Rock and Hard Places (17 page)

I occasionally bump into Max, The Serious Road Trip’s photographer, while wandering the London Borough of Hackney, where we both live. He remains a decent chap, for a Kiwi (this wholly gratuitous barb inserted by way of demonstration that we peoples of the South Seas are as prone to the internecine conflict fuelled by the narcissism of minor difference as the denizens of the Balkans, and of Tyneside).

THE VAN PARKED outside the rental office in King’s Cross is a battered white Iveco that appears to be held together by rust and gaffer tape. The legend “Midnight Flyer” is written in purple above the front passenger door, indicating either that this van cut rather more of a dash in its heyday, or that a previous owner possessed an overdeveloped sense of irony. My first thought is that we’ve got roughly as much chance of flying it to the moon as we have of getting it, and us, to Sarajevo and back in one piece. In fact, I’m prepared to offer decent odds against it getting around the next corner without losing a wheel.

There is a simple reason why we’ve had this four-wheeled cousin of the Raft of the Medusa foisted upon us.

“I told them where we were taking it,” explains Phil Barton.

Phil is the manager of Newcastle rock group China Drum. When Phil first spoke to me about this trip his band were planning, some weeks ago now, there was no mention of decrepit rattletraps with
cracked windows and—oh, this is reassuring—a side door that won’t open from the inside. The idea was that China Drum were going to travel to the former Yugoslavia in style, in a Hercules cargo aircraft belonging to the Royal Air Force. The plan was that they would play one show for British troops stationed in the Croatian port of Split, another for the peacekeepers serving with the NATO-led United Nations Implementation Force (IFOR) in Sarajevo and, finally, one for Sarajevo’s public. This sounded like great fun, a good story, and I asked to be counted in.

Days before lift-off, the Ministry of Defence contacted Barton, muttered something about “operational difficulties” and informed him that the trip was cancelled. China Drum, having announced their intentions, and having heard that people in Sarajevo were looking forward to it, and being men of their word, decided to go anyway. Feeling that I could hardly cry off just because I wasn’t going to get a ride in a cool camouflage-coloured aeroplane, I said I’d go too. I have been soothing myself ever since with visions of a gleaming deluxe tour bus, replete with tinted windows, comfortable bunks, televisions, stereos, sofas and microwave ovens (I felt I could live without the jacuzzi, if necessary).

“It does have tinted windows,” observes Barton. “Well, one tinted window. And a video.”

The man is as incurably, ludicrously optimistic as a Somalian travel agent. Even if this thing gets us as far as the Bosnian border, which it won’t, it’s going to disintegrate as soon as it hits the first shell-hole. We might as well be trying to take Cape Horn on a windsurfer.

“Well, it’s all we could get.”

Still, I take it the driver knows the roads well.

“He’s never been.”

Jesus. The truck is split into two parts: the band’s gear goes in the back, the people in the rest. There are seats for two in the front, and three rows of three seats in the back; the first of these faces backwards to allow space for a small table. It might be grudgingly conceded that half a dozen people could ride in relative comfort inside for a short distance. There are eleven of us labouring under the delusion that we’re going to Sarajevo: myself, Phil, all three of China Drum, China Drum’s
tour manager, two crew, one driver and two photographers, on a round trip of about 2500 miles. This heap will be our home, more or less, for a week.

“You could stop whining and give us a hand with this amplifier,” says Barton.

Further introductions are effected once we’ve loaded up and repaired to a nearby pub to await one of the photographers—Andy Willsher of the
NME
—who is marooned on a train somewhere outside Euston. China Drum are a heavily Hüsker Dü-influenced punk trio from Newcastle: Adam Lee (drums and vocals), Bill McQueen (guitar) and Dave McQueen (bass). At the end of their last European tour, they explain, they’d fetched up in the Italian city of Trieste. Scanning a map of the continent in search of interesting-sounding places to play next time out, they’d hit upon Bosnia. The war in that country had just been ended by NATO’s airstrikes and the subsequent Dayton Peace Accord, and China Drum reckoned, if they were quick, they could be the first British band to play post-ceasefire Sarajevo.

Once the link with the MoD had broken down, China Drum had turned for help to London-based aid organisation The Serious Road Trip. The Serious Road Trip had become a minor legend during the Bosnian war, ferrying food and medicine through the worst of the fighting in garishly painted Land Rovers and yellow Bedford trucks decorated with murals of cartoon characters. They had also taken clowns and other circus performers on tour in Bosnia and run music and painting therapy courses for children; copiously dreadlocked New Zealander Max Reeves of this fine organisation is the other photographer joining us.

The twin entertainments in the Caledonian Road pub we’ve picked on are watching former Pogues singer Shane MacGowan subsiding into unconsciousness at the next table, and the domestic travails of two other customers, a married couple who alternate moody silences with eruptions of screaming, and occasionally stumble outside to continue the debate with their fists, before coming back in as if for the first time. It seems to be a regular performance; they are regarded with surreal indifference by the pub’s other clientele.

“I like a spot of cabaret with dinner,” says Adam.

We finally leave, with all aboard, two hours overdue, but we make a
late ferry from Dover to Calais, and are on the road in Europe by three the next morning.

 

AS THE SUN comes up over Belgium, I’m sitting up front alongside Andy Matthews, the driver who came with the truck. I have not yet spoken to Andy, but I already suspect that he is the single most rock’n’roll man on earth. The blond mohawk, the sunglasses and the earrings are a good start, but where most veteran roadies will have tour t-shirts and caps, Andy has tattoos: “Yazoo: Crew” engraved on his left upper arm, and “Lenny Kravitz: Crew” on his ribs, visible beneath his torn t-shirt.

Heading towards the morning’s first coffee stop, Andy reaches over and takes a small leather case out of the glove compartment in front of me. He opens it to reveal a syringe and some phials of clear liquid. Keeping the wheel steady with his knees, he fills the syringe and injects himself calmly in the stomach. Suddenly, I feel strangely very awake.

I realise, I tell him, that this seems a funny thing to say to someone on first acquaintance, but I really hope that he’s diabetic.

“No,” he grins. “I’m a crack fiend.”

Ask a silly question.

Dave peers into the front cabin from behind the curtain. “Can we,” he asks, “stop at Mademoiselle Le Miggins’ croissant shop?”

This is the journey’s first deployment of authentic tour-ese, that weird, reductive dialect spoken by otherwise intelligent people who find themselves shut in a small moving space with a bunch of other otherwise intelligent people and doing something fundamentally stupid, like taking a rock’n’roll band on tour. Mrs. Miggins’ Pie Shop is a fixture of the popular television comedy
Blackadder
, and the popular television comedy
Blackadder
is a fixture on every tour bus in the world. No matter who the band, no matter where they travel, almost all tour bus conversations consist of verbatim or bastardised quotes from television sitcoms: Dave, accordingly, has cunningly regionalised Mrs. Miggins to suit our surroundings.

“No problem,” says Andy.

The drive across Belgium towards the Rhine is so transcendentally tedious that I become almost nostalgic for those school holidays when I’d travel by bus from Sydney to visit my grandparents in Adelaide, across twenty-eight hours of untidy scrub-country and deserts as vast
and featureless as UB40’s back catalogue. To a landscape as relentlessly, heart-breakingly boring as this, there can only be one response.

“Monners!” cries Adam, producing the travel
Monopoly
kit from his bag. “Who’s in?”

This could end in tears. Mine, if I don’t win. Theirs, if I do. With a mixture of skill, cunning and taking it far more seriously than anyone else, I win the first two games. After which everyone gangs up on me.

“We’re in Germany,” announces Phil, as I try to stage a comeback with assets totalling £20, Pentonville Road and a station. “Don’t mention the war.”

The inevitable collective hum-along of “The Dambusters March” follows.

“Can we stop at Frau von Miggins’ sausage shop?” asks someone.

There are a great many beautiful and historic palaces along the road that joins Cologne, Frankfurt and Munich. “Look,” someone will occasionally say, “there’s another kraut castle.” This rarely registers with the majority of the expedition, who are degenerating rapidly, engrossed in interminable travel
Monopoly
death matches (“Right, no buying on the first two laps, all fine money to be collected at Free Parking, no rent on a double, except triple rent if it’s a double four, you can have more than one hotel on a property and you have to move backwards on a seven . . . who’s in?”) or in the
Carry On
films which are being loaded into the video player. In a lull between
Monopoly
and puerile movies, several exquisite architectural confections are ignored while China Drum, all card-carrying volunteers in Newcastle United’s Toon Army, lead a stirring twenty-minute singalong of “Thank you very much for the six points, Sunderland, thank you very much, thank you very very very much.”

A few hours short of Munich, we are pulled over by a motorcycle policeman. Andy, who is now nearly fifteen hours in the saddle, has apparently been overdoing it.

“Everyone in the back keep quiet,” he hisses, as the cop approaches. “I can talk my way out of this.”

It all goes terribly school excursion. The strain of keeping a straight face causes several of us to water at the eyes. Dave cracks first.

“For you, Englander,” he says, quietly, “zer tour iz over.”

The passenger compartment erupts.

“You vill pay for your inzolence.”

We get a ticket.

Some miracle of record company largesse has provided rooms at the Hilton in Munich. Any flat surface would have done. A flat surface with a mattress and sheets and a neatly wrapped chocolate on the pillow is as welcome a sight as could be imagined.

 

THE CUSTOMS OFFICIAL at the Austrian border looks like all customs officials at all borders, which is to say he looks like his dog’s died and he can’t sell the kennel.

“Pliz ver are yoo goink?” he wants to know

Bosnia and Herzegovina, we tell him.

“Vot iz zer purpoz ov your vizeet?”

We tell him that, as well. He regards us with an expression that suggests he thinks we’re probably taking the piss but he can’t be bothered with us at this time of morning. He waves us through.

We pull in at Fraulein Migginsheim’s sauerkraut shop. This is a motorway service station owned by someone with a serious garden gnome fetish. Dozens of the little ceramic chaps are congregated on the forecourt by the café. While we’re taking pictures of each other sitting amid the tiny red-hatted elves, Adam appears from the gear storage area at the back of our truck with a triumphant expression.

“You can’t take a team photograph without this,” he says. He’s found the football. I feel that this cannot be good news, and I am swiftly proved right. Adam hoofs the ball into the car park. “Right,” he says. “I’ll be Alan Shearer, like.” Within minutes, we are re-enacting key moments from the 1996 European Championships for an audience of bewildered Austrian truck drivers. We stop only because nobody wants to be Scotland.

Back aboard, cabin fever is setting in. We have now watched every episode of
Blackadder
ever made, one series of
Absolutely Fabulous
, more than enough
Carry On
, and a bid to put
Fawlty Towers
on is shouted down when someone observes, correctly, that there’s no point, so many times have all present seen it. Already, indeed, any mildly controversial opinion advanced by anyone, on any subject, is greeted with a rousing chorus of “No! I won’t have that! There’s a place in Eastbourne!” delivered in the style of Ballard Berkeley’s doddering Major. By
lunchtime,
A Place in Eastbourne
is an early contender for the title of China Drum’s next album.

We stop for food in a small town in the hills. As we wander around the village delicatessen, an appalling sound rends the air, something like a misfiring tractor. It is China Drum’s tour manager, Stealth, laughing. In the refrigerator cabinet, he has found a locally-made yoghurt with the unfortunate, if undeniably evocative, name of Dïchmïlch. All of us, at this stage, think this is not only funny, but the funniest thing any of us have ever seen, heard, or in any way experienced. The poor shopkeeper now has an aisle blocked by eleven allegedly grown men, most in tears, several unable to stand up, having what must appear to be some sort of collective seizure.