Uncategorized

Norway, as you may know, rebuffed the euro.

It  has its own currency – kroner – as does Sweden and Denmark, but they’re different in all three countries. This constitutes something of a nuisance when touring, and has led to the dubbing of currencies as “shitters”.

The term applies  in the touring industry to any European currency except British sterling. Take the Bulgarian Lev, for example. Now, imagine you’ve slogged through the night from Bucharest to Sofia.

After a nice breakfast and a nap, you venture out to explore a little, perhaps opting to purchase a garish fridge magnet. Fumbling in pockets produces Romanian thingummyjigs  but sadly nothing with Lev printed on it. You see how easy it is not to even know what the currency is?

An inarticulate, articulated-truck driver must once have been in this very situation. Groping for a witticism, he floundered. Hence the coining – pun intended – of the term “shitter”. And, without further comparisons, the term stuck. Try it. Approach a British trucker at any rock show in Europe, mention shitters – straight-faced – and see if he/she bats an eyelid.

Erm, shall we get on with today’s blog? Oslo’s Telenor Arena isn’t finished yet. Norwegians fool about with electricity fittings while AC/DC’s truckers squelch around the catering area, sticking to the freshly-painted floor.

A local girl,  off to Ikea to buy last-minute pillows for the dressing rooms, eyes my trombone case. ‘The definition of optimism is a trombonist with a business card,’ she opines. Oh, ha ha. Just for that quip, I use AC/DC’s dressing room for a chillblain-inducing shower.

My father, finger ever on the pulse, emails me.  ‘Do they still have that funny little guitarist hopping across the stage?’ he asks. Tomorrow night AC/DC play the first ever concert in the building; I wonder fleetingly if bands are booked alphabetically here.

My colleague, Richard, a veteran rock n roll trucker – in fact Motorhead request him for their tours – is vertically challenged. As a result, I thought it might be fun to apply the soubriquet, “Little Dick”.

This morning, Little Dick is wearing one of the free, woolly crew hats that we’ve been issued with. The hat has a green, shorts-wearing gremlin on the front, and only comes in a size that leaves one’s ears exposed. Snow flies straight into my ear canal.

“Gentleman Steve” (yet another driver) opts for a flat cap instead, reminiscent of a character from Last of the Summer Wine, and looks as though he’s come from a nearby allotment.

These city breaks have their disadvantages, you know. Before the euro, turning up in, say, Portugal, we’d hoped someone else had enough escudos for a beer – we’re often only in a country for a short time, and understandably reluctant to change money.

The point I’m circuitously building up to is that Namibian and I, and Little Dick, have arrived in Norway with very few shitters.  So, with no money, we’re confined to bumbling about the immediate area as pedestrians, and rushing back to Catering for thawing purposes.

They say that the best things in life are free. However, rolling around in the snow for Namibian’s video footage turns out to be a foolish idea at the start of a walk. My hands get so cold that I have to walk the streets with one hand, then the other, down my trousers..

Oh, isn’t paperwork a bore? We’re mostly spoilt nowadays with these paperless open borders throughout Europe, but there are still a couple of non-conformers: namely Norway and Switzerland.

Neither belongs to the European Union, which means we have to export gear from the EU, then import it  into these countries, and vice versa on the way out. Rock n roll paperwork (the complicated but logical ATA carnet) is unusual; we never actually deliver anything.

Unlike most truckers, we re-load the same equipment (after the show) that we unloaded before the show. The big grumble, though, is that several trucks often travel under a single carnet.

Upshot: I have to go through these borders with other drivers, at a time to suit them, which almost always involves rushing. Formalities over, leaving Sweden and entering Norway mid-morning, we’re free to dither again, stopping for photographs and such like.

Driving into a blizzard is a bit like having concussion…so we pull in for elevenses. We’re in Norway now…and I get ever so slightly stuck this morning. I shan’t go into drive-axle weights – arguably a duller subject even than carnets –  but suffice to say I lose traction, rolling back just a touch, towards a large snowdrift.

The garage lends me a spade, and I buy a reasonably-priced bag of salt. Despite a good deal of puffing with the shovel, the wheels continue to spin on the ice.

The truck remains stationary. Namibian comes to the rescue, boiling the kettle. A capital idea – he really is a dear –  but no sign of milk or teabags. Eh?

He proceeds to tip a whole flask full of  lovely hot water onto the tyres. Who would have thought it – an African desert rat has come to the rescue in Arctic conditions. It does the trick, though. We’re off again.

Arriving at Oslo’s Telenor Arena, Namibian and I casually mention my spot of bother. ‘A trifling matter,’ I lie. There was a point at which I’d envisaged remaining at that garage until the ice thaws…in May.

Anyway, feeling a little behind with trombone practice, I unzip my soft travel case. Barely have I got the ice out of the trombone’s inner stocking when the phone rings.

Unloading, for me, has been brought forward a day which severely interferes with our plans to build a snowman…

It is 86km to the next truckstop, or “autohof”, as they say in Germany.

Our maximum speed is a snail-like 84km/h, and we have less than an hour of driving time on the tachograph. ‘We should make it,’ says Namibian.

Ooh, I assume everybody knows what a tachograph is? Very briefly, it is a system that records distance and speed in trucks of 7.5 tonnes and upwards.

This paper chart – although now that we have entered the digital age, modern trucks use a credit card type tachograph – also records how long the driver has parked for rest periods. Infringements are not looked upon lightly; driving for an extra hour on a whim, for example, is regarded as a serious offence.

Over a pork schnitzel last night, Namibian tells me he loses weight all the time. ‘Remember that Lou Reed tour when I got fat?’ he asks rhetorically. I wipe my eyes and get back up from the floor, my sides still painful from laughing.

‘Am I to infer, Namibian, that you were svelte before we started?’ On a serious note, he’s lost five stone, and is only making small inroads into large chocolate bars nowadays. So you needn’t worry, Namibian’s mum, if you are reading.

Uh oh.. We have “smokies” on our tail.. so seatbelts fastened, crosswords away, and hide everything, just in case. There could be shoot-outs and roadblocks coming up. Yeehah! Oh, this is not so much a chase by the German police as them just sitting fifty yards off Namibian’s trailer doors, electronically checking whether we’ve paid the German road tax.

We’re always running legally so they peel off, leaving us to board the ferry from Puttgarden to Denmark, surrounded by giant windmills.

A Danish pastry seems apt on this forty-five minute crossing, though I wince at the price, even after the fifty per cent freight discount. I steal a pen from the waitress to feel better, then feel rotten when she borrows my own pen, apologising profusely, to take another order.

Namibian films us arriving in “Norway”. Now when he says ‘Norway’, he means Denmark, but he’s now calling every country ‘Scandinavia’ to be on the safe side. Mountainless Denmark, barely keeping her neck above sea level, passes in scarcely three hours, and is spent waving to colleagues that effortlessly pass me, the slowest truck on the fleet.

Unfortunately, there is no time to stop in Copenhagen, and anyway it’s the wrong time of year for the secretaries sunning their breasts in the summer lunch hours.

With headlights permanently on, regardless of daylight or visibility – it’s the law, you know – we take the fifteen minute boat ride into Sweden, the only country in Europe where you can still use a hand-held mobile phone while driving. But nobody calls me, and I’m too frugal to dial an outgoing call.

As we pull in at Munkedal rest stop, the snow begins to fall. Jotting down a few notes, I feel racked with guilt; the pen I am using is the waitress’s pilfered biro..

I was so busy describing the Tina show yesterday that I forgot to mention that Namibian and I have been chucked off the tour!

No, it’s not because we’ve been naughty, or indeed for not being naughty enough; this is purely for logistical reasons – to avoid having too many subcontractors on a single tour.

Don’t worry though, we’re simply moving onto another road trip for the next nine weeks: some lot called AC/DC. Just the name has me lurching for earplugs.

So, no more tales of Mystic and his magic earplugs (photographed after he’d dropped one in his beef lasagne), or his fungal mug, with week-old tannin grime.

Another character that I shall now miss is Captain Birdseye, yesterday speaking of never visiting Namibia due to the threat of cannibalism, and telling me whites are called “longpigs” in Papua New Guinea, because we taste like pork.

Well, all good things come to an end. Before we say goodbye, though, a familiar, yet anonymous face enters “Catering” – this is an area frequented by the entire Tina Turner crew – wielding a fistful of pornographic films.

Unable to recall whom he’d borrowed them from, he ostentatiously holds them aloft, and asks: ‘who do these belong to?’ Feet are shuffled; shirt collars are hidden behind. Blushing and silent, nobody owns up.

Now that we’ve swapped tours, we had to move two miles away last night. The space was needed for the three trucks that replaced Namibian, me, and our mutual pal, Alice. Due to an absurd amount of drugs in his twenties, Mark was nicknamed “Alice” – after Alice in Wonderland. He’s lovely.

Nowadays, nobody even knows that his real name is Mark. Lucky that his name is in the tour programme, then? Nope, it’s been misspelt as Mary. Just to be clear, he is a red-blooded male, hardly ever seen in a dress.

Famished this morning, I’m already missing Catering which, fortunately, lies only two miles away, a mere pedal or two on the trusty bicycle. (Bicycles are a major part of touring).

For us, there will be no more “beef enchilada’s” – Agh! Why do people add an erroneous apostrophe when they are simply pluralising a noun? – or loud thrash metal at nine o’clock in the morning.

In short, for the next few days, we have no catering.  There’s a huge social aspect to huddling over interminable cups of tea in there, and now there is a gaping hole.

So, we’re swapping “Private Dancer” for “Highway to Hell” – talk about jumping from the frying pan into the fire. But, although I’m technically off the tour now, not only am I watching the show this evening, but I’m eating as much as physically possible without throwing up, and entertaining complimentary guests.

And I’m planning to have just one last, lingering perv at the dancers going up the stairs. Regrettably,  the best bit coincides with a backstage chat over a cup of tea, thus missing the eroticism completely.

The sassy hip-swaying in “Proud Mary” is also ruined, at least for me, by a prominent, middle-aged, bespectacled chap in a green cardigan near the front. He waves his arms, clapping, cueing the sax solo and singing wildly, looking like a human windmill in his own little world. I’d bet money that he sells insurance.

A whole new motley bunch of characters will be introduced shortly – and plenty of European cities – but, for now, it’s goodbye to the Tina Turner 50th Anniversary Tour. And it’s farewell to the “Sexiest Granny on Earth”, according to a banner in the front row tonight.

Tina, you’re simply the best, better than all the rest…

Anybody who puts a tea break in the middle of a concert is a star in my book.

There’s nothing worse than needing the loo an hour into a show, and having to stand there like a lemon, crossing your legs. The first half of Tina’s show closes with ‘we don’t need another hero..’, and “pyro” – dangerous stuff mere mortals don’t understand.

The pyrotechnic boys are clothed in mystery, emitting lethal-sounding bangs and producing propane flames on stage. The fire looks so impressive that I sometimes wonder if I’ve forgotten to turn off the iron backstage. Blimey, the bangs are noisy tonight; pyro was banned at our Austrian show for this reason.

The second half opens with some great footage of Tina Turner with Jagger, Bowie, Phil Collins, Clapton etc. She’s done it all. And I’d forgotten she was in the Mad Max Thunderdome film. An upbeat version of ‘I can’t stand the rain’ kicks off with some funky keyboard. The crowd roar when they realise the song. The tenor sax player, Euge Groove, goes off the stave with harmonics. Man, can he bite that reed.

While snow falls outside Antwerp’s Sportpaleis Arena, the show inside is rocking. The dancers are out again, more than rivalling Rod Stewart’s on-stage display a couple of years back. Is this tantric sex, I wonder? After three weeks staring at saucy dancers, do I need to spend the next month begging?

Tina holds her own against them, though, with fantastic legs still. Anybody want to hazard a guess at her age?

There is a discrepancy on tour, estimates ranging from 69 to 73. Assuming it was known accurately on the last tour, the older truck drivers are plumping toward the latter figure. Regardless, she is incredible. She must be: I’ve toured with  dozens of stars, and this remains the only act that I’ve ever watched more than once.

The big finish is bopping in stilettos on an extending walkway fifteen feet above the audience. This moving, hydraulic platform is about 45 feet long – it looks the length of a truck trailer – and only a few feet wide.

As Tina belts out “Nutbush” to an adoring crowd, the tour manager must be having heart palpitations. With spotlights in her eyes, it would be so easy to fall. It’s only rock n roll but I like it, I think..

I wake to a blanket of overnight snow. All would be serene if it wasn’t for the idling truck engines, neon, garages, and the rumble of the A3. Namibian, ever predictable, is smoking a cigarette and staring into space. And will have been for the last hour.

The dissolution of  the Deutschmark was bad enough. But with the current exchange rate from sterling to euros, buying a coffee in Germany is now daylight robbery. Admittedly, it’s nice not to rummage through a biscuit tin full of Austrian schillings and Dutch guilders when simply wanting a cuppa here, but at least it was cheap then.

Ah, rose tinted glasses, the old days.. Today, however, I pay through the nose for an extra coffee at breakfast. Then, after filling up with diesel, I’m given two vouchers…for coffee.

The hundred yard drive to the fuel pumps, in weather this bleak, seems quite  far enough for the day. Alas, still 560km to go.

The weather worsens as we pass Nuremberg and Frankfurt, culminating in a near white-out around Cologne. How am I supposed to finish my crossword whilst driving in these conditions?

Earlier, a particularly violent gust of wind had rendered my answer to 11 Across an illegible smudge. Instead, Michael Palin’s audio book, Pole to Pole, keeps me company.

As Namibian and I skid past Wurzburg –  actually, most of the wheels are gripping the road – Palin crosses the equator into Tanzania via a gate, informing me that the highly intelligent hippopotamus has one hundred separate sounds in its vocabulary.

More water-logged, snow-choked cities pass the window, until a streak of lightning illuminates a Shell garage in The Netherlands. By the time we reach Belgium (the land of Tintin, waffles and nonsensical laws), we’re in our third country since breakfast.

And as Palin lands on the world’s slipperiest continent of Antarctica, at 10,000 feet and minus fifty centigrade, we roll into Antwerp’s Sportpaleis.  Backstage, the pub across the road, which has loomed all-consumedly at the fore of our minds for hours, looks darker than it ought to. It is closed..

Namibian became flustered last night. Unclear trucking instructions, delivered second-hand, plunged him into a fit of frantic gesticulating and wheezing.

He stormed past me, sullen and jowly, like a bulldog that’s just licked urine from a nettle. Two hours later, with loaded trucks, the radio crackles.

‘Hang on, Barny,’ he says, ‘I’m having a heart attack.’ Oh, great. This from a man who told me not two days ago what good health he is enjoying. I briefly wonder whether I should retrieve my stove from his cab, but a few seconds later, between oesophagus-displacing coughing bouts, he tells me he’s OK. What a drama queen: it’s probably only angina again.

It was 1000km from Hannover to Vienna; now it is 1100km to Antwerp. The next concert after that is Zurich. Remember I suggested that these itineraries are  determined by cocaine-fuelled executives throwing darts at a map of continental Europe?

Well, thank heavens that a particularly limp-wristed lunge didn’t have us all trundling down to Istanbul instead. There are two travel days to reach Antwerp, so barely an hour up the autobahn sees us fast asleep for what remains of the night. After all, yesterday was my third consecutive day without an afternoon nap.

Parking tonight is at Geiselwind truckstop in Bavaria. Namibian upsets the blameless ‘dinner lady’ (waitress) with his terse mannerisms and pidgin German. His pork is too tough, which he indicates by making a sawing motion to her with his knife. The knife slides through the meat like soft butter.

He storms over to Burger King, tail between his legs. Meanwhile the rest of us exhaust the topics of lorries and perverts over a few surprisingly strong Kulmbacher beers.

Truckers, with so much time on their hands to muse – and I’m being serious here – actually make rather good philosophers. A conundrum emerges among our clan: what is the difference between a reason and an excuse?

A think tank in The Pentagon could chew on that for months but, at Transam Trucking Ltd, one of our team instantly remembers an incident at school which hits the nail on the head. ‘I was told off once, for putting my hand up a skirt. I had a reason but it was no excuse.’

The right to be heard, or in this case read, does not include the right to be taken seriously.

It has occurred to me, though, that, now I’m writing so prodigiously, my trucker pals might disown me, regarding me as the lone ranger. I must compensate with virile displays of testosterone.

A thuggish nameplate for the front windscreen perhaps? Or maybe showering less and murdering the occasional prostitute would do the trick?

After a balmy eleven degrees yesterday, this morning is foul and depressing. Even the house-wife prostitutes, not fifty yards away on Felberstrasse under umbrellas, do little to lift one’s spirits.

The scene is marginally brightened by two luxurious carriages from The Orient Express but, among the squalor, I half expect them to be riddled with resident heroin-users.

(We each have our own puddle to park in, just so you know; my Vienna walking tour looks doomed.)

Pedestrians waiting patiently for the “green man” in this country are beginning to annoy me. I feel such a lawless brute venturing across an empty street in Austria or Germany, or indeed German-speaking parts of Switzerland, watched disapprovingly by other bipeds.

Today, they wait gormlessly for the light to change, in the rain. Yes, I know it’s the law, but it’s frustrating beyond belief when there is little traffic. I decide eventually to risk the astringent stares, darting demonically through the five-hundred-metre gap between vehicles.

With the weather inclement, there is little to do but read. So, in the absence of observations from the Austrian capital, I’ll relate a little dialogue that took place over the headphones during Tina Turner’s show last night.

To pass the time, “on cans” before the show, we’ve been exploring the derivation of words. Yes, rather an erudite idea, and right up my “strasse”.

Last night, however, we were treated to a crew member’s report from a hotel room, where access to the pornography channel was blocked. Ringing through to reception, he asked: ‘Is my porn disabled?’ The voice at the other end, suitably taken aback, replied: ‘Ugh, Sicko, it’s just regular porn.’

Hey, don’t shoot the messenger; this is unadulterated gossip from backstage and ought to be turned into a BBC documentary.

The other all-time favourite hotel room tale, of course, is telephoning the madam of a brothel and explaining the unspeakable acts you’d like to perform when the lithe young call-girl arrives, only to be met with the embarrassing response: ‘You need 9 for an outside line, sir.’

Backstage, tapping away at a ridiculously small laptop, my friend “Mystic” says nothing, yet everything. He is wearing earplugs permanently now, to tune out the oral twaddle:

‘I don’t want to hear it, Barnaby. They’re talking about peep shows and masturbation.’ Oh, only another few months to go..

If you were to hide a camera in a building overnight, where would be the last place you’d choose?

Astute trucker, Joe, chose the oven, then got drunk and slept in. You can see what’s coming… By the time he emerges today, lunch is prepared, and those reckless caterers haven’t checked the cooking area for electronic devices. “Melted” would be an understatement.

My German friend Norbert – ‘from a wery small willage’ – introduced his considerably younger girlfriend last night. He is overtly flouting an unwritten rule, apparently: Germans and Austrians do not, I’m told, see eye to eye. This relationship works, however, because Norbert is from Bavaria, once part of the Austro-Hungarian empire.

Some years ago, Norbert stayed in my house as a foreign student learning English. Substantially his junior, I was nevertheless referred to as ‘my host daddy’.

Like me, he is something of an international gadder, so I called him yesterday to check he was actually in Vienna.

‘How are you?’ I began simply and slowly. ‘In the office,’ he replied, showing a worrying regression since leaving my tutelage.

‘HOW, not where,’ I persisted conversationally. Actually, his English is excellent, save for a few delightful mispronunciations.

In fact, we ended up chatting over Campari until 3am last night. I know, it’s not a very “cool” drink for someone in their early thirties, but it’s trendier than tea? I’m trying. And fine, if you’re going to be pedantic, I’m mid-thirties, I suppose.

Now, the complaints have started among the trucking fraternity on the Tina Turner tour: our railway siding parking area in Vienna comes without toilets.

The nearest are at the station, a ten-minute walk , which, quite rightly, upsets Namibian, needing to “go” at five o’clock in the morning. A simple matter like this, while the rest of the crew enjoy en-suite hotel bathrooms, breeds unrest.

While I cycle contentedly around the city – I re-visit a 16th century trombone in the Antiquities Museum; the instrument, then known as a sackbut, has changed little in the last 500 years – others have time to brood. In fairness, most of my colleagues will have been to Vienna fifty times compared to my seven or eight visits over the last ten years or so. They have become jaded.

‘Crouchers are better for you than Western toilets,’ Captain Birds Eye informs me, cryptically, then bombards me with statistics regarding bowel cancer in Europe versus Asia.  I think, however, we can safely attribute the marked difference in figures to diet rather than squatting techniques.

After a brief foray into toothless ferrets again – ‘they can give you a nasty suck’ – matters inevitably turn to sex.

Birds Eye, hogging conversation on occasions says: ‘Cos of the tablets, I have to book an erection two weeks in advance.’

I could of course choose to omit these quotes, but I think you can better empathise if they are included? People are for ever telling me what a great job I have, but look what I have to put up with.

Other colleagues start to arrive in Catering, glum-faced and bereft of cash, bitterly regretting late-night negotiations in the nearby brothel…

Needless to say, our Go-Boxes have a problem. So, we pull in to the nearest garage before being frogmarched down to a police station.

Wow, what a splendid selection of top-shelf reading material adorning the magazine rack, I muse. And when I say “top-shelf”, I actually mean bottom shelf, thrust upon the innocent customer popping in to buy fuel or a newspaper, a little bit like those internet pop-up boxes.

Take “Buttlust”, for example: a pricey Canadian publication, billed as the ‘magazine for fanny fanatics.’ This translates poorly for the British male reader, possibly expecting quality snaps of female genitalia.

Yes, blame the North Americans for once again butchering the English slang and causing bewilderment. I open the glossy pages for a brisk ogle – for journalistic ends, and arguably for enlightenment – while Namibian sorts out the tax.

6th February:

‘I can’t stand the rain, ‘gainst my windows…’ Nor can I, Tina, but it’s more of a damp mist than actual rain, the sort of weather one associates with Eastern European border crossings…and England.

This lack of sunshine, and its life-giving Vitamin D, is cracking the skin round my eyes. Or is it simply ageing? Or something more sinister? Whatever. But “Mystic” (mentioned in the last blog), at 41, guesses he might be younger than I, a mere whippersnapper of 33. Perhaps he’s just being nasty because his earplug-wearing antics are now recorded in cyberspace.

Or maybe it’s because I behave like an old git, storming out of bars in Sri Lanka, for instance, amid lasers and dry ice, because I could no longer see the columns of The Telegraph.

Regardless, Mystic was ‘verbally attacked’ later that day for wearing earplugs in the crew dining room; by doing so, he was tacitly implying that the caterers’ choice of music was naff. He’s a bit under the weather at the moment, unbalanced after losing a nasal hair.

And no, the green “L” on my truck is not an abbreviation of “learner”, thank you very much. Briefly, the Austrians require heavy trucks to have what’s called a “hush kit” fitted around the engine if travelling at night. I know, if I could travel during the day I would.

Anyway, the L indicates that this kit has been fitted. Occasionally, one has to show the accompanying paperwork before being allowed to proceed.

I’ll try and keep trucking stuff to a bare minimum in future, but I think it helps you to empathise? My only way to know if factual information has your eyes drooping is if you comment. And while I’m asking questions, any thoughts on constantly using the present tense?

There are two types of road tax here in Austria: pre-pay and post-pay. ‘What, you’ve got to pay by post?’ asks a poker-faced Namibian. Isn’t he adorable?

He assures me, incidentally, that his health is fantastic as he unwraps a 300g bar of milk chocolate..