Tour diary: Playing in the ivy league

Brunettes Heather Mansfield and Jonathan Bree.

Brunettes bassist James Milne is on tour with the Auckland pop combo in North America supporting the Shins. This is the first in a series of postcards from the road 

TORONTO, Ontario. Right now it's about 2am, we've just taken a circuitous route back from the Koolhaus, a smaller version of the North Shore Events Centre, like a big high-school gymnasium, reverberant, metallic and ugly.

We're staying at Val's, a friend of trumpet player Harry's mum, in a beautiful stone house overlooking Grenadier Pond in West Toronto. This is undeniably the most luxurious of all the homes the nine of us have been staying in, and nearly up there with the Shins tour bus.

That Thunderbirds-style mobile command centre boasts facilities to rival Air Force One, including two entertainment systems in the fore and aft with satellite TV, DVD player, Xbox, Playstation 2 and Gamecube.

Jonathan (singer-guitarist), Heather (singer, multi-instrumentalist), Harry and I rode in the bus a couple of nights ago after the Congress show in Chicago.

In the front lounge the roadies and bourbon drinkers were watching Led Zeppelin live and arguing the specifics of the DVD's audio and visual remastering process.

In the rear lounge, Pink Floyd Live at Pompeii was playing with the appropriate accompaniments.

The Floyd and The Zeppelin travelled through the night to Pittsburgh, as bourbon and scotch receded down the bottle and the Americans and New Zealanders had flailing and increasingly confused ideological discussions.

However, I preferred to consume huge quantities of peanut M and Ms while marvelling at the trippy camera work during David Gilmour's guitar solo in Echoes. Far out.

The morning dawned worse for the front lounge. Upon arrival at Carnegie-Mellon University, one of America's most pristine and wealthy colleges, Harry spent two hours in the gutter asleep under a parka.

His complexion was in marked contrast to that of the sunbed academic elite who bounced through the courtyard in letterman sweaters organising sorority kissing booths.

Despite the inauspicious start, the day in Pittsburgh was just fantastic.

Spring has hit this part of North America in a big way, and we spent the afternoon before and after sound check playing a demonstration game of cricket in the grass quad.

As the sun went down, reflecting off the 42-storey gothic Cathedral of Learning, we played a set to 5000 college kids looking straight out of The OC.

As usual, the seven of us congregated around the merchandise desk afterwards to sign autographs, and say thank you to all the newfound fans bombarding us with comments of: "You guys are freakin awesome!"

We find it's pretty good for sales, too, and we need to eat, so it's not too hard to get into chipper, public relations retail mode.

Americans are such enthusiastic consumers.