Sunday in OSLO (is it Halloween?)

Day 42 - 86 miles (138km) travelled 2day
Total Distance Travelled = 11,655 miles (18,704km)(TDT)

Got a lot to catch up with here. Falling behind a bit. Got to edit some babbling to make up
some time. So...

Speed through a couple of roads.

Get to the gig.

Load in.

Set up on stage.

Oh, where's Skinnies' silver case thats got all our spare strings in??!! We've only gone and left it back in Porsgrunn! Nuts!! That thing has a mind of it's own just like it's owner!
Right now it's probably saying to itself "Focking shite band shite guitarist" and "Liverpool rule la!". Focking shitecase! We'll do without it no mind.

Support are the Bronco Busters. Loads of girls in the band. 3. Rock'n'roll spat out. Dirty guitar and attitude. Got the CD. Backstage they comment how the M.A.S.S. posse seem to be involved in some kind of mobile phone / text communication game. We decide that at some point in the future we would like to play some more gigs with the BBs.
When M.A.S.S. take the stage, we get a great reception.
Keep forgetting that you can't drink outside while you have a smoke. So I stand in the doorway with my fag outside and my drink(s) inside the venue. Sticking it to em.
Thanks to everyone that came and made it worth the sweat and hard on that I had during the show.

Bergen > PORSGRUNN

Day 41 - 259 miles (417km) travelled 2day
Total Distance Travelled = 11,517 miles (18,566km)(TDT)

Slightly sorry to leave Bergen. They've been really good to us.

Up before 9am to pack the van. All equipment must come up a flight of stairs from the basement. This is not heaven. But it wakes us up.

After saying our goodbyes to Dennis who says something profound about something or other that ends in 'us needing to have guns', we set off and from then on I'm left wondering what the first half of what he said was.

A few hours pass... We're in the van heading toward the mountains. There's some great scenes up here. Half way over the mountains and at the top, we stop for lunch. Heads of beasts cover the walls. The whole skin of a wolf with head and the same of a bear overlook us as if they want a bit of our lunch.

We return to the same venue we played in last year. Again they are all really helpful here. Show goes and goes. Even the local Bikers 'The Savages' got into it. One leather clad bison of a man kept hugging Stuart and telling him how impressed he was with his drumming.

Jonny got eyed up thru the show by some biker girl with big tits. She keeps licking her lips at him and adjusting her chest. He's properly un-nerved by this attention. And chooses to steer clear as she's probably got a really big boyfriend which is later confirmed.

And at the end of Something Tells Me Jonny puts his guitar down and joins Justine jumping about in the audience. While she's moving through the crowd, he gets down on the floor on his back shooting out on the microphone. Then another girl gets down and shuffles up beside him.

But he thinks this is a boy and reckons that it would look good if he rolls over and pretends to shag him. Obviously the girl gets a bit freaked out at this and tries to struggle free. In doing so she accidently get wacked on the head by Jonnys' elbow.

Needless to say, she was a little upset by this we are told by her boyfriend. Jonny was sorry. But sometimes you never can tell in the heat of the action. It could've been a lot worse.

The night ends back at the promoters place. Again we all get rather jolly on drink and fall to bed at 5am.

Paul comes home 2 BERGEN

Day 40 - 111 miles (179km) travelled today
Total Distance Travelled = 11,258 miles (18,149km)(TDT)

Hey, don't need to get up too early today. It's not that far a drive from Stavanger to BERGEN, where we are playing tonight. This time we go through mountains and take a couple of ferrys.
Bass player Paul is getting even more nervous about coming to his home town to play in front of his family and friends. I must admit it's a hard thing to do.

Still the venue, The Garage in Bergen is a friendly enough place. And we'll be looked after. Tom and Dennis do this well. We remember them from last time.
Dennis is the man who runs the place. This man has an ability to talk and has a wide knowledge of things and their workings. His easy to talk to. But you learn to listen. As you will miss something.
He's even got a damn washing machine upstairs that he's put there for people like me to use. And when I'm putting my jeans in, he also advises me that I should do the zip up on them if I want them to stay up when I'm wearing them. That would explain why the other pair I have keep letting me down.

The evening goes well and we all have a bit of a laugh. Moving on to another bar later on. This is because one of Pauls friends is banned from The Garage. He was thrown out on one night for being naked and hard to catch!
Looking forward to Porsgrunn tomorrow. Gonna be going over the mountians..... Gonna try and get Paul down the back of the neck with a snow ball :-)

Trondheim > STAVANGER

DAY 39 - 601 miles (998km) travelled today and overnight :-(
Total Distance Travelled = 11,147 miles (17,970km)(TDT)

Up early in Trondheim to make a move for Stravanger. As Justine has explained, we are flying while Stuart is doing the drive with our new friend and driver Roy. Mad.

Oh Stravanger! What have they done to you?

You've got this stupid rule that states you can't sell whisky in a bar along side beer and wine.
The bars in stravanger are only allowed to sell whisky until 1am. But they can stay open 'til 3am if they sell beer and wine. Along with having to go outside to smoke and leave your beer inside, which you often lose on you way back in, the clubs and venues are gonna suffer.

Makes you wanna give up smoking. And drinking. Which I guess is probably a good idea for me to do if I'm gonna make it through this tour in one piece.

Back to the this evening. We are joined for tonight and tomorrow by a band called The Beautiful People. They sound good this lot! Should get something out of this business. If they can get over to England.

They come from the north of Norway where there are only 17000 inhabitants. It's dark for most of the year. And there's nothing much to do.

They sound like a lively Joy Division and a bit like interpol. Check 'em out.

Show was ok. Wasn't our best. But these things happen. Also we're up for a quite night tonight. So once the van is packed the rest go back to the hotel. Paul and me stay for a couple more. And things don't get messy for once.

Oslo > Trondheim. Andys dither

DAY 38 - 307 miles (495km) travelled today:
Total Distance Travelled = 10,546 miles (16,972km)(TDT)

Ah, last night in OSLO, Stuart turned up with a lovely new BLACK van. Lush!
Loads of room in the back for bags... oh yeah, and equipment. Hum hum it's got cruise control! Dead weird to drive with the cruise on. Has a life of it's own almost. Keeps us boys amused for a good couple of minutes.
This van can move damn it! But we are strictly limited to the speed limit of Norwegian roads which is at the most only 100kmh. Thats 60 mph.
So again, we leave early in the morning to make trondheim in time for the gig.

It's not that cold today. Sun is beaming down.
paul and me have taken our tops off in the front of the van for a while. Got some funny looks from drivers passing in the other direction.

Stuart voiced a concern that he didn't want to lose a toe to frostbite. It seems his worry is a bit unfounded 'at the moment'. Well, some of the rivers we have passed are frozen. But it's virtually 'Tattoos out' kind of weather!

The show turns out to be cool. Triffic! Sold a good few t-shirts etc.
We merge into the evening with true professionalism. Sinking a few units. Hitting the dancefloor with justine who's a dancefloor royal!
But drinking whiskeys in this place is a bit expensive. So I finish one or two off before the bar closes, which it's about to do and stroll back to the hotel.

A hard days night

DAY 37 - 172 miles (276km) travelled today:
Total Distance Travelled = 10,239 miles (16,477km)(TDT)

And so today we leave the exciting town of Randers in Denmark (if you are ever thinking of it, don't go there) and head for the ferry to Norway
We will move swiftly on from the tale of 'the manager' nearly getting arrested and onto the sad news.
Where were you when you heard that John Peel died?
Well, we were on a ferry from Denmark to Norway watching a besuited umpah band play Beatles songs, amongst others and when we recieved the oh so sad text about Uncle John passing away, the band was jogging through 'And I love Her' by The Beatles. In fact, JP would probably have liked this scene. We were shocked and could only think to toast his good health with a glass of double Baileys.

The rest of the day has, to be honest, rather overshadowed by this sad news. JP was particularly kind to M.A.S.S., the M.A.S.S. Peel Session was a sign of support early on and even recently, he waited to play tracks off the album until we would send him the vinyl version... a sad day indeed. Perhaps we should dedicate these gigs in Norway to his memory... when we mentioned the itinerary for the M.A.S.S. EURO2004 TOUR he read out all of the dates and expressed his awe... our thoughts today go out to his family..

On route > Norway we reach the 10,000 mile marker

DAY 36 - 400 miles (644km) travelled today:
Total Distance Travelled = 10,067 miles (16,201km)(TDT)

We have a new friend today, Bertha is 'being seen to' so we get a big new black shiny tour van as a safety precaution for the journey to NORWAY. Paul has told us that it will be many degrees below zero, we might expect to lose a didgit or two in the freezing weather and people have serious doubts about Bertha's performance over mountainous terrain. Our new Mercedes van, which we must return after Norway, even talks to us, via a navigation system, once we suss out the language we just put in our destination and she (for this is a sexy female voice) tells us to turn left right or continue ahead for 50 miles.. marvellous.

A few miles past KOLDING in DENMARK we reach a tour landmark, when we do indeed pass the marker of 10,000 miles traveled that's more than 16,000 kilometers on this tour so far and there is still a long long way to go.... tonight we could travel no more and have had to find an inn at a strangely modern Danish town call Randers... tomorrow we press on, to the ferry and Norway.

Back in BERLIN

DAY 35 - 0 miles (0km) travelled today:
Total Distance Travelled = 9,667 miles (15,558km) (TDT)

Don´t ask. The M.A.S.S. caravan is back in BERLIN, preparing to go to NORWAY via Denmark, band members are few and far between on the ground. There has been a revolution and it has been decided that van Bertha will not be allowed to proceed to Norway, on account of her waward steering and the fact that the stereo makes The New York Dolls and Iggy Pop sound bizarrely psychedelic.
So we return Bertha back to Berlin and found Skinny, yes, it´s true. You thought we had lost him or done away with him but in fact he has come here to Berlin. "Hi Skinny.." we share a beer and a German variant of Irish food but we still can´t persuade him to return to tour M.A.S.S. at this point... still there is always time... there is a lot of time on this journey, oh yes there is. So tomorrow we are being joined by Bertha´s better cousin, but can we be sure that this new mode of transport will be ... better? We'll keep you posted
Next year we are considering 'Around The World In 80 Gigs" what do U think?

Graz > HOLLABRUNN

DAY 19 - 156.2 miles travelled today:
Total Distance Travelled = 5,674.7 miles (TDT)

Zagreb 2 VIENNA

DAY 17 - 334.2 miles travelled today:
Total Distance Travelled = 5,396.1 miles (TDT)