Tour diary: Brazen advice from the locals in the city that never sleeps

Travel's hard, but the Brunettes tough it out - cheerfully

Woeful tiredness has struck the Brunettes. New York's 24-hour pleasures have proved too great a temptation, with a five-day stay here allowing us finally to do more than just the cycle of sound check, play show, pack down, sleep, then drive six or eight hours in our cramped van to the next venue.

We have just played our third of three New York shows at Webster Hall, formerly the Ritz, the most iniquitous new wave haunt in the birthplace of new wave iniquity.

It's tough to keep up the smiles and energy when you're doing the same thing every night. The only factor that changes from night to night is our gradually ebbing energy levels. In the face of this, you've got to remember that even though you're doing the same songs, the same jokes and hackneyed banter every night, it's totally new to these people. It must be quite a novelty watching this bunch of people with strange Australian accents playing all sorts of tinkly glockenspiels and castanets. For us, though, this is our daily bread, as banal as stockbroking.

Well, not quite as banal as that: I don't want to destroy any romantic preconceptions people have about rock'n'roll tours.

One variable that adds some variety to this ultimately repetitious cycle is the different venues. Webster Hall is full of exotic trinkets and different-themed rooms. Relief sculptures of sprites and demons line the walls, under-lit by red lights, like kids telling ghost stories around the campfire.

The toilet here's a real treat as well. Your urinal experience is enhanced by a loud soundtrack of Talking Heads or Led Zeppelin, the presence of huge piles of ice to diffuse the wee, primitive paintings of animals in luminescent ink, lit by black lights, and an attendant stocking an excellent range of colognes and candy bars.

Actually, scratch everything I just said about this being like a routine. This is my lifelong dream, and if there's one thing I've learnt from being in New York, you don't get anywhere by downplaying things. We played a record store in Williamsburg and afterwards an elderly woman told me (imagine an extremely broad Brooklyn accent): "You wont get anywhere unless you're brazen. You gotta be brazen."

This was in the context of telling me that we could get on the David Letterman show if we just went up to him and asked. "He's an approachable guy."

So, in the spirit of brazenness and Manhattan's proud culture of boasting, we are very much looking forward to celebrating Debbie Harry's and Kelly Osbourne's birthdays tonight at Charm School in Chelsea. Debbie is singing and Kelly is deejaying, along with Boy George.

This is the kind of pinch-yourself hyper-real experience we were expecting New York to deliver, and here it is. I'm expecting nothing less than a gay orgy with Great Danes strolling around with silver platters strapped to their backs, laden with cocaine. That's what happens here right?