Another date, another shed ... on tour with
the Handsome Family
Pursued by cold symptoms and contemptuous seagulls, and keeping company with Mr Queasy, Rennie Sparks of the Handsome Family still manages to enjoy herself as the band play the final dates of their UK tour
York, National Centre for Early Music On the way up to York we stop at a RoadChef. In the gift shop I purchase "Mr Queasy" - a package of three vomit bags and two moist towelettes. The back of the package has various pictures illustrating where Mr Queasy might be used: a Ferris wheel, a table full of overturned pill bottles, a speeding train... It's a beautiful old church we're playing in tonight and the light falling through the stained glass windows is breath-taking. As I'm singing, I imagine I'm dancing circles in the fading light with Mr Queasy.
Farndale, The Band Room The Band Room is way up in the Yorkshire Moors. Steve is worried about werewolves. I assure him that most likely he's already been bitten, having slept with his window open in York. There are fat pheasants eyeing us suspiciously from fence posts as we drive up the curving roads. I take a walk in the woods before the show and start crying a little bit. It's so nice to be somewhere outside the manmade world for a few minutes before soundcheck.
After the show we load our equipment out under a sky full of stars and there is nothing to hear save the whispering wind and the call of some night bird. In the morning there's a sheepdog rounding up cows on a green meadow outside my window.
Newcastle, Evolution Festival I have never been so cold while playing music before. We're playing an outdoor festival on a cold and rainy day with a whipping wind that cuts right through me so that my hands are shaking as I play the banjo.
Still, there are people here to see us. They're all wrapped up in parkas and wooly hats and clutching plastic pints of lager. I tell the crowd that my melodica is an ancient wolf-whistle that will gather all manner of wild dogs from the surrounding hillsides. Everyone laughs. I'm glad to be here.
Reading, South Street Arts Centre We're staying at a Travelodge along the M4. There are two fat geese sunning themselves in the muddy ditch outside my window and neither the cars whipping past on the highway, nor the wind full of dancing fast food wrappers, upsets them in the least. I wish I could be like them and just enjoy the sunlight on my dirty feathers. Instead I am washing my pantyhose in the sink.
Bristol, St. Georges What a beautiful place to play. We even have our own "clapper" - an enthusiastic stage manager who begins clapping wildly as we walk out on stage in order to get the audience to begin applauding. I am still sick and tonight my cold gets worse again so that I am swigging cough syrup on stage to keep my voice together. Ah, the gentle paranoia of too much cold medicine ...
Bridgwater, Arts Centre I actually start coughing on stage and can't stop. Luckily a double whisky helps get me through the rest of the show. There are enormous sea gulls in this town that have a strange laughing call. Can the entire town of birds be laughing at me?
Cheltenham, Wychwood Festival Well, there's no human sacrifice, no ritual bloodletting, no chanting of spells over smouldering mandrake root. But still - a fun time in a mellow, hippy sort of way. I tell the audience I am liable to burst into flames at any minute. I tell them I've been chosen as the festival sacrifice and that I will be tied to a stake at midnight and stoned with rocks. It took a lot of cough syrup and whisky to get me on stage. It's our last show and I'm tired. Later, in the CD signing tent, several people ask me what stage I'll be on at midnight. Oh, sweet innocence ...
Home One last curry in Hounslow then many hours packing and repacking and we are in the air again, leaving the land of green pastures behind.
Now I am home again in the burning brown desert, watching an endless red sunset. Time to do laundry and pet my cats.
