Jo Fo Euro. Day 11. Heidelberg, Germany

Jun and I have plans to wake up early and get some photos of beautiful Laussane.

But having fallen asleep so late I fail dismally and only meet Jun at the van at 9...

...before we all climb in and start the drive back to Germany.

Along the way I play Final Fantasy III on my DS, watch 30 Rock and animate ghosts floating over slo-mo landscapes of European countries we've passed through. Nestor safely delivers us to Heidelberg.

It's a really pretty town. Surrounded by mountains, it reminds me of Stellenbosch. Unfortunately, after driving through the city's lovely streets we find ourselves in what must be the most un-pretty part of it - a colossal construction site. According to the address this is where the venue should be, but there's nothing but this ugly wasteland and some half finished buildings. We sit around, confused for a few minutes. Then deiced to drive around the site and see if the venue is someplace close by. Eventually admit defeat, landing up in front of a seedy looking establishment called "Eroscenter 13". An elderly looking metal head on a bicycle drives up to us and flashes us a huge smile of metal teeth.

The dude turns out, not to be a retired James Bond villain, but instead our sound guy for the night. He directs us to the venue, which turns out to be a totally awesome old train station come live venue. It's huge.

Young Legionnaire, the band that will be supporting us on the rest of the tour, show up. They're a lovely gang of dudes (comprised of former members of Bloc Party, The Automatic and Yourcodenameis:Milo) and it's nice knowing they'll be with us for the rest of the tour.

We soundcheck, then go for a walk, hoping to see a bit more of the pretty town we drove past.

A half hour later we return defeated, only finding the constructions site, freeway and Eroscenter13 around us. We make ghosts for "You thought..." record artwork.

Eat delicious dinner and then start to worry about how few people seem to be showing up for the show. This worry turns out to be totally justified as 2 hours later Young Legionnaire start playing to 6 people. By the time we take over the situation isn't much better. We play to what has to be the least people I've ever performed in front of. Wether it's been with Kidofdoom, Johnny Neon or Eyes Like Mirrors, I've never slung Seafox over my shoulders for so few pairs of eyes to see my visuals.

I spend most of the show running around the empty hall of a venue, we kid around and honestly, just being able to make pictures to the sounds of The Foreigners makes me really happy regarless.

EURO TOUR 01

MANCHESTER!

WE ARE IN YOU!

We've had a super nice day in this city.

And now it's almost time for this show to start...

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.