Kíla U.S. Fall Tour 2024-Part 1

The country with arguably too many monster SUV’s, guns, tv ads, queues, fatty processed chemicalised foods, and decrepit morally dubious politicians. Stealing and eating cats, is it?

But also the country with a hard work ethic, fantastic big cities, brilliant music, great movies, a multicultural richness and so many incredibly kind people .

Day 1 Travel Day

I set the alarm for 6am but we were woken at 1am for an hour of screaming by our distraught toddler, obviously upset by the sight of me still being there! I left my beautiful partner at the front door of our humble abode and opened the door to another touring adventure.

The whole visa process, which cost the band €8k, affected us right up to the last day whereby I couldn’t 'check-in' for the flight due to my ESTA form being incorrect (What? I didn’t even need one). Anyway, we arrived safely in the US after the whole bureaucratic beast of a burden busted our many balls. We had to wait 2.5 hours for our 12 seater rental van. Americans do queues, supersized ones. I was hungry and wandered to look for food and then remembered the thing here of there being thousands of food ingredients listed on, for example, the back of a service station sandwich.

Thank God for my weird habit of bringing a tin foil stash of fresh deli sourdough sandwiches. It’s a bit prissy, but so what. I do it. So, 6 hrs in a cramped 12 seater with the belt receiver pushed into my butt cheek all the way. It had the suspension of a 1970’s school bus. Trying to dodge the coughs, snots and smelly socks in the back of the van brings back memories of US tours back in the day and the lack of personal space. I remember we were four to a motel room on The Frames tours, two to a bed. I was king of the snoring. ‘ZZ top’ they called me. And ‘No pluggin in’ was the main rule.

We were absolutely tripping with tiredness by the time we got to our tobacco stained, thin carpeted, formica walled motel at the back of some service station in the middle of Nowhere, Michigan, 24 hrs after saying goodbye to my beautiful little family .

Day 2 ‘Happy Wheatland Day’

Living in a cocoon the last 36 hrs, we finally emerged to rejoin the human race. The big humourless girl behind the counter in the breakfast place 100m from the motel asked me for my room number so I could get a $5 discount.

So I told her

“Dave Hingerty”

“Room 214””

“No. Don’t have that down here”

“No sorry, it’s actually 216”, I said.

“Nope. And the name again ?”

“Dave “

She paused for a while

“Eh , I have a Micky down here?”

Do you now? I thought. Maybe cut down on the MSG.

Off we went to the festival with grease and taurine slithering around our intestines…and before long, there it was, the mothership! The Festival Production office welcomed us to it's bosom. They couldn't have prepared for the sight of us.

Hereith lie thousands of leather skinned hippies lazing in the cold sunshine, with no booze to buy, and small portions of under and overcooked food available from the vendors ( with big queues) … wait, what? Small portions? America? Surely not!

I had a shit gig.

The wing-nuts on my rental floor tom gave way first song ….the threads were badly damaged cos some stupid big lug of a gorilla previously over-tightened them. So the floor tom was leaning on my bass drum leg , like a drunken sobbing friend that you’re trying to politely push away. Then the Backline guy tried to fix it and was talking away to me for fuck sake… like I could answer when I was playing probably the most tricky song of the set!! Then my stick fell out of my hand a few songs later and I tried to pick another out of the stick-bag and it snagged and I tilted off the stool mid song and my foot lurched away from the bass drum pedal . Not funny. What if one of the best drummers in the world was watching? Ha ha. As if!

We finished the gig well ( well the others did), signed loads of autographs and headed back to the motel on the bumpiest bastard road on earth. A bad case of ‘tourarse’ already.

Day 3- Second Wheatland Festival gig

I couldn’t face the breakfast again in dreary Edmore. Take the bread alone. It had Niacin, Thiamin Mononitrate, Sodium Steroyl Lactylate, and Silicone Dioxide in it. Yum. Enough to explode a hens head off.

So I asked the 3 receptionists at the desk….

Is there anywhere else to get breakfast in a walkable distance?”

“Not around here, sir”

“Well there is one but it’s too far to walk”

“Oh yeah, Laclears Tavern , well I’ve never walked there anyway”, another agreed.

“How far is it exactly?”I persisted.

“I’m gonna say 1/4 mile. No, wait, more like a third of a mile “.

I said I’d walk 10 miles to get good food, and they all laughed heartily, thinking I was a very humorous person.

So back to the same festival for our second gig. I knew all the drum students would be jealous when they realised Larnell Lewis, the drumming superpower was playing at the festival. Awesome the word, was created for him. The dynamic range … the effortless superhuman technique, the restraint and control and sudden unleashing of power were a joy to behold. The funny thing was, they were playing when we arrived to play on the first day, on the same stage, and I just walked past the gig, foostering around backstage looking for meal tickets. Anyway I heard he was playing on the second day and I wasn't going to miss it. It’s ok that they ate some of our backstage food. It’s all good.

Some of us in the band talked about feeling inferior in technique to American musicians. There are so many incredible players here. I certainly have that slight feeling of inferiority as soon as I set foot on these lands. They work harder. Simple. We can talk about our creativity and punk spirit and verve … but bad news everyone…. A lot of them have a lot of that as well. So, as Arnie says, "get up off the couch 'girly man' and stop complaining. Get up at 6am and work hard, nobody said life was easy".

I do think we managed to spin a little magic and rebellion into their souls at this festival though, so maybe we have something of our own, like the voodoo New Orleans players have. Allegedly an actual bass solo took place during our concert. It’s unlikely we’ll ever be let in to the US again because of this. There was a great ‘between song’ soliloquy/ song introduction by Ro about war and not just the external ones but dealing with the internal ones first.

Back in Edmore we went for a Mexican takeaway, served by the smallest woman in America. It was a heavy sandbag of a meal that we ate down by the bandstand at the pond, over looking a nursing home in front and dwarved by the twin glutonian imbibing emporiums that feed Americans their anti-nutrition daily behind us. BK and MCD’s; 2 huge pillars of processed fatty foods that delight and depress in unequal measure. It was there by the pond that we were treated to a great improvised ‘country song’ by Brian, which starts with a classic ‘guitar solo’.

Here it is… so funny..

Day 4- Stoking the coals.

I woke to a great idea at 6.30am and as soon as I meandered away from the thought, it was gone. arghh! And of course I chased it down the neural pathways then to try to find it . Like chasing a butterfly around the blue roads of America. Gone forever from whence it came.

But then I turned on my phone and this was the first thing on my feed on Instagram ….I felt spooked. Listening in to our thoughts AND dreams now, are you Big Brother, not just our conversations?

Obviously David Lynch is better at holding on to these vital seeds of thoughts than I am. " We don't really create an idea. We just catch them like fish". I’ll have to let that one slip out of the net.

Unable to sleep after all the butterfly chasing, I rang home to my loved ones to illuminate the gloom of a motel room. 6 hours ahead they are, and yet here we are, able to speak to each other live. A timely dose of love, fuzz and daftness.

Off we set on a 99 min journey to Johnson’s Beach House, a beautiful 7-room wood-framed holiday home beside the soft sandy beaches of Lake Michigan. The kind owner had a next door neighbour whose large house was on 20m skinny stilts overlooking the lake!

Nicole the owner, who had never even met us, showed us around the house and surrounds and we then headed out for a Baltic, sphincter-shrinker of a swim. Then a walk to the light house followed by a hilarious ‘team cooking’ bickering barbecue session , funny jokes , plenty of slagging, and a late night argument about Mister mis-demeanouring Boy George with our guest ( or were we his guest?). Our guest is an intensely talented singer-songwriter friend from Ireland and it was he who designed the 2 days off we had and was the interventionist for this heavenly sojourn. It was his friend that lent us the house. Kindness indeed.

I think it’s boring to go through life agreeing with everyone about everything and a passionate exchange ( albeit whiskey fuelled in this case) can really stoke up the fires and create an interesting battle of words whereby hopefully nobody feels disrespected or antagonised by the end. Boxers shake hands after a bout and so do we. Sometimes topics about subject matter or people we don’t know, or whereby we don’t know the full story, can become soaked in a bias from our own experiences. How can they not ?

Day 5- Second chances.

As an extension to that conversation, this friend and I picked it up again the next night, as I asked him whether he felt in any way uncomfortable from the experience. Not at all, he assured me. We got some fascinating insights from his friend who works in the Police force in the US, a very clear-eyed, fit, focused and well adjusted young man, someone who has the skill to extract confessions from people who have committed the most serious of felonies.

The modern technique of police interviews seems to have changed from the old style strong arm tactical ‘pressure’ to one more leaning towards empathy and understanding. As they pointed out to me, it’s well known that torture doesn’t get you the truth, just the answer you want.

We got a unique insight into the sympathetic things you might say in the interview room …

“Well, with your fragile mental health”…

Or

“After what such and such did to you”…

Or

“After the abusive upbringing you've suffered…I get it".

"I don’t know if I would have acted any differently “

“I just see it as a mistake”

“I feel like it will be a great relief if you tell the truth here”.

These approaches are getting greater results, he said. Once a confession is procured… (assuming they are guilty )… then, the journey is only beginning. The prosecuted can get a cheap bond and get back on the streets and do something terrible of course, and that is the worry. The social services aren’t really there to follow up and reintegrate felons back to society successfully in many cases and that’s where they can fail them. Mental health is a key buzz word presently to help everyone to empathise. Always judged on past misdemeanours, these people will re offend if they feel nobody is allowing them a fresh start. Everyone deserves a second chance.

Same goes for Mr. George then, I argued.

This town we played our impromptu gig in, Holland, Michigan, feels very puritan and it seems many Dutch pilgrims arrived centuries ago to escape the excessive liberalism of The Netherlands. So, as a society, it feels conservative, clean, mostly white middle class as I saw it, and therefore less culturally rich or interesting to my mind. My friends told me that there was a mixed race community in the area but not downtown in the upmarket shopping area. “Why not”, I asked? A naive question maybe.

The exception is the Park Theatre venue where we played our impromptu gig, a little island of liberalism; wild dudes with ‘rolled up to the shoulder’ t-shirts with cigarettes tucked in and tattoos proudly crying rebellion. Outliers. We watched the other artists on the bill perform. One rapper who went onstage after us urged cop hatred and recounted how he was wrongly arrested for attempted murder. Nearly did forty years. Hence the vitriol. I detected our detective friend looking to the heavens... and adding a sympathetic smile.

End of part one……