LC!

I’m not sure if its cause I have got older or what, but I have started taking an interest in gardening.  Mine and Neil’s house has a small garden which is okay, its mainly concrete.  But I have decided to take it on as a project and turn it into a nice urban area where we can relax when we are not on tour and hopefully if the weather is nice, have barbecues.

My aim is to have an area that has some colour with some seasonal flowers, a small area for growing vegetables and herbs and hopefully encourage wildlife into the garden.  I’ve seen some sparrows recently and it would be great if they frequented the garden more.

Heres what it looks like at the moment.

Okay, I admit I’m not going to go Titchmarsh on it’s ass, but I want to make it a nicer place.

I’ll give monthly updates and pictures so you can all see what is going on.

This months work:

• Clear out the rubbish that has accumulated.
• Clear out the flowerbeds of any weeds, trim back any bushes that look like they might flourish.
• Take out the old soil and replace it with new soil.
• Plant bulbs for the spring, probably Daffodils.

Any advice on what to plant and when would be appreciated.  I’m going to be consulting my mum a lot on this I think.

Back in May I sold a load of my personal, old band t-shirts on our blog. It was a success and nobody seemed to think it was a disgusting exploitation of my position and of having 4,500 followers on twitter. Well, now that time has come again. I need more space and a little bit of pocket money and as a result have been ruthless and found another batch of 20-odd band tees I can do without (read – that are now too small for me/not black or white). Basically, I want to make enough room in my bedroom to have a CHAIR. So I can do the occasional thing vertically, rather than laying on my bed all day.

Slightly more expensive than last time I’m afraid, as previously I was stung by p+p. ALSO, for this very same reason, I’m restricting the sale to UK ONLY. Yes, I know, I’m an awful person.

Some of these tees are in better condition than others (but all perfectly wearable), so, without further ado, here’s the list (all include p+p).

£8

The Smiths ‘The Queen Is Dead’ – S
Wolf Eyes – M
Lovvers – S
Hardly Art – M
Help She Can’t Swim – S
Kimya Dawson – XL Girls
Sleater-Kinney – M
the Blow – M
Blood Brothers – S
Slint -S 6
Bikini Kill – S
Goxxip – S
Why? – S
Johnny Foreigner – M
Parenthetical Girls – S
Tubelord – S
Sleater-Kinney – S
Girls – M (quite a small M)
BARR – S
Tender Forever – S
Xiu Xiu 1 – S
Xiu Xiu 2 – S

£6

Micachu & The Shapes – S
Flying – S

£5

Pwrfl Power – S
The Moldy Peaches – S

If you are a band or label and object to me doing this with a product of yours, then I am very sorry. Please get in touch and I’ll remove it immediately/send you the money I made from selling the t-shirt.

LOVE YOU FOREVER.

I enjoy playing Art Centres as they always seem to do good food.  The Norwich Arts Centre we played in 2 years ago did amazing food.

The Phoenix had a very fancy cafe bar which served a wide range of food.  I decided to go for a healthy option and picked Roasted Peppers with a garlic and cheese sauce, with cous cous and a homemade pesto.

The peppers were stuffed with courgette and aubergine, giving it a very soft texture.  The peppers were roasted to a nice level, retaining their bite and texture, whilst going soft and releasing those sweet flavours.  The sauce was nice, but it would have been fine as just purely some cheese grated onto the top of the peppers and placed under the grill.  The pesto, wasn’t how I imagined the pesto to be.  It almost had the consistency of boiled spinach, it didn’t really taste like pesto.  To be honest if I hadn’t known it was pesto, I wouldn’t have known what it was.  The cous cous was surprisingly dense and a lot more filling than I expected.  It had small slices of pepper and onion but perhaps could have done with a bit of spice to give it a bit more flavour and kick.

A tasty meal nonetheless, and thanks to all the recommendations to eat here. Extra special mention to the staff who brought us our food whilst we doing soundcheck.

Here is an overview of our past fortnight, in the form of statistics, rubbish camera phone pictures and superlatives.

We visited these cities, in this order:

Coventry
Southampton
Exeter
Cardiff
Manchester
Newcastle
London
Oxford
Leeds
Glasgow

Percentage of venues which didn’t have toilet roll backstage:

60%

Percentage of promoters which took any notice of the fact that we informed them a quarter of our band are vegan:

20%

Best related quote: “Yeh, sorry, I didn’t know what vegan meant, so I got you some nuts”.

Percentage of Sold Out gigs:

70%

We owe a huge amount of thanks to Nick Coppack of Manchester United Football Club who invited us to Old Trafford to do an interview for the magazine and have a tour. To be recognised by your favourite football club, I can tell you, is an amazing thing. It was also incredibly flattering that Nick was a proper fan of the band and came to the show afterwards and made requests. I could never tire of discussing mid-’90s league cup defeats, so thank you Nick.

Thank you to Les Savy Fav for DJing at our aftershow in London, and thank you to Wichita for organising such a spectacle. I was in a bad mood after the show due to getting punched in the face after going into the crowd and somebody wrestling the microphone from me and refusing to give it back. To rub insult to injury, after the gig they approached me and told me I was a great “modern poet”. Yuck. Who even thinks like that?

So spending the night dancing to ’90s club hits amongst good friends was an awesome tonic.

This is a picture of Stuart off of Copy Haho standing on Tim off of Les Savy Fav’s shoulders:

I had three of The Best Nights Of My Life on this tour.

1. A travel lodge, a putsch on a WH Smith and reckless abandonment of all regards of common decency.

2. After our Friday gig in Leeds. Dananananaykroyd, our own private disco, the first time we managed to get a DJ to play Dexys, dance offs with people I miss far too much, and conga lines.

3. Best gig we’ve ever played in Cardiff. Infront of family. It felt like a home coming. Watching members of some of my favourite bands crowd surf to our music. Silent Disco with newly found best friends and pals who’d come from out of town, alike. This is a video of us performing Sweet Dreams, Sweet Cheeks with Calum off of Dananananaykroyd and Alexei off of Johnny Foreigner.

When we all got swine flu. I look forward, in ten years time, to being able to say “I survived Swine Flu”. Hats off to Kim who soldiered on through gigs despite vomiting non-stop for two days. Hats back on to all the “media outlets” who somehow managed to spin a badly informed news story out of three caps heavy tweets I made.

Thank you ever so to Rob from Sparky Deathcap for coming on tour with us. Having him as the 8th Campesinos! is something we’d love to make permanent if we could afford to (which we can barely with 7, so we’re gonna have to get famous or something). His musicianship really adds something to us playing live, and means I don’t have to play any instruments. Something I’m very grateful for. Also, his solo sets at the start of the evening were always amazing. I cannot say enough that I think Sparky is the best songwriter in the UK at the moment, and to have the chance to play in his backing band was a real honour. I hope we get to do it again sometime soon.

Copy Haho: We’ve made friends for life. I couldn’t have dreamt of meeting four people as hilarious and nice and just amazing to be around as them.
I would never complain about being in a band. There are loads of negative aspects, believe me there are, but they are far outweighed by the opportunities we have to play our music and to have a platform for the things we want to say and to create.
But the worst thing is saying goodbye.
You travel the world meeting amazing people. You forge really close bonds in no time at all. And then at the end of a tour you say goodbye and resign yourself to the fact you live hundreds of miles apart, and that the next time you’re in their city, they’ll probably be elsewhere, making other new friends to break their hearts. It’s like a divorce that neither side wants. And oh my god, the poor kids.

“but with XBOX Live, hope and skype I could find you in a keystroke…”

Never has this been so true as it is with Copy Haho.

Thank you dearly; Joe, Richard, Stuart, Rikki, Rob, Todge, Jason, Stan, Lewy, Ceri, Gavlar, Jason and Stacey. I love you all.

Everyone who came to this tour, thank you.
Every gig felt really special, and I feel like with fans friends like you, we can achieve everything we’d ever want. Thank you for letting us be a band, and see you soon.