Glasgow

It’s funny to me when Brit folk are impressed by the 4 hour drives, like the one we had from Leeds to Glasgow. Used to touring the states, our average city to city time is over 6 hours, and we’ve become much too familiar with the occasional 30+ hour drive in the last few months. Van time is good time. It’s time for humus and pita and reading books. Finished The History of Love while a constant portrait of gloomy skied, ship laden fields filled the van window.

As a support band, it can take a few songs for a crowd who don’t know your music to respond, but the Glasgow kids would have gone crazy for a miniature monkey clashing a cymbal thrown out onto the stage. These were kids ready for new music. Everything is cake until halfway through the second song we hear muffled yell through our monitors; “stop f*cking playing!!” Confused, half the band decides to keep going with the song until the fire alarm kicked in, completely drowning us out. We finally relinquished as the crowd evacuated the building. They say it was the smoke machine that did it, which I think is a much better theory than someone straight hated our set and in a last ditch effort to escape misery decided to try and end the show.

Once they let everyone back inside our set time was almost up, so we finished with a couple songs and ended with Sun Hands. We invited up Nick from Marina, Alexis from Golden Silvers, and Joey from Yes Giantess for a massive ending drum jam session. So many drums on stage my ears were bleeding after the set. Needless to say that will be a repeat set closer for the rest of the tour.

I was determined to get in a solid night at Glasgow based off two reasons: 1. We had a day off following and 2. When we asked the bartender what was the recommended Scottish beer, he replied, “Whiskey.”

We ended up at the local Art School turned euro trance club in downtown. Three hours of intense communal dance moves and a few “beers” later, we were ready to go find a place to continue the celebration of Glasgow, but unfortunately had no common sense. First place we were kicked out of was Yes Giantess’ Hilton suite. Dance moves were auditioned, beds were somersaulted over, lamps overturned, and a three member Hilton employee confrontation council was at our door not to be haggled with within a half an hour. Next we tried to bring the group to our own room at the Glasgow Travel Lodge. We literally didn’t make it through the door as the desk woman was threatening angrily to call the police the moment she saw us approaching. Soggy, miserably tired and near deciding to just bum it and sleep in some cushionless couches left outside for the trash, we finally found victory at Nick and Nick’s (Marina’s rhythm section) who were at another hotel down the street. We pushed the two single beds next to each other and crammed seven people horizontally like sardines, finally closing our eyes at 7:30am. Needless, to say Glagow lived up to the infamy.

Taylor

Local Natives