On Tour For DUMMIES

A Fans Guide To Being On Tour

 

SUPPORT BANDS

 

Support bands can either make or break a tour, especially if you are doing multiple nights. Basically, support bands fall into two categories, good and bad, or should I say, support bands you either like or dislike.

Obviously, if you like the support band then you are onto a winner, if however, you don’t, you are doomed!

For all the people that don’t understand the importance of what I’ve just written it works like this.

You are following a band, a circus, those travelling minstrels that bring you joy and happiness and make you go all tingly in your special place. The whole point of your day is show time. It really doesn’t matter what time you wake up in bed (in fact just waking up in a bed is sometimes the highlight of the day). It doesn’t matter where you go during the day or what you get up to, or with whom. Literally everything you do from the moment you open your eyes is leading you to show time.

Now, you can be having the worse day, EVER (best Taylor Swift voice) but it doesn’t matter, because come show time, everything is going to be good with the world, because you are seeing that band, your band, the band that makes you go all tingly in your special place (and I don’t mean the pub).

From the moment you wake, your day falls into one of two paths.

Path 1. Your day, support band you dislike, headline band.

Path 2. Your day, support band you like, headline band.

It really doesn’t matter if your day has been good or bad, what matters is what happens 90 minutes before showtime. You can be having the best day you have ever had in your entire life, better than doing your girlfriends fitter younger sister and getting away with it, but if you dislike that support band, you are in for at least 45 minutes of misery, which gets worse if you want to go down the front to see the headline band, because you can’t just hide in the bar while the support band are on, and what makes it worse, is while you are doing you girlfriends fitter younger sister and getting away with it, is the knowledge, that you are going to have to suffer that 45 minutes misery. The Lord giveth, the Lord taketh away…

And that is why support bands are so important, if you’ve got a support band that you don’t like, you’ve got a 45 minute wall of misery coming your way, every day, and there is nothing that you can do about it. 

Conversely if you like the support band, the whole tour gets lifted to a whole new level of joy and excitement. Nothing you experience on that tour could be further away from Path 1. Everything on that tour seems to raise itself to a level you find hard to understand, to grasp, to the point where alcohol and drugs don’t add to the experience, they detract from it.

Having a support band, you like on tour leaves you buzzing your tits off 24 hours a day, you are properly fizzing all day, while having a support band you dislike is like finding a shadow on your X-Ray.

 

Noggin xx