The whirlwind tour continues... quick recap: I flew from NYC on Sunday night, arrived in London Monday about noon. A fan named Jed kindly picked me up at Heathrow and drove me to the Windmill in Brixton... A young professional composer, he does film and TV scores for the BBC, I should probably hire him to add some strings to my new album or something!

At the Windmill I played two shows in a row, then took a train the next day to Sheffield, played the big gala Rough Trade Anniversary show with Jarvis Cocker, which brings us up to date for Wed, Nov 26, a day which finds me schlepping my broken-wheeled roller bag full of comic books and CDs to the Sheffield train station to catch a train back down to London again for the Shepherds Bush Empire show.

By the Sheffield train station I find a pub serving breakfast, but I find out too late that they are not able to do hot drinks on this day, so instead of a joyful wake-up hot coffee in the morning I end up with a pint of cold beer, and so I don't stare out the train windows at the passing scenery but fall asleep immediately after reading about half a paragraph of my book (Gangs of New York, from 1928, great reading - if you're not too tired).

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As we close in on our last few shows here in the UK, we’re struck by the sheer volume of bands we’ve played with this month (around 80). The new friends we’ve kidnapped in a whiskey-fueled haze and brought to our next gig in the van. The omnipresent line-drawings of dicks on the wall of every green room at every club. The ubiquitous light rain. The superiority of English bacon… and footwear.

We’re immune to the beauty of English landscape—the sheep, the hedges, the stone and brick houses in quaint constellations. Our conversation has devolved into endless jokes about crying, punching, freaking out, screaming.

But we still look forward to the point each night when the sound has been checked, the tuning pedals clicked off, and we start the set. There’s really nothing like it.

And every night, the faint blue glow of the Travelodge sign…

Our last night at Dublin Castle in London was a rollicking, boozy and crowded finale to the residency. Mikel jumped off the stage and Anna’s viola got a new scar. We drank, sweated, swore and danced.

We think we may miss this place of numberless buildings and unnamed streets that lead nowhere…

Nottingham, Barrow in Furness, Stoke on Trent, Cardiff, Bristol, London (again), Sheffield, and Preston — all behind us, and so now we’re officially in the home stretch. Admittedly, we’ve fallen off in posting these things, as we’ve grown more and more exhausted and unable to do much else besides eat, drink, play shows. Leading up to our last London show, we’ve had particularly memorable nights in Nottingham, Barrow in Furness, and Cardiff.

Everyone kept scratching their heads at us whenever we mentioned we’d be playing Barrow in Furness, but we had an excellent show and met some really interesting people. Cardiff was fucking crazy, for no real reason except that we felt especially loopy and decided to play an entire song in the audience. It turned out to be our most ambitious post-show night outside of London so far, stumbling down cobblestone roads until four in the morning. That one pretty much set the tone for this next slew of shows.

It’s been a while since our last posting, and since then, we’ve been coping better than expected. Call it a higher plane, or some kind of controlled insanity, but it works somehow. The last London show was sufficiently berserk in all ways, fueled by exhaustion and drunkenness. We tried to make an epic night of it to mark the occasion. The next night, we headed to Sheffield, home of Pulp. In fact, we learned we’d just missed a Jarvis Cocker show the night before. Oh well…

Maybe we really are losing it. We’re trying not to make too big a deal out of it.

After London, we headed into Brighton and played a rowdy gig at a place called The Hope just up from the pier. Now officially in the last third of our tour and 19 days in without any real rest, we’ve all gone a bit wonky and recorded said wonkiness for your viewing pleasure. Noah howls occasionally while loading equipment, and Mikel has taken to playing gospel songs on the street. We drink more than we should, anytime there’s sitting and/or waiting involved.

That said, we love Brighton. We were here last summer for the Great Escape Festival, for which we played Komedia with the Annuals. Afterward, we wandered the lanes and ended up at a house party until late into the night. This time, we ran into a group of girls singing on the street calling themselves the Half Sisters. They really were sisters and had just played their own gig up the street. One had a flute and another had a ukulele. We thought they were gypsies at first.

Too bad we didn’t get to stay longer, as has been the case with a lot of the towns we’ve passed through. It sucked to leave Brighton so soon, but we keep busy, pushing ourselves to stay out after shows and chat with complete strangers. Who knew losing your mind was so much hard work?

When we started this band, we tried not to get too excited about guitar effects and gadgetry lest we became one of those groups with huge, unwieldy pedal boards. We bought Velcro, electrical tape, power strips, and slabs of wood from our local hardware stores and constructed our own, homemade boards, a couple of pedals for each member—just enough to get by. Eventually, they began to fall apart, so we broke down and bought proper ones a few months ago.

For the most part, we’ve stuck to the same, basic philosophy of staying slim, though we’ve made additions and grown particularly proud of Anna’s viola rig, which now includes a POG, or a Polyphonic Octave Generator. It basically lets her sound like she’s playing eight violas at once.

In this installment of our blog, we talk about guitar and viola effects for those who might not know much about them. They’re fun to use. We’ll probably acquire more and end up with huge, unwieldy pedal boards.

Days 17 and 18 were our Oxford and London gigs, respectively. Oxford was charming and cute; we had dinner in a converted church called Freud.

The following night was the third week of our Dublin Castle residency. We shared the bill with an impressive band from Brooklyn called Chairlift, and the place was sold out, amazingly. This one was more unhinged than the last. We’re happy to report that we’ve begun to feel very much at home at the Castle.

So we played the ICA in London on Friday night. It was sold out so thank you to everyone who came and helped make it an amazing night!

So sorry to everyone we had to turn away, it wasn't our fault, promise!

We'd spent all day doing a radio session, but luckily made it to soundcheck in time to get our ridiculous banner up.

And I got to road-test my keytar. I haven't played it for ages - it's really old and weighs a ton. I think it's made from solid wood but I managed to get it working and pull some ridiculous moves with it, along with some pretty repulsive pitch bends... but surely that's what portable keyboards are for?

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