In 2018 I put together the following photo gallery and memories of the first UK tour with our band, Canada Water for the 10th anniversary (I just reposted my tour diaries, written back in 2008). Most of these were taken by me, with a Sony DSC-T20 point and shoot camera. 15 years on, I’m still not entirely convinced my iPhone camera is much better?
It’s mad thinking that I had to carry around a camera, mobile phone and an mp3 player on this tour in 2008 when less than a year later all these functions were served by just one device.
Pierre and Pegasus
Pierre Le Bear, our longstanding mascot made his debut on this tour. This isn’t the full suit, this is a weird hybrid between Pierre and Ed, who played Mr Le Bear most nights. Keep reading for more from Pierre. Pegasus was the name we gave to our vehicle, which I’d forgotten until I reread the diaries myself.
‘Van Time’
It wasn’t a van. It was a Ford Freda, more commonly known as a Mazda Bongo, kindly lent to us by Tom’s Dad. It was all in working in order apart from “one small question mark”, which we only came to fully understand when we broke down in Truro. ‘Van Time’ was the half hour we spent having a bit of piece and quiet away from the venue each night before our set.
Our name in chalk
The Queens Hotel was a loveable shithole in Weymouth. We actually started and ended the tour here. Officially our last date on the tour was Horsham but we got offered another show here for the following Saturday so we came back. I think we played here a couple more times before it closed down and became a strip club, followed by an accountancy firm.
Sustainable communities
Even at 20 years old I was very socially aware. I set a challenge on the first night of tour to get dinner from an independent establishment each night. This wasn’t 2023 though, nor were we playing in metropolitan areas. We ate a stupid amount of fish and chips before giving up this ridiculous charade.
The Hub, St Ives
On our night off we went into St Ives town. Not St Ives on the weekend during peak season, St Ives on a windy Monday night in October. Somehow this was the catalyst for one of the most drunken nights of my twenties. Limited memories include getting told off by Tom for dancing on a table to Sex On Fire (a big hit at the time) and a Sambuca shot with tabasco in it called, for some reason, an ‘Amy Winehouse’.
Carbis Bay
The morning after the night before, feeling worse for wear in sunny St Ives. The man in shot is Benjamin Haynes Elkins-Green, he’s married now with two kids. This is him in the prime of his life, carrying a Tesco bag with his breakfast of a packaged sandwich and a Frijj milkshake (strawberry, at a guess).
Johnny’s Mum’s “studio”
Our accommodation for two nights of the tour. As I confessed in the tour diaries, I naively assumed that “studio” would be a recording studio and had to mask my ungrateful face at the sight of a cold hard concrete floor upon arrival. Some great extra stories to tell from our stay, but now is neither the time nor place for those.
Bar 200, Truro
Now sadly long gone, Bar 200 was the hometown show for I Say Marvin and the only sold out show of the tour. A few people continued to queue outside hoping to get in. I had the bright idea of playing an acoustic set for them in the street. This was shot down almost immediately by my bandmates on the grounds that we didn’t have a single acoustic guitar between us.
If you’re going to breakdown on your first tour you should probably save it for the moment you’re a stones throw from a Mazda Bongo specialist.
Yep, we got lucky. Double lucky, as there wasn’t anything serious wrong, we’d just overheated. As referenced in the tour diaries, below is picture of Ben Stiller’s doppelgänger, a friendly Cornish mechanic.
That’s all for now, I’ll leave you with a video of Pierre Le Bear attempting to order his dinner from a Noodle Bar in St Mary’s, Southampton.
Liam Toms 