We are working on a new album, we’ve demo-ed 8 songs, and we have 2 that we worked up for the tour last November. Things are definitely taking a turn for the indie. Very guitarry, more upbeat, open tunings, the odd bit of Dinosaur Jr style sludge-y rock. I’m excited! We’ll book some shows soon i promise and show off these new songs. In the mean-time, take it easy and stay well.

laying down some sweet guide vocals

Signed: Dr Science.

First off though, News! Hugo has announced that he and his wife Emily are moving to Trinidad in February. Hugo will be touring New Zealand with us in late January(see the tour page), but those will probably be the last shows we play with our keyboard, guitar, vocal and arranging maestro, so for all you Aussie fans and friends who didn’t make it to one of our November tour shows to see him, suck it! We had a blast hanging out together, stinking up the van and behaving badly on commercial airliners, it’s gonna be weird not having Hugo about to kick my ass about melodies, steal my food, beer and coffee and occupy the bathroom for obscene amounts of time. We’ll be continuing with the standard four piece for the time being, with a view to recruiting a keys player when the right person come along.

So we finished up the wings on fire tour a couple of weeks back, with our Melbourne launch and a couple of shows in Hobart. Friday 27^th November we played our hometown show at The Curtin Band Room in Carlton. It’s a great venue with a nice PA based around a big old Allen and Heath console and HK FOH speakers. Nice sound, cool room. We had probably the best lineup we’ve ever pulled together for a Falcon show, with Blood Ones, Oliver Mann and Single Twin opening for us! Hugo, Huw and I had dinner with a couple of friends at Sichuan House in the city, extremely tasty and hot food, probably not the best idea before a show but fuck it, sometimes you need to live a little(or a lot). We got back just in time for the start of Blood Ones set, which despite the lack of crowd was really amazing, Monica’s songs with Mel’s and Jims BV’s were positively spine tingling! Ollie was up next, still no crowd to speak of and I am starting to get worried. He sings the chorus of Diamonds and Silver down octave and my god, the control he has of his pitch, tone and volume is amazing. I know he’s a trained opera singer but jesus! Jealous! Single Twin round out the support sets and the tall and handsome Marcus Teague beguiles all present with his down-tempo lovelorn tales and beautiful melodies. We’re definitely in the mood to play now, regardless of the minimal crowd(40 payers + guests, everyone is at the Ned Collette show tonight). We play well, having a blast and enjoying the big stage and great monitoring. It’s a little sad to play our homecoming launch to so few people, but everyone is attentive and responsive and the thrill of playing together is unaffected. All feels right with the world for a brief hour.

Next morning we meet up at my place to catch a maxi-taxi to the airport and on to Hobart. It’s the beginning of schoolies, so the departure lounge is packed with inappropriately attired teenagers, making us feel like lecherous old men. The Jetstar staff member who singles us out and gets us to the front of the queue looks like some kind of Hitler Youth sex offender, the mo’ he has grown for Movember not helping his side part, lisp and Aryan über mensch bearing.

By the time we deplane in Hobart it’s pissing down and will continue to do so for the entire time we remain in this fair city. Last minute gear borrowing organised we head for lunch by the harbor, fish and chips, oysters and beer. Excellent. Next we head to the Lark to try some of their excellent house made whiskys and see a massive Great Dane with a weird pink thingy hanging off the underside of its front-quarters. Weird.

Finally we drag ourselves over to the Brisbane Hotel for our arvo slot on an all ages bill called The Hobart Medicine Show. Joe and myself have been to The Brisbane a few times with the Ramps and really love the place. Owner Gibbo and soundman Ivan are always super accommodating and great fun to hang out with and we have a great afternoon dicking around and getting way too drunk. The show goes surprisingly well and we sell a bunch of CDs, leading me to surmise that we might have provided the genesis of a country rock revolution amongst the youth of Hobart. Ha! After playing we hop-skip it over to the Alley Cat for our evening show opening for Teeth and Tongue and Ned Collette. Somehow we manage to cram on to the tiny stage and bash out a pretty decent set. Don is on fire on the drums, has been all tour really. Every time he gets the vibe that ‘anything goes’ at a particular show he really lets loose. We’ve really got to encourage him to do it all the time!

After the show we make a pilgrimage to Mykonos for pork rolls, pizza and veggie burgers. Its offensively bad food, but who’s gonna argue with Mr. Toast? Not Potential Falcon, I assure you.

This one from BMA Magazine in Canberra…

…and this one from Rave Magazine of our show in Brisbane with The Seabellies and Eulogies.

Joe, Don and myself grab another hire car from Hertz, this time finding out that if we were just members of the YHA we could get a significant discount. (I’m gonna have to look that up right now!) We leave at 9am and I take the first stretch of the drive, managing to push through to Holbrook before running out of steam. It’s around 40 degrees through the Riverina and the sky is full of smoke from some fire or other. Jumping out of the cool, air-conditioned Tarago in Holbrook to get a couple of pies is like stepping into an oven.

With Hugo taking the bus to and from Canberra for these two shows, Joe has the whole back seat to himself and proceeds to lie down and sleep for almost all of this drive and the return. Don and I swap again at Picton and I drive the rest of the way to Cronulla, where traffic be damned we arrive in good time at 6pm.
We manage to get a park directly out the front of the venue and the guys from Eulogies are hanging about out front. We catch up, finding out how the previous nights show at the Oxford Arts Factory went. The Seabellies don’t arrive in time to sound check, so we get set up and acquainted with the stage and extremely sarcastic sound guy. The set goes pretty well, other than Hugo’s guitar cutting out at the beginning of On the Road(this is why you don’t bother picking up cables left lying on stage – they are usually broken) leaving him with keys and the song without the lead guitar at the end. The audience are really attentive and seem to be enjoying the set, though we are playing as they eat dinner so we’re trying to keep it down.

After our set we get stuck into the beer and I get stuck into hitting on a very nice mature lady sitting at the bar. I cop a ribbing from the rest of the band but fuck it, its damn fun!

We stagger out of the bar after the Seabellies set and make our way back to Sydney and the awesome decrepitude of the Station Street house.

Friday morning I awake dazed and confused, with a cat named Handsome(and he is) begging to be pet. Breakfast is excellent Phõ from Pasteur in the city. That stuff is the breakfast of champions, wiping away all trace of a hangover. Joe, Hugo and Don then head off to see 2012(steaming heap of turd) while I visit my relatives Wayne, Tracy and their nearly 2 year old son Harvey.

We manage to squeeze in an interview on 2ser before load in and sound check at the Bald Faced Stag. The PA is one of the best in Sydney and the stage sound is excellent but damn is it hot! When Mr Rascal play later I can see droplets of sweat constantly falling from Christians’ arms.
Dinner at the pub is bloody awful, overcooked spaghetti with tasteless Bolognese sauce, unidentifiable Lasagna and a Chicken Parma that looks like the whole thing come from one packet, frozen and reheated. I feel sick for the rest of the night, though this is in part as I am stressed about our ability to pull a crowd. We wind up with 53 payers by the end, which at least covers some costs and play an absolute cracker of a show.

After the show Emma from El Mopa has bought us a bottle of scotch so we head back to the Station Street house to get into it. We party away until 4am, playing Beatles, Fleetwood Mac, Neil Young and The Boss on the piano and a guitar. Bless Hugo and his amazing ability to pick up the chords of an entire song just by hearing the first line. We smash an awesome version of ‘Because,’ having to double back and play a couple of verses again cause the harmonies sound so cool.
Unfortunately I party a little too hard and wake after 4 hours of sleep feeling decidedly shithouse.

I manage to make it into the city without vomiting out the window however, and a meal of home cooked beans and ham hock at The Wall in Surry Hills sees me right. Don takes first leg of the drive home and in the end I only do about one and a half hours, mostly feeling too shattered to be of use to anyone. We arrive back in Melbourne to the wonderful, heavy rain. Oh, so good to return to after the heat and smoke of NSW.
One more week to go….

For this tour we’ve got eight shows, not a lot but still more than a lot of indie bands touring in Australia. We’ve had to book a few flights; the first being from Brisbane to Melbourne and the second and third from Melbourne to Hobart and back. Otherwise we’ve been driving a hired Toyota Tarago (the touring bands’ vehicle of choice) as none of us own a vehicle that would fit the five of us and our basic gear(guitars, pedals, snare drum, cymbals).

Because of the few unavoidable flights and the fact that most of us play in other bands that also tour regularly, we have nice rugged road cases for most of our gear, with the few standard guitar hard cases slowly being phased out. Baggage handling staff and machinery are notoriously hard on musical equipment (and probably normal luggage too), so it’s a must to have solid road cases for all the fragile and expensive vintage guitars we cart about the place.

All of this, the professional looking cases, the flights and the shiny hire car add up to make it feel a bit like you’re faking it. We are a largely unknown band playing fairly unfashionable music and we regularly get less than 50 people to shows. Things are slowly building up, sure, but I regularly get a bit tweaked when someone in the check in line at the airport asks which band we are in, clearly expecting a name they’ve heard of, I mean look at all the ‘stuff,’ surely we must be important!

Anyhow, that’s been running through my mind for the past few weeks as we’ve started our little tour. Here are a few stories from the road…..

On Thursday 12^th November we picked up a brand new Tarago with less than 4000km’s on the odometer and hit the road for Canberra. Over the past couple of years I’ve had a lot of trouble with long distance driving, I struggle to last for more than a couple of hours without wanting to fall asleep. This tour I seem to have bounced back, smashing out 4 and 5 hours at a stretch. Rad. Setting the tone for the whole tour, we listen to a mixture of The Beatles, Ween, lots of soul music, The Savage Love Podcast and This American Life. We make it to Canberra in roughly 7 hours and head straight for the Asian Noodle House to grab a Laksa with Hugo, his wife Emily and my friend Nick. We haven’t had a chance to practice with Hugo so most of the conversation is taken up with discussions about new songs and bits and pieces we need to sort out in sound check…..

….Which as it turns out, we won’t be getting. We’re loaded in and ready to go with plenty of time to check, but the in-house sound guy doesn’t want to and doesn’t see the point of it. As a live sound engineer myself I can understand his feelings regarding this, but it’s always a good idea for a band to be able to get a feel for a stage prior to walking on for the main show. Instead of sound checking I change strings on the guitars and smash a pint or two of Little Creatures Bright Ale. Mmmmmm.

The show winds up going really well! We get a decent turnout, sell plenty of merch, our support acts are ace and I don’t get too drunk to play. It’s a very nice start to the tour, though we all know it may well be the highlight until we play Melbourne.

Friday afternoon Joe, Huw and I drive to Sydney. I’m going to mix Denim Owl (Aleks and Janita from The Ramps) at The Metro where they will be supporting Maximo Park. An early dinner at Spice I Am is amazing as always and the D’Owl show is really great and well received by the large audience of what seems like mostly British ex-pats.

We all crash at a hostel in Glebe, not sleeping for a few hours due to an extended round of celebrity name/food morphing. Some choice ones included; Almond Schwarzenegger, Edgar Rice Burritos, George Squashington and Bran Parsons. This game continues for the next week or so, alternately becoming tiresome and then funny again. We’re hardcore.

Saturday Morning we drag our hung-over asses to Big Brekky in Petersham for excellent coffee and a tasty feed. I have a very Larry David moment when I order Vitasoy in my latte, while everyone else orders Bon Soy. I realise soon after how much of an ass I must seem and how annoying it is for the barista to have to steam a separate jug of milk just for me. I head inside the café to try and explain myself and change my order but the staff won’t have it. I am only mildly less embarrassed.

We later head to Newcastle to play at The Lass O’Gowrie. Dinner at some café in Cooks Hill is as Huw described ‘either cooked with a total lack of joy, a total lack of skill or some mixture of both.’

The show is weird. We are playing sandwiched between two very hippie-ish acts and while there is a decent crowd they mostly head out to the beer garden while we play. Those left in attendance barely clap after songs, so with a too-hot stage and many awkward silences between songs we cut the set a bit short in an effort to escape.

We do manage to get paid the princely sum of $108, which is $108 more than The Ramps got at the same venue back in July, so it’s not all bad news.

After playing we get really drunk, eat McDonalds on the way back to the hostel and regret it in the morning.

Sunday we have a fairly slow start ahead of our drive to Brisbane. Google Maps has it at a 10hour and 40 minute drive, so we’re up at 730am. Huw and I realised before bed that we’d have an extra hour up our sleeve due to Queensland’s lack of daylight savings, but elect not to tell the rest of the band so they’ll get up at a reasonable time.

We get Breakfast Burrito’s and decent coffee and finally hit the road at about 9am. The drive is really rather nice, and we make it in 9 hours, arriving with plenty of time to load in, pick up an amp from good mates Halfway, eat dinner and sound check.

The show is quite fun, The Troubadour being on of the best venues in the country IMHO. The crowd however is scarce, which is a shame as Eulogies are bloody excellent and Seabellies play a really great set. We strike up an immediate friendship with the guys from Eulogies, I think we recognised a certain earnestness in each others music. They are super nice guys and we really look forward to seeing them play again in Cronulla.

Monday morning we head for the airport, where we’ll dump the hire car and head home. Hugo is on the first flight and due to heavy traffic, amp returnage and extensive road works we only get him there 20 minutes before his flight. He is unable to check in any baggage, leaving the rest of us 23kg over limit. Stung, is what we get. $230 excess baggage, up until which was destined for Huws’ credit card to help pay for the hire car. Balls. Hopefully things will pick up next week.

Today i have been driving around in the heat(it’s 34 degrees in Melbourne) spending what little cash i have left on guitar strings, case handles(broken off on the recent run of Ramps shows) and MDF to rebuild my pedalboard. I’ll also need to repair my Mustang and decide how many guitars i can reasonably take on tour. I want to take three, the ‘65 Mustang, the ‘72 SG and the ‘68 Coranado, to which Huw says “Eat a dick.”

Don has been taking a few shots with his old SLR, i didn’t ask his permission to post them but what the heck. I’m sure there will be plenty more to come as he and Huw have been messing around with each others cameras. Who knows, maybe we’ll even get a few shots of the entire band. That way when our press release says we are a five piece the photo will have five people in it.

see you on the road!

We’ve also announced our national tour in November to support it, here are the dates:

Wings on Fire - 2009

Thursday 12th Nov: CANBERRA, Transit Bar
w/ Voss and Hoodlum Shouts

Saturday 14th Nov: Newcastle, The Lass O’Gowrie
w/ Great Toad and the Chameleon Circus

Sunday 15th Nov: BRISBANE, The Troubadour
w/ Eulogies(US) and The Seabellies

Thursday 19th Nov: Cronulla, The Brass Monkey
w/ Eulogies(US) and The Seabellies

Friday 20th Nov: SYDNEY, The Bald Faced Stag
w/ El Mopa, Yae! Tiger and Mr Rascal(bris)

Friday 27th Nov: MELBOURNE, The Curtin Band Room
w/ Oliver Mann, Blood Ones and Single Twin

Sat 28th Nov: HOBART, The Brisbane Hotel, Arvo show.
w/ guests

Sat 28th Nov: Hobart, The Alley Cat, evening show
w/ Teeth and Tongue and Ned Collette

There’s also a few reviews up on the media/press page, check ‘em out!

Hmmm, what else is news?! We will more than likely tour New Zealand in late Jan/early Feb next year! Stay tuned for further announcments about that.

We’ve also been setting up a studio space in Fairfield, for both Aleks and the Ramps and Potential Falcon. Al and I got really itchy the other day installing sound insulation bats in the walls. I can tick that job off my list, been there, done that, never want to do it again. As Aleks said, “If someone invites me to an insulation installing party i’m gonna say i have to wash my hair…”

Here is a very boring pic of the space:

we have plenty more carpet to steal, and couches, PA system etc to move in and make it more homely. It’s really great to have a place for ourselves though, no more putting up with metal bands jamming in the adjacent room!

- We dropped the album artwork off to the printers to be turned into cd’s. Release date is Friday October 2^nd, yeah!?

- We had a song(Honey (pt 2) on some TV show called Rescue, Special Ops. Neatly paying for the above cd pressing.

- Three neat shows were played, at The Retreat, The Edinburgh Castle and The Evelyn. We were planning to debut a new song but didn’t quite practice it enough.

- The tour booking has been continuing, slowly and painfully. We’ll be on the road in November, with shows in Melbourne, Sydney, Canberra, Brisbane, Hobart and Newcastle. Hopefully we can get some more happening and we’ll be announcing the tour for realz in a couple of weeks.

- We’ve found a warehouse to build a studio space in, so Aleks(of the Ramps) and I have been stealing carpet out of dumpsters for a few weeks, getting ready to outfit it. This is really exciting for us, rehearsing whenever we want, storage, recording. Every time we see footage of Wilco in their loft we get jealous, but now we’ll have our own!

- We’re on some kind of featured artist list on Sydney community station 2ser this week.

So, while you wait to hear about our tour plans, head to the Myspace page to hear a new track from ‘Wings on fire’ entitled For Melinda, and check out the front cover of the cd right here!