Foreigners in America. Episode 500

29 October 2010
2:30AM Central Africa Time


Right now I'm 11269 meters above some little spot of land in Ginuea. In 6 and half hours I'll be back in Africa, riding our little train into Sandton. It's hard to believe our tour of The States is over. Well actually what's a whole lot harder to believe was that I've just played 14 shows across America with one of my favourite bands this side of Sonic Youth. The past 3 weeks have been some of the best of my life - looking at this tour as a single endeavor it feels like it could be the most fulfilling thing I've ever done. Sitting on hundreds of photos, hours of footage, 14 shows and thousands of miles worth of memories, getting my head around how I'll start blogging about all this is totally daunting. There's also the question of how much of the "behind the scenes" I even want to get into. Honestly, if Jo Fo, Dan and I weren't so crazy about hanging out together each and ever day this tour could have been hell at times. And while some of the mishaps of our adventures would make for some pretty amusing reading, I wouldn't want to dwell much on anything to negative when talking about an experience that overall was overwhelmingly positive. But there were some major setbacks that made this tour a pretty damn trying at times. Most of these problems could be linked right back to the fact that there was virtually no budget for the tour. For a far more amusing and detailed explanation of why this was the case you should head here, but what it came down to was that, after producing 2 albums and several singles for a record label, Jo Fo were left high and dry when it came time to cash in on the touring budget the band were promised as part of their record contract. So with no lable support, to make the tour happen the band resorted to throwing a virtual garage sale, flogging old recordings, art and videos to raise enough money to cover tickets into Canada and out of America. So essentially, the tour was (in part) directly made possible by fans. The other parts of the "in part" pieces were the tour's sound engineer and tour manager Francis and Los Campesinos who basically forked out a bunch of money, just because they all love Jo Fo very much.

And of course, putting gas in our tank city to city, was the money made from selling t-shirts. So transforming human torsos into canvases for the art of Lewis Herriot in exchange for evil pieces of paper in exchange for dead dinosaur goo, 7 bodies crammed themselves into a tiny tin can and what happened was totally fucking beautiful.