Last chance to dance

Well, you've probably heard the sad news by now (if you haven't you really should go check the main part of the website, otherwise none of this is going to make any sense). Yes, it sucks. A lot of people have emailed me asking me to be more forthcoming on the reasons why we've taken this decision, and I wish I could help out here. But the fact of the matter is that our reasons are personal, rather than musical or professional, and as a band we've decided to exercise a certain degree of disgression here. To everyone that's said they're shocked, saddened, disappointed or gutted, I can only reply "me too".

What I can elaborate on is the issue of gratitude. Of course our first line of thanks was to the people who worked with and for us, often for less reward than is usual, and who believed in us and helped us get this far. We've become friends with these people and have and will thank them in person. This particular forum of communication is better suited to saying something to the "kids" (haha), the (I hate the word) "fans".

As I hope has been clear since day one of Million Dead, we've never been a band who wanted to erect an uncrossable barrier between ourselves and the people who come to our shows, buy our records and enjoy our music. I never wanted to be in a band like that. Call me a punk idealist (go on) but I still cling to the idea of being more equal with those who appreciate our music. At the end of the day most of you lot either play in bands or do something comparable with your lives, and it's equally valid. I'm happy to count a lot of friends among our "fans" - close friends, and people I know by name or by eye to just say hello to. So while we always maintained a healthy attitude of not giving a fuck what anyone thought of our music, that doesn't mean that we didn't spend a lot of time going "holy shit" at the extent of some people's appreciation of and dedication to what we do. You guys fucking rule.

I'm very glad that we have this final tour coming up. I know it's not as extensive as some of our past tours, and I know there are regions we're missing out (hell, there are vast tracts of the globe we never made it to). But it gives both us and you lot a last chance to dance, as it were. You'll probably be hearing from us all again soon, in some form or other, and you'll still have our albums to be scene about owning, but for now, come on down, mosh the fuck up and scream your fucking lungs out. See you on tour.

Some Kind Of Nonsense

We’re putting together a DVD at the moment, which is going to be out and about in the autumn. The tentative working title is “Schminstrument”. We’ve been working on the principle that we want to include as much as possible on the disc – not make it one of those lame one-gig-only DVDs where the special features include “song selection”. And nothing else. Ever devotees of the principle of value-for-money, we’ve been trying to gather up everything we think you’d want to see (and then some) and jamming it all onto one small piece of plastic.

In the course of all this, we’ve had to watch a lot of footage. And I mean A LOT of footage. Last weekend we collectively sat through around nine hours of MD-on-film, and quite a lot of that was on fast-forward. And that wasn’t quite all of it. As we now know from experience, there is a limit to the amount of footage of oneself that one can see before creeping insanity takes hold. But in the name of our fans, we soldiered on, and it’s all coming together nicely.

One of the interesting things for us (and for you guys too when it comes out, I hope) was seeing the amount that we’ve changed and developed as a band over time. We’re not being shy with this release – we’re including some footage from way back in the day – 2001 even – and it’s quite eye-opening. As well as the intriguing path of our musical evolution, there the haircuts. Oh my. For those of you who are recent converts to MD, there’s some horror in store here. There’s a distinct possibility that you may never think of us in quite the same way again after seeing this DVD.

We’re also including some commentary on the disc, which is going to be interesting to record. I for one have never been the type to turn on the commentaries on DVDs I own, so I’m not really sure what’s expected of these things. We’ve been assured that we’re going to the pub first to get limbered up, and I’m sure it’ll come naturally after that. Which brings me to my final thought for the day… As a close friend of mine commented after seeing some of the out-take footage we’re including from various tours, video shoots, studios etc., there may well be people out there who still think that we’re hardcore dedicated revolutionaries, living in a series of underground tunnels in Latin America, wearing berets and fighting the man day-in-day-out. “How disappointed they’ll be,” he mused, “to discover you’re a bunch of piss-heads.” Well, that’s not 100% fair, in my opinion, but then the object of the exercise is to document (schmocument?) more fully the band that we really are… Just like Metallica did in Some Kind Of Monster. Whoops.

A couple of things

It’s been an eventful few weeks for everyone recently, and various little blog updates that I was going to do keep being made to seem a little redundant just before I get round to doing them by something else happening. So in the end I’m using this update as a general dump for things I was going to say another time. Lack of focus? Bite me.

We went back to Italy for a one-off show in Senigalia the week after the debacle. It actually went pretty smoothly for once – I guess that’s Karma. We flew in on Saturday morning, having got up in London at some ungodly hour, and were met by a completely insane Italian guy called Nooz (pronounced rather too much like “Nuts” - he sent us the attached, rather disturbing picture). He was very nice and looked after us well, but revelled rather too much in teaching us super-offensive Italian swear words and hitting on Julia in an only half-joking kind of way. We had some lunch, chilled out at the hotel, and had a soundcheck. The show went well, although my use of the phrase “porco dio” onstage was met with rather less humour than I’d been expecting – apparently it’s about the most offensive thing you can say in Italian. Oh well… afterwards we got shitfaced and then flew home with hangovers.

Since then we’ve been out in the UK with Finch. This was great – they bucked a trend by being a genuinely really nice American band, and won us over by covering a Faith No More song. I think we won a lot of new friends on the tour – howdy! – and generally had a good time. There was one mishap in Bristol, on the first date of the tour – a genial MD fan challenged Ben to an arm-wrestle after our set, when he was minding the merch-stand. Ben, ever the gent, accepted the offer, and then proceeded to BREAK HIS ARM (not on purpose, you understand). We were actually quite impressed. Of course, we also felt bad for the guy – apparently he’s having metal plates put in his arm, which sucks – but even he has to concede it’s pretty insane.

And then of course there was last Thursday. We were en route from Glasgow to Portsmouth (what cunt booked that?) when it happened, so we were all safe, if a little scared and confused by the media coverage. As far as we know, all our nearest and dearest were fine, even though (being, on the whole, North Londoners) it happened in an area that we and our friends travel through every day. Anyways, personally I’ve been avoiding London since the attacks happened, enjoying a bit of a break down in Winchester. It was probably bound to happen, and I think that extension of anti-Terrorism laws in the aftermath of this is nonsensical, but it’s still been a big shock.

Italy Ho!

Ah, Europe. As many of you may know, as much as we love the UK we’ve been itching to expand abroad for some time now, so when the news came through that we’d got a string of shows in Italy supporting Sick Of It All we were pretty stoked (see post below…). We set out from our north London rehearsal studio on a Wednesday morning. Even at this stage, though, there was an evil portent; our van somehow wasn’t quite right… Jamie, our driver, assured us that the “Nightmare Visions” logo on the bonnet was actually “cool”, but we weren’t so sure.

We motored down the highway, wind blowing in our hair, to Dijon in central France where we spent the night in a cheap hotel, before setting off on Thursday morning for Torino. We drove through the Alps – see picture – discovering in the process that our van didn’t like hills much. Seeing as we were passing through, we thought it only polite to get lost in Geneva for a while. Then we thought "hey, why not go through an alp?" and hit the Mont Blanc tunnel. Finally, we arrived at the festival site, where we discovered that it really was called “ChicoBum Fest”. We hadn't really believed it till we saw it. Much hilarity ensued.

We played the show (though we were on very early) and all was well. We watched the other bands of the night – Amen, SOIA (who were truly awesome) and Linea77 – then hung around the festival site while Jamie and Colm (our sound-guy) got lost in town trying to find the hotel. When we did eventually get there it was pretty plush, and we set off on Friday morning for Milano after a much-needed sleep and a hearty Italian breakfast.

It was en route from Torino to Milano that we started smelling diesel in the van. A lot of diesel. Smoke pouring out from under the bonnet diesel. We pulled in to the side of the road and the crew (Jamie and Colm) had a look under the hood (see picture and note MD crew uniform – black shorts, wallet chains, no shirts etc.). There was indeed diesel everywhere, coming from what seemed to be a fault in the fuel pipe. We patched up as best we could and set out again, the van just about making it to the site of the next gig. Here we found someone who knew a mechanic, and we got the parts to get a new fuel pipe together. All seemed well. We played the show – a better gig than the night before – hung around, watched Amen again, and then set out to find our hotel for the night.

We had booked a hotel for the night in “Morimondo”. The quote-marks are apropos of the fact that we never could find the fucking place, but it was while trawling around back roads looking for it that the diesel smell came back, and at midnight on a Friday night the van gave up the ghost. After some investigation we found out that the fuel pump itself was knackered. Shit. The next development was to find out that for reasons we have yet to fathom, our European Roadside Assistance plan didn’t cover us in… Europe. Go figure. After frantic phone calls to our Italian label guy Stefano, we managed to get towed (at extortionate rates) to a hotel, and then the van was taken to the nearest garage and left outside. In the morning, the man from the garage concurred that the pump was dead, but said nothing could be done till Monday morning. It then dawned on us how fucked we were – the last Italian show had to be cancelled, as did our Bukandskit appearance. We were not happy campers. On top of this, we hadn’t budgeted for 3 more nights in hotels, we didn’t speak Italian, and it just happened to be the hottest weekend so far this year. Our mood was not exactly Euphoric.

The next few days were spent killing time. We took it in shifts to be in the Hotel Visconteo in the small town of Binasco, or in the van in the smaller town of Zibido. The former generally meant watching Italian MTV, while the latter meant sleeping in an oven and drinking ‘Hell Bier’ (pictured). It was dull, it was frustrating, and it was expensive. The only highlight was on the Sunday evening, when Colm and I had a little adventure. We’d run out of weed and wanted to get some more, but obviously didn’t know where to go in a tiny Italian town on a Sunday night. We then had the brilliant (and Hell-Bier-inspired) idea of asking the hookers standing out on the highway if they knew where we could go. Rock and roll! We never did get to go through the phrasebook with them, however, as we ran into some kids in town (bizarrely enough they were MD fans) who sorted us out and even took us to a bar with their friends where we got drunk and tried to learn some Italian.

Monday morning, thankfully, brought a brand-new fuel pump, and we finally bid farewell to Zibido and started for home. We spent the night in Saint Quentin, and took a ferry back to Dover on Tuesday afternoon. We unloaded at the rehearsal space, and got home at about 7pm – a good two days later than we should have done, and a couple of thousand pounds in the hole to boot. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the true story of our first Italian tour, and the reason why we couldn’t make Bukandskit. We were pretty gutted about that, not least because we heard it was a great day. This whole thing has been filed under “will laugh about it one day”. We did also get to play with and meet SOIA, so all is not lost. Next time we go to Europe, we’ll be taking a better van, methinks…

"Sitting round at home..."

We finished our last batch of touring a week ago today. At the time we were pretty exhausted, and not at all unhappy to be heading home for hot showers and beds that weren't on wheels. But, as predicted, it took precisely 2 and a half days before we were all wishing we were out on the road again. A little rest is all we needed, and now we've had it we're back to twiddling our thumbs. Given the amount of UK dates we've done so far this year, we're only going to one more short tour here this year, probably in October. And festivals, of course, which are going to rule - especially Reading / Leeds. Those of you who know our whole saga on that one can thank the great Mike Davies for getting us on the bill - all props to Mike.

So anyhoo, for the time being, attention is being turned to Europe. And the great news is we have some dates in Italy coming up with Sick Of It All. You may be able to guess what I'm going to say next from the post about Agnostic Front below - FUCKING YES!!! I've seen this band countless times; "Scratch The Surface" was one of the albums that got me into hardcore. They are legends in their own right. And we're playing with them. Brilliant.

Album reflections

The album has been out for almost a week now. In the first 2 days of release, we sold over 1,000 copies, which by anyone's standards is fucking great. The reviews came in a while back, and while we read them with interest, they essentially only ever represent one person's opinion, and the politics behind them can be byzantine. Not that I'm making excuses for bad reviews - in fact, they've generally been great. But my point is that comments made by our fans on our forum, by email or at shows mean just as much as any review does.

One thing that I suppose I hadn't really thought about too much was the comparisons with 'A Song To Ruin'. Given that it was recorded in April 2003 by a different line-up, and that by then they were an already ageing collection of songs, they seem very old to us now (not that we don't enjoy playing them). In many ways the songs on 'Harmony No Harmony' feel like they're a million years away from that first record, and we hadn't given too much thought to people making comparisons between the two records. Of course, people have done just that, and it's interesting to see what people think. The time-gap between the two, having Tom in the band rather than Cameron, and our confidence in the new material I think led us all to not consider the possibility of some people being more into the old record. But it seems that there are a few people out there who genuinely feel that way (after you cut out the scenesters trying to look oldschool by liking the old material more). Our only response is to hope it grows on them - at the end of the day there's not much else we can do. It's just an interesting thing that I hand't really given too much thought to before the record came out.

We're definitely in a new era now. It feels fucking great to finally have the damn thing out there for people to love or hate as they see fit. People starting to sing along at gigs, people dancing to the new material... it's awesome. And we've also started writing new material already, so expect a follow-up sooner rather than later! Ah... this being in a band lark isn't all bad...

Homecoming

On December 18th 1997, two friends of mine and I decided to go up to London from Winchester to a gig. It was a bit of a gamble, in that the only experience we had of Agnostic Front at that time was the fact that Fear Factory had covered one of their songs. We were all big Fear Factory fans, so we thought it was worth a shot. None of us had any experience of punk or hardcore at that point, apart from maybe an album by the Sex Pistols or Rancid. The show was at the Highbury Garage.

Needless to say they absolutely tore our faces off, particularly mine, and that evening started my descent into obsession with punk and hardcore that has yet to let up. But the point of this little ramble down memory lane is more about the venue. After that occasion, I went to the Garage so many times I've completely lost count. I've seen every band in the universe play there, from AFI to Zeke. We've played there a few times before, and even headlined once in the past, but that doesn't dull the buzz. We played there last night, and it was an awesome evening. On top of the fun of playing, and having all our friends there to see us, it's still a massive deal for me to play on that stage, to think of all the people I've seen up there who I respect and love. It's a neat reminder of how lucky we are to be where we are, and how fucking much I love what I do. So props to anyone who came down, we had a blast, and keep working at it because you'll make it up there too.