Week 11 News!

So the latest news entry is up and it looks like the next one will be all about their escapades here in Australia!

This is a fairly obscure route.
This meant we used a fairly obscure budget airline.
This meant they had a small plane.
This meant the small plane had small doors.
This meant the small, small-doored plane could not accommodate an enormous double bass...

Band News

Week Eleven

WOMAD festivals consist of amazing bands - of a world music-ish bent - that you probably haven't heard of, and interesting food. We’re huge fans of both of these. What's more, WOMAD happens all over the world. So far we've played WOMAdelaide, WOMAD Singapore, and WOMAD Reading. Next on the list: WOMAD Eden.

The Eden Project in Cornwall (the pointy home of Cornish pasties in the southwest of England) is home to 140,000 plants, which represents more than half the species that can be found on Earth. So much of our society relies on resources that come from plants, and the Eden Project believes that if we help these plants to survive, rather than just trying to stay away from them, we’ll all be around for much longer. We’ve been half-assedly spreading the message that trees aren’t just for hippies, so it’s our kind of place. The two biodomes on the site, housing warm temperate and humid tropical climates, sure are a welcome change from the Cornish weather. It's no wonder they've had over 5 million visitors in three years. It’s a great site for the WOMAD festival too: world music and ecological conservation seem to go hand in hand. On the bill this year were Susana Baca, ourselves, Asere, Laye Sow, Dreadzone Sound System, Charlie Gillett, and David Lowe’s Dreamcatcher project. We hadn't heard of the others either.

We were in Edinburgh, and had to get to Eden, which is sort of near Newquay. We all shuddered at the memories of Newquay last year - our windowless accommodation smelt like pappadams and vomit, so we slept in the lanes of a bowling alley - but were still pretty excited about playing another WOMAD festival. The closest airport is Exeter. So we flew from Edinburgh to Exeter.
This is a fairly obscure route.
This meant we used a fairly obscure budget airline.
This meant they had a small plane.
This meant the small plane had small doors.
This meant the small, small-doored plane could not accommodate an enormous double bass.
I found this hard to believe. If I can fit my bass in a Ford Laser, and still take two passengers, I can fit it in anything. I once fitted it in a rented Mazda 121 in Byron Bay. You know, those mid-1990's bubbly ones. The FlyBe staff were adamant, though. And so we set off, bassless, to Exeter.

It's a bloody lot easier to travel without a double bass. Most of you know this, having never travelled WITH one. We're used to seeing a certain look on the face of whoever's manning the desk we decide to aim our luggage barrage at - it's a simultaneous roll-of- and widening-of-the-eyes that yells, "I’ve never seen this before in all my years of luggage handling." Not surprisingly, without the double bass, we must have looked like any other party of seven. There was something strange about FlyBe. The “Be” stands for British European. This is confusing enough. But I also noticed that the same girl who checked us in downstairs was also taking our boarding passes when we got on the plane. The speech mannerisms of the woman announcing flight information at the airport were nothing short of fascinating. I’d have called it monotonous, as this is a commonly accepted synonym for “repetitive”, but she seemed to be singing the same five notes for every announcement. We wrote a bassline inspired by the pentatonous announcement for our flight’s final call to kill some time.

Next week: farewell to Edinburgh, a short stay in Melbourne, some red carpet, and the start of another tour.