Diary of a Touring Musician: days 21 - 23
In September & October 2023, we took to the road in the UK to introduce our new album STARLITE.ONE. This is all about the drive home and part 18 of the warts-and-all-account.
If this is the first article you have seen in the series and want to put it into context, you can find them all by heading over to:
Goodbye St Albans!
It’s Monday, October 16th and now our thoughts turn to the long road trip home - 1367 miles or 2200km.
Our return ferry was booked later that day so we drove to Eyes On St Albans to say our goodbyes to Jez and had our usual specialist coffee from Fade To Black, which is conveniently situated next door.
This was followed by an excellent and surprisingly cost-effective meal at Molens Cafe - a favourite when lunching around The Quadrant as it’s just 50 metres from the shop and the food is home-cooked and of excellent quality.
Simon is a bugger for his Middle Eastern inspired grilled chicken & Suzy consumed a builder’s portion of cottage pie.
This is a post with quite a few photographs and probably too long for email. The best way to read it all is to open it in a browser.
Customs, a ferry and spiders
Gone are the days when you can head straight for the ferry.
Our first port of call heading homeward bound was the Inland Border Facility at Sevington to fulfil the legal requirement of having our ATA carnet stamped.
If you are unfamiliar with this process, it is an official paper (yes paper) schedule of equipment with weights, serial numbers, place of manufacture and value of goods that we brought into the UK - in our case, all our musical gear for the tour.
This costs us €414.11 plus the additional time of physically going to the Chamber of Commerce in Lisbon, then to the Portuguese Customs for the stamp, then to French Customs, after that UK customs and of course the reverse procedure on the return journey.
It’s time-consuming and a lot of messing about for the sake of the required official stamp on paper documents.
The carnet needs to be checked off on the outward journey when exiting the UK to ensure that no commercial sales of our goods has taken place - i.e. avoiding payment of any VAT.
Oi
We parked up in good time at the Inland Border Facility at Sevington. There were piles of security everywhere - akin to 20 bouncers for one person in a nightclub.
Simon was walking across to the appropriate building when a clump of said security guards started shouting ‘Oi’ at him. He was wearing black and certainly didn’t respond very well to Oi.
It transpired that he was missing a hi-vis jacket that one was supposed to wear on site. Too late. Fuck that! Simon gave them a black look and walked on.
Little English was spoken but the Irish & German counter staff were lovely.
With the paper duly stamped, we drove to the Irish Ferries terminal and were relieved to have made it in good time.
The floating car park
Again we were part of a captive audience on board this floating car park and therefore at the mercy of corporate pirate profiteering. We have all been there.
Needless to say the wine and food on the boat was very expensive. It’s times like these when the luxury of having packed a homemade baguette accompanied by a bottle of wine would have made us feel a million times happier. But hey ho!
When we arrived on the other side of the water, once again we had to reprogramme our minds to drive on the other side of the road.
No matter what, it always takes a few hours to get back into the swing of things to drive instinctually. Until then, you use up double the brain power in concentration as you know this is when accidents can happen.
Rain & spiders // Why can’t we follow the butterflies
Next stop. A last-minute booking at Hôtel restaurant Campanile in Vierzon.
We weren’t sure how tired we would be and how far we could drive so unusually, we had deliberately left it until the last couple of hours to book our overnight accommodation.
France is fucking big.
It was dark and Simon was totally knackered so Suzy drove through Paris. It was a nightmare drive with many heavy goods vehicles on the road, and it started to rain. Spray, French drivers. Bloody awful.
We were so tired and relieved to finally arrive at the hotel in the early hours of the morning. The receptionist had left the card in our room door as they didn’t operate a 24-hour front desk.
The place felt weird and abandoned - like a scene from Psycho. We should have known. What a disgusting room we encountered. It was run down and filthy with the complimentary gift of spiders hanging by the side of the bed.
There were no blackout curtains and we didn’t see the switches for the electric blinds. We were buggered, didn’t care and just fell into bed.
Day 22 - Tuesday, October 17th
The one thing that gives magic to our soul is when we wake up and realise that we are in France - which means we luxuriate in the culinary delights of our beloved croissant, pain au chocolat and coffee for breakfast. Let’s go, but not to the hotel restaurant!
We found a nearby pâtisserie, bought our feast, found a café and breathed a deep sigh of relief.
It was a little brisk but we sat outside and enjoyed the sun.
We were also doubly excited to wake up in France because we were off to see our wonderful friends Kaz Hawkins and her husband David Saunderson.
Kaz & David
Kaz is an award-winning musician and is now very well-known in France. She was born in Northern Ireland and has an interesting, if not traumatic life story.
If you don’t know her work, check her out, she is one cool woman - a real badass with a serious set of pipes.
We arrived in Limoges at 1300 and spent the afternoon in their garden chatting away about life, the universe and the music business. You may also not believe it but our beverages of choice were tea and carbonated water. Why? Because Kaz had a gig in The Netherlands the next day and we were shattered.
After a much-needed and enjoyable catch-up, Kaz made us a delicious spaghetti bolognese for dinner, where we also decided that a little vin rouge was obligatory to complete the meal - d’accord!
We all went to bed relatively early, waking up refreshed after a well-needed sleep in a friendly bed.
Day 23 - Wednesday, October 18th
Breakfast was great with gallons of coffee and we were all in a rush to hit the road.
Before we left, Kaz and David mentioned a holiday they had booked for the middle of January and invited us to join them. A very cheap apartment in Tenerife adjacent to their digs - what’s not to like? We had never been on an official holiday together. Even our honeymoon was only two days as we had to return to Spain to play a gig 🤣.
A day off in Cognac
Apart from a few smaller roads, the route to Cognac from Limoges is fast with no tolls.
On past trips, we have stopped off here as it has a pleasant town square with boulangeries, pâtisseries, bars and cafes.
It also has great wine and sensational regional Brandy surprisingly known as Cognac. Although Simon prefers Armagnac and even though a rock ‘n roll cliché, we love the stuff - perhaps a bit too much and therefore don’t have spirits in the house for that very reason.
Kaz had played in the town and the annual festival a couple of times and recommended Le Cheval Blanc for us to stay at which always helps when you have personal and local recommendations. We rocked up, checked in quickly to find a great room and lovely staff then made haste to a local French eaterie.
In Spain, all restaurants are deserted until 1400. In France and Portugal, lunchtime starts at 1200 prompt.
We found parking right across from the hotel which is a miracle as locating a space big enough for the van of rock is always tricky, especially considering the ancient and narrow streets of Cognac.
Armed with Tripadvisor and Around You apps we hastily (and foolishly) selected Le Coq d'Or for lunch which was by French standards disappointing and expensive. Even the wine wasn’t what we had come to expect.
Afterwards, we wandered around the town, walking aimlessly down ancient cobblestone streets, window shopping and passing some of the iconic names of Cognac: Rémy Martin, Hennessy and Camus.
Of course, any day off for us is punctuated with a beer or two - Belgian Affligem being the local favourite - and even though hellishly expensive, the quality is great.
Cognac Blues Passions
The town is also renowned for the annual Cognac Blues Passions music festival which began in 1994. Despite having the word blues in the title it has featured a lot of different artists over the past twenty years including ZZ Top, Joe Cocker, Sting, Joan Baez and Lenny Kravitz to iconic blues artists BB King, Buddy Guy, Ray Charles and Mavis Staples.
The festival has a shop in the town so we decided to pop in and see if the festival director Michelle Rolland was around. We were connected on Facebook but had yet to meet in person.
Fortune had it he was in and he popped down to say hello and gave us a signed copy of his book celebrating 20 years of the festival. Great!!
Back on a wander we popped into a local café and ended up chatting with a British chap called David Poole from Nottingham who was now living in France in a village just outside of Cognac.
He was really into his music and marketing and told us as soon as he saw us - he knew we were musicians. Well, black is our favourite colour.
It was good to meet a friendly English-speaking person so at least we could have a decent conversation and not struggle with our rusty school-level French.
La Maison
The one luxury that we always hope to experience when in France is a delicious meal washed down with a fabulous bottle of vin rouge.
Lunch had been such a disappointment so we decided to ask the proprietor of a local wine shop for assistance in making an informed decision with regards to our evening meal on a rare day off.
We were looking for something contemporary and relaxed at a reasonable price. Some impressive restaurants were located outside of the town but they were fiendishly expensive and would also require a taxi there and back. We were also warned that we could not guarantee any availability of return transportation.
So, we narrowed our culinary search to a walkable distance and decided upon La Maison which was highly recommended.
“Our plates all have in common that they are colorful and tasty. Influenced by seasonal products from the four corners of the world, we guarantee you a culinary journey in a rejuvenating setting. So that the journey never stops, we imagine a menu with refined dishes that is renewed every week. So welcome to La Maison for a timeless stopover, in the heart of Cognac!”
Our hopes were high and we were not disappointed. The service was beautiful and the atmosphere felt special, intimate, contemporary and relaxed.
Starlite is not a big meat eater and opted for asparagus and egg for her starter followed by the falafel, Simon - foie gras followed by ‘The Pig’ pork dish. To accompany the meal, the Sommelier recommended a most splendiferous bottle of vin rouge. We were very very happy!! Result!! Merci France!!
We always like to try locally produced goods and after dinner, we were treated to a signature Cognac d’auteur colourfully named ‘Fanny Fougerat’
We had a wonderful evening with romance shimmering in the ether.
That night we slept with good food in our bellies and peaceful dreams floating around our befuddled brains.
It is always special for us when we go on tour. You experience life in a multitude of alternative ways trying to understand the world we live in. There is still so much to learn.
And finally…
The next post is the penultimate in the series documenting days 24 and 25 of the journey with more driving, weird towns, great food, picking up our hounds and arriving home safe and well.
Thank you for sharing the memorable UK tour journey… hard to believe it is coming up on one year already… and yes Kaz is wonderful. We will see you soon back in Portugal ✌️❤️🇵🇹
Some great pics in that piece! -- and I had NO idea Kaz was now in France (every day is a learning day) and yes, quite the back story she has -- and quite the voice.