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FBi SOCIAL // 15 NOV
Iluka + Evil J and Saint Cecilia + Briscoe
The FBi Social show was just meant to be a nice warm up for the rest of the tour - that was before we booked a Brisbane show the night before. Instead it became a grueling test of our minds and bodies. It was part of FBi Radio's Supporter Drive so if nothing else it was for a very good cause.
Side note: If you are not a supporter of this most excellent community radio station, sign up HERE. They are advancing the cause of the arts in a town that seems hell bent on stifling it. Full disclosure: I work at FBi, but I only work there because I love and believe in it.
In the morning, most of us had gone from the airport to work then to the venue for soundcheck, and we subbed in Luke Davison on the drums. On a macro level, the gig was really good but pretty uneventful, at the cellular level though it would have been bloody spectacular - no sleep, low blood sugar, synaptic activity 2% above what would be considered vegetative, yet somehow we managed to play something that resembled a great show.
Side note [and contrary to how it might seem]: I effing love this tour slog stuff. It can feel really good to sustain injury for your music. Sometimes being in a band can feel like almost total bullshit - like 98% social media content aggregation, publicity, self-abasement and arselicking to get a gig and futile response chasing, and then 2% actual music. The pain most often comes in the form of a slow erosion of your resolve, a strangulation that works imperceptibly over the years until you quietly lose consciousness then wake up on your 40th birthday in an ice bath without your kidneys.
A rough tour is a short right to gut - it's the acute pain that gives immediate weight to the whole exploit of making and playing music. When most of a band's life is lived online in the documentation of minutia; in the quest for something viral and in confected tweet-sized press releases, doing something in the name of your music that you feel in your bones brings it all crashing back to reality. And work is good for you, it feels good to work hard at something and touring feels more legitimately like work than does posting goat remix vids to get your facebook algorithm humming.
