tour is over: a love letter from Dublin (Patreon)

SECRET DEMO CLUB. how are you? I am home. like, HOME home. Dublin home.

I hope you can forgive me for being something of an absent mother on here in May - the tail end of the busiest few months of my life took its toll on me mentally & physically. after avoiding illness january through april I was finally struck down by some nasty not-quite-covid-but-covid-adjacent illness that lingered for weeks and truly outstayed its welcome. I guess with all the travelling it was inevitable at some point, but man does it suck being sick on tour. anyway - I'm home now; dodie's month-long EU run finished in Ireland and the bus essentially dropped me back to my childhood home on its way back to the UK. 58 shows played since feb and now since the last show on monday I've been laying low, sleeping and eating everything my mother puts in front of me.

I have to admit, I'm not as exhausted as I thought I would be at this point. don't get me wrong - I am tired, a weary sort of tired that makes me forgetful and groggy until lunchtime, the sort of tired that makes me trip over my own feet. but considering how wildly burnt out I was after 1 month of touring at the end of last year, I assumed 5 solid months of *dodie US tour* straight into *my EU tour* straight into *dodie's EU tour* might wipe me out completely. I was reminded on this run of shows how much energy the audiences can give back to you - it's not all output from my side and when you're into your 3rd or 4th show in a row you need that more than ever. I suppose like anything it's a muscle to be flexed and maybe I've just built up my touring stamina once more - whereas end of last year we were going in blind after so long without live shows. Jesus, remember that? remember my entire industry ceased to exist for 2 years? yeah, me neither.

let me reminisce on some of my highlights of the past few weeks - Pete and I travelling from my tour to dodie's on april 22nd is definitely a day I'll never forget. the thing is, Pete & I still use the same guitars/basses/pedalboards & keyboards across my show and dodie's. at one level above us you might start having dedicated instruments for each show but at this stage, it's all the same gear. so with my final show in Antwerp on april 21st and dodie's first in Copenhagen 23rd, a problem appeared. with a limit of 4 bags each max, how can the two of us fly ourselves and our 10+ bags, cases & instruments from one tour to another? well - as it turns out, you tape it all together. man, did we push Brussels airline to it's limit that day. the cheers we got from the dodie tour camp when we rolled out of a taxi into our Copenhagen hotel with all our gear in tow made our crazy airport adventure all worth it.

2 of our best friends Greta & Martin came to dodie's Madrid show, which was another highlight for me. dodie & I were peak sickness at this point and really needed a pick-me-up, so having an injection of new energy in the camp was just what we needed. the Madrid crowd were amazing too, after what felt like a slight lull in the tour: the culture at live shows in some European cities seems to often involve showing respect with attentive silence (not something we're used to in Ireland & the UK!) but when you're on stage you can sometimes interpret that as 'people are uninterested and unenthusiastic', so we were finding a lot of the shows mid-tour quite hard. Gret & Martin watched the Madrid show, which happened to have one of the best crowds we played to and then travelled to Paris on the bus with us where we had 2 days off to frolic around. oui oui.

dodie's Hamburg show was in an amazing venue & I took myself out that day for some errands, including going to a launderette which turned out to be a launderette-slash-rock-themed-cafe-and-bar where I had a lovely chat with the owner as my clothes swished around the dryer. dodie's Tilburg show was another highlight - what a beautiful place! It was the biggest show on the tour and on those nights where the crowd is so vast I just burst pride for everyone in the touring party; like, look what we did! needless to say the Irish shows at the end were also MEGA. the Dublin show was at The Helix, a spot near my family home where I used to go and watch pantomimes as a kid so that was kind of a fun full circle moment. the entire touring party came around to my house the evening before for a BBQ, too - I got to cook for the first time in 5 months (!) and it was glorious. watching my real family & my adopted touring family interact made my heart SO FULL, I couldn't believe it. above is a picture of the man the myth Mick Gartland in his element, cooking for the tour gang on his new grill. 

it’s really easy to romanticise tour, to assign it more merit than it often deserves. rest assured in between all the sightseeing & shows are some significantly less dreamy moments; hours spent killing time in dark basement green rooms, the pressure to be ‘on’ and perform when you often feel totally OFF, the ambitious projects you think you’ll get done on tour that always (always) get squashed by total exhaustion. zero alone time is the one that always gets to me the most and the mid-tour desire to go and live off the grid in a cave is very real. luckily, a *hugely* redeeming feature of both my tour & dodie’s is the people we’ve chosen to tour with: they’re all amazing. truly, I have no idea how anyone does this with people they don’t like; with everyone in such close proximity one bad apple can spoil the bunch, so I thank the sweet lord above that wasn’t something we had to worry about.

across my own headline shows & dodie's I was reminded of how much live music has been missed, especially for those who regularly attended shows in pre-covid times. the joy in these rooms felt like something new entirely, a fresh enthusiasm and elation. perhaps it was the collective feeling that you never know what you've got until it's gone and you might not be so quick to take it for granted now that it's back.

.........

that's it from me for now, my angels. I will have a new demo to post for you on here towards the end of this week (monday latest!) and the next gold tier live stream/zoom will be this Saturday at 7.30pm BST. I'll finally be back in my studio in London, so no balancing USB mics on chairs in dimly lit hotel rooms! hoorah.

love you endlessly,

OG xxx