unicorn onesies & oatmilks: a UK tour diary....(with lots of pictures) (Patreon)

hallo loves.

first of all: WELCOME to the whole slew of new patrons, many of you from the UK tour. welcome welcome. say hi. it's nice here. here we are. it's been nice to be out on the road finally, spreading the gospel of the patreon (and everything, including the songs, that's grown out of it) in realtime.

in quickie news: the brighton show is pretty much sold out but there's a small handful of tickets, and there are still plenty tickets for norwich and dublin. for those of you in ireland/dublin: i've also added a TALK AT THE DUBLIN LITERARY FESTIVAL, i'll be in conversation with laurie penny (who's also here on patreon). this is going to be totally different from the show, and you can expect that it'll be a pretty unforgettable talk, so please please come. i'll also try to film it, even if it's just with an iphone.

UND....

everyone: sorry i’ve been incommunicado for the past week or so…it’s been one thing after another with barely any time to catch up, because when i’m not on the road on one form of british rail or another (where the internet is sketchy at best) i’ve been at sound checks and on stage or back in london in Mom Mode. right now i’m on a train heading from bath (where i played the bath festival last night) to brighton, where i play the brighton festival tomorrow. it’s festival week....

touring with andrew o'neill has been really fucking lovely (to use a worn british phrase…i’ve also adopted a habit of saying “FOCKIN HELL” every chance i get lately).

if you want to get a true feel of what it's been like backstage...watch this youtube clip of me & andrew backstage....clearly gateshead really has a bee up it's butt about Not Being Confused With Newcastle (which is across the river, people):

https://youtu.be/mavh-mVwHIs

TODAY. YOU. ARE. IN GATESHEAD.

it’s weird. i booked this strange little UK tour of never-usually-visited cities (with the exception of birmingham and brighton, which i’ve toured in a ton) because i didn’t want to be stuck in london for an entire month and i’d agreed to take it for the couple-team and come over here for a month while neil did his job. we trade like this, and he’s done plenty of moving around for me over the past decade. and i really wanted to see more of the U.K., which ironically making neil a little glum, because i’m doing it without him.

marriage, long-term relationships…it’s funny that way. you spend a shit-ton of time in the beginning trying to bear your soul to the other person (well, i do, at least) and then once they’re caught up on the basics, a part two begins…okay, now you’ve got the basics down, let’s get into the nitty gritty. i’ve told you about my insane family, but let’s move onto my very particular childhood traumas…that’s not usually something that happens until you’re a good few months (or sometimes years) into a relationship. you can also fall out of practice and forget that it’s your job to delight and surprise and educate your partner. our air bnb in london is a stone’s throw from abbey park, and andrew was chatting about it, describing the cemetery to me on a train ride. i mentioned it to neil and he remarked that it was one of his favorite places in london. it’s three blocks from our house. (this post is not my passive aggressive way of pointing out to him that he’s forgotten to share his world with me.....or is it?)

the shows over the past week have had a similar thread…a lot of these cities are First Date territory for me, and i FORGET. i forget that a city i’ve never played in acts differently than a city i’ve played 6 times. i forget that an audience responds differently when they only know me through the portals of the internet and not in the flesh. i forget. 

but also, i like forgetting. i like treating the audience like an old friend, an intimate friend, a we-dont-need-to-do-the-formalities friend. i like getting straight to the sex. come to think of it, my relationships were always like that too. i mentioned this on stage in bath last night and said: forget the foreplay. we are just going to have sex on the first date. i can't pretend to be someone i'm not.

i remember the one time i decided to experiment with not having sex with a new boyfriend/lover immediately. i was like: i’ve never tried this before, why not try it? so i waited a month. the sex we had after waiting a month was really good, and i found myself being pissed that i’d missed a month of sex. 

in gateshead, two people walked out of the show because there was “too much death”. they were NICE. they might even be reading this. 

the venue was like a spaceship cocoon:

my brain is a-swirl with the coming year of touring…it’s my plan (unless things change) to do a decking YEAR of touring on this record i’m making in the fall. the show isn’t a downer, exactly, but it’s emotional as fuck. i do wonder how to prepare myself (and everybody else) for that.

all the venues will be these, big, seated, silent theaters. 

should i sell tissues? brand them? scent them?

should i put up warnings the way there are signed for epileptics when there are strobes and flashing lights?

WARNING: FEELINGS AND CRYING, PLEASE TAKE NOTE OF EMERGENCY EXITS & KEEP FLUIDS TO YOURSELF

also in gateshead….a live-action back-row plea from a girl who desperately needed to pee turned into a full-on mutiny (well, not really, i asked the audience if they’d like a breather and they voted YES). so now we have an intermission. it’s been built into the shows and i daresay it’s made life really interesting. i’ve never before had this strange 10 minutes of life in the middle of a really emotional show. it also led to the vague idea of calling the album (and the tour) “THERE WILL BE NO INTERMISSION”. 

and then, of course, have an intermission. 

it sounds a little catchier than "ALL THE THINGS", don't you think? i dunno. i have about five months to title this fucker. maybe i'll even write a song for the middle of the album called “intermission”, one way or another. i like the idea of an album having an intermission (and i've done it before).

in gateshead (wait, no, newcastle) we stayed with andrew's pals jaisen and ali in their voodoo den, and i slept among a shoe and handbag palace. 

it was really comforting. the more i think about it, the more my life has been anemic since i've stopped sleeping in people's houses. i miss it. it's hard when you become a family, an entourage, and/or have a husband who thinks it's a kind of hell to stay with strangers. neil and i have been having this long-standing conversation about our different styles. we're actually not as different as all that: we like to be comfortable. it's how you define comfortable. and what risks you're willing to take to be comfortable.

and this has been a beautiful kind of couchsurfing: I DIDNT HAVE TO DO ANY OF THE WORK, since all of these places we're staying are vetted and trusted friends of andrew. this is what wound up happening on the northwest tour with jason....we wound up staying with his friends in every city. this is clearly the key: get support acts who have awesome friends who live in awesome houses. i share neil's feelings neil in some regard: when you are tired as fuck it's just a bad time to start and test a new relationship. but when your FRIENDS friends are putting you up, and they're rock-and-roll-understanders? i cannot tell you how superior it is to get into someones little car, drive ten minutes to a bed surrounded by handbags (and if you are lucky, cats) and just get into it, weeping with gratitude. while your alternate self is still behind some soulless people in a soulless lobby of a soullless hotel and you're forced to interact with people who give no shits about you don't know you, don't care about you, and are only there to be human beings to take your credit card. there's nothing less comfortable than getting to a hotel and waiting in a lobby while you're fucking tired to finally be given a plastic ket, which you walk a half mile to a little box in the sky, only to find out the little plastic key does not open your little plastic box. it crushes your soul after a while to only live that way.

anyway. before neil thinks i'm railing on him too much in this post, the bath festival put us up in a CUSH fucking hotel last night and i was in fucking heaven. 

sometimes a hotel is the shit. it just depends.

andrew, by the way, has been crushing it as my opener every night. he’s just so fucking funny. we've been joshing our way through the U.K. he's a good friend and a soul brother.

birmingham was beautiful, we played town hall - we bought a delightfully tacky spangled gown in the train station (which doubles as a shopping mall) because there was one of those awful swarovski-crystal-ball-gown shops....

....and we decided that adding andrew to my set singing “vegemite” in full lounge gear would be a positive thing. it’s been getting better every night. andrew tells the story of the transphobic swarovksi-gown store.

(photo by james cheadle)

in birmingham we stayed with the retired parents of one of andrew’s occult pals. they made us haloumi for breakfast and were just the sweetest ever....then we traine dto liverpool, where the venue (st. george's hall) was feckin GORGEOUS just off the hook:

we were treated to an organ concert rehearsal which was running parallel to soundcheck...

and we stayed with alan moore’s daughters, amber and leah....and they had a nice toasty unicorn onesie, which i wore to bed, and breakfast:

carmarthern was the best show of the tour (so far, though i have a feeling brighton might crush it) - and wales itself was just gorgeous. this was what i was imagining when i imagine this tour into existence: seeing beautiful parts of the UK that we’d never seen....and castles....

we stayed again with a friend of andrew’s named clare, in her hidey-hole house about a half hour outside of town in the deep country. her 13 year old gave up their band and i slept with a kitten on my womb:

…and may have traumatized her 9-year-old son who accidentally walked in on me while iw as in the bath in the morning. i rarely take baths, and almost neve run the morning, but my back has been giving me grief lately (the twisting at the piano, mostly, and the furious pedaling, i’m going to have to figure something out so this body can sustain an entire tour). 

then we all went to the very very cold and windy beach….and said goodbye to wales. andrew looked like bono from the eighties...

and all our hair went everywhere (this is clare)

...and we dropped our stuff at the train station with our tour manager, joep (the same one who TM’d my edward “i can spin a rainbow” tour, he’s a real gem) and figured we had JUSt enough time to drive up the hill to town to grab a coffee. the train wasn’t leaving for twenty minutes. joep looked at us suspiciously but relented when promised to bring him a delicious double espresso. my desire to grab coffee ant beyond just the coffee…i’d wandered into this tiny little hole-in-the-wall coffee shop in an alleyway the day before,e struck up a conversation with it’s proud (and brand new) owner, tom, and put him on the list for the show. the coffee was reallllly good, but also i knew it would make tom happy to see us off. 

clare raced us up the hill in her car, along with the 9-year-old (probably still traumatized) and 13-year-old (still high that i slept in their bed) and andrew and i darted into the coffee shop. tom did not quite understand our body (and english) language of WE ARE IN A HURRY TRAIN TRAIN and proceeded to introduce us to his mum and inquire what he thought would be a fair price for the quiches they’d just decided to sell. andrew and i looked at each other and were like: “oh fuck. we are gonna miss our train to bath, aren’t we?” but we’d gone all the way up the hill, clare was idling in our getaway car, and we NEEDED COFFEE. and at that point it was going to feel super rude to tell poor tom that we just didn’t have 15 minutes to wait while he created the perfect latte hearts. so…we waited. getting more flabbergasted by the moment as tom took his time with our coffees. soy milk, he asked andrew, his fellow vegan, or oatmilk? the oat milk has a kind of nutty aftertaste…but it is slightly bitter. but tom prefers the oat milk.

we grabbed our coffees, ll three of them, and a quiche (thanks tom’s mom, and we suggested that four quid was fair) and booked it up the little pedestrian street to clare’s waiting car. i huffed: “IF WE LITERALLY RUN TO THE CAR AND SHE DRIVES WE WILL MAKE IT”. andrew slammed himself in the back seat and i flung myself into the front seat and clare went to start the car, and the engine turned over…and….nothing. she looked at us and said “HOLY FUCK. THIS NEVER HAPPNES.”

i looked at andrew. he looked at me. how far is the train station? half a kilometer…?

we scrambled out of the car, andrew said “clearly we leave the coffees here” and i was like “FUCK THAT TAKE THE COFFEES”, i took joep’s espresso, and ran down the hill at full-speed, spilling coffees over ourselves and crossing a river and carmarthen’s approximation of a highway. 

i texted joep while running at full speed, with my non-espresso hand, that we were gonna try to make it, to load the luggage onto the train. we had 2 minutes to make it. 

we made it. we were covered in oatmilk.

it turns out (from a facebook post of clare;s) that she has simply RUN OUT OF GAS.

this was the beginning of a phenomenally bad-luck tour day yesterday. why don't i tell you about it.

i then proceeded to LEAVE MY SUITCASE on that fucking train when we got off at newport to connect to bath. i only realized it as we were walking down the train platform onto the elevator and the train was just closing its doors. i had to do that awful thing where you beg and plead and scrape and apologize for them to open the doors back up. 

then joep mixed up the train lines and we wound up getting on the wrong train to bath and we wound up in reading. we were basically looking at each other in that “WTF THIS DAY” way by that point, and we made the best of it by getting more coffees in the reading train station and buying some deep heat cream at the boots pharmacy in the train station and i used andrew’s large hardsheel suitcase as a yoga ball, stretching myself and my shitty bad out on it like some sort of itinerant manatee. 

we got to bath just in time to soundcheck and open doors. the theater (the forum) in bath was just fucking gorgeous…look at this place:

and they tricked the stage out with some really classy decorative lights.

the bath audience started cold, no pun intended, but they warmed to a dull roar. the bathrooms (weirdly, i’ve never seen this in a fancy theater) were located DIRECTLY off one wall of the venue itself, which made for some hilarious bids to try to de-gender them. we succeeded, a bit.

bath was filmed and we’re filming brighton tonight. if any clips are stellar we’ll youtube them, but the full shows are for the patrons. i’ll pick the better show of the two and Thing It. (or if the footage is really stellar from both, i’ll thing one and give you the other one just cos why not).

all of this learning, dudes.

(from bath, photo by james again)

this is happening. the stage is my laboratory. i’m piecing a tour together. i’m projecting my brain into next year and trying to figure out what i’m going to be doing with 2.5 hours on a stage in every city in the world. it’s not like me, to plan like this. i like it.

i’ve given some beautiful gifts on tour…including these in bath last night (including a book called “sexuality and its impact on history”, from the author) but goddamn how great is this labia pin. i said, to the gifter: “nice labia!” and she said “IT’S MINE!”. this lady made beautiful art-pins of her own labia. the bar has been raised. get on then, people…..

by accident, because sometimes patreon does that, it posted sideways. but i kind of love that.

and....this gorgeous drawing from max kyro in (i think) liverpool…this one is almost print/shirt-worthy. let me know, i can do anything. 

…………………….

and now, my loves….my dears...

the dresden dolls are about to announce two shows in londonon monday. be watching. october 30 & 31. tickets are going to vanish. get ready - the announcement post with presale info will go out to THE MAILING LIST first and then everywhere else....(yes, you should be on the mailing list, always, even though all the info comes to patreon, there's sometimes info that gets blasted out to the mailing list first. it's here:  http://amandapalmer.net/emaillist/)

i love you all….

xxx

a

------THE NEVER-ENDING AS ALWAYS---------

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