What goes on tour: Rock'n'roll stories

Nikki Sixx’s industrial experiments with cocaine, heroin and women; Ozzy Osbourne pelting his audience with animal offal; Johnny Cash, amphetamine-amped, taking to his hotel room with an axe; Keith Richards, where do you start?

Glastonbury Music Festival offers rock’n’roll on a grand scale but, according to Luke Buda of The Phoenix Foundation, it’s not a pleasant experience. “There’s 175,000 people’s worth of portaloos, and there’s 175,000 people’s worth of overflowing-with-shit portaloos, and the entire site smells like shit and mud, and it’s just horrific,” Buda tells me.

“We’ve got photos, it’s amazing. It was so muddy your gumboots get sucked off your feet. That’s how muddy it is ... I saw a dude take his c@#& out and take a piss in the mud by a queue for a food stall at Glastonbury, that’s what it comes to.”

You can’t sleep either. “Our tent was about twenty metres away from the rave tent, so we had a f@#&in’ Glastonbury banging rave like 20 metres away from us. Lying there at night, we had duo tents, and me and Sam [Flynn Scott, also of the Phoenix Foundation] are both going ‘Oh my god. Oh my god. F@#&ing hate it’.’’

Buda says the band’s English tour manager’s warning – “Lads, make like you’re going to f@#&ing war’’ – was warranted.  “I think the only way people do it, because it’s England, they pretty much just slam the drugs, and so it just doesn’t matter.’’

Speaking of drugs, the wildest stories of rock’n’roll excesses come from Head Like a Hole’s Booga Beazley. “During the period when Nigel Regan, the guitarist, was playing naked a lot in Australia, we played in Annandale. He had a woman jump up on stage mid-though the song and she honestly went straight to his arse.

“I just couldn’t stop laughing. He didn’t see the funny side of it at the time. All he was wearing was Doc Martens. He quickly spun her around with his foot and put his foot on her back and gave her a big heave. She went flying off the stage, like a stage-dive into the crowd. That was wicked.”

Sex and drugs went together – and everywhere, from cemeteries to beaches via buses. “We [HLAH] had ample opportunities to probably be very debauched and just be sex-crazed maniacs… there has been a fair whack of it ... It was all really funny back then. People leaving through windows, getting locked out of hotels, backpackers. The debauchery was mainly through the excess of drugs.”

But Booga says there was nothing funny about being a heroin junkie.  “Hideous, hideous, mate. I wish I’d never touched it. You know everyone says it, it’s a total cliché, but I’d like to know what it was actually like to feel like a real human being, back in my early twenties. Just waking up to a new day and seeing the sun out. Drugs consume your life and all of that goes out the window. Your pleasure sense is rooted. Nothing is pleasurable anymore apart from the drugs.”

My being feels mismatched and faded. My stomach is in revolt. I’ve just eaten a kind of yellow I hadn't encountered before. I have to lie around like a snake. If New York is the concrete jungle then L.A must be the concrete desert

Though HLAH is now happily reformed (and clean), it was heroin that led to their break-up. “I’d be doing shows where I just felt terrible. I’d be lying in the back of the van until the last minute before I had to be on stage, just tossing and turning, sweating like a pig … My performance would be lacklustre. Me and Nige [Regan], we were the ones that were the bad bastards most of the time, and we would egg each other on. I thought that as long as I was in the band, and so was Nigel, I was never gonna stop.”

Over a hearty breakfast at a cafe in New York, Liam Finn tells of the extremes of life as a musician and how they affect his writing. Things falling apart in London was the subject of Finn’s terrifically potent first album I’ll Be Lightning. He broke up with his long-term girlfriend, his band split up, and he got robbed.

His song This Place is Killing Me put it best:

There is nothing for us here, yeah we can start over again ... I suck and drain to numb the pain
What do you need me for?
My broken heart in the rain and the pain of getting shot down like an aeroplane
There’s a devil in the trees, and don't let him in, please.

“Bad experiences can be great fuel for creativity,” he says, but adds that he’s pleased he didn’t have to “emotionally f@#& himself over to the same extent” to make his upcoming third record, The Nihilist. He’s buzzing with energy, clearly inspired by the energy and variety of living and working in New York. “I really love it here.” Music’s greatest city isn’t perfect, though: Finn says looking over the river towards Wall Street can be a bit scary.

Unlike Finn, Mara TK wasn’t able to be stirred by New York last year. Electric Wire Hustle’s frontman was denied immigration entry for New York’s CMJ festival in October, thanks to a bureaucratic stuff-up. “‘Shipwrecked in the middle of my own body’ is how Pablo Neruda felt when he wrote Friends On The Road in 1921”; Mara felt the same way visiting Hollywood during his last American trip he recalls,  reading aloud entries from his diary:

My being feels mismatched and faded. Presently, we’re in Hollywood and my stomach is in revolt. I’ve just eaten a kind of yellow [“wasn’t food; it was just yellow,” he explains] I hadn't encountered before. I have to lie around like a snake. If New York is the concrete jungle then L.A must be the concrete desert.The shore is only ours until the tide comes in and one feels that, similarly, Los Angeles will eventually be claimed by sun and dust.

He was relieved to make it to Austin, Texas to perform at the South By Southwest music festival. “Here an enormous sky bends over us. Only in Australia have I seen more of the heavens at one time,” he wrote on arriving at his hotel which, typically, smelt like old wet washing.

He’s got those tunes that will make you feel like you’re on class A drugs, man. Remember, I’ve never touched those kind of drugs in my life, but the music that he does is so energetic, it’s crazy

Singer-songwriter Lisa Crawley also has vivid memories of Austin. “When we went to South By Southwest from London we missed two planes, took too much gear, and on the last day I’d had too much to drink and got stranded in a field where The Mint Chicks were playing a secret show way out of the city. I had to be at the Texas airport at 6am, and I was far from the airport at 3am. I remember barely making it on time. When in line to check in I was half-asleep, but definitely heard a lady saying that I looked how she felt. Charming!”

Touring across America when Swing hit number one, Savage faced some outrageous egos. When he first arrived during 2008, a minor rapper was dissing him like he wasn’t even good enough to be backstage in Utah. “He had a head bigger than a pumpkin. This guy’s ego was so far gone it was unbelievable!”

Of all the many colourful characters Savage performed with, DMX Australasia was the liveliest tour, he exclaims. “He’s got those tunes that will make you feel like you’re on class A drugs, man. Remember, I’ve never touched those kind of drugs in my life, but the music that he does is so energetic, it’s crazy. You know, when you go to a concert and you see those speakers that are tied up with chains that go all the way to the ceiling? He climbed all the way to the top of one of those. I was just looking at him going, ‘You’re crazy, bro’, but the crowd just loved it. He’s an awesome performer. How he is on stage is how he is in person, even when you’re talking to him he’s got a lot of energy. He’s got a few mood swings in there as well, but who doesn’t?” 

Fellow rapper K-One – who had a run-in with a kangaroo filming the So Long music video deep in the Australian outback – says music is a full-on job, but much easier than forestry. While working a stay-out crew in the Wairarapa bush for a couple of weeks with no TV or internet for entertainment he’d write music. “They’re both high energy [industries] but it’s a different kind. Forestry is physically one of the hardest jobs out there. Anyone who has actually done it will know. I’d probably die if I tried to go back to it now; music has been too easy on me.”

Back home, The Shocking and Stunning’s Jack T Hooker says touring New Zealand is chaotic, particularly when starting out. “Especially in the excitement of the first couple, where there ends up being a bigger emphasis on getting smashed and partying in different parts of the country.”

Like most local bands, The Shocking and Stunning did (and mostly still do) everything DIY: booking the shows, organising the support bands and backline, and sorting the advertising. “We’d pack into the car, bring along anyone else who wanted to come and drive across the country, all in the hopes enough people came along to the gig, we’d sort somewhere to stay, and we’d [hopefully] make enough money to pay for petrol to get back to where we came from. Considering the shambolic nature of the touring, it all led to some pretty exhausted states.”

Hooker remembers one South Island trip ex Wellington as being indicative of how things go. Right in the middle of his Victoria University term, it involved two Shocking and Stunning shows, in Dunedin on Friday and Christchurch on Saturday, as well as a lunchtime solo acoustic guitar show in Christchurch. He was the only driver.

“Dunedin was great fun, as always,” he remembers. “After driving from Dunedin since 6am – everyone else got to go crash out – I made my way across town to play an hour of technical instrumental guitar music. The brain has a great tendency to stay sharp when it needs to, but in this case mid-way through the gig my brain abandoned me and left my hands on their own to sort everything out.”

He was back to uni on Monday, exhausted. “It can all be fun – though every so often you have to ask yourself why anybody would put themselves through so much shit to play music in front of 40 people.”