Day 8 – Edinburgh. I spent part of last summer here, performing Paradoxical Undressing at the Fringe Festival. MJ, the show’s stage manager, meets us at Cabaret Voltaire (fun fact: there are 8 stories of subterranean apartments below the club) so we can catch up over dinner in the Thai restaurant where a waitress once asked us, “How are you? Sweaty and crying?” I love that place. I ask people if they’re sweaty and crying all the time now.
Our favorite friendly Viking, Olaf Furniss, shows up right before set time and Billy blanches, as he rarely survives an evening with Olaf and his hip flask of mescal. We agree to meet for coffee in the morning rather than making a night of it; Billy exhales.
Day 9 – Travel day. After coffee with Olaf, we drag Ethical Paul to Thirsk so we can take pictures of James Herriot’s surgery and have a beer at his favorite bar. We’re Yorkshire-geeked, Paul is bemused, but drinks his beer politely. Then we drive to the B & B we’ve booked for the night, hoping it comes with a wacky old lady who could be our temporary grandma. It does. It also comes with a nuclear power plant.
We thought Butlins was weird! This is even more post-apocolyptic. We wonder if the combination of the tremendous heat in the B & B and radiation have given our new grandma tentacles, or something even cooler, like super powers. Then she tells us that she trips on mole hills, which could happen to someone with tentacles, but probably not someone with super powers.
Day 10 – York. Granny Nuke thinks we’re staying 2 nights and no one wants to hurt her feelings, so we don’t check out, we just spend the day wandering around York, calling the club every couple of hours to see if they’ll let us in. Eventually, someone feels sorry for us and unlocks the door. It smells like a mushroom farm in the dressing room, but the people are lovely.
We swap out the sweet-as-pie “Welsh hobo” opener, Chris Rees, for keening local, Chris Helme, fresh from a train tour (“are you a hobo?” I ask him). He’s great. Then I play way up high on a stage upon a stage. I actually bump my head on the rigging. Three encores; the audience is super swell.
We pack up, settle up, load out, then back to Granny Nuke’s.
Day 11 – I spend the morning catching rabbits. Well, trying to. British rabbits are faster than ours, I think. Saying goodbye to our temporary grandma is harder than we thought it’d be. We’re all a little worried about leaving her there in the shadow of the cooling towers.
We drive to Lancaster, a beautiful town. Everything there is made of stone except the trees. My old friends Patrick and Karl meet me at the pub across the street from the venue and tell me that they’re getting married. I’m thrilled; I actually well up (I swear I’m not a girl). Before I can congratulate them, a scalper interrupts to ask if I want to buy tickets to the Kristin Hersh show.
Day 12 – Burnley. Get to meet the amazing Fin, a young Toby Snax fan who is recovering from brain surgery. He is precious and bright and working so hard right now. Fin brings gifts: a sparkly pine cone, a homemade card, birthday candles. I well up again (maybe I am a girl). I sign his book and draw him a picture of Toby. I wish I had more to offer this brave little boy.
Tonight’s show is in a library as part of the Get It Loud in Libraries series. I was really looking forward to reading some books tonight (I can never bring enough books on tour) but the improvised dressing room is in the large print true crime section. Billy smuggles in a gardening book and I make do with that. Burnley Library is a beautiful venue with perfect sound – packed, yet casual. This series is a great idea.
Day 13 – Travel day. I ask my Twitter pals for a scenic drive to Norwich and they send us through the Peak district. Lordy, it’s nice. “This is pretty fuckin’ quaint,” says Billy and I have to agree.
We get to our hotel early enough to have Ethical Paul over for a couple of episodes of “Jeeves and Wooster.” Anglophilin’ out.
Day 14 – Norwich. All I knew about Norwich before today was the British TV series “I’m Alan Partridge,” a brilliant piece of squirmy pain.
The Norwich we drive to has nothing to do with squirmy pain, however. I’ve heard that I’m playing in a church that’s been converted to an arts center, so we pull up at a church that’s been converted to an arts center, but there’s no Kristin Hersh show scheduled. We notice another church a few doors down, one that appears to have been converted to an arts center, and wonder at the coincidence. “That’s gotta be the venue,” says Billy. It’s not.
“Try down the block,” they suggest. We keep walking until we find another church that’s been converted to an arts center, but they’ve never heard of me either. The fourth converted church we come to is where the show is.
As if Alan Partridge wasn’t cool enough. This town literally worships art. Wicked.
Love,
Kristin
50FOOTWAVE
books
Kristin Hersh
Paradoxical Undressing
Throwing Muses
Ha! Yeah, I think Norwich has more pre-Renaissance churches than anywhere else in Europe. Not much God worshipping goes on, so a lot of them have been converted to other uses, like a puppet theatre, a scout shop and a world of arts centres.
I used to work as a tour guide on top of an open double decker bus in the city, and we would drive down the arts centre street with me at the front of the bus, facing the passengers and pointing out and naming all the churches. There are so many on that one street on either side that it was like doing some kind of temple dance, with microphone (pointing left, “here is the church of St Lawrence”, swap mic and point right “and the church of St…”, swap mic and gesture left, “and the church of st….”. Happy days!
I had a friend who went to UEA to do a PhD in art history. To study the Puiset? Bible in Durham Cathedral – which scriptorium, etc. I decide to visit. I fly out of Toronto on a Sunday afternoon, and make the mistake of having 2 small glasses of wine (to sleep, you understand) and get the WORST altitude/alcohol headache ever. I land at Stanstead at 2:30? AM, where the only question I’m asked is if I’m bringing alcohol in (smuggling booze FROM Canada TO the UK?). The lights are out and I wait on a hard plastic chair until 6AM, when I catch the shuttle to the train into Liverpool Station (prob should have gone up to Cambridge -but whatever). It’s the Monday morning commute and I’m face into the glass on the train with my duffle. British Rail hadn’t finished repairs on a section of track, so we’re dumped into the parking lot behind a pub to watch the sun rise. The coaches come and we get on, and are delivered not into the city but to the exact spot the rails are working and get on another train. I finally get into Liverpool, buy a bacon and egg sandwich from a Portugese guy for two pounds. I then get on the train to Norwich and arrive around 10AM exhausted with a still pounding head. I have my friend’s phone number but not his office
phone (no mobiles then). I find my way to UEA but can’t find him. I go back to town and start trying to find addresses I have where my bank card will work, and my friend‘s house. I get a little tourist map that, among other things, lists the Cathedral. Norwich is an old cathedral town built in a spiral, so I try to find streets with the map and common sense navigation with the sun and the Cathedral spire. I spend all afternoon with my pounding skull constantly turning and wondering “how can the spire be over THERE now?” and putting it down to my mental state. I eventually give this up when it gets dark and sit in a pub. At 9:30 I finally get him on the phone at home. He laughs his guts out – he tells me that there was a 50 year period when Norwich went wild and built about 300 churches , all of which would be considered cathedrals by someone from Saskatchewan. At this, I spend the money on a taxi to be taken safely to his door (ironically, the taxi driver wants me to explain “blocks” to him “like he sees on telly” – he must have been taking the piss surely?). I get to my friend’s place not having slept for 30 hours, with my head still going hammer and tongs having endured an entirely natural psychedelic experience. He opens the door and I essentially fall over the threshold. That’s what Norwich churches did for me.
Yeah, building our cities on spirals = we don’t have blocks
I hope you recovered and got to see a bit more of the city, without a headache.
It was all good – no worries. It was my one time in Norwich, but one of many in the UK (my dad is from there). It just strikes me that this taxi driver must have never left Norwich? It’s not like blocks are exclusively North American…
Nah, we don’t actually have blocks in the UK, funnily enough. Most villages, towns and cities are too old to have had town planners when they evolved. Wonder where else?
I guess I never think of it when there – but I presumed some 60s council flats in some planned suburb, or something? nowhere – I’ll have to digest this
will there by a final part of the tour diary? i would love to read about your impressions while being ‘four days in Spain, spooky Spain’ and about how it felt playing the Primavera Sound gig.