Life on tour

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Hi groupies,

Little Drummer Boy Cavey tapping away here on the blog.

Day 86 of our sell-out world tour and we continue to chalk up the venues of Japan with the help of our high-tech 'tour bus' - the Shinkansen bullet train - which rockets us from venue to venue at a few hundred kilometres per hour. I've noted that each town or city we pass through has certain common features:

1. A ferris wheel
2. A golf driving range
3. A piece of Seventies sci-fi architecture, harking back to the golden years when Japan was truly years ahead of the rest of the world

Eating on the tour bus often consists of opening up several packets of pre-packed fast-foodstuffs and cobbling together something resembling a meal. Last night after the gig we slept in another capsule hotel. The capsule hotel experience was best summed up for me by the sight of several bleary-eyed salarymen sat in the smoking room at 7am watching Japan's answer to Anne and Nick (of TV-AM fame).

We were due to record our live concept album, Typhoon Looms, today. It was to be performed at the summit of Mount Aso (the largest volcanic caldera in the world) at the beginning of tropical storm Man-Yi but has been cancelled by our tour manager for safety reasons. Not to be dissuaded from recording what would be our first concept album (our fourth album since commencing the world tour) we've retreated back into our bullet train tour-bus to escape the threatening weather and constructed a make-shift studio.

We've managed to get on board - both in the musical and locomotive sense - Messrs Rick Wakeman (yes dear groupies, he of Yes fame so we get that stadium rock sound that I think our band is heading toward) and Rolf Harris (as Two Little Boys has been hummed countless number of times by all members of the band in recent weeks) to produce our efforts. For percussion we've installed tea urns at each end of our carriage-cum-studio and bussed in, at great cost, a dozen weavers and their associated apparatus from the foothills of the Japanese Alps. This unforeseen change of circumstances from our previous cyclone theme has led to a necessary revision in the album title: Typhoo Looms. I think you'll be in for a sonic treat when it's released in the autumn. The performance is being aired on Japanese TV tonight so scan the airwaves.

Mr Kieron, the band's knob twiddler with a the god-given talent for extracting unearthly sounds from his organ writes:

Following our improvised recording we arrived in Nagoya, where "A Taste of Morocco" was discovered in the 'burbs and the New Yorkian hostess of Casablanca restaurant kindly set aside her offence that we hadn't reserved a table and squeezed us in for a hearty and yummy feed of couscous, olives, lentils, chick peas... (okay omnivores, I know it aint sushi, but it's a treat for me!) Mid-starter, the lights dimmed and Elbi the bellydancer entered both the room and my subsequent dreams (of which no more later). Hypnotized by the butterfly in her bellybutton, I may have ordered more beer than I had originally intended. Elbi dragged a few Japanese Friday night revellers onto the stage for some ritual humiliation, further evidence that when they let their coiffeured hair down, the Japanese are a great laugh (except the lass on the next table who had one of those horrific machine gun cackles - you know the kind where her date cracks a joke and wonders why the entire restaurant have felt the need to dive under their tables for cover.)

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