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NME – Feature
Way Out West Coast
Bitter exes, desperate housewives and dead dog’s ashes won’t stop LA troubadours The Airborne Toxic Event spreading their love. Martin Robinson joins their crazy Californian road trip.
By Martin Robinson
January 24, 2009
Photo Credit: Andy Willsher
Bill Hicks called it “turd city”, Woody Allen said its only cultural advantage is “being able to turn right at a red light”, and Larry David fans will know Los Angeles as plastic and preening to the point of insanity. Imagine our surprise, then, to find in the suburb of Silver Lake, a warm-blooded indie scene bubbling dirtily underneath the shiny Hollywood machine. The Spaceland club is the meeting point for the city’s struggling artists, writers and especially musicians; its tin foil-clad stage has raised the likes of Cold War Kids and Silversun Pickups, but tonight NME has come to meet its most promising band yet—The Airborne Toxic Event.
Named after a section of Don DeLillo’s masterpiece novel White Noise, the band are centred around Mikel Jollett, a man very much in the Springsteen mould of raw feeling, anthems …
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UK 30 Shows in 30 Days: Day 27 – We’ve seen a lot of sheep…
From NME.com.
As we close in on our last few shows here in the UK, we’re struck by the sheer volume of bands we’ve played with this month (around 80). The new friends we’ve kidnapped in a whiskey-fueled haze and brought to our next gig in the van. The omnipresent line-drawings of dicks on the wall of every green room at every club. The ubiquitous light rain. The superiority of English bacon… and footwear.
We’re immune to the beauty of English landscape—the sheep, the hedges, the stone and brick houses in quaint constellations. Our conversation has devolved into endless jokes about crying, punching, freaking out, screaming.
But we still look forward to the point each night when the sound has been checked, the tuning pedals clicked off, and we start the set. There’s really nothing like it.
And every night, the faint blue glow of the Travelodge sign…
Our last night at Dublin Castle in London was a rollicking, boozy and crowded finale to the residency. Mikel jumped off the stage and Anna’s viola got a new scar. We drank, sweated, swore and danced.
We think we may miss this place of numberless buildings and unnamed streets that lead nowhere…
UK 30 Shows in 30 Days: Days 20-26 – The Last Week
From NME.com.
Nottingham, Barrow in Furness, Stoke on Trent, Cardiff, Bristol, London (again), Sheffield, and Preston — all behind us, and so now we’re officially in the home stretch. Admittedly, we’ve fallen off in posting these things, as we’ve grown more and more exhausted and unable to do much else besides eat, drink, play shows. Leading up to our last London show, we’ve had particularly memorable nights in Nottingham, Barrow in Furness, and Cardiff.
Everyone kept scratching their heads at us whenever we mentioned we’d be playing Barrow in Furness, but we had an excellent show and met some really interesting people. Cardiff was fucking crazy, for no real reason except that we felt especially loopy and decided to play an entire song in the audience. It turned out to be our most ambitious post-show night outside of London so far, stumbling down cobblestone roads until four in the morning. That one pretty much set the tone for this next slew of shows.
It’s been a while since our last posting, and since then, we’ve been coping better than expected. Call it a higher plane, or some kind of controlled insanity, but it works somehow. The last London show was sufficiently …
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UK 30 Shows in 30 Days: Day 19 – Losing It
From NME.com.
After London, we headed into Brighton and played a rowdy gig at a place called The Hope just up from the pier. Now officially in the last third of our tour and 19 days in without any real rest, we’ve all gone a bit wonky and recorded said wonkiness for your viewing pleasure. Noah howls occasionally while loading equipment, and Mikel has taken to playing gospel songs on the street. We drink more than we should, anytime there’s sitting and/or waiting involved.
That said, we love Brighton. We were here last summer for the Great Escape Festival, for which we played Komedia with the Annuals. Afterward, we wandered the lanes and ended up at a house party until late into the night. This time, we ran into a group of girls singing on the street calling themselves the Half Sisters. They really were sisters and had just played their own gig up the street. One had a flute and another had a ukulele. We thought they were gypsies at first.
Too bad we didn’t get to stay longer, as has been the case with a lot of the towns we’ve passed through. It sucked to leave Brighton so soon, …
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UK 30 Shows in 30 Days: Days 17,18 – Geeking Out
From NME.com.
When we started this band, we tried not to get too excited about guitar effects and gadgetry lest we became one of those groups with huge, unwieldy pedal boards. We bought Velcro, electrical tape, power strips, and slabs of wood from our local hardware stores and constructed our own, homemade boards, a couple of pedals for each member—just enough to get by. Eventually, they began to fall apart, so we broke down and bought proper ones a few months ago.
For the most part, we’ve stuck to the same, basic philosophy of staying slim, though we’ve made additions and grown particularly proud of Anna’s viola rig, which now includes a POG, or a Polyphonic Octave Generator. It basically lets her sound like she’s playing eight violas at once.
In this installment of our blog, we talk about guitar and viola effects for those who might not know much about them. They’re fun to use. We’ll probably acquire more and end up with huge, unwieldy pedal boards.
Days 17 and 18 were our Oxford and London gigs, respectively. Oxford was charming and cute; we had dinner in a converted church called Freud.
The following night was the third week of our Dublin …
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UK 30 Shows in 30 Days: Days 14,15,16 – First or Favorite Concerts
From NME.com.
We’ve been to Manchester, Hull, and Leeds now, acquiring quite the scenic tour of this country. We’re excited that we’ve passed the halfway point intact, while gaining an appreciation for the towns we’ve only heard about from Smiths songs or episodes of The Office. Just another 14 days to go before it’s officially the longest any of us have gone without taking a night off.
It’s what you would expect: fast-paced and thrilling at times, and tedious and incredibly draining at others. We’re meeting tons of people and becoming experts at roadside eating establishments like Little Chef and Welcome Break. We try for any chance to partake in “normal” activities, like shopping and strolling. We try to read books. We watch a lot of DVD’s. We decided to take this opportunity to talk about our first (or favorite) concerts. It’s not a mind-blowing topic, but an important one nonetheless that makes us marvel at our younger selves—how they might be intrigued at our current undertaking. Primus, Mike Watt, R.E.M., Sonic Youth, U2, the Sugarcubes, Public Enemy, The Cure—the range is pretty amusing.
For now, it’s starting to hit us that we might actually survive this thing, and we’d be …
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UK 30 Shows in 30 Days: Day 13 – A Day in the Life
From NME.com.
Naturally, a few of us started humming and singing Beatles songs as soon as we got to Liverpool, so someone came up with the idea to do a “Day in the Life” blog about what a typical day has been like on this exhaustive (and exhausting) tour, titled after the song. We readily admit that we’d set ourselves up for a terribly boring entry, but still, thought it would help encapsulate—for anyone who cared—the simultaneous tedium and rush of a band on tour.
Like most days, we started the day off by checking out of our Travelodge. Having passed through the UK a few times before, and now well into our 30 Shows in 30 Days tour, we’ve become quite the connoisseurs of England’s various Travelodges. We give Liverpool’s a 4.5—not as nice as Leeds’, but miles beyond Birmingham’s, which seems on the verge of collapse. Depending on what time our load-in is for the next gig and how far we have to drive, we either: a) grab some food, then leave immediately; b) grab food, stick around and explore the city, and then leave; or c) hit the road as soon as possible. Luckily, England’s fairly driveable, …
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UK 30 Shows in 30 Days: Day 11 – Downtime
From NME.com.
We’re now halfway through our residency—not halfway through the tour, though, mind you. It feels simultaneously disconcerting to find ourselves still so early on in this adventure and amazing that we haven’t imploded yet after 11 consecutive days of driving, performing, consuming massive quantities of alcohol, and sleeping in dodgy hotels. Normal life is forcing itself back into our wayward schedules, and so upon our return to London, we set out to do mundane things—shop, eat, call friends, sit… After so many days, you get the hang of it and learn how to mimic normal living, as much as you can.
It only lasted for a few hours, though, and then we were off to sound check at Dublin Castle in Camden. We held an impromptu drum competition (you learn to get creative with things to do while waiting for sound people to arrive) and then headed next door to Toasted, a living room of a Toastie shop co-owned by the proprietors of the Dublin Castle. In addition to toasties (which we learned are sandwich pockets that can contain anything from cheese and peanut butter to cat food), you can get custom-made t-shirts. We continued our afternoon wind-down …
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UK 30 Shows in 30 Days: Day 10 – “We are the UK fan base.”
From NME.com.
Sunshine is rare in this benighted land. Though we do believe it invites wit. The most one can reasonably wish for is a light drizzle to accompany the ubiquitous grey skies. Instead of torrent. Though that has its advantages too, as we discovered in Hayle the other night, playing inside an enormous white tent while the wind raged against the side walls. The amps were plugged in anyway. Ale was consumed, the flash of bodies moving together in time while the storm wailed on lent a certain air to the evening — that of people huddling close against a great abyss.
As Californians we are not accustomed to the emotional influence of weather.
We have, however become quite accustomed to the emotional influences of late-night post-pub fare: kebabs, jacket potatoes, fish, chips.
We’ve also been heartened at our reception here, which has been beyond our reckoning. We went to dinner tonight with Sean and Steff who we met on our first UK tour over a year ago.. Today’s blog is about them.
The touring continues. We still have 18 shows to go. Friday night we play Manchester at Moho Live then Sunday it’s Leeds at Rocket then Oxford on Monday then …
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UK 30 Shows in 30 Days: Day 9 – Stonehenge – “It was bigger than 18 inches…”
From NME.com.
So we were driving south heading towards Cornwall and casually looked out the window and saw one of the most famous sites in the entire world. From a distance, it looks like a does in the movies. Up close, it’s much windier.
So we stopped for a few minutes to take in the history, the engineering achievement, the sheep.
We don’t get to do much tourist stuff on this tour with a show to play every night, but 20 minutes in front of this stack of enormous rocks gave us our fill.