Eddy Says

Eddy Says: Fear and loathing in France

By Eddy Temple-Morris | Published on Monday 9 May 2011

I looked at the Losers tour itinerary and my heart sank. “Depart Tom’s in splitter van at 4am”. Tom is in north London, I am near Brixton. What’s more I’d already been working non-stop from 9am til 2am every day, so my body clock had set itself to that rhythm. I had to get up 45 minutes after my bedtime and cross London by car.

I greeted my red eyed band colleagues, and an equally stunned looking entourage of friends, two crew members, and we loaded the luxury splitter van and headed east to the Chunnel terminal. We had to be in Poitiers, nearly half way down France on the left had side, in time for a late afternoon soundcheck, hence the ungodly departure time.

One of our friends on board was Dan Fisher, the former guitar player in The Cooper Temple Clause, whose reputation as the hardest drinking British band of their generation I was about to be reminded of.

It was shortly after our first petrol stop, still in pitch darkness, that Tom opened a red wine box. I felt I had to abstain on this trip as I had four X-posure shows to think about and program in their entirety, but nothing stopped my other tour mates and by the time we reached Kent, things were getting quite euphoric.

The confusion that comes with a large and unbuffered ingestion of alcohol before breakfast was put right by the Channel Tunnel authorities, who saw fit to let us know, in a way even WE couldn’t miss exactly where to go.

Paul, our driver, stalled a couple of times, early on in the proceedings, prompting a glorious, cacophonous rendition of ‘I Just Stalled To Say I Love You’ – a Coopers tradition now upheld by Losers.

Our splitter van had three seats at the front, six in the middle and a useful double bed behind them, over the gear. The bed proved useful pretty quickly, as not long into France, and shortly after entertaining us all by adeptly filling a water bottle full of wee, ‘Dumb And Dumber’ style, Tommy passed out for a few hours in it. The bed, not the wee. The loss of consciousness was understandable. The wine box had long gone, several ciders had been partaken and chased with Jagermeister.

Despite the astonishing intake of what is, let us not forget, a toxic substance, Tommy still managed to soundcheck professionally, carry on drinking steadily, and play a note perfect gig in a huge venue, Le Confort Moderne, in this lovely city.

The response from the French crowd was really strong. We played our first foreign gig here a couple of years back, before Camilla had joined us on drums, and the feedback was rapturous. The French, it seems, really GET us.

I had so much work to do that I was getting my head down in X-posure playlists and show format clocks in every spare moment, so I disappeared back to our hotel afterwards, while the band, Fisher and friends carried on drinking for what would turn out to be a solid 27 hours.

At the Britannia Hotel, the reality of band touring sunk in. You get spoiled as a DJ, you travel in style, on jets, you get picked up, fed high quality restaurant fare and helped at every juncture, and you stay in nice hotels. With a band, unless you’re a BIG band, you’re lucky enough to even GET a hotel. And if you do, it’ll be a pikey little fleahole akin to a guest house in Skegness. My shower closet, I won’t dignify it by calling it a bathroom, was covered in mock cork. Yes. MOCK cork tiling. In other words a cheap rendering of a cheap wall covering (beautifully pointed out by one of my Twitter followers).

Top of day two and we had roll on to Paris, to a venue called Nouveau Casino. I caught up with the previous night’s shenanigans, and worked out that Fisher had been drinking solidly for 27 hours and managed just a few hours sleep.

“How are you?” I enquired.

“I have felt better”, he politely and surprisingly chirpily replied.

We stopped at a Supermarket to get sustenance. Fisher’s breakfast was the breakfast of champions. If your champions happen to be Charles Bukowski or Charlie Sheen.

Fisher and Tom had forgotten sections of the previous evening, and needed to be reminded by somebody whose memory was less fried. I reminded them that Tom had chased Fisher down the main street in Poitiers with his cock out, attempting to urinate on him. There was a ‘tour name’ for this but I myself cannot remember, more from age and dementia than anything else. I think it was something like ‘the running man’.

Tourbus conversations were soon in full flow, many musos reading will know the ones I mean: ‘your favourite lyricist?’, ‘a spoonful of poo or a pint of wee?’, you know, the standards… Tom shunned this and went to bed in the van, having established, early on, a peripatetic existence, drinking, and sleeping a bit by day, drinking and performing a bit by night. He woke up on the outskirts of Paris, and the first thing he asked for was a beer, so he could start catching up with Fisher, who’d had something of a head start. It occurs to me that I still have no hard evidence that Fisher slept at all on the entire trip.

Our excellent crew’s forward thinking ensured we arrived at La Nouvelle Casino in good time, and as I helped load the gear in, I was really impressed with the club. It was a lot smaller than the Poitiers venue at 700 capacity, but so stylish, like a cross between a Mad Max villain’s lair and a posh chateaux. The walls were made up of rhomboid metal panels, with the overall effect of a cave or tunnel in an alien spaceship, but with massive crystal chandeliers hanging down over the bar.

The promoter gave us the bad news that because the venue would be so packed (it was Saturday night in a hip Parisian neighbourhood) we couldn’t load the gear out until after 6am. Ben and Paul, our amazing crew would earn their money that night.

I’d passed on several well wishing tweets from friends in other bands who’d played this great little venue before, so we were collectively pumped. It was a late show, 1am stage time, a timeslot I like, my body has adjusted to nightclub time over a decade ago, but Tom is nervous about late gigs as there is always the danger he may peak early.

He needn’t have worried. Once we’d rectified the slight hitch of losing the third Loser (Camilla, in a beautifully Spinal Tap fashion, got lost between the nearby hotel and the club) we played what was probably our best gig ever. The muscle memory that came with one gig and two soundchecks in close proximity made it tight, and the reaction of the heaving club was off the chart. Any band will feed off the audience and this crowd went nuts, so Tom reflected that, throwing mad shapes, writhing and cavorting more than I’d ever seen him do, even in his Cooper Temple Clause days.

45 minutes and several pints of sweat later, and the van became the scene of our afterparty. We were joined by a coterie of friends from a French band who we’d shared the bill with at our first ever French gig at Tignesfest, plus some random nice passers by. Our van attracted a crowd like a turd attracts bluebottles, and several drunk Parisians were successfully moved on either by one of our watchful crew, or, impressively, Tom’s girlfriend Abbie, who, as I left to go back and sleep at about 4am, was manhandling a guy who looked like he was one of the Sopranos.

The 6am load out became less of an issue, I discovered the next, glorious day, as everyone but boring, work obsessed me, was still up at dawn.

Our last date was Lille, in northern France, which came as a bit of a shock after the picturesque, chocolate box quality of Poitiers and the urban chic of the 11ieme Arrondisement de Paris. The venue looked a bit like a 1970s shopping mall, in a red brick neighbourhood that felt like the kind of council estate you wouldn’t want to find yourself in alone even in daylight hours. The kids looked feral as they scampered about, eyeing us suspiciously. We could see a man with an attack dog of some kind, a bit like a pit bull, but bigger and slightly more sinuous. It had the kind of face that shows no emotion, and the eyes of a great white shark. It looked like the kind of dog that knows what human testicles taste like.

We soundchecked in the cavernous hall, a bit like Brixton Academy but slightly smaller, then went for a few beers in the bar. By this time I’d broken the back of the X-posure shows so had my first pre-gig ale and relaxed a bit. The barman there reflected what we saw outside, as he made ham and cheese sandwiches with less love than a spite fuck with someone who ran over your dog.

Thankfully, the catering backstage was more typical of the greatest gastronomic country in the world, and we’d managed to sneak Fisher, Monty, Jim and Abbie, our entire tour party, in as band/crew to line stomachs for another night’s hard playing and hard drinking.

The gig was odd. We were first on, really early, like 7.15pm, so not even the rush of the crowd’s first drink of the day had time to work its magic. They were consequently subdued during the songs, but it seems even this potentially disastrous scenario didn’t stop them from showing their appreciation; they were rapturous in between each song.

Early finish meant early relaxing and even I joined in this time. We found an open shop and I got a bottle of really good Beaujolais Nouveau for about half what it would have been at home.

I got Jim a bottle of stupendous trappist ale, at almost 10% alcohol content, to say thanks for the amazing pictures he’d been taking on the trip.

My overriding thought, as I hit the hay on night three, after annoying some poor random hotel room neighbour to the point of wall banging with our daft rock-band-on-tour antics, was an overwhelming sense of relief that Losers ‘French tour’ had been only three dates long. I talked to Tom and Fisher about this on the way home, as our best laid plans to fill the van with cheap wine were scuppered by Christian opening, or rather, closing hours on a Sunday.

I asked them how on earth they were able to deal with the punishing touring schedule in the Coopers, that could last for months at a time. They looked at each other and shook their heads in disbelief at the thought and confessed they would return as broken men. I asked if they could sustain this momentum over a long period or did they pace themselves? Interestingly they simultaneously said “tour-head!” They explained that was their band’s word to describe the state of mind they were in at that precise time. It usually takes three days to get your ‘tour-head’, they recalled. You drink solidly for three days then after that you slip into this special zone where you only need to get topped up at each venue.

So would you then have to do the three day thing after each day off, I wondered. Apparently not. They explained that on days off they’d all get completely shit-faced. When you’ve got ‘tour-head’, they said, and you take a day off, the lack of soundchecks and pre-gig kerfuffle just led to copious, often disastrous drinking sessions.

The lack of sleep alone would have killed me. I get shingles almost every time I miss a night’s sleep. I was shattered, and remember I’d hardly drank anything the entire trip, my god the others must have been putting a brave face on their already shell-shocked expressions. I think I’d have been hurling in some car park bush.

Soon afterwards Camilla told us this would be her last tour with us for the foreseeable future. Unfortunately for us, she is too good at her day job helping Festival Republic run smoothly, so with regret we will have to kiss goodbye to our dear friend and six foot blonde Losers mascot.

Luckily though, the brilliant Oceansize sadly split up recently, and happily for us, their drummer, Mark is up for filling Camilla’s shoes. We were about to announce a fourth member too, Craig, from White Belt Yellow Tag, is joining us as another useful all rounder, for further guitar, keyboards and vocals layer, to help with that epic layering we need. It’ll be sad not to have Camilla at the festivals but Tom did cheer me up by saying that Mark from Oceansize is, in his opinion, one of the best drummers in the UK. So, the live show will be progressing to a new level. The official press release is yet to go out, but it’s on my mind, so I’m letting you – my circle of trust – know about this first.

So next time you see Losers, we’ll be a four-piece. And with our second album three quarters done, there will be a lot of new material in the set. The two songs we’ve teased live already are going down better than anything in the set, so do come and check us out if you’re going to Glade, Rockness, Secret Garden Party or Bestival this year.

Happy summer and remember to www.drinkaware.co.uk!