The Lovely Eggs – What it takes to survive 20 years as a DIY band:

Lancaster’s The Lovely Eggs have just completed a 20th Anniversary UK Tour, supported on all dates by Polite Bureaux, and at various locations by Phill Jupitus in his Porky The Poet persona, Stewart Lee, Frank Skinner, Rob Auton, Zara Gladman, Simon Donald, and Eric Rushton. In addition the band released Bin Juice a compilation of tracks that didn’t quite fit on the previous Eggsistentialism album (LTW review) alongside some obscure B-sides of B-sides.

As such we took the opportunity to ask the fiercely independent band just how they have negotiated the past two decades.

10 punk rock disasters: How did we survive 20 years?

1. Surfing our way across America on a beach towel:
When you are offered shows overseas, first of all check that you’ve got adequate transport, somewhere to stay and bedding you can borrow. We did neither. Consequently, we toured America for 21 days straight in the back of a cramped hire car, with another two-piece band who argued constantly, with only a beach towel to sleep on. Each night we had to ask the audience for somewhere to stay and of course each night they all wanted a mammoth fucking party. In the really grim places, we slept on the towel, at nicer places, we used it as a blanket. So much random shit happened on that tour (including Holly entering an arm-wrestling competition to try and earn some extra wedge) it’s hard to believe we survived.

2. Trust Your Gut:

If you are in America and you turn up to play a show in what you thought was a venue but turns out to be a weird Indian restaurant in a shopping mall, at a night put on by a brother and sister music duo who subsequently make out on stage, and then afterwards the dude invites you up to a cabin in the woods where he suggests that he ties you up and makes a music video for you, get the fuck out of dodge. Similarly, if you are lying awake at 4 in the morning and you suddenly become paranoid that your van and all your gear has been stolen, wake up your entire crew with your random theories and trudge back en mass in the early hours to prove yourself wrong. This is a sure sign of madness but a classic example of a perfectly normal well-adjusted band member.

3. Old vans:

All bands need them but like every band’s expectation of “making it”, they always let you down. We bought our Fiat Scudo, an ex-police dog van to go on tour with Art Brut round Europe in 2011. And it’s had its fair share of getting a backie on a tow truck. The worst time was when our little boy was taken ill during a tour of the UK. He was taken to hospital and we were on our way to a show in Bristol shortly after he was discharged, when the not-so-trusty Scudo broke down, leaving us stranded at the side of the motorway, with our lad just out of hospital wrapped in a blanket. The traffic cops rescued half of us and took us to the nearest services, while the rest of the gang waited 6 hours for a tow truck. The show in Bristol was cancelled as a result, but our support band played in our absence doing a mass rendition of “Fuck It” with the crowd. We later found out that our van had been written off before we even bought it, but love knows no bounds between a band and their van, and we loved our Fiat Scudo. RIP 2001-2024.

4. Kids:

Should you want to take the pure slog and harshness of life on the road as a touring band up to the next level…then have kids! Nothing feels quite as bleak as waking up at 6am in the morning to the sound of Hey Duggee! when you’ve only gone to bed a few hours before. Not even coffee can save you. And if you think you’ve got a few hours to chill out and doze off in the van, let a kid’s soft play centre slap you in the face for a cold hard reality check. Dressing rooms full of train tracks and dinosaurs, highchairs and travel cots, a selection of non-alcoholic drinks on the rider… can you imagine?!?! If punk rock is the fire, kids are a can of liquefied petroleum.

5. Admin:

All bands hate admin. But DIY bands REALLY hate admin! It is the fucking bane of our lives, and we also make fuck ups ALL the time! Once we sent out a link to pre-order a rare 5” vinyl edition of “I Should’t Have Said That” but ended up sending the same pre-order link to one of our albums so we hadn’t got a clue what anyone had ordered. We ended up having to write to hundreds of people individually asking them what they ordered and the problem was that the 5” was super rare and sold out so fast that people were fibbing about what they’d really ordered. The whole thing was a fucking nightmare, and we still get palpitations just thinking about it. Unfortunately, we don’t seem to learn our lesson, as this sort of stuff continues to happen in The Lovely Eggs world. I guess that’s what you get when you’re two dickheads trying to do the smart stuff.

6. Gear breakages:

You can’t go for 20 years being in a band without shit falling apart and you’ve only got to hope that it’s your equipment that goes first and not you! When you’re jamming econo, the tendency is to tour with a skeleton crew and that means no stage techs to fix stuff when they break during a show. This has bitten us on the arse many a time, the most memorable being a sold-out show in Brighton when Holly stomped on her Big Muff in the first song and the switch went crunch! As you can imagine we weren’t going to go acoustic and break into a rendition of Scarborough Fair, so it was extremely fortuitous that a fan in the audience shouted out that he had one at home and ran back to get it. We’ve also had amps die and bass drums go through etc midset with absolutely fuck all people around to help and our only bit of advice when shit like this hits the fan with broken gear is to distract the audience by playing the snooker theme tune.

7. Be prepared for weird encounters in strange places:

One of the most memorable examples of this was when we were staying at the Travelodge in Tunbridge Wells – which in itself has to be seen to be believed (it actually has a photograph on the wall of a corridor and a vending machine in the same corridor next to the very same vending machine – very David Lynch). After our show at The Forum, we were reversing the van in the carpark when an old man popped out from behind the bins. He helpfully tried to guide us back into a space before shouting “Bang! you’ve ‘it it!” When Holly got out of the van and asked him why he was stood there in short shirt sleeves at midnight he explained that he didn’t feel the cold because he was a badger. We love encounters like these. It is what touring was made for. Long live badger man!

8.Sleeping on floors:

If you’re starting off at the bottom and are going nowhere, you’re gunna have to get used to sleeping on floors. Back in the old days when we were touring with the all-girl Manchester band Hotpants Romance, we remember a particularly memorable night. It was our wedding anniversary, and we ended up sleeping in a cellar. The Hotpants Romance girls insisted it was “the honeymoon suite” but it looked like a cellar, it stank like a cellar, was full of ants and gave off heavy “Fred West” vibes. That tour we also slept in a garage, after playing a do there for a girl called Maggie who put the show on. And in America too – things can get pretty random. We’ve slept on the floor of record shops and in scrap yards. Get your kip where you can!

9. Being drunk gets you through it:

When you’re first starting a band, life on the road can be pretty grim and there’s only one thing to do – drink your way through it! We remember playing this show in Lyon on a boat. It was snowing and the heating on the boat had packed in. We arrived at two in the afternoon and had to wait on this freezing boat until the promoter arrived. We started drinking whiskey to warm up as the lightbulb in the dressing room wasn’t kicking out enough heat. Cut to our midnight stage time and we were fucking arseholed. Can’t remember anything about that show, except for the intense cold and the desire to just have regular lives like normal people.

10. Don’t cry over spilt milk:

When we were over in America mixing our album at Tarbox Road studios we were driving down a hill in the middle of nowhere, hit a bump and an entire 4 litres of milk hit the roof of the hire car and exploded giving us all an impromptu “bain au lait”. It was everywhere and the whole car fucking stank for days. Each day we would go out and make a futile attempt at cleaning it. Even the studio engineer joined in our plight out of pity more than anything else. Moral of the story: Don’t cry over spilt milk because there are much more important things to stress over like David going missing in a scrap yard in the middle of the Californian desert…but that’s another story!

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The Lovely Eggs – What it takes to survive 20 years as a DIY band:

Image credits – thanks to Darren Andrews and Daniel Brereton