TPi_Magazine__February_2018

ROAD DIARIES
DAN WOOLFIE
Tour Manager & Drummer
In my pre-Tour Manager days, when I was a drummer (circa 2013), my
band had just finished our first night on an European support tour. It
was my first ever ‘proper’ tour, one of those tours where, due to the
routing, we should have had forked out for a tour bus rather than a
splitter van and hotels. We roped in an ex-ambulance driver (because,
well, you can’t get safer than that!) to help us drive the splitter
while the rest of us took turns in the driver’s seat too. He was also
coincidently a huge fan of the headliners, so on the promise of getting
to see them play every night, he was more than keen to be there. Until
show number 2...
We’d arrived in Salzburg, Austria, and got some sleep before our
drive to Geneva. After lunch we were accompanied by a whistling sound
coming from the engine. We pulled over, opened the bonnet, couldn’t see
anything obviously wrong. And we blew, with 200 miles to do in 4 hours.
After a bit of back seat Googling, we’d figured out that the sound we were
hearing was a rip in the turbo hose. “Sorted,” we thought. “Gaffa tape,
we’ve got tonnes of the stuff.” We were of course, wrong. We plastered
the hose with gaffa, convinced we were mechanical geniuses and were
quite pleased with ourselves for the 5-or-so-miles we got before the
whistling noise came back. Even louder. We located an SOS phone at the
side of the road and managed to call a local mechanic. ETA unknown.
We were contemplating making the call that we weren’t going to make it,
and possibly opt to go to Milan in time for the next show, but by the time
we’d decided to do so, the mechanic miraculously appeared. Hope soon
turned into a “ah, nope!” Though, as what we witnessed (for €450 - that
we definitely didn’t have) was a Swiss mechanic take off our black gaffa
tape and replace it with his silver gaffa tape. Less than half a mile down
the road, his more-inferior-gaffa-job-than-ours blew off and had us back
on the side of the road. We asked for our money back but suddenly his
English was no good.
We made the call to the headliner’s Tour Manager and from what I
remember, the response was “Try to get here… we’ll wait for you.” Now,
try as we might, Switzerland is proper hilly. We had so much hope that
everything was going to be OK while we were going downhill at a normal
speed, then utter misery as we tried to get back up the next!
I woke up in the back of the van around 7:30pm, our intended stage
time. We still had an hour to go. There was another call. We’d now play
at 8:30pm. We were all peering over the front seats and watching the
miles tick away, while simultaneously screaming “FLOOR IT” at our exambulance
driver, who was now having a mild heart attack in the driver’s
seat.
8:25pm. We’d made it. I’ll never forget the moment where the guitarist
& I, loaded with our gear, burst onto an empty stage to a full crowd of
around 4,000 people. No one told us the doors had opened already! It
was so frantic; I was being handed parts of my drum kit fully assembled
by people I’d never met before, I could hear our FOH Engineer through
my wedge “Woolfie, gimme kick, gimme kick… snare, gimme snare!” We
played. And we were only 6 minutes late. I remember very little from the
actual show other than it was one of the best we’ve ever played.
As soon as the headliners had finished playing, we had to set off as
early as we could to give our best chance making it to Milan with our
broken van. Our FOH Engineer had been pretty quiet on this part of the
journey, he was trying to figure out how we could fix this turbo hose if
we couldn’t get the part from a Mercedes garage. We needed a solution
to finish the tour. As soon as we got into the venue in Milan, he was
rummaging around for a beer in the fridge. He came back out, opened
the bonnet and said: “Woolfie, get me a knife and some more gaffa.” He
opened the beer, necked it, chopped both ends off the can, slit it down
the side, wrapped it around the turbo hose, gaffa’d both ends and shut
the bonnet. Now, I know you might say it’s no good drinking on the job,
but I swear, that bloody can of crappy beer got us from Milan to Madrid
via Toulouse, then to Lisbon and Luxembourg before landing back in our
hometown of Manchester. 3,500 miles. Full speed, zero problems. Forget
the rip off mechanics, turns out gaffa tape and a desperate beer can solve
all.
Dan Woolfie
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