I RELEASED A NEW TUNE THE OTHER DAY, PLEASE TAKE A SECOND TO CHECK IT OUT!
Anyway, back to the tour
We’ve arrived in Berlin. The traffic is mental. Horns are blaring, we’re all screaming. We are going to die.
20 minutes later we arrived at our AirBnb for the weekend. To our dismay we realise that the advertised on street parking is not available and if we paid for street parking out front it would set us back an abhorrent €50 a day. We postponed our parking mission and drove to Chris’ gig at Cosmic Comedy in the centre of Berlin. Chris was opening up and did a good job! The audience were so warm and receptive that they laughed at everything; even Chris acknowledged after that they were laughing at parts that weren’t even meant to be funny. The other comedians were good but the highlight was an Aussie guy who described in great detail the conversation his body had while he was falling off a skateboard (“My hands were like, nah face, you’ve got this bro, y’all good” and my face was like “it’s cool bro, i can take this.” My face hit the floor like nothing on earth and then suddenly my legs piped up “I’m still here, let me come and join the party.”) Bloody loved it. Exactly my type of humour and Aussies are generally; brilliant.
The rest of the first night in Berlin was spent wandering through AlexanderPlatz and sampling a Currywurst beneath the Berlin tower. We got back to the flat and looked through some pictures before hitting the hay. We had our first full day off the next day. No travelling, no gigging. We had some friends flying out to meet us so we were very excited.
The next morning we woke up to a missed call from our tour photographer Brendan who was joining us. Brendan’s been doing my photos from the start. We met on our first day of uni together back in 2012 and have formed a strong friendship ever since. The man has been there from the start and no one has done more for pushing my music forward than him. Brendan’s a plucky Yorkshire chap from the glorious town of Barnsley. His undying optimism was everything we needed to refuel the hypothetical touring machine and we headed out into Berlin rejuvenated and ready to meet up with another uni friend, David, and his mate Callie.
We went for lunch with David and Callie. David was in full tourist mode and was a huge amount of fun. Callie went to uni with me but we’d never met (despite living in the same accommodation block in first year.) Both were perfect company for our time in Berlin. We grabbed a Bratwurst for Lunch and drank a few pints before wandering up to the Brandenburg gate where the Berlin Marathon was taking place and got some photos in front of the Reichstag, we then agreed to reconvene a couple of hours later for a ‘big night out.’
We started our night at the flat drinking cheap Apple liquor. It was probably about the German equivalent of a WKD as we got a few smirks on the street but we didn’t care (it was 18% and €3.00 and we had a full bottle of it.) Me and Brendan finished a bottle of the stuff and we headed out. We had a few swanky cocktails in a cool hipster bar before hitting an ‘absinthe bar’ where we had another couple of cocktails and sampled some blue absinthe. We then hit a German club and danced like no one was watching. Chris pulled, and fair play to him. It was highly amusing for us as we kept singing his song modern romance from a distance very loudly while he tried his best not to acknowledge us. I danced with Brendan and David while they went up to strangers with flyers for our tour with Google translate open saying in very thick Northern accents “This guy here, he is famous in England.” – which was highly embarrassing. The Google translate fun lasted way into the night and we finally hit the hay at 5am.
At 10am we were briefly awoken by Chris Tavener returning home before passing out for another few hours. Love life can be tricky on tour so fair play to Chris; you never have any time to yourselves, you’re always broke. If you’ve played a gig you’re always thinking about the thousands of pounds worth of equipment that you’ve got to lug back to where you’re staying over anything else. Just another reason why touring isn’t all that glamorous. But yes, Chris as the only single person on this tour; is doing ok.
Our show in Berlin was looming and we’d slept in far too much to do anything productive with our final day in the city so we briefly took some snaps in our backyard and went out for lunch. We met up with David and Callie and a fan who had travelled from Hamburg to catch our Berlin show before heading back to our apartment to grab our stuff for our show…
#FollowTheGrandTour
Please note the use of ‘boiz’ in the title is a sarcastic one.
Joel's Side Of The Story 
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