Out of the circus
The end of a long tour provokes a conflicted emotional condition.
It is a day that should be celebratory: a day of goodbyes and exchanging addresses with people you have lived and worked with intensively for weeks. But it is a day of stress. Returning to a state of mind that makes concessions to the world outside of the circus is slipshod and haphazard.
A long drive home is my preferred way to end a tour. At the end of the last Europe outing we had a long haul from München back to London—a chance to depressurize before spilling out messed and messy with goods and chattels onto the pavement in Glasgow and into a familiar black cab. This tour ended with a flight home. The process of putting six weeks of life in The Phoenix back into check-in luggage in a remote parking lot can provoke latent compulsions, doubts and regrets. And a day of airports and aircraft is the opposite of depressurizing. (This particular journey metamprphosed from a simple three hour hop across France into a fourteen hour rigmarole of delays and rerouting.)
On recent tours I have paid scant attention to what is going on in the world beyond the confines of the stage and the dressing room and The Phoenix. When we toured in the US last summer I didn't look at newsertainment for eight weeks. The release from doom scrolling was revelatory. Over the past six weeks I have been even more extreme in my disengagement from the world outside of the circus. I have found it almost impossible to deal with anything that is not immediately necessary. There is a list of emails glanced at and flagged as urgent and not dealt with that lurks with its little red badge announcing 123 unread messages. I have neglected friends greetings and professional and academic communities. Even writing this blog became difficult to focus on.
The disrupted sleep pattern of the overnight drives makes for a brain-fog that can thicken into a smog that caffeine only swirls into a vortex. However well intentioned, getting into that bunk on those long drives is not easy. The bubble of a Phoenix with the white lines flashing under the wheels and a copious (if not actually unlimited) supply of red wine, beer, salty snacks, whisky and confectionary with a bed at your disposal is a safe place. But it is a zone where chillaxeing and getting a decent nights sleep can be almost impossible. Late night craic with a glass is just so much more appealing than five hours of abstinent bus sleep and the truth is that a healthy dose of alcohol and shooting the shit for a couple of hours before clambering into a coffin sized windowless bunk can make that sleep a bit less fractured.
In a holding pattern over Heathrow airport the parameters have to be reset, the mind set must be shifted back to embrace the outside world, back to a state of mind where I can operate effectively without a day sheet that defines where I will be at any given hour, where I can effectively make things happen on my terms.
Things used to feel different at the end of a tour: there was a write→record→tour cycle that we took for granted. Life seems so much more precarious now, particularly in the wake of Justin's Parkinson's diagnosis—precious and precarious, and time spent touring seems urgent and valuable.
'Be not solitary, be not idle'*—the originary self help advice from Robert Burton. Touring as a musician, however tiring, however trying, however alienating it might become in the margins, does not admit solitariness or idleness. Add in the transcendent experience of playing to 15 000 people on a daily basis (even if only for forty five minutes as the support): being on tour is a strange thing to step away from.
* Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, ed. William H. Gass and Holbrook Jackson, (New York: New York Review of Books, 2001), iii.432. [First edition published in 1621]