Going on tour as an utterly unknown musician is like walking into the office next to your flat and holding an impromptu meeting. No one’s sure why you’re there, but, if you dress right, work the projector, and seem to know what you’re doing, for the most part they’ll go along with it. 

That’s why I wear formal attire on stage – it shows, at least, you intended to be there, that this is indeed an event, an evening wherein spontaneous clapping may occur. That and you never need to decide on what you’re wearing any given night.

So, I packed my suit, my guitar, and I left Berlin on a Flix train at 8.30am, with Flavie Mialon, my tour manager and opening act, on our way south.

13 hours later we were in Lille, France. We stayed with a local artiste named Angela, who was kind enough to offer her beautiful house to us for our stint there. 

It was a cottage in the back house of a block of flats, in a beautiful, central part of the city. 

A short walk from our cottage was the water. There, we played out first show on a boat. Our cello player accompanist, Ri Dunne Ward, fresh off a plane from Dublin to Brussels, and a connecting bus to Lille, arrived just in time to catch Flavie’s opening song. 

Flavie plays silky meloncholic music, having left France at 17, says her speaking Fraincais is rusty, though a native speaker, having not spoken English and Spanish more than anything else this past decade. 

The audience laps her up. 

Ri and I then go on to drown the audience in unceasing morauding waves of bass.

That’s the trouble with diy-ing your own independent tour, you’ll inevitably have to be your own sound technician, which, is tricky when your hands are full playing your instrument.

Occasionally, you’ll know you sound like crap, but, have nothing you do about it until finish your song and awkwardly twaddle off stage to go inspect the mixer. 

“Can you hear yourself?” I asked Ri half way through our first set.

“I can’t hear anything but bass.” She replied. 

So is the case with unruly sound systems, differing from venue to venue. We brought our own mixer to lessen the damage of having to wrangle an assortment of speakers, into, something resembling sound a band may emit, but, occasionally we still lost the battle.

There’s a direct correlation between good sound and good gigs – that, strangly enough, we only realised at the end of our time together in France. 

Turns out, we the makers or sound, rely heavily upon it to appear any good.

The best we ever sounded was completely unplugged in a chapel, playing for three people, the owner of the manner which housed us half way through out trip, alongside two spiritual seekers, who attended a Nepalian holy man’s service the previous days to our arrival. 

When Flavie saw his picture, her eyes dotted white, wetted, and she kept repeating “what is my life?” having realised she had spent time learning from the man in queston, and helping out at his school for orphans and run-aways in India.

Small word indeed. 

Those synchronisations are all over the place when you’re going from place to place. You realise coincidence is too small a word, a shoddy excuse for the strangeness that is living. When things start rhyming, it’s hard not ot look for reason behind. Particularly if you’re a songwriter, who rhymes only with reason in mind – but, knows the true golden stuff comes deep out of reach from the conscious part of you. The subconscious is the true writer. But, like a dream, sometimes you wake from your trance, moved, but at a loss for knowing why. That doesn’t mean there’s no truth to it. Seems to me synchronicities speak to something similar.  

The small chapel was nestled amid painfully gorgeous gardens, stone ruins, and farmland, enclaves of stone hovels for sleep or prayer, adorned with images of more holy men, and candles.

Flavie only booked beautiful places, deciding to keep off the toll-laden motorways in favour of rural communities, which still cater to culture throughout France, with unmatched food, warmth and welcomes. 

Often, we’d travel 8 hours in a day, curated songs from Ri’s playlists, or desert island discs I’d sworn were gold – particularly fitting when the driving got laborsome, Flavie was the sole license holding driver on the trip, talking seems to perk up the mind over songs which can lull you in, if you’re not careful. 

Before we’d arrive at out venue, Flavie would get us to a lake or the shore, or a river to swim – it being France in July, after all, the weather was with us, more often than not. Nothing eases the lower back, or loosens the muscles, tightened in hot tin cars, than a picturesque dip in the cool waters, hearing the light flow of French singing and lightly played acoustic guitars.

In Brittany we found a cove, and ran bare to the bone into the waiting waves, climbing the rock face back to he car, barefooted. That’ll restore any strain left in you. Can’t recommend highly enough for weary travelers.

Try it at once!

Brittany was the most beautiful destination of the trip. We played a venue called La Pave in a town so like Galway it was uncanny. Galway’s where I first learned to preform, busking on Quay Streey, The only decipherable difference to a deaf ear, being the dress and the the fact people genuinely carried bunches of baguettes, and for good reason, once you sank you teeth into them.

Nothing like it.

Everywhere we ate in France, be it a lidl carpark, sitting on curb between parked cars, so as to not mess our rental car, or being wined and dined before a show – the result was always spectacular. 

The Pave owners fired-cooked aubergine and rice, and brought a good bottle of red for the meal, and we sat outside listening to the laughing seagulls.

One of the best bottles I ever had.

All the sterotypes coming true.

Playing The Pave, our bellies, beautifully full – everything came together, the sound was impeccable, the crowd, though small, was eager, even for the darker stratum of of our set, the more experimental tunes, which where previously prone to prompting older generations to up in whole rows from their seats and vacate.

Here, though, our darker set rose a raucous applause.

They got it.

That’s the greatest feeling there is in original music, rather than singing covers everyone knows – when you play something you wrote, to a complete unknown and it lands.

Trying something strange to the ear is always a risk, but the pay-off is worth a sea of walk-outs, once it comes good.

An audience is forgiving for all that’s familiar, but for anything resembling something novel, they can be as ruthless.

They look at you like you trod on a puppy. 

If you don’t stick to the script, play pop, play what’s been heard a thousand times, seen and done, so indiscernible to what’s been, you’ll will get punished. But, those who’ve been starved for the new, the novel, will lap if off if you’re in right room. 

Problem is getting in. And, it grinds you down as a performer after a while.

Playing safe, singing only what pleases, due to its affiliation with what’s already been done to death – that eventually kills you too, creatively starving you out.

Like following trends, once you catch one, you’ll only ride so long before the whole wave collapses, and you’re out on your own, in the open water, with only sharks around you, those who solely propped you up for the crowds you brought. Fading, now they’ll just want to get their last bite in and go.

Doing what’s popular, following a sound that’s happening, rather than creating one that’s new and you, you’ll end up just training a certain muscle, relying on craft, crafting an image rather than creativity for its own sake.

I think there’s nothing more dangerous than that in art.

Bowie did too. Said “never play for the gallery”. But, a producer friend of mine, also said his colleague met with Bowie once, and in talks to produce with him, and all Bowie said to him was “I need a fucking hit”, so I dunno, take it with a pinch of salt, like everything you hear on the internet, including this hear-say.

Point is, when it all comes together, the crowd and the sound, it’s nothing short of paradise.

Best feeling on earth. Not just to be heard, to be understood, but to find comrades. To go on with, whether touring companions, band mates, or crowds, those who come along the way with you, make the journey into the great unknown – magnifique.

Merci France.

–

P.S.

I made it too Bern, Switzerland and played in a cellar venue, which charged tickets on the door, had a whole lighting rig, and fancy PA, the first stop of the tour with an actual backstage.

I played solo, as we weren’t sure we’d cover costs otherwise. A crowd came, I played two sets, and loved every second.

Keep going, I say, and you never know what’ll come good. No matter what you expect.

6/5/26

(Originally written in summer, 2024)