Yorino!

04/12/09

A report from the olive-oil drenched, condimento balsamico-soaked production office in Turin…

… We went nuts this morning, and spent far more than we should have in an amazing shop called Eataly (see what they did there? Prego?

you join us in Torino. Turin, as some call it.

We went nuts this morning, and spent far more than we should have in an amazing shop called Eataly (see what they did there?)

Its basically like Wholefoods, but very italian, and a bit fancier. Lots of little delis, and food counters, inside a large building. As a result, I’m sitting at my laptop, having eaten a whole baguette with oil and vinegar, to myself. A wholly embarassing thing to admit, though made less so by the fact that i’m far from the only one to have gone completely nuts in the place.

So, today is sadly our last day with the Muse boys and girls. We’ve spent the last few weeks with them, and whilst we’re looking forward to striking out on our own, for the headline shows over the next couple of weeks, it has been a lot of fun spending time with the lovely people we’ve met on this tour. A huge thank you to everyone for making us feel so welcome.

Our valley-boy friends, People in Planes join us in Zurich tomorrow… we are excited to spend a few weeks with these fine gentlemen. Good times ahead. More specifically, devastating hangovers ahead.

We had a day off in Turin yesterday. Lovely. Except, we couldn’t find anywhere that served any food before 7.30pm. So for approximately 4 hours, Simon, James, myself, drum tech Adam and Lighting Engineer Jamie, strolled around, going slowly and slowly more insane at the complete lack of eateries.

We understand completely that things are slightly later over here, and everything is a bit more, shall we say, casual, but really… for fuck sake Turin… As one of the aforementioned gentlemen put it yesterday…
“I mean really, its fucking stupid. The whole country is basically constantly losing money.”
Whether thats true or not, it certainly made us laugh.

The first drafts of the Many of Horror single artwork are due today. If they come anything close to Storm’s sketches for these artworks, they should be amazing. You might have also seen the video pop up. There was a little bit of a debacle there, which I won’t go into here, but there is now a video for your perusal (I think it will be on this site and elsewhere from early next week… its on the NME just now though…)

We would like to invite everyone to recommend some CDs for us to pick up, to listen to on the dressing room CD player ( I think I explained previously, that we have recently bought a CD player, and are trying to wean ourselves off the old iPod stereo system, and embrace the album)

We’ve built up a nice little collection of touring CDs over the past few weeks, notable mainstays are the newest Mew record (must have been played over 50 times now), the new Pearl Jam, Weezer and a number of others.
But we’d love any recommendations anyone has… However eclectic you want…

We have now been out of the UK for just under a month. And whilst we read the newspapers, its amazing how disconnected you feel by just not being there. We just heard today that Glasgow’s Borders book store has gone under. Which is a bit of a shame. What are people supposed to do when they need a book, magazine, some wrapping paper, a coffee, a classical music CD boxset and travel scrabble, but only have time to visit one shop?!

A travesty.

We are now looking ahead to 2010, which is quite a daunting prospect. Whilst we’ve unfortunately had to postpone our planned trip to Australia and New Zealand over the festive period, which we’re upset about.

The slightly good news on that front, is that it looks like the rescheduled dates will allow us to do a few more shows over in that part of the world, than originally planned! We received an email from band’s booking agent a few days ago, that basically spelled out the plans until December 2010. Some exciting things are afoot. You’ll hear more about them soon.
We have plans to visit our friends in North America on at least a few occasions, and will be spending a lot of our time over there next year… We are excited about returning to Japan early next year, and look to be re-visiting mainland Europe in early February… This will hopefully include the remaining shows to be rescheduled from this current tour. We will be sticking our heads back up, meerkat-style in the UK, sometime before the summer, for a few shows in places we haven’t been to in a while… but again, you’ll hear more on that in the next few days… We’re looking forward to a summer of festivals as well. We’ve got a few lined up, but in classic fashion, nothing that we can discuss as yet… They take that stuff very seriously, do the festival bosses… We are looking forward to some sunshine though. We hope to take in a few festivals we haven’t been to before as well, excitingly…

We are now off to over-feed ourselves some more,
hope you’re all very well… We’re beginning to feel slightly christmassy, having had to start wearing our winter-coats over the last few weeks… I bought a particularly nice little woolen hat, with a little black pom-pom on top. I was also given a lovely red and grey striped scarf, so I’m all set. Simon, unfortunately, lost a lovely pair of grey woollen finger-less gloves, but with a little mitten that you could button over the exposed fingers… If anyone is looking for a gift to bring him at any of the upcoming shows, you could do worse than a set of nice gloves… Ben and James are slightly under-dressing for the cold, if I’m being truthful, but they’re hard as nails so its all good…

Next stop Zurich. Again. More news soon.