Brain Tales (#3 in a series.)

 

 

Lets give Martin credit here...his unwavering commitment to his art was stunning. I could never match him for that. Quite how he managed to get us a trip to the USA I will never know. He spent hours on the phone, arranging gigs, visas and the like and eventually we were on our way. The night before we left on our first tour we decided to stay up all night believing that it would help deal with the jet lag! In actual fact that was just an excuse to take loads of speed and go to the all night cinema in London and watch Charles Bronson films. It was great, violence on screen and violence in the cinema as numerous fights broke out amongst the crowd. We sat and watched, for once not getting involved. It was like watching the screen fights in 3D! 5 films later, we came out into the morning gloom and hitched a ride in the front cab of a tube train. God knows how we did that. Would you let four drug crazed young punks into the front of your train?

On the flight over, we drank all our duty free whiskey before we landed and so hit the New York streets pissed as rats and we stayed that way for the next two weeks.

Our forays to the USA were always going to be eventful. Two near alcoholics on free booze was a disaster waiting to happen, and it usually did. The drinks rider was generous for three people to say the least. We ended up in hospital several times. We thought that all our medical bills were covered on insurance, after all, we had paid a "manager" to sort it all out giving him a couple of hundred pounds to do so. It turned out he never bought any insurance at all and had pocketed the money. The first in a long line of cunts that I met on the way. After returning from that trip, Martin and I received medical bills for months afterwards as the hospital tried to reclaim their costs, We never paid up.

The two most serious injuries were when Martin got smashed in the face with a beer bottle, a full on pitch from the crowd at short distance. The glass shattered on his head causing a vicious deep cut, and the broken glass cut me and put shards of glass in my eyes. Could have been really nasty, but we still came back on for the encore, covered in blood. The second incident was when Martin got his head kicked in at the Rat club in Boston at our end of tour party. Martin had been winding the band up by pulling the singers microphone cable while he was on stage and generally being a drunk twat. On his later visit to the toilets his head was smashed into the wall while in mid piss and retribution was handed out in the form of a broken jaw. Martin came back out with a face like a football. On the flight home next day, he could hardly talk and could only suck his airplane food  through a straw. After that, we always went into bogs in pairs. It never occurred to us that acting like pricks might be the reason for all the trouble!!

Getting pissed so much, fighting, no security, seedy hotels, dangerous equipment, drugs, dirty women, it all happened in true rock 'n roll style, dunno quite how we survived it all!!