Joe and Claudine

The Dreadnoughts have just learned that two of our good friends in Chicoutimi, Quebec, have died in a tragic car accident. We have been all over the world and met a lot of people, but not many could match the incredible kindness and fun-loving spirit of Joe Desgagne and Claudine Belanger.

The last time we saw Joe and Claudine, we had just been treated to a booze-soaked private show in their home basement, a fully decked-out bar they called the Unnipek Pub. Ono the wall was a large mirror with the phrase "Cider is Good For You" etched into it. We drank obscene amounts of their liquor for free and they helped us to invent the World's Greatest Drinking Game: "Let It Ride", a spectacular game with chips and a roulette wheel. By the end of the night, everyone was tired, happy and nicely drunk.

It was one of the greatest nights we've ever had, and it will always stand as a testament to Joe and Claudine. We did not know that the poutine we shared with them the next morning would be our last together, and we did not know that our good-bye embraces would be final. However, we do know that they were among the finest people we've ever had the chance to meet on the road, and we will never forget them.

Douce mère qui sait, au sein de la victoire,
Faire toujours veiller un rayon de sa gloire
Sur les tombeaux de ses enfants.

-Octave Crémazie (1860)

Poland II

It is impossible to tour in Poland without coming back with some utterly bizarre stories. The country is full of wonderful, energetic, drunken, batshit insane people who seem to communicate mainly by shouting at each other. This makes it so that any problems you encounter are magnified. Times a lot.

When we think back on this particular trip years from now, one word will leap out of our memories: "cold". Europe has just experienced its worst winter in decades, with temperatures dropping to -23C in Poland itself. This normally would not be a problem, unless you are travelling in a van which has inexplicably lost its heat and also you are surrounded by people who think that a good solution for this problem is to fill the engine with bits of cardboard.

Good god, I wish I was making all of that up.

It started when the heat stopped and a little red light came on. Things got very cold, but we (somehow) made it to a gas station and warmed up with some food. We had barely turned our backs when we discovered that eight Poles (tour manager, opening band) were standing around our open engine and stuffing cardboard into it. Their theory was that the extreme cold was preventing the engine from getting hot enough to heat the van.

If you think about this for five seconds, you realize that it is completely, COMPLETELY retarded. But our brains had frostbite and we somehow allowed them to gum up all the airflow in the engine with cardboard.

We drove away. Predictably, the engine temperature shot up to 130 C, which is techincally, as a mechanic might say, "very bad". Suffice to say, we took the carboard out and continued to FREEZE OUR BLUE, ICY BALLS OFF. The engine refused to cool down. The irony of freezing our blue, icy balls off while simultaneously having panic attacks about the engine overheating was not lost on us.



Somehow, we managed to keep our spirits up:



It took a couple of days and some horrible nights to get the van fixed, and let's just say that we will probably never be that cold again. Let's also just say that we broke down some traditional gender barriers by using each other's heat to stay warm. That's all I'm going to say.

This entry will be too colossal to read if I try to tell you everything else that happened. But I can summarize: we got on a major polish TV station and screwed it up by shouting Polish obscenities too often, we lit Druzil on fire on stage, Squid Vicious gouged his head open by smashing a beer glass on his head, I nearly broke my leg in a vodka-assisted fall in Krakow, one of our shows was run by the Polish mafia who decided to take a ton of extra money from us without warning (our response: "well, your money's worthless anyway, isn't it?"), our van door fell off, and (FINALLY, on the last day), we were able to eat proper Polish pierogy:






.

Nonetheless, the shows were huge, incredible, and filled with excellent (and, as I've said, insane) people.

Those are just the things we remember. Multiply it all by 4 and that's pretty much what happened to us. Fuck. Kourrrrva.

Career Opportunities

Last night we played a sort of irish-punk showcase, with some great bands and a big hall and everything. Normally, a band would use this opportunity to carefully craft an excellent set of music and to make some useful contacts.

"Normally" is really the key word, there. Instead of doing these things, we decided to:

1. Drink 16 litres of cider before the show,
2. Run around the venue with the words "fuck Ireland" written all over our skin in black sharpie,
3. Threaten to beat the living shit out of a banjo player in another band,
   
4. Barf on stage,
5. Empty about two pints of Seamus' blood onto the stage via his mangled elbow,
6. NOT cut a plush sheep in half, (definitely not. we don't even know which sheep you're talking about), and,
   
7. Play a show which was later described--charitably--as "disturbing" and "avant-garde",

Dreadnoughts!

The Plan was to spend some time in Switzerland. This, of course, meant crossing the border.





So, we made it to Switzerland. A few days ago we played a big indoor festival called "Ska-Fest". We were excited about this for two reasons:

1. We were playing with TALCO, an incredibly good Italian folk-punk band with horns and violins and all kinds of awesome, and
2. We had a golden opportunity to make fun of ska music.

You see people, ska is generally terrible music. The reason is is terrible is that it sucks and we hate it. The reason there are so very many ska bands in every single city in the world is because most children are forced to play some kind of horn instrument in high school band. Then, as adults, legions of these musicians get a little baked while listening to Sublime and realize that they might get laid if they join a band. The songwriting and stage performance seems to be of secondary importance.

So, meeting Talco was something else. They blew everyone else off the stage...





...went backstage and were promptly annihilated by an Albertan drinking game taught to them by a certain Canadian punk band. Not only were they incredible guys, they also had that distinctly Italian inability to resist peer pressure. The result? Two soused folkpunk bands shouting, throwing things and generally terrorizing the rest of the (ahem, ska) bands.



Now, The Dreadnoughts generally do not believe in being poseurs. That is to say, we sing about getting drunk and going on adventures and doing utterly stupid things, and we do all of those things. We like to play big festivals with other so-called "party" bands, because we get to see if they, you know, actually put their cider where their mouth is, actually walk the walk.

Suffice to say, at this festival, we emerged as the undisputed champtions of The Walk. We destroyed the stage, we lit things on fire, we ran screaming through the halls, we valiantly leapt to defend the honour of damsels in distress, we poured obscene amounts of beer into our gullets, and most importantly, at the end of the night, one of us had to be carried out of the venue by Squid Vicious and the president of our record label.



Win.

And ska music? Well, ska music got the full treatment. We'd just finished "Ivanhoe" for around 200 moshers, and I got on the mic:

"Hey, do you guys like ska music?" The crowd roared their assent, throwing their hands in the air.

"Why?" I countered. "Ska music is terrible."


(Some laughter, a few scattered boos.)


"No, some of you seem to think I'm joking. Ska is terrible. It's all exactly the same. You only like it because you're white and that means it's the only music that you can dance to."

(Here, we all parodied that ridiculous "skanking" dance that ska fans do).

The boos became much louder. "OH!" I shouted. "Can't handle the truth, eh? Hey guys, wanna do a ska song for them?"

We broke into an easy two-chord ska breakdown, complete with our best trombone imitations into the microphones. The crowd began to dance wildly, and we soon ground the song to a halt. "wHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU?" I shouted. "Didn't you SEE HOW EASY THAT WAS? JESUS!!!"

Anyway, Martin, our aforementioned label president, told me the next day that this was the best thing he'd ever seen and that he was sick to death of ska music. This is rather unfortunate for him, as he does happen to run the biggest ska label in Switzerland. Hmmm.


Also we went to Belgium. For some reason.

Week I

An INSANE few days for the Dreadnoughts. Where to begin?

We'll begin with Rupert the Bear and his injury (and subsequent recovery) in Hamburg, Germany:





Then, we go to a report by Seamus O'Flanahan, describing his favourite parts of the tour so far:



Coming back from Copenhagen, we encountered -20C weather, high winds, and snow drifts. We quickly learned that Danish men are 60000% more manly than we are:




In Kassel, Druzil displayed his extraordinary talents for the locals:





Finally, today in Spangenberg... Squid Vicious decided to concoct an entirely novel dish, the Choco-Herringdog:





All in all... well... fuck.

Just Wing That Mother

AND another grand European adventure begins!

Our plane leaves at 6 AM, in four hours. We were going to try to smuggle some cider on board until that feckin' eejit tried to blow up a plane by lighting his ballocks on fire or whatever it was and now there's no liquids at all. Bugger.

The new countries on this tour are Denmark and Croatia. Croatia is exciting: we hear they have incredibly creative ways of getting completely annihilated there.

As for Denmark, well, there ARE rumours that Uncle Touchy has spent one previous night in Copenhagen, and if you talk to the right people they'll tell you that he may have emptied an entire bottle of Absinthe down his gullet and thrown a television out of a 5-story window. Uncle Touchy would just like to set the record straight and remind everyone of how viciously inaccurate the rumour mill can be. He also drank a beer.

Stay tuned for videos, images, and our new "scratch-and-sniff" blog entries! Mmmm!

The best 8 minutes ever

Some Recent Tour Activity

Fun Times at Sarah Sin's House in Toronto

You know, one day you're sitting around, thinking it would be nice to play some bigger shows, and fairly soon you've got Sarah Sin's cellphone--which she has unwisely left downstairs after going upstairs to bed--sitting right in front of you.

I don't know what Squid Vicious and I are going to do with it, but it is going to be epic.

Crabshaw

Here's O'Flanahan performing "Buried Alive" with the Creepshow on Halloween! Wait 'till the end to hear Uncle Touchy's special message to the Creepshow.




Our shows are going very well, but it is simply awesome to hang out with these guys and watch them every night. Mike is one of the most incredible drummers we've ever seen, The Reverend McGuntey eats like a starving horse, Sick Boy seems to know everything there is to know about the music scene and Sarah Blackwood is sweet and kind and also she loves unicorns and crayons and pretty princess stickers.

Cyderween

Happy Cyderween everyone! Uncle Touchy and Seamus combined to make this pumpkin, which was awesome.

Poland, or KOURRVA MACH...

No time to say much about this wonderful country, but here is picture from land of pierogy and Slibovica...

Pile of Coal right outside someone's house... POLAND!!

Economy is bad so must hire chickens to work at gas stations.

Salon Meblowy... a must for any businessman traveling through Poland.

SSB wearing traditional Polish Speedo.

...

Relax in Krakow with a nice tall glass of Boner.

Too much Boner and you are susceptible to van pranks.

Home in 6 days! Many stories to tell! KOURRRRRVAAA!!!!

Our gig in Portugal was shut down by the cops. This is a rock n' roll LEVEL UP. HOwever, we just played outside for a bunch of folks. Here is the video...

Espana

We were very excited to go to Spain, because as wonderful as Germany, Holland and the UK were, Spain seemed like the first place we would go where the culture was genuinely different from ours. Our last German gig was in Kassel. We stayed at our promoter's place. Heis name was Armin, and he was a sort of wiry little mustachoied german dude in his mid-30s who kept saying "This is a great honour... the DREADNOUGHTS are in MY HOUSE!". He had procured 24 Guinness, 24 Newcastle and a bottle of expensive whiskey. We disappointed him by collapsing into bed and passing out.

And yes, I know, those of you who have actually gone to bed with a Dreadnought understand entirely what Armin's experience was like.

However, I awoke the next morning and said to Armin: "Hey, let's get pissed!" So we did. Instead of, you know, beginning the 23-hour journey to Galicia, we sat in Armin's basement, listened to obscure European folkpunk and drank all of his booze. I somewhat regretted this move later, as I lay mostly comatose on a hill in France, completely in the middle of nowhere. Everyone else slept in the van, and when I heard wild dogs howling in the distance, I decided to cozy up into the driver's seat and pass out on the steering wheel.

We sleep in the van a lot.

The next day, somehow, we made it to Spain. To Galicia, where Cider (or "Sidra") is EVERYWHERE, almost as ubiquitous as in Bristol. However, there is a seriously terrible tradition, one which we broke many times, something for which we were almost murdered several times. In Galicia, you pour a bottle of Cider OVER YOUR HEAD into a cup that you sort of hold down by your bollocks. This results in half of the cider going on to the ground. The remaining amount, you're supposed to chug.

We enjoyed this tradition once or twice, but when we started paying for our own bottles, and when people started coming up to us and demanding that we pour half of it on the fucking ground, we had had enough. "Fuck OFF," we said, but they kept coming. Fuck. Idiots. CIDER. Fuck.

Speaking of Cider, we changed the "Cider" song to "Sidra" in order to impress the Spaniards. All over Spain, we've been singing "SIDRAAA, SIDRAAA, SIDRAAA, SIADRAA....". Someone has just informed us that our pronunciation is bad and it sounds like we're saying "SIDA". Which, in case you didn't know, is Spanish for "AIDS".

Spain: 1, Canada: 0.

Anyway, it would be difficult to summarize this wonderful place, but our booking agent has luckily provided us with a decent quote:

"In Spain," he said, "we don't give a fuck about anything."

He is basically right about that. Their Siesta is legendary: three hours a day where everyone fucks off from work and goes to sleep. Alcohol is UNBELIEVABLY cheap, and it's not uncommon to walk past a cafe at 10 in the morning and see hordes of old Spanish men drinking Cerveza on the patio. Usually they look at you like you're completely retarded and they hate you. Every building here looks like it's going to collapse in ten minutes. It's awesome.

At one festival we were playing, a man challenged Squid Vicious to a punching competition. There was a machine that registered the power of your punch. The guy wound up and pounded the bag... we waited for a minute, and his score came up: 1140. Squid nodded, stepped up to the bag, and ploughed into it. We waited for a minute, and Squid's score came up: 9908.

Spain:1, Canada:1.

Tonight, we play our final Spanish gig and head back towards a festival in Switzerland where, if you can believe this, we have 4-star hotel rooms, a shuttle bus to the hotel rooms, and a room full of cider waiting at the festival. As wonderful and enticing as this is, we will be sad to leave Spain. It is a beautiful, wonderful, squalid, noisy, fucked-up place, where sometimes, if you're drunk enough and the lighting is right, you can imagine that you're back on East Hastings.

The Shelf

So, an interesting discovery we've made is that in Holland and parts of Germany, the toilets are what can only be described as "disgusting and completely retarded".

When you first see one, and you have to do a "number two", the first thought that enters your head is: "why?". The second thought is, "OH GOD, WHY???" And so forth.

WHY??

So, we asked our friend Tom from Circle J to explain the Shelf to us. This is his response:





Totally unsatisfactory, but hilarious.

We are in Spain now, and it is hot, and full of Spaniards. The toilets are normal. The food is spectacular. The punks are drunk. You can buy a liter and a half of sangria for 1 Euro 75 at the gas station. YES.

The West Country, and England In General

(photo: Adam PW Smith)

We went to the West Country of England with several high expectations. We expected to find a folk-punk scene obsessed with Cider... Cider-Punk. We expected to find a folklore tradition centred on Cider, represented by a bunch of stout, broad-shouldered, bald guys who say things like "Oi therr lads, how's about wee go out tae the zoider bars an' get roight sottered, wha'?" We expected to be treated to a full tour of the West Country's finest Cider farm, the Wilkins' Farm, a place Johnny Rotten and Joe Strummer have both described as the "best place in England". We expected, in a word, to be drowning in the right old fermented apple in all possible ways.

Sometimes, you set your expectations too high, and it turns out that reality cannot possibly match them. You are inevitably disappointed, because you've been imagining something to be much more than it actually is.

This was not one of those times.

Jaymer from the Surfin' Turnips is the greatest man alive. Every song they sing is actually about Cider. For example, here is a verse from "It's Cider Swillin' Time Again":

It's Cider swillin' time again,
Oh aaa! Oh aaa!
It's Cider swillin' time again,
Oh aaa! Oh aaa!
It's Cider swillin' time again,
I might has one, I might has ten
And we'll all go rollin'
Back to the pub again!

OHHH ARRR AYE. Here's another gem, from "Drink Myself to Sleep":

Drink, drink, myself to sleep,
every night a cider by my side
auuuRAAAAA laa laa AAA rauuu RAAAA

Kev, the Turnips fan we stayed with, is also the greatest man alive. Zoe, his girlfriend, is the greatest woman alive. Bristol rules. Cider is everywhere. We drank on a BOAT WHERE THEY ONLY SERVE CIDER. THEY SPELL IT "ZYDER". THEY SING SONGS CALLED "DRINK UP THEE ZYDER" UNTIL FIVE IN THE MORNING. WEST. COUNTRY. FOR. THE WIN.

We staggered away from the Wilkins' Cyder farm loaded with ten gallons of the stuff, bought at something like twelve cents a pint. We are still in the process of consuming the rest of it all over England.

(photo: Adam PW Smith)

Speaking of England: we do not want to leave. The European continent is OK and everything, but England is simply one of the best places on earth. The cuisine is awesome. Beans on everything. Yorkshire pudding. It is all incredibly cheap. Pints are three dollars. People speak proper English. Simple, basic features of civilization (phone booths, post offices, phone cards for sale, grocery marts, public washrooms) are all over the place, unlike the rest of Western Europe. People are totally polite by default, which is very Canadian.

Essentially, what I am saying is: Rule Brittania.

Here, via Spark, is the Amsterdam Incident:

Canada Day in Amsterdam

Well: we have officially gone up six levels as a band. We're at level 32. Why? Three words:

Mushrooms. On. Stage.

That's right: on stage in Amsterdam, The Stupid Swedish Bastard dropped mushrooms and proceeded to play the set.

The man who sold us the mushrooms told him to take, at most, 7.5 grams. He dropped 15.

The set was epic.

Afterwards was even more epic.

Adjectives cannot do justice to the epic. The Stupid Swede ended up at some town 30 kilometers away, jumping into canals with Dutch people while holding a beer and a lit smoke, climbing apartment buildings and stealing plants off of people's balconies, and writing "TEGAN AND SARA" in giant letters on his chest. Europeans simply had no idea what to make of him.

OOOOOOOOOOO CAAAAAAAAAAAAAA NA DAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA...

Pre-Canada Day Update

So we've been playing shows every single day for... ever? We're not sure. To put it mildly, a few things have been happening to us along the way.

Our recent shows have been with Circle J, an awesome folkpunk band from Holland. They have been incredibly nice to us: booking us a bunch of shows, letting us use their gear and even letting us sleep in their van when our van becomes too crowded. However, I keep getting drunk and (correctly) reminding them that "we liberated your asses in World War II, ya fuckers" so I think we're basically even.

Speaking of getting drunk, I may have hit an all-time personal... high? Low? We found ourselves with an unexpected day off in Kreuzberg, Berlin, and I had been taking it easy for a few days because of a nearly broken toe. I woke up in the van around 11 PM, turned to Squid and said: "Well, I'm gonna find some breakfast, then I'm gonna get deee-RUNK!"

Never have I followed through on a promise with such vigour and enthusiasm. After some excellent turkish-style breakfast, Squid and I found ourselves in the middle of a colossal park, drinking a six-pack each. We polished those off and went to collect everyone else. In very little time at all, the whole band was in the park, gathered around a small beetle and a ladybug. "MAKE FRIENDS!!" we shouted. "MAKE FRIENDS, YOU LITTLE FUCKING BASTARDS!!" When it became clear that BottleBeetle and Spotty Bitch weren't going to commiserate, we decided to play some soccer. As a Canadian in Europe, you have to have a few drinks in you to play soccer, because even four year-old European epileptics are better than you at soccer.

Soon afterwards, I found myself throwing old, rusty bicycles down a 60-foot high marble slide with a small British girl. We were sitting at the world's weirdest playground, a giant stone auditorium-style construction that had completely fallen apart and was full of all kinds of nooks and crannies. We were hanging out with these awesome kids and their moms, running around on this giant complex and generally making fools out of ourselves.

Everything was totally peachy until some dudes started throwing rocks at a woman because she was drinking alone in public. According to whatever bizarre, fucked-up version of Islam that they adhered to, this was apparently the thing to do, and it is not entirely uncommon for such incidents to occur in Berlin. The guys backed off pretty quick when Squid made an appearance in front of them, arms crossed.

Seamus and I headed off into Kreuzberg, determined to find some goddamned cider. We hadn't seen a proper cider since Quebec. So, we wandered into the streets and stopped at every bar, asking "Hast du Apfelwine? Cider?" After a series of negative responses, we realized that we could double our efficiency by walking down opposite sides of the street and going into bars seperately.

As it turned out, the only bar with Cider was populated by four lesbians who kept using scissors to cut our T-shirts into fascinating shapes. This is when things start to get really blurry for me, but I do recall a gypsy accordionist wandering up to our table looking for money. "Why would I pay you for gypsy music," I slurred, "when I've got the best gypsy violinist right here drinking with me?" Seamus pulled out the ol' fiddle and began to engage the accordionist in a gypsy duel. Seamus would play, then as the gypsy dude tried to match him, I would motion him with my fingers and shout "BRING IT!! BRING IT!!"

Apparently, after this, one of the lesbians had to go and find me, as I had wandered aimlessly off into the streets. They brought me back to a bar where Circle J were enjoying a few pints, where (apparently) we played Pogues tunes for almost two hours.

And then I woke up in a Hostel when a bunch of retarded Spanish girls kept giggling at me, for some reason. Fuck.

Next: CANADA DAY IN AMSTERDAM...