Antillectual

Text by Riekus, most pics by Tom Roelofs:

On this day in 2013, we could cross another item off our bucket list, or two items, in fact: our first-ever nightliner tour with Propagandhi. That’s two dreams coming true in one sentence. While travelling in a hotel on wheels with a dedicated driver is nice, there are some challenges: the bus is basically a collection of bunk beds on wheels, and the beds themselves are about the size of a coffin. More often than not, you wake up not knowing where the hell you are, and the only way to find out is to check your text messages for “welcome to <insert country>” messages or to ask one of the drivers. There are upsides too: since the bus had room for 14 people, we were able to bring more crew than usual on this tour. Roos and Thomas both joined, and for the first part of the tour, our English friend Dave March joined as our sound engineer; on the second part, he was replaced by our photographer friend Tom Roelofs. Another upside: travelling overnight sometimes gives you a bit more time actually to go around and explore the cities you’re playing in.

The tour would begin with a festival in Sweden, where only Propagandhi and The Darkness would play. Our first show would be in Arendal, Norway. On the way to Scandinavia, we dropped off our van near Hamburg, boarded the nightliner with driver Helmut – or was it Wolfgang? – and picked up Propagandhi at Copenhagen Airport.

Both bands were perpetually hungry, so we stopped for some groceries first. When everybody had returned from the shop, we checked the score to see if we had missed any vegan treats. Chris Hannah, Propagandhi’s singer, had bought some bread, which, after translation, turned out to be part-baked. Willem always claims I made my best joke on that tour when I asked him, “So Chris, who will help you bake this bread?” (Take a look at Propagandhi’s How To Clean Everything album tracklist if that doesn’t make you laugh). Since we had some time to kill, we also visited Christiania, a famous autonomous area in downtown Copenhagen, a very inspiring place!

We were a little disappointed not to be booked for the first festival date in Sweden, but when we saw Propagandhi play to a seated audience – pre-COVID, mind you! – that disappointment quickly faded. Up in Norway, we witnessed the Midnight Sun in the northern city of Trondheim, alongside the impressive World War 2 Nazi U-boat bunker DORA I. In Gothenburg, we were joined by Inge Johansson (of Refused, The (International) Noise Conspiracy and later Against Me!) for drinks on the bus after the show. Living the rockstar life!

The show in Bochum was interesting. The venue sounded like an echo chamber, and the local crew assured us it made a great setting for tekno parties, not so much for a punk show. Despite Dave’s best efforts behind the desk, the sound was terrible, and I even remember stopping halfway through a song because I simply couldn’t hear what Willem and Glen were playing. There was also an incident with the promoter. Anyone who knows Propagandhi knows they hate capitalism, especially in the form of shows and festivals sponsored by big brands. They simply refuse to play shows at overly sponsored venues and festivals, and they are big enough a band to have this demand met. Imagine their surprise when someone came to the merch after the show to have their ticket signed, a ticket with a huge logo of an energy drink brand on it. I don’t think they’ve ever played that venue again.

In Paris, we once again witnessed Etjen’s genius. As it was the closest show to the Netherlands on this tour, he and Lisa Gritter of our Dutch record label at the time, Suburban Records, arranged a press day: they invited Dutch journalists on an all-inclusive bus trip to Paris to cover the show and the tour. Lisa, Etjen, and we set up our press camp somewhere outside the Petit Bain boat and spoke with the journalists about our experiences on this tour, our upcoming album, and so on. The result: a nice report in the largest Dutch music magazine, OOR, and another in the national newspaper, NRC.

In Marseille, we experienced another interesting side effect of travelling on a big bus: the infamous cross-load. Because the bus was too big to enter the city centre, the only way to get our gear, merch, and people to the show was to unload everything we needed from the bus into vans provided by the venue, then hook the trailer up to one of the vans, only to repeat the ritual the other way around in the middle of the night. Oh, lovely Marseille…

The tour ended with Propagandhi and us both playing Punk Rock Holiday in Slovenia, at one of the most beautiful festival sites I’ve ever seen, by the bright blue Soča river, looking out over the Julian Alps. It was our first visit to the festival, where we played the beach stage – right next to the aforementioned river – and had a great time hanging out on a day off, watching tons of our favourite bands and witnessing Todd Kowalski and tour manager Jason “Keebler” Colwill wrestle in the car park.

After Punk Rock Holiday, our ways parted: Propagandhi would fly out of Venice to play a couple more shows in Greece and Spain, we continued (in the nightliner on our own!) for one last show in München, and then home. All in all, the tour was a great new experience, and it was an honour to play alongside and see Propagandhi play each night! We have kept in touch since this tour and have played together on a couple of more occasions. One of my favourite Propagandhi memories is not even playing with them, though: when we played their home town, Winnipeg, in 2015, most of the band actually came to our show to catch up and hang out.

Jul 4 2013, Arendal, NO, Grand (no Antillectual)
Jul 5 2013, Trondheim, NO, Verkstedhallen
Jul 6 2013, Gothenburg, SE, Sticky Fingers
Jul 8 2013, Bochum, DE, Matrix
Jul 9 2013, Paris, FR, Petit Bain
Jul 10 2013, Toulouse, FR, Dynamo
Jul 11 2013, Marseille, FR, Molotov
Jul 13 2013, Tolmin, SI, Punk Rock Holiday
Jul 14 2013, München, DE, Backstage (no Propagandhi)

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On this day in 2008 we bought our first van! The very first owner of the van was Sorbo, a cleaning company who probably bought it for their cleaning teams in 1998. After them it had been bought by Engelbarts, the both loved and hated van garage and rental service that offered cheap but sometimes unreliable vans to bands. They added a second row of seats to the van making it fit seven people. Even though they did add seats, they did not add seat belts. That’s not illegal, but not very safe either. Gijs from van and backline rental company Smoeff had some sort of deal with Engelbarts where he leased the van from them for a longer period of time. Dutch band Malkovich rented the van from Gijs and when they started playing more and more they bought the van from either Gijs or Engelbarts. When Malkovich disbanded in 2008 they had a van to sell.

Our friend and the only official manager we have ever worked with, Jeroen Vrijhoef, knew about this van being for sale and arranged a tryout. It was the perfect setup for us: enough seats to bring enough extra people, plenty of loading space in the back and above the loading area there was a loft with a bed, which was accessible via the back seats. Extremely illegal, extremely comfortable. After having taken it to a couple of shows we decided to buy it. 

After ten years of service for Sorbo, Engelbarts, Smoef and all the bands who rented from them, and finally Malkovich (who were known for their rowdiness), the van was in a subpar condition. When we got it the odometer said 423.000 kilometers, and it showed. The front window was broken, the mattresses that came with it were stained to say the least and the seats and benches were very dirty. We gave it a lot of love though, we cleaned it thoroughly, put in new mattresses and started to service it regularly.

The van was a Mercedes Sprinter and they have a good reputation of strong engines lasting forever. However, it had the slowest engine Mercedes offered for their Sprinters. Besides not being able to go faster than 110 km/h (we never got a speeding ticket!), we especially noticed how slow we were when going uphill; we’d get passed by cars, old and tiny cars, trucks, very slow trucks even. So we had to calculate some extra time to reach destinations and we learned to get extra speed on the way down before hitting the next hill. The van was very loud and had a huge gear shift stick. It would shake and tremble enormously and we gave it the nickname “de paardenlul”, horse’s dick. If you were sitting next to it a little too close, it could whack your knee and you’d scream from the pain, we learned the hard way. 

We had it for another ten years before the gearbox started to give up on us. This happened not long before we had to go to the UK for Manchester Punk Fest 2018. We decided we didn’t wanna take the risk of stranding halfway with a broken gear box and a dead van, so we got a new one only a couple of days before leaving for the UK. With 678.000 kilometers on the odometer we said goodbye. It probably went on to eastern Europe or Africa to find a new old gear box and to pass the million kilometers mark and beyond.

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Bad Religion is one of the most iconic punk bands around and Paradiso is one of the most iconic venues around, so we were extremely grateful when we got to play this iconic show! We had played with Bad Religion before, which was incredible, but it would be our first time at Paradiso! We had seen bands like Alkaline Trio, Millencolin and The Lawrence Arms play there, and now we got to enter the legendary (back)stage! We asked our friend Tjeerd Derkink to make visual souvenirs of the night, our other friend Niels Vinck made some incredible shots that night as well!

We had an amazing night, playing our hearts out and singing our vocal chords to shreds during Bad Religion. We did get some mixed signals that night too though; our set was a couple of minutes too long, so a member of the Bad Religion crew yelled at us afterwards. Another member told us we had been the best support they had the whole tour!

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On this day in 2011 we started one of our longest tours and our first support tour ever. We had a couple of shows on our own to warm up, but the bulk of the tour was together with a band we grew up on and looked up to: BOYSETSFIRE! Third band on the bill was the amazing letlive.!

The first show was at the A38 in Budapest, which is a boat on the Danube river. To make it extra exciting: Deez Nuts were added to the lineup and played first, and we had to follow them! We were stoked as little kids to experience a 3-band tour circus from “the other side”. Exciting, as we got to meet the people we looked up to and play the same stages and audiences. But the tour was also a reality check, as band members turned out to be normal humans, very humble and down to earth people.

We have great memories of the tour and the amazing shows, especially in Germany. We became friends with the people of BSF and letlive. Natasha and Chad would later help us out with guest vocals on our ENGAGE album and we love bumping in to them at BSF and The Iron Roses shows. We got extremely sad last March when we heard about the passing of founding member and drummer on the 2011 tour, Matt Krupanski, rest in peace. Lastly, credits to Destiny Tourbooking who invited us to this tour after releasing our album Start From Scratch via Destiny Records

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Heads You Win was our first single release after announcing we had stopped making albums. Of course that was a slightly skewed announcement. We knew from the start that we would eventually combine all single releases on an album. But it was a fun, innocent way to give attention to a new way of releasing music.

Heads You Win is our most played song on Spotify with 800k+ plays. In 2018 small bands could still get on major playlists. These days building a full album from single release is more rule than exception. However, getting attention for a DIY release seems as hard as it was before the digital “revolution”.

The song was written in response to rising populism and Trump’s first term. You gotta love it when songs stay relevant…

Released via Uncle M, music video by Claudio Stanghellini, cover artwork by Thomas Mennen. Find the song on all streaming platforms here!

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