I WALK THE LINE in AUSTRALIA / NEW ZEALAND (april 2009)

Report : Jani

It's weird how randomly things happen sometimes.. well, for I WALK THE LINE most of the times! We just got back home from an amazing tour in Australia and New Zealand - going there had been a dream of ours for many years already and we had been talking about it with a bunch of people but the schedules were never right for both sides. Then a couple of months ago our finnish label COMBAT ROCK INDUSTRY received an IWTL hoodie order from Australia and Janne who does the mailorder, just happened to look at the customer's email address and then checked out his homepage - it appeared that this guy Paul had booked tours for AGAINST ME, DARKEST HOUR and so on over there.. so Janne just sent a sidenote with the order that he should book IWTL as well - and immediately got the reply that hell yeah, if we would really be interested in coming over, he would be happy to do it.. so, he put me in touch with Paul and fast forward a couple of months, there we were, tired but happy at the Melbourne airport after 30+ hours of travelling!

When we are touring in Germany we always want to play every day - no days off if we can have our way, it good to keep rolling all the time - but since getting the chance to go all the way to the other side of the world could be a once-in-a-lifetime chance, we opted for some serious tourist action as well!

We arrived in Melbourne on Monday night, and the first show was going to be Friday night so we had plenty of time to hang out and get adjusted.. tour booker Paul, who was also going to be our driver for the tour, picked us up from the airport with his sidekick, promotion master Julian. These guys crammed us in the smallest van we've seen since the Japanese tour two years ago, it was a beat-up old Mazda, lovingly called the Blueberry. Well, they also immediately gave us a 4-liter bag of the cheapest red wine so felt right at home on the backseat! Not much else to say about that night, we cruised around to do a quick radio interview, got to the guys' friends' place and crashed right out.

In the morning we were ready to hit the streets of Melbourne - first stop being the POISON CITY RECORDS store in Fitzroy, the hip area of the city, packed with most amazing cafes, restaurants and so on. We would hang out there most of the days while in town.. the Poison City store was really cool, a lot like my own COMBAT ROCK SHOP but less vinyl and more skateboards / shoes - a better business move than loads of hardcore vinyl i'm sure hehe! It was great to catch up with my friend, Poison City owner Andrew who also plays in the great A DEATH IN THE FAMILY. In the spirit of trademark IWTL / Combat Rock luck, ADITF got an offer to tour the US with GASLIGHT ANTHEM at exactly the same time as our shows in Australia were.. amazing news for them, not so amazing for us - playing with them in their home country would have been great! Well, next time..

We spent the day hanging out and eating and proceeded to hit the bars at night.. highlights being getting hammered at the AC/DC Lane bars and having taxis race against each other on the way back home!

The next morning hell's bells were ringing in my head.. but not for long, it was my birthday and i got champagne for breakfast! That, sunshine and a quick dip at the backyard pool made us feel a lot better soon and we were ready for a new tourist day. Which we spent in true tourist fashion.. well - beach, food and bars, what else is there?! Oh, at night we went to this emo-disco at a downtown nightclub, it was so weird - like watching MTV. But we got free drinks from the venue which was kind of our reason for going there... so we had a few beers and observed the 1000 emo-clones go totally, like, crazy! LOL! Damn i feel old sometimes but that's cool...

Friday, time for the show.. The Old Bar is a really nice small club in the heart of Fitzroy - we were pretty nervous, opening our flight cases for the first time but were relieved to find the equipment still in one piece. Local bands including KILL WHITEY and DAYSWORTH FIGHTING played before us, cool HOT WATER MUSIC / NO IDEA RECORDS inspired stuff, like most of the bands we would play with, turned out to be. POISON CITY appears to be doing to good job over in Australia!! And when there's a room full of people who are into melodic music it's usually a good situation for us - and this was no exception, many of the people might not have heard us before but it was a great show, lots of energy both on stage and on the dance floor!
The afterparty was not quite what we might have hoped for though - the distances in Australia are just crazy so it was pretty much straight to the van from the stage! A night riding the Blueberry.. drinking and hoping to pass out, to no avail!

About 15 hours into the drive, getting close to Newcastle where we were to play an all ages show, we got a call from the organuzers that the police are at the venue with breathalyzers to test if the crowd has been drinking.. and when we got there the bad news really hit - about 80 people, including one of the bands, had been sent away because they had been drinking before coming to the venue! Of course i understand the no-drinking rule inside the all ages venue, that's obvious.. but this shit was totally unheard of. Obviously after these people called their friends about the situation at the show, who wanted to come there?! We sure wouldn't want to. But we kind of had to.. and what's there to say. Drive 17 hours, play for some of the other bands, get no money cos the paying customers have been turned away by the cops. Punk fucking rock. Sometimes there's a price to pay..

The next day made the drive up to Newcastle worth it though - up until that we were very disappointed cos we had not seen any kangaroos, koalas or other kinds of exciting wildlife around hehe! Well, when we drove to the Blackbutt Reserve park, we saw all those things and even got to pet a koala so we were happy again! The day continued in a weird tourist fashion as well, we ended up having beers at a members-only bowling club with no bowling with a bunch of pensioners and Jussi won a 100 bucks from the slot machine, making all the surrounding grandmas envious!

The next morning we drove to Sydney, luckily only two hours away from Newcastle. After a lunch of some of the most delicious mock meats we ever tasted, we were ready for some serious tourist action again but that's when it started pouring rain. So we just ended up driving to the punk house where Mitch, the singer of the great country/punk band SYDNEY CITY TRASH lives. With the rain pouring all night, we just got wasted around the house, had Julian read us bedtime stories from a finnish book and laughed ourselves to sleep!

The following day we had more luck with the weather and got to see all the basic stuff and more - the iconic Opera House and so on.. and most importantly the Bondi Beach, featured in at least two Baywatch style reality shows - the weather was amazing so we had to run straight into the ocean of course.. the waves were huge and the current in the sea was unlike anything we had experienced before so i almost got to be rescued in the reality show, hehe!

The next morning we had to wake up at 6am to catch the flight to Hobart, Tasmania.. we were expecting it to be one of the highlights of the whole trip - a punk band from Finland playing in Tasmania, that's pretty unreal.. not least for Ville, up until he got the tour dates, he almost thought Tasmania is something that only exists in comics! But seriously, Tasmania is the furthest place you can go from Finland, if heading for the South Pole doesn't count.. yet when we got there it felt not unlike Finland at all. It was cold and raining! Give our money back!

Since it was raining and the venue was a hotel and we had not gotten much sleep or privacy in the last week, we ended up just chilling out at our room for the most part. The venue was really cool and people had been telling us how the people in Tasmania are always hungry for music and go crazy when bands go there, so the expectations were high. Unfortunately, because whatever expectations we had, they were to be crushed to pieces. After Newcastle, the last thing we needed was another disaster of a show but that is exactly what we got. Oh well.. there was a sticker on the wall of the old Blueberry that said "When Life Gives You Lemons, You Paint That Shit Gold". It's good to remember that.. so, drink and be merry for tomorrow you may die!

But again, the next day more than made up for the time, effort and money it took to travel to Tasmania! We rented a car and headed for Mount Wellington, standing majestic just outside the city and offering amazing views from the top. No-one of us had driven a car with steering on the right before this, so we opted to pay for the extra insurance.. no problems though, Ville took the wheel and it was all good! We also decided to head for a nature park because our trip to Tasmania just would not we be complete without seeing a live tasmanian devil! Much to our disappointment, they were pretty cute actually - not at all as blood thirsty and vicious as we expected..

The following morning the wake-up call was at 4am to catch our flight back to Sydney. We spent the day there taking it easy, eating too much vegan goodies again, doing some shopping at the huge chinese market... good times.
The show was at a pretty big venue called The Bald Faced Stag. KILL WHITEY played with us again, as well as THE OPTIONALS who sounded kind of like ALL or something like that - interesting stuff. We played last and it was all right, back on track after two bad luck shows.. and celebrated by hitting the road, another all night drive in the Blueberry!

We were headed for the last Australian show in Julian's hometown Brisbane so expectations were on the rise once again. On the way we stopped to chill out for a bit in Paul's hometown Gold Coast - just like Florida!
The venue in Brisbane was a big night club and the was an indie disco on the other side from the show room.. a weird mix but it did bring in a lot of people, making it our best australian show! THE GIFTHORSE and Paul's band NOT OK also played with us, nice! And after the show, for once the time and place were right for a party!

Waking up the next morning, i didn't have a slightest idea where i was.. one of those days eh. A closer examination showed that were at Julian's house, there were passed out bodies lying around everywhere.. the farewell party must have been good! We had planned to do all kinds of stuff but we ended up just chilling out, taking the tourist ferry at the river the runs through the city and eating the most amazing vegan pepperoni pizza - just the right things to do on a slow Sunday.

We also had big plans for the last day in Australia.. if you can call hanging out in the sun and trying surfing big. But somehow we ended up only being able to step out of the Blueberry for about an hour - those damn distances and small roads, eh.. amazing views once again though! And we did visit this hippie village called Nimbin but maybe it was not really for us.. but if seeing a village full of spaced out people on a Monday morning is your thing, then you know where to go!

After all this and more bad traffic, we also almost managed to miss our flight to Christchurch, New Zealand... after an hour of rising panic we made it at the last minute though, huh! Arriving in New Zealand almost felt like coming home weather-wise but this time it didn't come as a surprise. It felt good to be there, we took a taxi to the hostel and hung out at the lobby for a few hours, planning the next day's tourist activities!

We rented a car and decided to head for the mountains here too, and after seeing amazing mountain views and about million sheep, we arrived at Hamner Springs. It was actually your average tourist trap but whatever, it was pretty amazing to just chill out at the the different hot springs and stare at the mountains - sometimes you need moments like that!

The next morning turned out to be pretty confusing - we just happened to look at some local event guide where it said we were supposed to play in Christchurch the next day - this day we should be in Dunedin, a couple of hundred kilometers south! In the end it turned out there had been a bunch last-minute changes with the whole tour but of course we were not aware of them, we only had the recent infos from the organizers... so it was all good and we still had a couple of tourist hours left!
We met up with THE OUTSIDERS, who we were playing all four NZ shows with, before the show and crammed into the tour van - it was as small as Blueberry... we were in for some more travelling fun! There was no room for the backline at all, just seats for people - and we did have a full backline so packing the van called for some creativity to say the least!
The venue, Al's Bar, was really cool - maybe the best on the whole tour! Unfortunately the people in Christchurch were someplace else at the time of the show.. THE OUTSIDERS sounded really good even though they claimed it was their worst show in ages. About our show there is not much to say... except that i hope THE OUTSIDERS enjoyed it hehe!

The next morning we woke up early to start driving to Dunedin, the Outsiders' original home town - now they all live in Wellington. The drive was long, packed and uneventful - if being scared of dying, racing down the small mountain roads doesn't count!
Before the show we met Stu Outsiders' parents for dinner at their house - it was both really nice and really weird to do something so normal at this point! Back downtown, we were just hanging out in the van having a few beers cos the weather was so cold, there was no backstage and no free drinks at the venue. But just watching the people on the street was pretty good entertainment, apparently it was the university students' big night out and they were pretty wasted... luckily some of them came to the show as well, it was pretty packed and good fun - not exactly our normal crowd but fun!

And what better way to celebrate a good show than the good old night drive, eh?! Luckily most people managed to pass out.. and when i opened my eyes in the morning the views were pretty incredible : the blue ocean on the right, snow topped mountains on the left, and the sun rising slowly - it doesn't get much better! We stopped to watch seals chill out on the beach but had to keep on racing towards the ferry to Wellington soon. We got a free ferry ride because Dan of the Outsiders had promised to play a solo acoustic show in the bar there - which he did, and rocked the boat!
Wellington looked like a really nice town straight away - not only was the venue Mighty Mighty in a cool area, it was a a super cool tiki / rock'n'roll lounge - nice!!! We checked out some ace shops and went for dinner in a most amazing restaurant and since this was New Zealand, i just had to try their fake lamb curry - it was delicious! After some more sightseeing we headed back to the venue and it was already pretty packed. THE OUTSIDERS played a great hometown show and for us too it was a really good response - pretty much a perfect day on tour all in all! Unfortunately it was a national holiday and because of some ancient law, the bars had to close at midnight = no party... so we just drove to Stu's house to catch some sleep.

Another morning, another early wake-up call.. the last show on this tour was in Auckland. The street where the venue was located, was pretty interesting - apparently it was the transvestite capital of the country and right next door to the venue there was a big cabaret going on! We were starving after the killer drive so we just went searching for food and when we got back, a band called THE MURDER CHORD was playing - just piano and drums, something different! THE OUTSIDERS' final show with us was great, for us it was not the best night - the show was delayed really late because of some technical hassle and a bunch of people got tired of waiting...

So this was it - after taking the obligatory silly photos with friends we took a taxi to the airport and killed a couple of hours there by taking more and more silly photos! Also in Melbourne we had 10 hours to kill so we decided to escape the airport boredom and rented a car once again - and it was great to have a bonus day to hang out in Melbourne!

About the rest of the trip back home there's not much to tell - we were too tired to think, even too tired to drink! But 30+ hours after taking off from Melbourne we were home, tired but happy and already planning the next tours! See you somewhere!