Speaking of festivals, the Meredith Music Festival near Meredith in Victoria, Australia, announced their lineup today and we’re a part of it. It seems, however, that the Dickhead Policy (scroll all the way to the bottom) has yet to be released. We eagerly await it’s unveiling.

More Australian and New Zealand dates will be unveiled soon as well, so stay tuned.

Five more shows left on this tour: Reading, Leeds, Push Club @ Astoria 2, Club NME at Reading and an in-store at Rough Trade East this Saturday, August 23 at 4 pm. Yeasayer, who seemed to have followed us at every festival this summer are on at 1:30 pm so come early.

Here they are getting a Holy Fuck lesson from Graham before we opened the mainstage at Lollapalooza a couple of weeks ago:

I guess we’ll see on Saturday how much they learned…

The first show in question was an afternoon slot at the Camp Bisco festival in upstate New York. It was not the most auspicious of debuts in that it completely sucked. I did, however, get to see Slick Rick play and visit the Professional Wrestling Hall of Fame the morning after the gig.

Since then we’ve played over 160 shows, at least a dozen live sessions and about 20 studio dates. We’ve taken about 40 flights, a few trains, buses, boats and countless vans while touring in Canada, the U.S.A, Mexico, England, Scotland, Northern Ireland, Ireland, Spain, France, Belgium, Switzerland, Norway, Sweden, Poland, Czech Republic, Denmark, Holland, Germany and Greece. Good times.

Today we’re at XL Recordings in London testing out their brand-spanking new recording studio. We’ll be here for the next four days working on some hot new jams which may or may not appear on our next record. Snooper’s Paradise came through again yesterday and we picked up a new drum machine that should get a good workout in the studio. While in Brighton we also played the Loop Festival. Or it played us, I’m not sure.

Before I go butter my strings, let me introduce you to our newest furry friend, who we met at the Lowlands Festival in Holland: Randy the Setlist Squirrel…

Cowboy Cat might want to watch his back.

Driving from Stuggart to Hasselt, Belgium today the abundance of wind turbines in Germany is hard not to notice. Really makes me wonder where all the wind turbines are in Canada. There sure is enough wind - and this past week more than enough hot air - and the technology is no longer too costly to consider. Although it’s not so affordable that both candidates for the U.S. presidency can be excused from missing a crucial vote on tax credits for alternative energy producers and investors like they did a couple of weeks ago.

(Geez Louise, all this European hospitality seems to be giving me a North American hate-on, eh. Watch out Mexico, you’re next.)

Pukkelpop is on today’s agenda. In what could be diplomatically referred to as an adventurous decision in festival programming we follow Drive-by Truckers who are preceded by Henry Rollins doing spoken word .

I’m excited about the show because I washed my “uniform” in the hotel bathroom sink last night. This is the first tour where I’ve tried the rock uniform - meaning I wear the same clothes on stage every night so that only one shirt and one pair of pants get drenched in sweat. While this allows me to travel light, it also allows me to kill most houseplants with my stench after about three shows. So get ready, Belgium - I’m starting fresh and, much like the tiresome windbag on our flight from Toronto to London last week who wouldn’t stop complaining about the smell of the dirty diaper belonging to the infant in the row behind her, my arse will smell like roses.

The last time we were in Norway - less than a month ago in Bergen - I stayed in my hotel room for two hours carving a piece of bone so I could repair my broken bass (second of that tour). Again, pretty standard Scandinavian fare.

We’re playing Oya later on today, or tomorrow depending on how you look at these things. My Bloody Valentine are playing as well and they may very well top Radiohead who we saw at Lollapalooza last week. Could be tough though, as Radiohead’s amazing light show is run off battery power! Dig it.

Anyway, wish us luck… We haven’t been vaccinated for Obamamania, hopefully I’ll be around to post an update later on.

I was with 10 year-old Cole from the get-go, but then he was less than enthusiastic about my favourite band in the world and I read on to discover that he like KISS and Canadian football, so it seems our differences are actually quite profound.

The response to our record was pretty good, but 12 year-old Anna wasn’t at all impressed. We’ll see how it all shakes down come September 29, Anna… We will seeeee.

Only three festivals left! Lounge on the Farm today, Oxygen tomorrow, and T in the Park on Sunday. That means only six more flights til we return home, for a grand total of 16 flights on this tour. 16!!! That leaves a pretty dismal carbon footprint, I know. We’re working on it…

Cowboy Cat, for his part, couldn’t care less, he just wants to continue riding our coattails around the globe. Here he is enjoying some Polish vodka in Bergen, Norway…

This equation continues to prove itself time and time again, most recently with Festival Nowa Muzyka that we played a couple of nights ago in Cieszyn, Poland. The smaller size affords us more time to hang with our hosts, not to mention all the positives that come with playing to a smaller crowd. Not that Glastonbury wasn’t fantastic, it’s just so giant and the audience is about 50 metres from the stage.

In Canada we’re blessed with very small festivals like the Wolfe Island Music Festival, or the multi-stage but still small festivals like the Hillside and Dawson City Music Festivals. (I’ve been lucky enough to play all three!) Festival NowaMuzyka is well on its way to such levels of awesomeness. Especially if they continue to book bands like Battles, who battled through major technical issues to deliver a blistering finale of a set.

In celebration of Battles’ conquest, Brian rode the red bull for all it was worth and we discussed the almost always ill-fated idea that is the opening band “spontaneously” joining the headlining band for the last song of their set as evidenced by yours truly on one of the drums in this sad clip (note: Brian thinks the clip isn’t so bad, we’ve agreed to disagree).

Now we’re in the Norwegian town of Bergen, which is easily one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever been. A big festival canceled but some local promoters picked up the pieces and we’re lucky enough to have been invited here to play a small show tomorrow night. It’ll still be light out when we hit the stage at 11:30 pm. The last time I did that I was in Dawson City, Yukon. Which reminds me, happy Canada Day!

My poor bass had taken so much similar punishment in the past, but I guess it was fed up with my idiocy and decided to teach me a lesson. Ah well, like they say: you win some, you lose some. Or, in this case, you lose the championship game by scoring in your own net.

Thankfully, Biffy Clyro was kind enough to loan me one of their back-up basses to get through Glastonbury, saving me from having to use the cheapest bass in all of the United Kingdom, that I had purchased in Bristol during a mad scramble earlier in the day (and that broke three songs into last night’s set in Cieszyn, Poland). It all worked out fine in the end and we made it through our John Peel Stage set.

Thankfully for us, Glastonbury was not muddy in the least, so I was able to take it in with relative ease. The rest of the guys earned their Glastonbury stripes by trudging through the slop last year, but I got off easy. A guy like me needs to be eased into a festival like Glastonbury though, since its population is greater than that of my home province.

Matt and I caught White Denim blowing the roof off the Queenshead Stage and then Buddy Guy tearing it up with his way-too-slick band on the Jazz World stage. Now if White Denim was Buddy Guy’s band we’d be talking about serious shit.

easyJet took us to Poland the next day. It seems to me that their baggage handlers could stand to take a cue from their courteous flight attendants and not treat my bass like a Guantanamo detainee. But then it’s clear that I don’t treat the bass much better myself…

And on that note of self-defeat, I will retire to my quarters at Katowice’s Stadion Slaski (no idea how we ended up staying at a soccer stadium, but it is kinda neat) and prepare some photographic evidence for a recap of our time in Poland.