass! Move it!" way - more in the manner of "Hey man, just a heads-up, I'm right behind you and I'm about to plough down the inside lane, so just chill for a second, yeah?" No one seems to crash. But I don't think I'll be doing the driving anytime soon, thanks.

We're not far into our first day - ostensibly a day off, to prepare for the shows - before we realise Fin and Rob actually think the Mumbai gig is tonight. We put Fin out of his misery quite early on, but we let it get to about four p.m. before we break the news to Rob, once he's started to ask reasonable questions like where the hell our instruments are. He's quite relieved - as are we - to learn that the most strenuous thing we'll be doing that evening is drinking beer and eating curry. But we've popped into the amazing art-deco cinema where we're due to play tomorrow anyway, to sort a few things out and check the facilities. The building's mains power is apparently not to be trusted so the whole gig is going to run on independent generators. We just tell ourselves it's an urban festival. The cinema has a proper display board out front, on which the legend "FINK AND THE STAVES" is already emblazoned, and a massive billboard to the left of the building introduces the passing public to photos of Fin bashing his guitar onstage somewhere in Europe, and The Staves dressed for an English autumn: scenes that suddenly seem a very long way away. Here are flower merchants, juice vendors, chaps frying and selling delicious looking street snacks, people just hanging out as the evening approaches, and a weird truck pulled by a scrawny white cow. I stroll across the street to buy a glass of lemon and ginger juice for about thirty rupees (forty pence), and come across Guy on my way back, having a cigarette outside the cinema. "Dude!" he exclaims, horrified, his standard reaction to anyone drinking or eating anything that hasn't come from a sterilised packet. "Enjoy that bout of amoebic dysentery, bro..."

We're in for a treat next, as Anuj (already proving himself to be a more than capable handler, not to mention all the other things he seems to be doing) has decided to take us to Leopold's café, a Mumbai institution, just around the corner from the Gateway of India. It's an old-school bar and informal restaurant (familiar to readers of Gregory David Roberts' Shantaram) where one can order huge cylinders of beer complete with their own draft taps and lots of very hot and tasty Indian-Chinese grub. Robalicious, a former drinker, vicariously enjoys himself by pouring the beer for everyone. After a while he gets a little too involved in his role and starts meticulously wiping the condensation from the side of the cylinder. "Rob," says Argy, "can you please stop rubbing our beer?" Quote of the day. We have a five minute excursion to the Gateway of India, a giant, domed archway that I like a lot less once I discover it was built in 1924 by some British bloke, then we get our team of Hyundai drivers to take us round to the Gaylord restaurant, where after we recover from the name we order more beer, curry and, rather incongruously, sizzling chocolate brownies with ice cream. I am then sped back to the hotel in about a third of the time it took to get here, partly due to our understandably bored driver hurtling along the Bandra-Worli Sea Link at three times the speed limit.

Next day is gig day, and in the main, it's business as usual. Argy has constructed a faithful approximation of our dear departed Lamposaurus from bits of lighting truss and regular stage-lights, the only difference being, as he cheerfully tells me with his familiar "for you to know" introduction, is that this one is unlikely to be earthed properly "so try not to touch it. Ever." Gulp. Given that we are crammed into half our usual space, and we still have to make room for The Staves, this could get tricky. I break the rule and potentially electrocute myself four times in the first twenty minutes.

Anuj is either very confident or he's very good at smoothing over band's worries. Seven o'clock, and the teeming mass of fans queuing up outside has failed to materialise. I ask him if he thinks anyone will show up. "Definitely," he replies, before I've finished my sentence. "There are four hundred advance tickets bought, eight hundred expected on the door, nine hundred competition winners and a thousand people on the guest list. We might even have to open the balcony." But Anuj, I ask. The upstairs lounge, through which everyone has to pass to get to the balcony, IS our dressing room. Shouldn't we then move our personal items somewhere else now? Anuj smiles awkwardly and then suddenly remembers something he has to do downstairs.

In the end we do pretty well. The cinema is comfortably full, The Staves fill the space with their beautiful noise and manage to get the murmurings of an encore, and then we take to the stage ourselves to a gratifying ovation. And they do know their Fink songs here. Fin starts to sing "Fear Is Like Fire", and an excited cheer ripples through the crowd. People shout out for various songs: "Blueberry Pancakes", "If Only", "All Cried Out" (sorry, whoever you were) and sing every word to "Sort of Revolution", our sole Elbow-esque singalong moment. I have to admit we are a little rusty around the edges, also the fact that we no longer have Erica and Rae's widescreen strings and piano is a little tough to get used to, but everyone seems happy afterwards and our first Indian gig is done. There's just the small matter of a seven o'clock wake up call to deal with, and by the time we're back at the hotel with all twenty-two bags squeezed through the X-ray machine, it's about three a.m... ouch...

Bangalore - or at least, the tiny bit of it we see on the way from the airport to the festival site - seems distinctly un-Indian to me, in terms of landscape and climate. It's more like some southern part of Spain or Italy. I share this musing with a passing Stave. "Is it because you expected it all to look like The Jungle Book?" she suggests, sweetly. I concur that this may well be the case, while mentally crossing her off my Christmas card list. But hell. We're here to do a festival, and the NH7 Weekender, Bangalore branch, is a pretty damn well-organised and vibey one. We meet Vijay, the founder of NH7 (which makes him the Vince Power of India, I suppose), who welcomes us and shows us the rather scarily big stage we're playing. A familiar band to us, Advaita, are currently soundchecking. We remember them from the Great Escape festival in Brighton, of all places, and they're busily doing exactly what they also did there: running over their soundcheck time. In truth, it wasn't their fault then and it probably isn't now. I see them play later, and in fact they are glorious: a wonderful mixture of rock and Indian fusion, complete with wailing vocals and sitar riffs.

We hang around in the sunshine while the various other bands set up. This is one of the great international myths of rock'n'roll, whether you're in Brighton, Belgium, Budapest or Bangalore: that soundchecks at festivals are actually worthwhile. What is the godly point of setting everything up, checking it's okay, to then take it all down again and set it up AGAIN come your stage time? Nothing ever sounds or feels the same. Quick line-checks all the way, I say. We could have had a few hours' more sleep at the hotel then. Anyway, I'll quit moaning and report that once again, The Staves charm anyone within a country mile with their sunset slot, despite an amazing amount of sound spill from the other stages ("You're getting two gigs for the price of one," quips Milly Stave.) It's just what I like to do when I'm in Southern India, watch an all-girl folk band and crack open a bee- uh, what? No beer? Anywhere? What, really? Even in our dressing room? Dewar's whisky, you say? Seriously? Bacardi? Where do you think we are, a nightclub in Croydon? But yes, the rumours are true. No beer. So Fink play the first beer-less gig since they gave us Budweiser on our rider in Barcelona. And actually, we're probably all the better for it. The stage and audience are bloody huge, and Testament are metalling their way into the stratosphere on a stage not too far away, so it's "A" game time. We smash our way into the songs, pounding out "Blueberry" and "Warm Shadow" as if we're on the metal stage ourselves, and amazingly, people seem to like it. It could be Argy's video wall, however, filling the Bangalore night with images of people skateboarding in Tottenham.

That's all from Bangalore, although I'd like to mention an interesting little situation with our dressing room. We get a standard-sized Portakabin room, like all the other bands, but for some curious reason (curious mainly because it gets ignored everywhere else) our rider requirements have been carefully adhered to and we get our own security guard outside and, halfway through the evening, a kettle and coffee machine. Periodically, the security guard mooches into the room, sticks the kettle on and makes himself some tea. No tremendous problem with that, although we're being our usual smiling, approachable selves: it might have been nice if he asked. Never mind. Ten minutes later, he comes in again to make more. Fifteen minutes after that, he helps himself to a Coke from the chiller, and then another cup of tea. And so on. By now we've stopped being affronted, we're just genuinely intrigued. I go for a walk outside the festival perimeter a little later and get the answer. All the guys who run the generators have brought their families with them: a whole bunch of ladies and toddlers hanging out under the trees, and they're all drinking cups of tea and cans of Coke... happy days...

The final morning dawns, and forgive me if I sound a little unappreciative, but from this point on, we could really be anywhere. We catch a plane to Delhi, a quick set up, another show. Mumbai seems like another trip entirely: one where we had a bit of time to soak in the culture. But Delhi might as well be London, aside from the thick smog as the plane lands and the beggars perpetually coming up to our car windows (some of them six year-old kids: a little hard to handle). All we're really concerned about now is remaining awake for long enough to do a show, and that our digestive systems aren't suddenly attacked by some waterborne nasty. The Blue Frog, the venue for the Delhi show, is a standard sort of jazzy bar in a swanky complex of restaurants, and the food we are offered is blatantly western: nice, but we can't help feeling a little sad. After all the build-up, this is basically all that's left of our Indian trip. I take five minutes to go upstairs on the roof terrace, where I see huge outdoor cooking areas, domes and temples poking up in the distance, and a bunch of guys playing sunset cricket in the field next door. There's a powerful allure to this place, but I feel strangely shut out from it. I want another week out here, I want my wife to come out and join me, for us to explore. We've barely touched the surface of the surface. But hey, that's how it is. The final gig of the trip, and indeed, the final gig of the whole Perfect Darkness cycle, is mercifully a cracker: the Delhi crowd seem even more Fink-familiar than the other audiences, dancing, jumping, singing along with every word. At the last minute, nay, second, we decide to encore with "Sorry I'm Late", a song we haven't rehearsed for a year or so, let alone played in a gig, and it seems like a wonderful release in this tremendous, vast country we've been invited to play our tunes in.

Anuj tells me afterwards that very few western bands make the trip over here. I go through a few names, asking if they've been. Radiohead? "I don't think so," he says. Mentally I chalk that one up against my heroes, have a final swig of Kingfisher, then hit the sack before the return voyage to London. We'll be back.]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.2014496 2012-10-25T05:32:33-04:00 2012-12-25T05:12:01-05:00

Tim Thornton http://www.huffingtonpost.com/tim-thornton/
Okay, what doesn't spring to mind? Roadworks. Dead bowling alleys. Receptionists with toupees, black teeth and (possibly related) bad breath. Shopping malls entirely staffed by old people. Branches of Starbucks that vanish from the map. None of that, I expect. Clearly you have never been to Redding, CA.

"It's too far to drive from Seattle to San Francisco in a day," chuckled our tour manager, "so I've booked you into a motel in Redding." We know better than to argue with our tour manager (when he's angry he makes us roomshare on days off) so we accepted this edict and punched the address into the satnav. Just gone 10pm, we rolled into the Redding "metropolitan area". First, the highway exit was inexplicably closed, so we had to drive ten miles out and back again. Then we pulled into the deserted motel car park on a deserted street in a deserted bit of the no-horse town to be greeted by the aforementioned receptionist apparition. "You can't park there," he chewed. "You're too long. You'll get ticketed." By who, the grim reaper? - I felt like asking. Instead, we checked in, adjusted our headgear and strode out to see what the Redding nightlife had to offer. Ten minutes later, we were in the dead bowling alley being served beer by an escaped Coen Brothers character. Approximately six minutes after that, we were in Denny's diner. So much for Thursday night on the town.

So imagine our surprise the following day - after we had failed to find Starbucks, negotiated the path out of the town without hitting a wayward octogenarian driver, hotfooted it to the Bay Area, found our San Franciscan venue and soundchecked - when we saw a Twitter message from a fan telling us "We were only told about your show today! We're driving four hours to see you and we've just heard you're sold out!" And what badly-informed backwater did they hail from? "Redding!" To reward them for being the only residents of the town under sixty, we snuck them in the back door, so to speak.

The San Francisco show was loud, trendy and challenging. The digital sound desk did its traditional pre-show prank of wiping clean all its settings minutes before we took to the stage, giving the first half of the gig the flavour of a soundcheck, but we did okay. The dressing room was about four blocks away so we used the van to hide in afterwards. The short drive back to the hotel was sadly all I got to see of San Francisco, but I did get to drive down some of those crazy hills which flatten abruptly at every cross street, and I think the van's exhaust pipe can be fixed.

It's my fifth time in Los Angeles, and it never gets any closer to my idea of normal. If you haven't been, you really should go. You'll hate it. The second time, you'll love it. The third time, you'll hate it again. And so on. One piece of advice: don't try walking. Anywhere. If you park your car a little far away from where you're going, hire another one to drive to the door. Don't think about hailing a taxi. The taxis ignore everyone. Lord knows how you're actually supposed to use one. And you see that part of town with all the enormous skyscrapers? That's the outskirts of the city. Everything is on its head. It confuses the hell out of me, but I love it.

So, in keeping with these confusing thoughts, we showed up for our gig at the Bootleg Theater, where the first thing that happened was we were offered a beer by a lady from Nottingham. Next we were told that between our soundcheck and our performance, there would be a play. Not another band, but a real play, with actors and shit; and would we mind soundchecking with all the play's scenery left in place? Then we were shown a pleasantly spacious dressing room, we settled in, then were informed that we'd have to move to another, temporary dressing room, behind a curtain in the middle of the bar, and return to the original one just before we went onstage. We had an exhausting thirty-minute debate about where to set up our merch table: in the auditorium itself was for some (still mysterious) reason not allowed, but neither could we set it up in the main bar, because the audience would only be in there for the first fifteen minutes after arrival, after which they'd all be herded into another bar. The solution was simple: the merch stand was put on wheels, so it could move wherever the audience moved. I thought about asking for a small motor so the merch stand could self-perambulate around the room (like those drinks robots in Yo Sushi) but this probably wouldn't have simplified matters.

8pm came and the audience filed in, bought their drinks, stood about chatting, bought a few bits of merch (my wonderful merch helpers for the night Anna and Dave already doing a sterling job at the ol' sales thing), then all the audience were firmly invited by an epically large bouncer to decamp to the second bar. The audience, assessing the epicness of the bouncer, obeyed. I filled Anna and Dave in on the plan. "We'll have to move too, in a minute," I explained, pointing at the merch stand's wheels. I popped my head into the second bar just to check there was somewhere to park the damn thing, only to behold the sight of about four hundred people, crammed into the bar, crowded around the tiny bar-room stage. It only had a couple of mics and a piano on it, but clearly, as far as the audience were concerned, this was the room in which Fink were going to play. The assembled throng were already behaving like they were at a gig, jostling for position, sending their companions to the bar while they held their spot, totally unaware that they were shortly (in about twenty excruciating minutes, as it turned out) to be moved to yet a third room, where finally they could remain until Fin and I skulked on. A pair of baffled girls passed me on their way to the loo. "How can they be playing in this room when there aren't any instruments onstage?" they muttered. I gave serious thought to getting all English, maybe standing on top of a chair, perhaps even clinking a glass with a spoon and announcing in a BBC voice, "Ahem! Terribly sorry, we just thought you ought to know..." etc. But I decided that would plummet the gig even further into student-union-ville. What's a little confusion? At least no-one was bored.

Thankfully, boredom remained on the reserve bench once we took to the proper stage. Apologies to anyone who came to see us in New York, Chicago or any of the Canadian shows, but LA stormed in as our best gig of the tour. The room was big and packed, the sound was thumping and we played an absolute corker, even if I say so myself. We even had a proper dressing room to go to afterwards, meaning we could do a proper "encore" encore: one where we leave the stage and vanish for a moment and then actually come back on, rather than shuffling to the side of the stage, looking a bit awkward and then reassuming our positions, as we did at almost every other show. Call us old-fashioned, but that felt good.

Next day: the final gig. I don't want to take anything away from The Loft in San Diego, but it was mercifully straightforward: here's the stage, there's the merch stand, there's the dressing room - all very nice, friendly and efficient - so there's an awful lot less to say about the evening. Suffice to say the audience were charming, the staff were lovely, the support act (Julia Stine) was new but extremely promising, and it was a superb way to end the tour. I saw even less of San Diego than I did of San Francisco, but if that crowd was anything to go by, we'll be back.

And so, feeling a little sad but thrilled to be on the way home, we trundled back up the highway to Los Angeles, where we dumped the gear and said farewell to our faithful van (still powering along the highways, but definitely making a few noises which suggested it needed a rest). Generally we were charmed and delighted by the reception we received in North America, and we sincerely hope we sent everyone home glad that they'd chosen to spend their evening with Fink, however long they'd driven to get there. And whatever happens, Fin, Rob and I are now part of that insane clutch of people who can honestly say, "I've driven across America." It's a bloody big country. As Simon and Garfunkel once sang, "Michigan seems like a dream to me now." Well, it does. A dream with bad border guards. And bed bugs. Never forget the bed bugs.

See us in Europe right through November! Details here.
]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.1999971 2012-10-22T07:18:17-04:00 2012-12-22T05:12:01-05:00

Tim Thornton http://www.huffingtonpost.com/tim-thornton/
Of course we didn't drive it all in one go. That would have been nuts. It was bad enough in two goes. After driving through the rest of Minnesota (fields, barns, cheese), all of North Dakota (bigger fields, bigger barns, not much cheese) and half of Montana (rocky hills, cows, casinos), we finally reached our motel and staggered into the nearest (well, only) bar, where Fin and I discovered the lengthy drive had briefly robbed us of our ability to communicate with regular humanity. 'Uhh... beer,' was all we managed to utter to the barman, who thankfully wasn't too put off by our thousand yard stare and served us two frothing beverages and a plate of something fried and indescribable that we gobbled up in seconds.

The following day was similar but with better scenery. I hope you Americans appreciate what an astonishing country you live in. Coming out of Montana and into Idaho was so dramatic I almost parked the van and cracked into a few poems. After this lengthy injection of natural beauty, however, a previously unheard of Washington city named Spokane (birthplace of Father's Day, according to Wikipedia) briefly jolted us back into urbanville; you can picture some early twentieth-century town planner shouting, "That's enough of this nature shit! I want a ten-lane highway and I want it now!"

I'd be lying if I said time flew as we bashed on through Washington towards Vancouver. By the time we reached the Canadian border at around 10pm we were practically hallucinating. Fin started talking to me about engine mechanics before I realised he was actually sleeptalking (don't worry, he wasn't driving). Another encounter with a disarmingly friendly Canadian border guard and we were finally at our destination, just in time to drink some watered down beer in a touristy bar with some molten plastic cheese and brown tomato sauce masquerading as Spaghetti Bolognese.

The next morning I woke up to find I'd been absolutely savaged by bedbugs and was experiencing something of an allergic reaction. I rushed to the nearest pharmacy (via the coffee bar - priorities please) and was promptly sold a box of the kind of antihistamine that's been illegal in Britain since about 1980. "What the hell," I thought, downing a couple, then embarking on a pleasant morning off, wandering around Gastown (old Vancouver) and Chinatown. Halfway through lunch I experienced a feeling so weird I honestly thought I was having an acid flashback (particularly strange as I've never taken acid). I floated out of the restaurant and realised I could neither focus nor feel any of my limbs, and when I phoned my wife to share the good news I found myself slurring like a drunkard. Returning to the pharmacy, shaking my "fist" (actually a flapping hand) and barking at the pharmacist
("youyevertollmeischwasgonnahaveshiseffectooohme"), she pointed me in the direction of a doctor's walk-in clinic where I was given* some antibiotics for the bedbugs' damage and told to sleep off the antihistamine. Sadly we were but an hour away from loading in the gear at The Media Club so I soldiered on. Fin and Rob didn't notice anything particularly different about me (either they're rather unobservant or I'm quite frequently a gibbering mess) and after a few more Vancouver-strength coffees I was almost back to normal...

The Vancouver show was storming (have I mentioned how brilliant Canadian audiences are? Not only are they numerous, attentive and appreciative, but they also think nothing of driving for a whole day to see a show... we had guests from Edmonton and Calgary, which is akin to me "popping up" to Inverness for a gig - further actually) and we toddled off back to Seattle the next morning, quite sad to see the back of Canada. As usual with these trips, I saw next to nothing of the place, but the vibe was relaxed and a welcome antidote to the usual madness.

But I was happy that the vibe also trickled down the coast to Seattle. As we drove in, the houses looked nice, the trees were green, there was water everywhere and it all seemed rather fresh and oddly... calm. It took me a few minutes to realised what was missing. Some local progressive hero has banned billboards. For once, we were driving in an American city without being constantly ordered to "buy this, buy that, eat here, listen to this, watch this" - and it might be my imagination but I'm sure we arrived at the venue feeling somewhat happier. Barboza, in the achingly cool Pike Street, is a great little club (despite the colour of the stage curtains) where I think we availed ourselves pretty well. We were in Seattle but at times we felt like we were in Portland as almost everyone we spoke to said they'd travelled up from Portland. We toyed with the idea of saying "Good evening Portland" but decided this might have been pushing it. Afterwards, the newness of our American career hit us again, with more than a couple of people saying "I just discovered you a few weeks ago", or, "I just discovered you this afternoon", or "I still don't know who the hell you are, what's the band name again?" - reminding us once more that we are not in Amsterdam. It's a pleasant adventure, this American jaunt, and we've got one more leg to go...

*I say given: they actually cost about fifty quid. No NHS here, dear.

Next: The FINAL PUSH... San Fran, LA, San Diego, and, um, Redding...

See http://www.finkworld.co.uk/allgigs/ for details of our European tour, NEXT MONTH]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.1949785 2012-10-08T20:25:56-04:00 2012-12-08T05:12:01-05:00

Tim Thornton http://www.huffingtonpost.com/tim-thornton/
So what have we learned since last time? Well, far from the 'twenty people and a Labrador' scenario we were perhaps expecting, our shows in Montreal and Toronto were stuffed with gratifyingly enthusiastic music fans who made us feel quite ridiculously welcome. I don't know if you've ever had the experience of travelling three thousand miles to find someone singing along to something you've written, but I highly recommend it. It almost made up for our van getting broken into outside our hotel. That's something else we've learned: Montreal junkies aren't very clever. They took a brown corduroy jacket belonging to Robalicious our sound man, but not our GPS, nor a couple of pricey sets of headphones. Ah well, if dressing like a middle-aged Dutchman makes their life slightly easier, who are we to argue.

In other van news, we have taken to listening to BBC Radio while haring along the highways. Sorry if this comes across as excessively quaint, but being five hundred miles from your next destination with gigantic trucks breathing down your neck can sometimes make you feel a little unhinged, so hearing the chimes of Big Ben, a English voice discussing politics or culture, or even Tom Ravenscroft spinning some cool tunes on 6Music, is enormously grounding.

Sadly nothing can sweeten the experience of driving across a US border. The States is an awesome country filled with charming people, but what on earth makes some US border guards think they can speak to foreign visitors the way they do? This particular chap managed to make me feel both stupid and like some sort of unsavoury, freeloading criminal, neither of which I currently consider myself to be. It would be foolish for me to go into detail, but I do hope that one day this guy wakes up in the morning and thinks, 'hmm, perhaps I should try to not be such an arrogant arse today.'

Luckily for us, we had a sold-out gig at Schuba's in Chicago to look forward to. Schuba's, for those of you who've never been, is one of those superb bar-cum-venues that America does particularly well: all wood floors and interiors, great jukebox with free credits, atmospheric back room with a nice stage, lovely food, enthusiastic staff and a beer selection which kinda makes you wish you weren't playing a gig. Of course I don't mean that. At this show we were lucky enough to have Daniela Sloan on support, a relatively new artist from Chicago itself. We've been really fortunate with support acts on this trip; they've all been a nice surprise. Some have been almost too good. Matthew Santos in Minneapolis was a case in point, who with his cracking songs, magical voice and insane effects units, threatened to upstage us. Next time he'll have his band with him and finish off the job.

Coming from England as we do, it's difficult to imagine travelling very far to see a group you like. In the early nineties I once went from London to Cambridge to watch some unspeakable indie band, but that's an hour on the train. In Minneapolis we met Tony and Stephanie Belmont who drove FOURTEEN hours from Arkansas to watch us. A few others else came from Dakota. In Chicago, we had a nice couple from Detroit. All parties claimed it was worth it. Hot damn - as probably no-one says anymore - we must be doing something right.

Next up: The GREAT DRIVE west... Vancouver... Seattle...

Five shows left! See our gig page if you happen to be local and fancy coming down: http://www.finkworld.co.uk/allgigs/]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.1933418 2012-10-02T15:27:39-04:00 2012-12-02T05:12:01-05:00

Tim Thornton http://www.huffingtonpost.com/tim-thornton/
But let's not get ahead of ourselves. Fink, since Wednesday, have been in on the left hand side of the Atlantic, zooming up and down highways in our pimped-out black Mercedes Sprinter, drinking gallons of coffee, playing shows and then belting onwards to the next place. The thing about being over here is you're constantly, and legitimately, able to exclaim stuff like: 'Yo! We're in one of the world's largest and most important cities!' Or, 'Well, shit! We're in the place where the United States as we know it today was formed!' Or even, 'Oh, word? Barack Obama lives over there!' and so on (faux-Americanisms optional). The point is, the place reeks of history, culture and significance and anyone who thinks otherwise clearly hasn't opened their eyes. Driving into Philadelphia past the docks, we spied a warship which looked like it had literally just returned from WW2. In New York, the bridges are so old-school it's like they've been carved out of the rock, rather than built. And heading along the Charles River in Massachusetts, we had a sudden A-level History flashback and started saying things like, 'What about that Captain John Smith, then, eh?'

But in truth, all I've wanted to do since arriving over here is EAT. Even now as I write this, I'm guzzling down a pork bun from Chinatown around the corner which is officially the nicest I've had in my life, a far cry from the strange savoury doughnut I occasionally 'treat' myself to in London. The first thing I did when I hit New York was eat a pastrami sandwich roughly the size of my snare drum. Before every single gig I'm surrounded by temptation: sushi, burgers, pizza, noodles, cheesecake; but I have a strict 'no food less than two hours before the gig' rule, lest I end up looking like the drummer from The Stranglers. Frequently I've taken to the stage feeling a bit peckish and then ruined everything by wolfing a meatball sub immediately afterwards.

Not that it'd really matter as we've been (hopefully) offsetting any tour lard by running around like total lunatics, trying to get to all the venues in time to set up. The first gig, we arrived to find our CRUCIAL PEDAL (i.e. the one which fools the audience into thinking we've got a bass player) was deader than a badger crossing the New Jersey turnpike, so instead of artistically preparing ourselves for a scintillating debut gig, we were racing into the Maryland suburbs looking for a music shop, only just making it back to the venue in time. In New York while we were supposed to be soundchecking, I was moving a tree branch out of the way (with the assistance of a ninety year-old Korean grandfather) so I could squeeze into the only parking space in Lower Manhattan. The gigs have been great, the audiences have been wonderful, but it's been hectic to say the least.

So we've done the DC show (lovely club, a great way to start), the Philly show (a gloriously scuzzy indie bar presided over by a man called Chicken), the big NYC show (boy, was I nervous) and the Boston date (great beers on tap; we resisted the temptation to get completely trolleyed before playing)... and now, as you probably guessed correctly, we're in Montreal. Crossing the border into Canada was so welcoming we've still got the remnants of a warm glow from it. Can you imagine: a scary-looking customs building with scary-looking border guards, then one of them smiles and says, 'Ah yes, we knew you were coming, we've just been listening to your music on YouTube and it's great!' How nice is that?

But not all exchanges have been so simple. I'll leave you with this short tale of confusion from when we stopped at a rural gas station in Connecticut, en route for Boston, to get some oil for the van. The attendant, when she was sure no-one else was listening, said quietly, 'Can I ask you something?' 'Sure,' I replied, thinking she was probably just going to ask where I was from. But no. 'Why do people put oil in cars?' she enquired. After shaking myself out of a state of mild shock, I muttered something vague about it lubricating the engine. 'So what is it when people put diesel and gas in?' But this question sadly vacuumed all the language out of my brain. 'Uh... fuel,' was all I managed in response, before leaping back into my rock'n'roll vehicle and heading back to civilisation FAST...

Next up: the Montreal show! Toronto! Chicago! And here's our gig list.]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.1910595 2012-09-24T16:01:04-04:00 2012-11-24T05:12:01-05:00

Tim Thornton http://www.huffingtonpost.com/tim-thornton/
It has proved to be one of British rock's enduring enigmas, even to the most seasoned and knowledgeable of industry pundits: which acts will sell out there? And which won't? Frequently everyone's got it wrong, with surefire domestic winners (Blur, The Jam, Manic Street Preachers) going down like a sack of lead shit out there, while bands who wouldn't get arrested back home (Bush, A Flock of Seagulls, Spacehog, Catherine Wheel) have been treated like conquering heroes Stateside and, in more than a few cases, swiped a couple of the USA's foremost pop music hotties as matrimonial bounty.

The country's vast size has frequently resulted in battleplan miscalculations of Napoleonic proportions, with Britbands returning home dejected, skint, wounded, alcoholic and generally in dire need of beans on toast, chocolate digestives and a comforting gig at the Dublin Castle.

So it is with some trepidation that Fink are hurtling out to North America next week for yet another bite of the, if you will, apple pie. Oh, we've been before. Several times, actually: sometimes with successful results (we've played sold-out shows in LA and NYC, and have even given South by Southwest a run for its money), and sometimes it's been a little less than ideal (memories of a barely-attended gig at Chicago's Empty Bottle, together with a bemused and disillusioned Young Knives, do not reside in the box marked 'treasured'). But this time, we're bloody well GOING FOR IT.

A hectic 13-date road trip: up one side, across the top and down the other, taking in all the big-hitters (Chicago, Philly, Seattle and of course LA and NYC), some of the smaller, cooler medium-sizers (Minneapolis, Boston, DC and San Diego) along with three dates in Canada (Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver) - we'll play some rocking shows, drive some enormous drives, meet some hilarious characters, stay in some amusing hotels, eat some ridiculous food, drink some ridiculous drinks and, with any luck, keep our Dutch sound engineer on the right side of the law. It all kicks off this Thursday, September 27, at the DC9 Club in Washington, and I'll be documenting every step of the trip in as much detail as I can batter out on my intrepid 2006 vintage gaffertape-splattered Apple laptop ('oooh, it looked so new and white when I bought it...'). The highs. The lows. The breakfasts. The border guards. Sign up for notifications on Twitter (@finkmusic or @timwthornton) and you'll be as good as right there in the tour bus with us...

See our tour dates at http://www.finkworld.co.uk/allgigs/]]>