Studying on tour!

So I’m in my cabin on the sleeper train from St. Petersburg to Moscow, and I’m feeling a little more settled now the five guitars and three equipment-filled suitcases have all been lifted on board and carried down the needle-thin hallways. There are eight of us dispersed amongst three sleeper cabins, each cabin with four sleeper-beds, but the mountainous piles of cases expertly stacked by our drum technician…well…they take up almost all of the available space.


The gig that evening was pure chaos, though unfortunately we couldn’t relax/party afterwards like usual; instead we had to smash it through the snow to the train station. We’re only a few days in (we played near Siberia only two nights before), and already we’re desperately craving sleep. In the morning we plan on running full pelt through the snow again, but this time to a TV station to record three live songs for Russia’s biggest morning breakfast show.


Anyway, sleeper train. Cabin. Study…The rest of the crew are enjoying a well-deserved celebratory/preparatory nightcap (Russian style), and I can hear them through the paper-thin walls as I balance my laptop, writing pad and textbooks on the guitar cases and open Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s exquisite (if ever-so-slightly and regrettably anti-Semitic) comedy of manners, The School For Scandal.


I’m trying my best to consider Sheridan’s use of characterisation to satirise the sentimental comedies of the time, but Charlotte (our bassist/singer) is belting out one of Kylie’s earlier pop hits, and now I just want to swing round the door – bottle of tequila in hand – and nail the harmonies (maybe in the minor third), and possibly steal the show. That sounds awfully tempting.


But then a line on a page catches my gaze, then a few lines more: “I am not sorry he has run out of the course a little…I hate to see prudence clinging to the green suckers of youth; ‘tis like ivy round a sapling and spoils the growth of the tree.” To the guy whose debut album was called Young For Eternity, and who also screams “these teenage lips they speak too fast” almost every night to a surging mass of sweaty bodies, this utterance is an affirmation.


I’m briefly shaken from my bliss as the band’s manager drunkenly stumbles in and flops onto his mattress. In one movement he manages to pull his duvet up over himself and switch off the light, leaving me in total darkness. Cheers! I decide to work by the fading light of my laptop; I really want to get these pages done to a decent standard, and in decent time!


I look at my watch. Oh Christ. I’ll only manage, at most, four hours’ sleep before we disembark. I can sleep when we get home in a few days, I reason…


A week later and we’re in Cape Town. Two days ago I managed to squeeze in some study time in my hotel room in Johannesburg, now and then looking up to admire the flatness of its plains and the surrounding mountains from fifteen floors up. I got a lot done, even after making time to go out and explore and absorb the streets and the people.


I finish the interviews scheduled for the day, and soundcheck on a stage that faces the inconceivable Table Mountain, which magically traps the clouds to its very edge before rolling them off to dissipate over the city. I strum my guitar and look forward to sinking into the complexity of Sheridan’s wit for a while before the invariably manic show. Then I imagine the faces of the fans. Lucky!

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