Kerrang! Introducing stars The Xcerts recently did a short tour around the UK. The band kindly kept a short tour diary for Kerrang! readers - as well as drawing some lovely pictures - for your entertainment.
Check out the diary below, and hear music from The Xcerts here.
Wednesday April 29
DJ set at O'Couture, Glasgow.
"So we're DJ'ing tonight. Spent the entire drive up building internal playlists, thinking about which tracks to use as massive openers and which would be the cigarette-after-sex comedown numbers. Except it didn't really work like that...
In short, we turn up to a basement club on a busy Sauchiehall St armed to the teeth with good tunes, only to be met with a smattering of lonely wall-flowers (it was a single peoples night, not a singles night) whose only concern was not going home alone. They pulled our set after about 15 songs. Highlights of the evening included Murray closing the set with Youth Movies, wholly inappropriate and entirely wonderful, and our return to our friend Jonathan Snees' for an evening of the worst horror movies imaginable. Titles include Killer Nun, Maniac Cop and the award-nominated Frankenhooker. This is going to be a tough night to beat."
Thursday April 30
Hinterland Festival, Glasgow Art School.
"For anyone not aware, Hinterland is an all-over the shop sort of festival, in the same vein as Great Escape and Camden Crawl. Loads of bands, different venues, and a general bustle and hum about the city. Good times. Except most of the bands everybody wanted to see were on at fairly close intervals, which meant decision-time for us. Our decisions included Murray and Tom getting soup with their paninis, deciding to catch In Case of Fire support Fightstar at the ABC, deciding that our show at the Art School was one of the best we've played in a long while and that the people that came were pretty cool for sticking around.
However, the decisions made any time after this are a little hazy. Free bar at the Fightstar after-party and some encouraging words from a friendly Mr Simpson meant our decision-making abilities were a little... not good. Couple this with an excitable Dragon (beardy-Scottish one, not scaly-English one) at the Sucioperro show and the result is pretty abstract, not so much "Yes I'd like one of those" but rather "what is that and why am I here?" Day 2: down in one!"
Friday May 1
Hinterland Festival, the Admiral.
"Today was a much smaller affair, which usually means double the volume, triple the sweat and 10x's the banter. (People are funnier in smaller places. It's a fact, look it up...). After a fairly understandable dispute with the sound guy about our combined stage volume making people cry blood, we settled on a fair level, quietly turned it back up, played and ran away before the cry-baby's could hit us with their law-suits. Later that night This Will Destroy You did just that to Murray and Tom. They're currently suing them for damages to their ear-holes."
Saturday May 2
Jericho Tavern, Oxford.
"Stevie Wonders' album Hotter Than July is bullshit, I'm going on record here. May is way hotter. Especially when you're in a van for six hours with only a Ricky Gervais podcast and lukewarm coffee for company. The show was a warm-up for truck festival, organised by the handsome folks at You! Me! Dance! Promotions. Nice eclectic line-up (weird-as-anything acoustic trio Ute, super-slick 80's pop from Tired Irie, proper Band of Horses Americana by Dusty and the Dreaming Spires, and us. Sweating. Sweat-pop.) Lovely bit of fried halloumi from the barbeque, loud Oxford gents in straw hats rugby tackling each other and generally making us feel really Scottish, and just an overall feeling of the arrival of summer. Roll-on festival season!"
Sunday May 3
Limbo in Brighton.
"Limbo isn't a club, or a venue, or any other concrete place for that matter. It's a fairly ambiguous nothingness that you meet upon your arrival home after an intense period of days (yesterday I woke up on a floor in Glasgow, spent the evening in Oxford and went to sleep in Brighton...) I haven't left the house since I got back and I feel like I've been hit by a car. It's like sharks, and how if they stop moving, they die. If we had a show today we'd all feel just as up-for-it as yesterday, but when you're given the opportunity to slow down, you lose momentum altogether, and crash. So that's where we're at, three sharks that can't wait to get back in their van and devour miles of motorway all for the sake of melodramatic popular song (we really should change that MySpace headine.)"
The Xcerts' album, In The Cold Wind We Smile, is out now.
totally gutted about Saosin pulling out, I wa...