In Birmingham we met up with Vivian Girls to give them their instrument for documenting their wild antics on their UK tour: a disposable camera. Standard. Ali guides you through their time spent sleeping on floors with some motherly love and affection.
The first thing Cassie and I did once we received our tour camera was go backstage and photograph ourselves in front of all the beer we were about to drink. Birmingham was a party night.
We spent the first half of our two week UK tour with our friends Veronica Falls. They are such an awesome band. This was us before having dinner together backstage at the Deaf Institute in Manchester.
That night we stayed with this awesome woman named Bernie. We stayed up drinking tea and listening to records. Her cat liked to sit on top of them.
Cassie after a shower with our host Bernie. Drinking tea, eating biscuits, talking about The Smiths. Just being generally very English.
We always forget to bring something on tour, and this time it was sleeping bags. Fortunately in Liverpool our friend Paul had a ton of blankets. Here I am making a blanket bed on his living room floor.
After Liverpool we had a day off to drive to Scotland. This was one of two sunny days we had the whole tour. The drive to Scotland is beautiful.
We stayed at our friends of friends, Paul and Esther’s house. They have two kids named Ronnie and Georgie. They made me read to them before bed and it was pretty much the cutest thing ever. We don’t get to hang out with enough babies on tour.
It turns out that English people are way thinner than Americans because we sold out of all of our small and medium shirts in the first week. We decided to sew the large and extra larges we had left into smalls using some floss and Katy’s Sex Vid t-shirt as a pattern. DIY is alive!
Cassie made us all dinner while Katy and I sewed up shirts and burned CD-Rs.
It seems that every tour we come up with a new catchphrase. This tour it was “in it to win it.” The night of our show in Newcastle Cassie was definitely “in it to win it.”
Cassie wound up drinking too much, threw up, then fell back down into it. Finding a washing machine was the first order of business the next day.
We ended our tour with two shows in London. Unfortunately the film ran out on photos of our soundcheck. Cassie tunes her guitar. The show went great, though there is no photographic evidence of it. The next night we played Hoxton Bar and Kitchen in Shoreditch and got to meet Kate Nash and Crystal Castles, which was also great. This was definitely our best UK tour to date and we’re happy we got to share it with you guys.
See you next time England and Scotland!