It all starts with a shiny silver tour bus that sleekly parks up outside your house, ready to whisk you away from mundane suburban obscurity and take you on a magical mystery journey to far of places to play incendiary shows to packed out venues in places you’ve barely even heard of but where everyone already knows your name. That’s what it’s like to go on tour. I know, I’ve seen it in movies. Even the knackered old tour bus in Almost Famous seems glamorous and exotic. It’s the reason I love 2008’s The Rocker with Rainn Wilson - it’s all about wish fulfillment. There’s a big, wide, mysterious world out there and its waiting to be rocked and why shouldn’t we be the ones to do this? And this why, on a cold evening in early December, I found myself huddled on a roadside curb, guitar on my back and a satchel over my shoulder full of cables and pedals as Scott Blackledge waved to me out of his car window and pulled up his big, green 4x4 behind my car. “Dude, I totally have no idea where we’re going!” he says as he jumps out the car and pulls open the rear door to retrieve his own guitar. This is where it all started for me - The Six-String Theory Tour - my first true experience of being out on the road. For the next two months we’d be heading out to far of venues in places some of us have never heard of to play venues most of us have never stepped inside and it all started with The Watershed in Newport Pagnel, where Scott had evidently never been to.
The Watershed turned out to be one of the coolest venues any of us had ever been to. Hidden down an allyway and sprinkled with Christmas lights - dudes with beards and dreadlocks behind the bar and vinyl records stuck on ceilings. There where paintings by locals artists on the walls and a big screen hung in the bar that projected all the action going on upstairs where we would be playing. Most exciting of all, there was a large, red drum-kit on the stage which Olie would be jumping behind for The Phil Sky Experience’s headline set...
Phil Sky – 07/11/2011
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