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  • Tour Blog Part Eight Kyoto

    Scott Hall had a beautiful wooden stage with a grand piano and Lirico records had organised for a hand made, wooden cased pa system to be moved in for the night.
     
    Feeling a little rusty because of it being a few weeks since our last tour, I practiced the songs in a little kitchen to the side of the stage- which served as our band room. It was a fun show and we saw several of our friends from Tokyo after the show which was great.
     
    The next morningI we were on the train to Kyoto for our show at Urbanguild with Sharon Van Etten.
     
    It takes about two and a bit hours and as the cities of Nagoya and Yokohama slipped by Kim and I found ourselves talking about the much explored but little understood art of song writing.
     
    It feels to me like there are two equally elusive sides to it- neither of which I feel like I have any claim on.
     
    First there is simply the question of writing memorable melodies, ones that -as only Nick Cave could say- ‘follow you around like a dark little child’. The songs that grab you in moments of your life and stalk you forever after.
     
    The second part of great song writing is the carving out of a style or form which is your own. You might be able to string together a couple of brilliantly melodic songs but that does not make you a defined artist. Being a defined artist is stamping something across an album or a series of albums which is unmistakably yours.
     
    It can go either way. I know bands and artists who I think have developed an unmistakable and coherent sound that they work with. But that doesn’t mean that their melodies follow me around. It doesn’t mean that I am especially moved by any of their songs. Conversely, I know bands who have written a great tune -or even several- but they haven’t yet discovered what they are doing. I don’t listen to them and immediately know it is them because of the uniqueness of their sound.
     
    Anyway, as I said, I find that a challenge and am always judging myself on those things- and feel as though I am coming up short.
     
    The encouraging thing playing in Kyoto was that Kim, Anthony and I all agreed that Sharon Van Etten had no shortage of either element. She had both an unmistakable sound and more than enough classic melodies to back it up. So I thoroughly recommend her record if you have the chance.
     
    So it was a little intimidating as she finished her set and we went up on the stage as the supposed headline act of the night. But the show was fun – Urbanguild is yet another impossibly retro chic Japanese indie venue and we met people from Osaka and Kyoto and even Okayama – who had come to the show (including an 18 month old girl who was sitting in the front row).
     
    Song writing is one of those intangible things where at one moment you can try your heart out and completely fail and then at another moment find something wonderful without trying at all.
     
    Strange.
     
    But perhaps there is a secret in there somewhere? If there is, I have a feeling that Sharon Van Etten knows it already.
    8:05 AM

  • Tour Blog Part 7 Tokyo

    It was a small wheeled Renault fold up bike.

    We found it in a corner bikeshop in central Shibuya in ....Tokyo..... Anthony was impressed. And also happened to have 39,500 yen in his pocket.

    A dangerous combination.

    In the end, wiser heads prevailed and Anthony didn’t buy the bike, but the bike shop made me ask a fundamental question. Why is it that in ....Japan.... bike shops can basically just stock normal bikes? They are not mountain bikes, or racing bikes, or off road bikes - they are just bikes. No flashy gears, just pedals, handlebars, wheels and a frame.

    In contrast, in ....Australia.... if you talk about wanting a bike most bike shop salespeople would look at you blankly. And eventually they would plead with you that you need at least 24 gears and some titanium light weight frame to make your riding experience satisfying. (Though Anthony tells me that in inner city ....Melbourne.... now there are some moves toward people riding plain old fashioned retro chic bicycles).

    Well I am thoroughly with ....Japan.... on this one. I reckon if we started to just see bikes as just bikes we would be better off. If bikes were something that can transport you over to your friend’s house or to university -as opposed to a high tech chariot that must take you toward triathlon or mountain climbing glory- then that would be a good thing for all.

    I guess it comes down to the fact that Japanese people –and especially Japanese women- can do retro chic with their eyes closed. They don’t need to be inner city hip kids – the entire country seems to have chic seeping out of it. I remember being up in the mountains of central Honshu a couple of years ago in the town of ....Matsumoto..... Certainly not a hub of fashion, but I reckon I saw the coolest, scarf wearing, gloved, retro bike riding grandma that I have ever seen. ....Japan.... has chic and has it in spades.

    Another reason why Japanese bike riders can glide around the streets with such grace is that helmets are not mandatory there (for push bike riding). In fact, as Anthony tells me, ....Australia.... was the first and only country to have mandatory helmet wearing. No other country has taken it on because it is a fundamentally flawed policy. Sure, in inner city ....Melbourne.... you should wear a bike helmets because it may save your life. But, making it mandatory in a whole country undermines bike riding as an easy form of exercise and transport. (Apparently the new hire bike initiative in ....Melbourne.... is not working because people don’t happen to carry around helmets with them wherever they go.)

    Sure a fraction of the population will have accidents and be worse off for not wearing a helmet, but if you take an overall population health outlook- there are many, many more people getting diabetes and heart disease and other things because they don’t do any exercise. The argument is that the health burden is higher by making helmets mandatory. Interesting.

    Anyway, that’s the argument that Anthony told me as we wandered through Shibuya on our first day in ....Tokyo..... That afternoon we made our way to the beautiful old Scott Hall....

    3:27 AM

  • Tour Blog Part 6 Shang Hai

    There were trees -thousands of them- in lines beside the railway line. And all of them had four little poles surrounding them holding them up.
     
    So while we were sitting on the train, Anthony -who happens to be studying landscape architecture- explained that these trees had all been transplanted to this area in the last couple of years. They were almost fully gown trees but apparently they can still be transplanted anyway (and it transforms the industrial landscape much faster than by planting seedlings). The only thing is that they need to have the supporting poles surrounding them to hold them up because their roots have not taken yet.
     
    The train ride from Nanjing to Shanghai seemed to take no time at all and in the front of the carriage – just to make us all feel safe- they had a screen with a speedometer, which from my recollection peaked at 330km/hr. So no wonder it didn’t take long.
     
    At one point in the tour Kim said that if you were going to be a full time touring musician –as opposed to part time amateurs like us- you would need to be fully committed to transportation. And he is right in that I reckon we spent an average of 5 or 6 hours a day in some form of transport- car, train, plane, bus.
     
    So it is a strange existence. There are some amazing parts of touring- some to do with music, like hearing hundreds of people sing along to a song that you write in your living room a couple of years before or meeting people who say bought your album four years ago and have listened to it every day since. But the best parts have nothing to do with music- and are more about being with your friends in different amazing cities. Walking around –even for a couple of hours- and seeing forty people from the African community of Nanjing eating chips at Burger King or the having someone translate the plaque at the Forbidden City for you or meeting some kids from an amazing new media company in central Beijing.
     
    The downside is the logistics. Shuttling from train to plane to taxi and then trying to work out why there is no sound engineer at the venue or why the projector is not working. If it was just about the logistics, it would be a mind numbing job to do. As in reality most of the day is taken up with getting to places and then setting up equipment. That makes me think two things. First, all credit goes to the people in the industry- in this case Diyana and Jennifer from Pocket Music- who manage the incredibly difficult web of arrangements. The second thing is feeling sceptical about the quality of art coming from artists who tour full time. In general, touring is a strange and transient existence. If that was one’s entire life, you would end up writing songs railing against sound engineers who don’t turn up. Real life and real community are far more interesting material for art.
     
    My theory is – that is why so many bands put out great first albums and then rubbish second ones. They spend time in the own homes and in their own communities writing a bunch of great songs. Then they get famous and end up touring all the time. So they write a mediocre second album based on their time spent sitting on airports and trains in a hundred different cities. Maybe it doesn’t always work that way- but I suspect that in general a life of full time touring is not good for art.
     
    So there are amazing parts of touring and also downsides. But Shanghai was certainly one of the highlights for us. We played in a new and high ceilinged venue which was- apparently ironically- called “Mao”.
     
    The show was fun. Kim and Anthony and I felt as though we finally were able to play in time together. I was able to offer the rest of our backstage jiao tse dumplings to some people in the crowd which I think made them happy – as afterwards they got me to sign the jiao tse box (I refused to sign the dumplings themselves).
     
    After the show we met a guy who had flown from two hours away (I can’t remember which city he was from)- travelled on the train and taxis to make it to the venue only to hear the last couple of songs. He was pretty handy on the guitar so we all sat on the stairs with him after the show and sang some songs together.
     
    I could only open my eyes half way during the trip to the airport at six am the following morning. We realised too late that we had accidentally gone to the wrong Shanghai international airport- there are two and they are on opposite sides of the city. But remarkably the driver wound his way through the morning traffic and I just managed to catch my plane home.
     
    But as we drove full circle around the city I wondered whether Shanghai is a bit like a city transplanted. It is a young city (only growing in the late 19th century) but is also a global city. It doesn’t have the historical roots of Nanjing or Beijing but is now the biggest city in China – growing all the time in the numbers of people and buildings but also in its global importance. I don’t know whether Shanghai people feel their city needs four little poles – like the trees on the Nanjing-Shanghai railway line- to hold it up as it grows ? Or whether it now has its own roots?
     
    Whatever the case – we all agreed that next time we needed more than 20 hours in Shanghai.
    2:49 PM
    • Post a comment...
      • Alexmade Whiter

        Welcome to china !I'v just bought yr new album. That's amazing :)right? I listen to your songs since i was just a little boy. Now i'm 16And i'll support you all the time .thanks for your songs with warm voice. This winter.you are being there. :-)

        1 year ago

  • Tour Blog Part 5 Nan Jing

     It was a pretty sobering start to the day.
     
    After some spicy hot pot for breakfast in central Nanjing, we spent the morning at the Memorial for the War and Occupation of Nanjing in 1937. It was a very sobering experience –in fact it was one of the most moving memorials I have been to- and the only comparison I have is with the Hiroshima Atom Bomb museum which I visited a few years ago.
     
    The most haunting image I saw was a bronze statue of a small baby crying on the breast of its dead mother. The baby’s tears, the mother’s milk and the blood had frozen together in the winter weather.
     
    The rest of the images were equally hard hitting so -as you can imagine- the rest of the day as we were setting up for the show, we were feeling a bit preoccupied.
     
    For the rest of the day I kept dwelling on one question. What does a horrific experience (like what happened in Nanjing) compel people or a country to do next?
     
    One theme in the memorial was about the need to look toward peace in the future. And to remind ourselves that this kind of thing should never happen again....anywhere...ever.
     
    But there seemed to be another theme which took this further and said that- in order to prevent this kind of thing from happening again- we need to ‘revitalise the nation’ and ‘make it strong again’. I am not sure if I got it right and there may have been some translation errors but I started to wonder whether that really is the answer?
     
    I wrote a song a few years ago called ‘Signs I Can’t Read’ which was partly about the situation in Myanmar. One of the key ideas I had was about the futility of trying to use force to bring meaningful peace in a country. Can we increase the size of armies and the number of guns – in the name of trying to bring peace? Perhaps soldiers and guns can bring ‘security’ – but can they bring peace? And can they bring the kind of reconciliation that is required for these kinds of things to never happen again?
     
    So I was not so sure about the idea of fostering genuine peace through ‘making the nation strong’. ‘Revitalising’ China (or Myanmar or Australia) is a good thing - but building a nation is not the same thing as building peace.
     
    The most genuinely encouraging thing about the morning was something I found on a small plaque near the final peace monument in the Nanjing Memorial. It told the story of a Japanese soldier who had been in Nanjing in 1937. At the time he had collected some seeds from one the hills near the city and when he had returned to Japan after the War he had planted the seeds and grown some beautiful small trees at his home. A few years ago, when he was an old man, he was compelled to go back to Nanjing and plant some of the same trees at the site of the Memorial. I thought it was an amazing statement of reconciliation that someone who was involved with this horrific tragedy could come back to the same place decades later to say sorry and bring a gift that was meaningful to him.
     
    At the risk of sounding like some hippy folk musician who is harping on about peace- I want to say one final thing.
     
    How are we going to stop these kinds of atrocities from happening in the future? It seems to me that the act of reconciliation from that one old Japanese man in planting trees at the Nanjing memorial will do more for world peace (and especially for peace in Asia) than a thousand soldiers with a thousand guns. Nation building can be a good thing but it is a dangerous platform from which to talk about peace.
    2:48 PM

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