Fruit Bats European Tour Diary Pt.1 Turin
By: Eric D. Johnson
I’ve done my fair share of touring with the Fruit Bats over the last nine years or so, but we’ve somehow managed to avoid Europe all this time. It hasn’t been on purpose, I’ll assure you. Just timing. I’ve toured Europe with other bands a bunch of times. But that’s been in the tour bus bubble - a relatively carefree moving universe filled with all the beer you can drink - a world that is more or less the same anywhere on the planet you might be. So it was with an excited belly inhabited by butterflies that I headed out a few days ago to Turin to begin this tour. After a decade as a band, this is new territory for us, and it feels like the first time we hit the open highway in the States back at the turn of the century - little nervous, hopeful, broke as hell and stoked*.
*Please pardon my occasional use of West Coast American slang. I’m trying to use a sort of conversational style here, so you might witness some unfortunate knee-jerk usage of words such as “sweet,” “rad,” “stoked,” and “dude.” Here we go.
Turin
We got to Turin a couple of days early. That was my idea. I thought it would be a smart move to have a day and a half to shake off the jet lag before the first gig. Instead, it just made us have absolutely no reason to succumb to the new faraway time zone. We walked around like zombies for 36 hours or so. Turin is a real deal city. It’s not designed for tourists, barely anyone speaks English, people are laid back and fast-moving at the same time. I liked it, though - it reminded me a little bit of my blue-collar hometown of Chicago. It was not the soft landing that London or Amsterdam would have been for a bunch of tired-ass Yankees (and one Canadian). And that’s why its perfect that it was day one. It shocked us right into the touring mindset, we’re ready to slay. The concert went, um, fine. Not our best set, but no real clams either. We didn’t have any rehearsals before this trip so we needed to knock some dust off. We’re doing the non-UK leg of this tour with our really good friends Vetiver, so the vibe was supreme. Jet lag lasted the whole three days. Still kinda lingering. Bologna up next.
Artists in this article: Fruit Bats