21st Feb 2022 – How exciting. To be in a band.

A week or two after playing shows around the UK with our new pals from Holland, The Vernon Walters, we were off to Europe somehow, to play there with our local buddies, Corporate Grave. Our drivers, two Welsh hippie punk miscreants who kept us entertained with stories as they figured out which direction we should be headed. I don’t know how any of this happened. I was just the vocalist in the band. Before I knew it as a phrase, I would ‘get in the van.’

I don’t recall where we were picked up from, or any of the journey across the South of England to Dover where we would await the ferry to Calais. We would have picked up Rich and Corporate Grave along the way in Southampton.

We arrived in Dover in the late evening and beer seemed to be an important requirement so we bought a case of 24 cans of Stella. We had probably already spent all the spare money we had. Beer and cigarettes came before food.

We left in darkness, with a bunch of paperwork cleared, the details of which I’m vague on now, but it would have been related to earning money, carrying expensive equipment and those sorts of things. As we were accepted we assumed everything would be in order for the rest of the trip, particularly as Europe had just opened up without much in the way of cross border checking once on the mainland.