Airport friction ... touring has not always bred marital harmony between the Handsome Family's Brett and Rennie Sparks
Acclaimed duo the Handsome Family - described by Greil Marcus as "the Beatles of the folk world" - are about to embark on a British tour to promote new album, Last Days of Wonder. The alternating boredom and excitement of touring is much mythologised, but in the coming weeks the band's Rennie Sparks has agreed to let Culture Vulture know what it's really like.
Today, as she and husband Brett land at Heathrow, she shares some less than rosy memories of earlier tours...
Zurich Airport, 2001, scene of my worst touring nightmare... After eight weeks on the road my husband Brett and I were exhausted, angry and sunk down in the kind of paranoid depression that makes you feel like swerving your car into oncoming traffic just to find out if the other cars are really there.
Brett had taken to travelling in the back seat of our rental car with sunglasses and a wool cap hiding most of his face, his hands furiously gripping the armrests as if he expected we'd fly off into the air at any moment.
I had become obsessed with the idea that everyone in Germany was staring at me and had also briefly harboured the suspicion that a dressing room teapot in Manchester was mocking me with its very spout.
What is it about touring that wears you down? The lack of sleep? The constant forward motion? The surreal repetitions (every day a new place and new people, but everything else exactly the same)? Realistically, it's probably just not a long drive to Crazyland for either one of us.
And so we arrived at Zurich airport. We each had our own trolley, piled high with so many cases and bags we could barely see each other (yet still managed to continue our on-going argument about who was driving who insane).
We had to go down to the first floor to check-in, but the elevator was only big enough for one person and one cart. Brett took the first elevator. His parting words to me as the doors slid closed: "I can't live like this any more. No one can!"
I got into the next elevator and rode down to "0". No Brett. Was he so sick of me that he'd chosen to wander off into a strange city without passport or plane ticket rather than spend another minute at my side? Was he hiding in the milling crowd, snickering at the tears streaming down my face? By now I was sobbing loudly.
People averted their eyes and moved away as the wailing woman of Zurich wandered the airport searching for her lost love. Two hours later I gave up. I decided to get on the plane without him. I'd start a new life organised around never leaving home. I'd cover all my windows with aluminum foil. I'd shoot anyone who came to my door...
Then suddenly I had a single clear thought: I hadn't seen the airline's check-in desk anywhere on my endless sobbing turns around the airport. I was on the wrong floor.
Ten minutes later, when I rose up in the elevator from floor 0 to floor 1 - cursing European math and my puny American brain - there was Brett: wool cap pulled down to the brim of his sunglasses, hands gripping baggage cart tightly enough to make his arms tremble.
"Where the hell were you?" He barely had the strength to scream at me.
A delightful memory, yet we continue to put out new records and tour foreign lands. Gentle Reader, do not abandon me now. We have just arrived in Heathrow. We're arguing about how to pile the suitcases on our baggage trolley. Another tour begins...
