By DON McGLASHAN
Steve, our manager, has found us a practice room in the centre of London. It's more light and dry than the place we always used in Holloway Rd, but it still has pin-boards covered with the familiar tragic ads: "Kick-ass bass player wanted for up-and-coming band. Influences: Suede, the Beastie Boys and Janis Joplin. No time-wasters."
After a few days I go to stay with friends in my old neighbourhood, which means I'm coming into the city on the Northern Line again.
Rehearsals finished, we leave for five shows in Wales, Scotland and the North. The first gig is in Wrexham, North Wales. On the way, in the traffic jams around Birmingham, we pass a median strip with a stunted outcrop of shrubbery on it. Almost hidden in the bushes, we can see a tent, with gas bottle and TV aerial. Surrounded by miles of busy exhaust pipes, it's a strange symbol of grit and eccentricity.
Wrexham is pretty, if you don't count the people. It's Friday night, and I'd forgotten how large Northern lads and lasses like to squeeze themselves into undersize bits of latex and leather, get lathered, then stagger around looking for a fight, or someone to go home with, or both. We keep our heads down.
The gig goes well. Ross [the drummer] has given up smoking, and he's as wired as a suspension bridge.
That, and the energy that Andrew [the new guitarist] is bringing to the songs, makes us louder than we've ever been. While You Sleep is so full on that no one could sleep through it without industrial sedatives.
We drive north the next morning, through Cumbria, and heather the colour of rust. Dry stone walls marking divisions between long-dead neighbours - occasionally a tiny cottage with smoke curling from a chimney.
It reminds me of Central Otago, but I know it's the other way round. Generations of Britons went out and peopled the world, and we grew up stuck in their homesickness like ants in honey.
Onstage at the Liquid Rooms, Edinburgh, I'm having a bad gig. I can't hear which notes to tune to in the squalling, rumbling storm of each song; can't remember how to stand or think of anything to say to the audience. And yet the place is full and jumping, and people come up to me afterwards and rave to me about how it's the best they've seen us in the five years they've been following the band.
Scottish thriller-writer Ian Rankin collars me to tell me he's named his next book after The Falls, a song from our latest album. He's excited, speedy and wants to tell me the whole plot right there and then. Unable to quite follow his accent, and still cloth-headed from the gig, I mutter thanks and flee to the hotel.
In the morning I skip the traditional Scottish continental breakfast and go for a run up the Royal Mile, down past the railway station, across Princes St, to the New Town. To my right, every long street finishes in the pale, grey sea at Leith. The castle rises histrionically out of the rock like a Lord Of The Rings promo still.
We load the gear up the icy cobblestones and drive south on the A702 through tiny villages that seem to have grown out of the hillsides.
I drift in and out of the traveller's constant daydream: What would it be like to live in that house; to know that place with the kind of soft, easy knowledge that piles up, like leaves, over time? So that what looks (from the van) just like a hill, a church, a stream - becomes The Hill, The Church, The Stream ...
But we're round the next bend now, and suddenly in beech trees, nearly bare in the waterlogged fields, but catching the sun with their last remaining bits of orange and yellow.
I feel myself coming out of my normal early-tour cocoon (worried my voice won't hold, not coming out to the pub after the gig, not saying much in the van ... ) It hits me, as it always does about now, that this is not really a job; I should be paying someone to let me do this.
* Mutton Birds' frontman Don McGlashan continues his column on the band's British tour next week.
Cocoon breaks open after night caught in the storm
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