Part One: England

So we’ve just completed the first leg of our Miracle on Neon Clown Avenue UK/EU Tour. I’ve spent the past several months booking and promoting this tour, which is a tour to celebrate the release of the album Miracle on Neon Clown Avenue that I made as a collaboration with my drummer and producer Gem over the course of about 4 years.

We recorded the album in 2019, when Gem was living in London and working at a studio called The Rattle. Because we didn’t have the budget to hire a studio, we recorded the album by sneaking into The Rattle after hours and recording in the middle of the night, 10 nights in a row. After recording, it took 3 years to mix, and we worked with our friend Ben Turner at Axe & Trap Studios in the very small English city of Wells, to finish mixing it. Then, Peter Fletcher did the mastering at Black Bay Studios in Scotland.

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We finally released the album last summer at a show at Centro Cultural Liliana Loth in San Pedro Ixtlahuaca, Mexico, which was a joint celebration of both the album release and my parents’s 40th wedding anniversary, and featured performances by myself, my dad (Mark Statman), Efraín Velasco, Isahrai Azaria (with Beto Cruz), and Duo Toque de Azafrán. Gem and I also performed some songs from the album as a duo at Voodoo’s Pizza in Norwich, UK a few weeks later on a lineup with Mike Thunder and Lamona (both of whom Gem also played drums for that night), while I was visiting the UK to record our upcoming album Hard to Break. 

We didn’t have the chance to do a proper tour for the album until now, because the economic situation that music venues were dealing with at the time due to the pandemic would’ve made it impossible for us to cover the costs of the tour with what we’d be paid. The situation is still pretty bad, but we’re going to make enough money on this tour to pay our bassist and drummer’s bills for the month, and the driver we’re touring with is celebrating his 66th birthday (and therefore becoming a pensioner/retiree) by lending us a car and his driving skills and covering some of our additional costs.

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Since the recording of Miracle on Neon Clown Avenue, Gem moved to Norwich with their partner Honor, and the two of them opened a multidisciplinary art space called Ambition’s Graveyard. I’ve been living in a little room at Ambition’s Graveyard for the past couple weeks, rehearsing for this tour with Gem and our new bassist Chu, and making various preparations with Gem, Chu, and our driver Moon. Gem, Chu, and Moon all know each other from the arts community in Norwich, which all 3 of them have become important pillars of in their own ways. On this tour, we’re performing songs from Miracle on Neon Clown Avenue and our upcoming album Hard to Break, in addition to a few songs from previous albums. We kicked off the tour on Wednesday with a show at The Peer Hat in Manchester.

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I started the morning with English breakfast and coffee at our friend’s cafe in Norwich called Butterfly Cafe, and then Gem, Chu, Moon, and I all met up at Ambition’s Graveyard to load our gear into the car and take the long journey up to Manchester. Moon’s lovely wife Dea came down to wish us good luck, and took some nice photos of us in front of the car.

Nothing too eventful happened on the drive up to Manchester, other than us getting to see the always beautiful English countryside, and meeting some lovely green haired people behind the counter at a Starbucks that I refused to buy anything from, who follow us on Spotify now. Moon found it amusing that there were people with green hair working at a Starbucks in rural England now, as he’s become accustomed to only seeing people like our purple haired drummer Gem in urban centers.

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Chu grew up in Manchester and their family still lives there, so doing this show was also a good way for them to catch up with family and old friends. As it turns out, a good friend of theirs was bartending at The Peer Hat when we arrived. While chatting with the sound guy during our sound check, it turned out he’d also done sound for one of Chu’s bands at a festival back when they still lived in Manchester. Small world!

After sound check, we had some free time before the start of the show, so Chu showed us around Manchester a bit, including taking us to a place called Afflecks Palace, full of interesting independent shops. It was also nice for me to be back in Manchester, since I hadn’t been since 2017, and I used to perform there kind of regularly back then, because I released some albums on a label called German Shepherd Records in Salford (right next to Manchester) and there are a few radio DJs around there that have been playing my stuff for awhile now.

After having curry for lunch at one of Chu’s old favorite spots, we returned to the venue, where we met up with our friends Tamsin (aka VICE VERA) and John (aka JD Meatyard), who we were performing with on our 3 dates in northern England, starting with Manchester. I hadn’t seen either of them since 2017, when we toured together in the Netherlands with our friends Mankes, so it was great to catch up. Tamsin lives in Manchester, and kindly invited the 4 of us to stay on her spare beds for the 3 nights we were in the North. John lives in Spain now, but grew up in the UK and knows people all over the North, so he stayed with various family and friends on this trip.

John’s friend Kenny, a photographer for the Manchester Evening News, took some photos of all of us in the green room before the show. This was great to have documentation of, especially since it was Chu’s first time performing with us, and the first night of our first tour as a band.

The show in Manchester was wonderful. As was common throughout our time in the North, I saw a lot of familiar faces in the audience, all people I hadn’t seen since 2017, or even earlier. John’s son and daughter-in-law Tom and Hannah came all the way from Liverpool to see the show, and Hannah was so excited to see me again and meet my tourmates that she jumped on the hood of our car and, inspired by one of John’s songs that instructs the audience to kiss their friends, kissed me and my drummer.

Throughout the Northern leg of the tour, we followed roughly the same set order: Tamsin opened each show with her intense, emotive, multi-layered songs that she performed incredibly, followed by John’s raucous and equally intense acoustic punk songs of love and rage, with the Cannonball Statman trio (“the New York boys”, as John affectionately called us) closing out the night. Both Tamsin and John were better than I’d ever seen them.

It was also nice to hear John play songs from his new album Live the Life, an album I highly recommend! I’ve known John for about a decade now; we met when we performed together at the New York Antifolk Festival in 2013, which was the same week he married his wife Shosh, who he lives with now in Spain. In 2015, John invited me to the UK to do a 2 week tour together, which was the first time I’d ever been here, and I’ve been going back pretty regularly ever since. We’ll be doing some shows together in NYC in October this year with my friend Thomas Patrick Maguire, which Tamsin might also join us for.

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Our set in Manchester went down great. People stuck around, even though we played pretty late and it was a weeknight, and the people who hadn’t seen us before were won over by what we were doing. I was especially impressed by Chu’s bass playing and harmony vocals; we’d met less than a month prior to that show, and never performed together, and they were already playing my songs better than I do!

Stephen Doyle, who runs a local radio show called Sonic Diary, came to the show and recorded our whole set to play on the radio. Later on, he told me I’m one of his favorite artists of all time, and that this is the best he’d ever seen me; that meant a lot coming from him!

After the show, we went to Tamsin’s place, had tea, and fell asleep. I recalled to Tamsin how one of her friends who came to the show jokingly offered me £20 to destroy her TV upon finding out I’m staying with her, and expressed my disappointment to find that she doesn’t actually have a TV for me to destroy. That aside, her house is lovely, and we slept very well there.

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We spent the next day exploring Manchester and having pasta that Moon made us all for lunch, before driving to Birkenhead to perform at Swinging Arm, a biker bar right across the river from Liverpool, with a lovely view of the Liverpool skyline. When we arrived, John and some friends of his were at the venue setting up, and one of them asked me how it all went in Manchester last night. I said it was great, and John said “wrong answer!” and explained to me once again that you’re really not supposed to say anything nice about Manchester when you’re in Merseyside, as there’s a lot of rivalry between the two. This is something I also learned when we toured together in 2015, but had apparently forgotten since.

All in all, the Birkenhead show went really well. It seemed like the crowd really enjoyed the whole night. A local musician called Rusty Strings also performed, and we were all very impressed with what he did, and surprised to find out he’d only recently started playing guitar and writing songs. Nigel from HMHB was there, and we hung out for a bit after the show, but my face-blindness led me to be completely unaware that it was Nigel until after we left the gig. This happens a lot. A great guy, in any case, and I love his music.

We spent most of the next day getting some much needed relaxation in a beautiful park in Manchester.

After our time in the park, we hurried off to Darwen to perform at Bar 39 that night. Darwen is a very small town in Lancashire, where John spent some of his childhood after his family moved there from Glasgow looking for work. Because he partly grew up there and some of his bandmates in his old band were also from there, a lot of his old friends come out to see the show whenever he plays in Darwen, and it always feels like a hometown show, even though he doesn’t live there anymore. Darwen also holds a special place in my heart, because some of the best times I’ve had in the UK have been performing there with John. In fact, Darwen was the first place I ever slept in the UK, because John and I stayed at his old drummer Gary Ward’s place there the first night of our 2015 tour.

A few friends who’d come to see us in Manchester on Wednesday also came all the way to Darwen to see us again that night, adding to the already full room of people who’d come out to see the show. While we were all having curry nearby, a fan of ours who happened to also be in the curry shop told the waiter “I can’t believe you’re charging these rock and roll stars for a meal here!” which is a nice sentiment, but also led to the staff being understandably suspicious that we might refuse to pay.

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The Darwen show was easily the best of the English dates, with a packed house full of happy fans and all the performers on top of their game.

The show was not without controversy, however; for a few minutes during our set, five policemen showed up outside the venue and interrogated the owner, which caused the entire room, including my bandmates, to stare attentively out the window in anticipation of what might happen. Thankfully, they didn’t shut us down, and didn’t even enter the venue.

After our set, Stephen Doyle, who’d come all the way from Salford to see us play again, took the stage to give an impromptu speech about how much he’d loved the whole show. We barely made it out of Darwen alive because so many people wanted to talk and hang out with us after the show, including a woman who had visited every place in NYC that Lou Reed had ever mentioned in a song.

One thing I really loved about the gigs in the North of England this time around is that we had a local poet joining us every night to read some poems between the musicians; this was JD Meatyard’s idea.

In Manchester, we had Lisa Moore (aka WORDERHERDER), then in Birkenhead, we had The Birkenhead Punk Poet, and then in Darwen, we had Pam Gregory. All were fantastic, so much so that they inspired Moon to start writing his own poems about being on the road with us.

In fact, Gem, Chu, and Moon have all been talking about how this tour will be a good way for them to learn about what’s going on in other music and arts scenes and see what kinds of inspiration they can bring back to what they’re doing in Norwich from that. This is reassuring to me, since I was worried I’d be depriving the Norwich arts community of 3 important people by taking them on tour for a month.

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The next morning, we said our goodbyes to Tamsin, and headed off on the long journey to Norwich to perform the 4th and final UK show of our tour. Moon’s mom, who’s in her 90s now, gave us a call while we were in the car, and reminded us all to take good care of ourselves on the road. Moon, a royalist, jokingly complained about how he was missing the coronation to drive us to the gig, and spoke of how happy he was to finally meet what he described as “normal people” in the McDonald’s we stopped in on the way; they didn’t have green hair this time!

The Norwich show was at Gem and Honor’s venue Ambition’s Graveyard, and it was actually the first time they’d had a live music performance there. It was a celebration of Honor’s birthday, and Gem surprised them by having their favorite comedian, Leslie Ewing-Burgesse, come all the way from London to perform at the start of the night. Leslie performed a lot of different pieces she had never performed on stage before that she’s going to perform at Edinburgh Fringe Festival later this year, so it was a real treat.

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After Leslie, we played our set, and it started raining so hard that the rain started leaking into the venue and got all over pretty much everyone and everything. That aside, it was a wonderful night, and the crowd loved what we were doing. There were a lot of familiar faces from when Gem and I played in Norwich last year, and people I’d met in the local arts community while I was in Norwich rehearsing for the tour the past couple weeks. Everyone had a great time, except for my vocal cords, which were very fatigued from performing 4 nights in a row.

I spent the night at Ambition’s Graveyard, where I’m also staying tonight. I’ve spent the day catching up on emails and recovering from the great, but exhausting, beginning of this tour. Tomorrow afternoon, we begin our long journey to Paris, where this tour continues. Stay tuned for my update next weekend, where I’ll tell you all about our adventures in France and Belgium!

Part Two: France and Belgium >>

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