sydney

It’s currently Tuesday night where I’m sitting, which is Brisbane by the way, and this morning I had one of my wisdom teeth pulled out.  It was surprisingly much less of an ordeal than I had anticipated.  My dentist stuck needles in my gum, that part of my mouth went numb, and then he literally grabbed my tooth with pliers of some description and pulled it out.  End of story.  It doesn’t even hurt.  So that’s what I did today (well not the only thing but you get me yeah) and now I’ll move on.

I’m behind the times a bit because we were in Sydney nearly two weeks ago now but it’s always worth telling a story no matter how late after the event isn’t it?

On a particular Thursday two weeks ago we all headed to the airport.  Well that’s not strictly true we all flew down at different times but for the sake of brevity let’s leave it at that.  Actually it’s an important part of the story.  You see one of the terrible things about being in a band and flying is that you always have gear with you and airlines don’t particularly like gear.  Usually, when we’re flying together, we have lots of gear but there’s also four of us, and by the time they’ve weighed everything and sorted out our tickets and endured listening to John talk about why we should be exempt from any excess charges, the person behind the desk is usually pretty confused and just lets us through for free.  This time, however, I was on my own at the airport and it’s pretty strikingly obvious that I’m over my baggage limit when there’s only one of me and nothing to get confused by.  I tried talking my way out of it but I just don’t have the gift of convincing people they should be nice to me.  So I got charged $10 for every kilo I was over which equaled $100.  $100!!!!!!!!  That’s like more than I paid for the fare.

Excess baggage charges have always been a source of much frustration for me.  I’m a pretty small guy, I weigh about 70kg.  I take next to no personal luggage with me.  The only weight I’m taking on the plane other than myself is the gear I absolutely need to perform a show.  That gear equaled 33kg, which is 10kg over the allowed 23kg.  So in total I’m taking 103kg on the plane.  This is where I think it gets unfair.  See if someone weighs 80kg and brings personal effects on the plane to the tune of 23kg they’re all sweet despite taking the same amount of weight as me on the plane.  What’s more unfair is that sports people are allowed to take an extra 5kg of sports gear on the plane for free.  Take this example: if you’ve got a rugby player who weighs 100kg (which is not unusual for rugby players), he’s allowed to take himself on the plane (as you do) plus 23kg worth of his own stuff, plus an extra 5kg worth of sports shit and he doesn’t have to pay anything extra.  So that’s 128kg of weight for free when I’m paying $100 extra for only 103kg.  I don’t know if anyone else finds this ridiculously unfair but I nearly lose my mind every time I get to an airport.  Whatever happened to giving musicians free baggage hey airlines?

Anyway, we all made it down to Sydney.

For the first couple of nights we were staying with a friend of ours who very kindly gave us free reign to her living room.  So we settled in and prepared for our gig that night.  We were playing a show at the Oxford Art Factory.  If anyone’s familiar with it you’d know that it has two rooms where bands play.  There’s the main room which is awesome by the way, and then there’s the gallery bar which is a lot smaller but is also very cool.  We were in the gallery bar.  I think Metronomy were playing the main room that night.  We opened the night which was great and two cool bands The Shiny Brights and The Winter People played after us.  It was a really fun night and we had quite a few drinks afterwards.  The highlight probably was the video that was playing behind the stage on loop all night.  It was this really weird like cult video where everyone got naked and just did weird shit.  It was in black and white and was almost impossible to look away from.  Obviously we couldn’t hear the sound but all night I was intrigued as to what it would have been like with sound.  I wish I had taken a picture of it or something.  Bottom line, it was f*#king weird.

The next day we wandered into Sydney town and yeah just wandered really.  John took me to the bar where he had his first ever pint of beer as a young 18 year old.  He said it was a great day.  He’d had beer before but never a pint.  For those of you who aren’t aware John’s passion other than drumming is drinking beer in pubs.  So it was quite a little history lesson for me.

That night we were playing at Candy’s Apartment which is another great venue.  A cool band called Sooners were headlining and they let us borrow all their gear because they were cool.  They also sounded great and it was exactly the sort of music I felt like listening to on that particular Friday.  We had a pretty quiet night that night though.  One of the best revelations was that just on the corner of where we were staying was this awesome food place that was open until like 3am.  They did pretty much every sort of food you could possibly want after getting home late from somewhere.  John and myself paid it a visit and I think if I had food place like that on my corner I wouldn’t ever cook.

On Saturday we headed out of town a bit to Tim Powles studio.  Aka “The Time Bandit” Tim plays drums for The Church.  If you don’t know who The Church are quickly enlighten yourselves here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Church_%28band%29.  In a nutshell they are an awesome Australian band who have been around since 1980 and are still going strong.  So it was quite awesome to be working with Tim.

We took some songs down with us that we’d never played before.  So when we set up in the studio we were playing them for the first time which was a really new experience for us.  It was great having Tim as producer building the songs with us from the ground up rather than us having already arranged them ourselves.  It was a completely different experience and one that made us push the boundaries of what we were doing a lot.  We’ve been so lucky to have been able to work with some awesome people in the studio this year and we can’t be more grateful.

We’ll be returning to the Time Bandit’s studio later this year/early next year to record the songs we started working on.  Can’t wait for that.  It will be awesome.

And that was our Sydney weekend.