"Living The Dream"

As I sat last night on a plush leather couch in our green room, drinking free prosecco, munching on kalamata olives, stuffed red peppers and pickled white asparagus, one thought kept going through my head:

This isn’t very punk rock.

The punk rocker in me felt as though he ought to be out in the street, swilling cheap vodka with some local brain-damaged Neanderthals, urinating on public monuments and frightening the pigeons.  If I were a Real Punk Rocker, I would see this plush, amenity-laden green room for what it was: a symbol of bourgeois luxury and oppression, a symbol of class warfare, of the pervasive inequality of modern capitalism. I would stand up, scream: “fuck the rich!” throw my freshly baked brochette across the room, and go out to raise hell with other members of the working class.

Luckily for me, I am not a Real Punk Rocker, I am a weedy twat from Edmonton who likes freshly whipped pesto. Class struggle gives me a rash. “Squidney!  Why yes, another espresso for me, thanks very much old bean!  Have you seen this youtube video of the riots in Egypt?  Ghastly affair.  Yes, two sugar cubes, please.  But no biscuit on the side, my tummy has gone a little squiffy.”

In the van, Real Punk Rock bands sleep off hangovers and heroin crashes, pausing only to vomit on the side of the highway, their Mohawks waving gently in the breeze.  The Dreadnoughts, on the other hand, pull out their laptops and watch The Inbetweeners, play NBA 2010 or Super Mario Land, and listen to Glenn Gould whenever possible.  I’ve even developed a little tradition of opening one of our many free bottles of red wine and pouring myself a little glass while I watch season 1 of “All in The Family” or season 2 of “Rome”.  Cockface and I are going to have a Super Mario Tennis tournament today.  It’s awesome.

Now, before you think that we’ve gone soft on you, rest assured, this is all quite new to us. Certainly, the previous 250 European shows were not played in such circumstances.  In 2009, we spent two months sleeping in the van, destroying our livers every day and eating nothing but Polish “Chakalaka”-flavoured chips for weeks on end.  While you were sipping coffee at work, I was sleeping on a muddy hill in god damned France, shivering, cradling the bottle of whiskey that kept me warm, and trying to ignore the ever-increasing sound of wolves howling.  You think I’m not going to put my feet up and eat my pickled white asparagus?  You think I’m not going to sip fine rotwein from the banks of the Rhine and watch Archie Bunker yell at his wife?  Fucking god damned fucking right I am.

“Living the Dream”, a phrase that has officially lost all traces of irony for us.  We are truly living it.  Now, if you’ll excuse me, this free hotel breakfast ‘aint just going to eat itself.  One poached egg, or two?  Hmmm.  Such difficult choices we face in this life.