S*T*U*F*F* Reloaded

Last year during the Air tour in the USA, I was discussing with JB & Nico the fact that Moon Safari was 10 years old in 2008. Its always easy to look at something like that and feel melancholy, retrospective, maybe slightly negative? For them, they’ve gone on to produce other great work; but Moon [...]

Back in London after what was really a most excellent tour. What a year - touring with Air… it sounds almost surreal to me to write that. Their music has been a massive inspiration and I’m now keen to get some more music going, having realised a few home truths about where I am happiest [...]

CONGRATULATIONS TO THE MOLE!!! My brother just had his first baby!! Baby Crista was born to Michael and Dasha in Cyprus this-morning, which is just the best news. For those that know the Mole, this may come as something of a shock, but there you go… He is ecstatic beyond anything I’ve ever known. Magic!
Some [...]

Such a long time since my last confession. Oops.
I managed to break two of my touring records yesterday and today:
1. The shortest stay in a hotel room, namely 7 minutes
2. The longest continuous drive - 18 hours on the tour bus, from Clermont-Ferrand in France to Bratislava in Slovakia.
By the end it seemed I [...]

OK, so you know I’m an Apple fan. So try and imagine the moment when, during lunch with Jonathan Ive, the designer of the iMac, iPod and all the beautiful magic of Apple, I said, looking at his iPhone - “Ah, an iPhone… I’ve been dying to have a play with one of those” to [...]

I got an email from Foy Vance today that just said “FOX CAKE (which is our pet way of saying “for f**k’s sake”) POST WILL YE” plus three hundred exclamation marks. After hosing myself, I decided to respond - with a great and unexpected riposte - by, eh, posting.
Yes it has been a long time. [...]

We’re climbing into the heavens on an Iberia Airlines jet. In the name of passenger comfort, some airline exec has asked his wife to put together a collection of her favourite easy-listening cover versions so that the poor folk travelling with Iberia get subjected to this musical drivel to the point of insanity. I mean, [...]

Foy’s album “Hope” is out today. Just Google “foy vance hope” and buy it. That’s an order. Not only is it full of drifting magic both soulful and shambolic, perfect and imperfect, light and colour that is rare these days, but the vocals are stunning, the playing has a touch we all dream of, and [...]

It was pretty much perfect. Getting out of the minibus to catch the midnight train to St. Petersburg, there was some Russian brass band music playing at the station in Moscow. The train is straight from a movie scene - Earl (Air drummer) and I are sharing a compartment at the end of a long [...]

So here I am, back in London. My garden is in full bloom and really beautiful. The mayhem of New York City seems a long time ago, as once again the strange accordion of time pushes and pulls its dusty old bellows pumping haunting melodies into my soul. The last post was definitely the low [...]

Every tour has a low point - this is it. We left Coachella festival in California on an extreme low - it was nothing short of a disaster… I can’t even go into it now, but it couldn’t have been worse, as gigs go. In front of such a huge crowd, it was so disappointing [...]

The lights of Las Vegas are starting to glow in the dusk. The blue MGM Grand is towering in the distance. There’s the Bellagio… planes flying in overhead, bringing the adventurers into this twisted adult Disneyland in the desert. Its one of the weirdest places I’ve ever been… nothing in my brain nor my heart [...]

We’ve just played a TV performance for “Canal Plus”, concluding the European phase of the tour. Strange, and an inevitable come-down after last night.
The final show proper, in La Cigale, was destined to be a highlight show, and it certainly lived up to its hype - the venue is so beautiful, and it was outrageously [...]

Every tour has to have a “worst show” - and it will be hard to beat the appalling nightmare that bestowed itself upon us last night. Something happened to JB’s midi controller which put all of his keyboards just shy of a quarter-tone sharp. The racket was hideous, from the very first notes of “Radian”. [...]

Flat landscape. A canal. A solitary wind generator gracefully turning in the sunshine. It must be Holland. I slept for a long long time… almost forcing myself to avoid facing the longest trip of the tour… a mammoth 14 hour drive from Milan to Amsterdam. In fact, as we left at 7pm last night, and [...]

Such a miserable day is not conduisive to taking long walks in Milan. The sky is a mottle of stained greys, rain hardly even having the energy to fall. I decided, looking at the map, that Stazione Centrale was close enough to venture towards, perhaps with the vague notion of picking up something to eat [...]

When your tour bus bathroom has a heated floor, crocodile-skin print wood-panelled walls and a porthole revealing a virtual aquarium, you just know things are going to be OK.
In the past, I have come to associate tour buses with the curious perfume of nicotine-infused cushions and portable toilet fluid, a foul and heady concotion [...]

I’m on the train from Edinburgh to Glasgow Queen Street. I can barely guess how many times I’ve made this journey in my life - way back in student days, a long time ago, it seems. I went to meet my mate Ian Hartley, from both those days and these, for some very fine sushi [...]

I’m going to try really hard to be disciplined about writing during the Air tour… which is now more than I bargained for in the beginning, in that they’ve asked me to stay on for the full world tour. It transpired to be a lot more complex gig than Leo or I had originally thought, [...]