We heart Horsham

Our Biggest Fan!


Well as you can see, the fans went wild for Miss K and Captain Funk! Little Ella thought we rocked anyway....
No seriously, Horsham was... how can I put this diplomatically... an exciting challenge, a thrilling success, an exhausting experience, an eye-opener and a very steep learning curve. The town seems to weep a drought induced sadness that seeps from the empty shop doorways, the deserted streets and the half-full pubs of drunken gen y-ers, intent on drowning out their boredom and country town frustrations in cheep beer and multi-coloured shots.
The show went really well despite the mic not being on, the crowd more interested in their own comments than my dialogue and the distinct lack of comment from the women who booked us. My sexy merch chicks, Leanne and Uma managed to squeeze a good number of sales to the crowd and we filled our bellies with free champagne served without glasses in the kitchen after the show.
The Beautiful Town Hall

Captain Funk was well liked and I'm starting to get the feeling the next show is not so much Miss K but some kind of shared glory... oh how that's going to sting!
Anyway, we concluded very quickly that we had been accommodated in a detention centre disguised as a caravan park situated in the dust bowl 3 k's south of town and right on highway 1, at a point where the endless trucks begin the breaking process to bypass town, yay. I had a lot of time to think that night, because sleep I did not!
Me and mini Me

Day 2 was spent discussing every little move between the 4 of us and failing to see any of the art exhibitions that were supposed to be around. What arts festival???!!@
Gumpy and Uma rocked the Commercial Hotel on Saturday night despite the steady influx of county bogans and drunken wedding revellers trying to take over the stage. We ended up at the very funky house of the campest straight we've ever met drinking and laughing till the wee hours of the morning, with me avoiding indecent proposals from married men with open arrangements... Horsham eh! The drinking did something right though, when I hit the hey at 5am, I slept like a passed out baby! What trucks??!!!
Home via the long way and so tired I could have curled up in my own underpants for a kip. See ya next time Hor....sham!
Captain Funk

Bordertown of Bust!

As we drove off the highway, hungry, tired and hungover, it was hard to fathom that we were stopping off to do a cabaret show in no where land.
As we got further and further off Gumpy's dummy, whoops, I mean GPS and deeper into sheep country, it was becoming more difficult to fathom the cabaret thing by the second. When we drove over a massive brown snake (no injuries, it cleared between the wheels) we became downright frightened and I begged Gumpy to quickly put together a country and Western set or we were sure to be crucified...
But then relief came in the form of vineyards. As they built up, we convinced ourselves that with wine, comes highbrow intelligence and perhaps even full sets of teeth, and we were mostly right, except for Rosie, our sound chick, who we were not completely convinced was actually a chick.. but that's another story.
Anyway, we rocked up, were lead to the storage shed to change(thats me in the shed changing), met Rosie who was keen to tell us about her divorce to her ex husband (Gumpy wanted to ask what her name was) and scurry around us like a small dog trying to impress its owner. This was to be our first gig in the beer garden of a pub at 3 o clock in the afternoon, and I'm very surprised to report, we nailed it!
Of a population of 162, 56 came to the gig and they all seemed to love it. I felt queasy from no lunch, too much wine in Mylor and exhaustion kicking in, but faked it till I made it and found Gumpy's running around the 180 degree stage amusing enough to keep me going.
They cleaned me our of knickers and made a healthy dint in my stubby holder and singlet collection and sent us on our way back to Melbourne waving and calling out their gratitude to us for visiting their little town.
Home to Melbourne, arriving at the stroke of 11pm, weary, stinky, dirty, messy, dazed and slightly delirious. Tour over, a smiling success!
Thanks for following and see you when we hit Horsham in couple a weeks! Yay!

Mental Mylor

Where to start..... How about I summarise with the fact that the show went well, but the after-show antics went even better! Here are now a series of photos to illustrate my point. You know what they say, a picture speaks a thousand words!!!

What do you think... Miss K models in the making?

















Ta da!!!!
















Dawn stood in standing ovation at the end of the show... she then showed her appreciation all over again in her modelling of her brand new Miss K knickers.
















One does worry....


















Piano Bums





Well that's it for Adelaide. 3am and tucked into bed in preparation for tomorrow's show in BORDERTOWN!!! Stay tuned people...

The winery show

Now, just to clarify, for those of you that wondered where I'd mysteriously shipped my Mother off to in the last blog, she was actually still in Adelaide at the time, but I'd thought it better for both of us if i sent her off to stay in the hills with the oldies and left us youngies in town to do what we do best... drink.
So anyway, that was a few days ago and it is now Saturday, the morning after out winery show.. and what a show.. in fact, I'm going to break tradition and put in a second photo... this one shows Captain Funk (and I) squished into the disabled toilets and baby changing room that was our make-shift dressing room. We were in fits of giggles and slightly freaked out at the prospect of walking into the centre of the art gallery - come - restaurant where the people were happily eating and suddenly putting on a show. It felt a bit medieval jester. anyway, here's Gumpy:


The show turned out surprisingly well; I'd go as far as saying our best so far. I loved the sense of space and the staircase that I used like I was permanently singing 'hey big spender'. The modest older (what is it with Miss K and oldies??!!!) crowd absolutely loved it and said some very very nice things that we've both decided to take back home with us and drink a bottle of celebratory bottle of wine through along with an entire block of cheese! And so now I sit, with my stomach rumbling in anticipation of the massive fry-up Brian and Leonie are preparing in lieu of tonight's Mylor show. Last year, the hall was packed and my merchandise case was empty of undies by the end of the night so here's hoping for a similar outcome. Tomorrow we play our final and most anticipated of our shows..... Boardertown!!! If you don't here from me again, then I'd say a stray beer bottle got through the chicken wire and hit me in the head. It was do doubt meant to be a compliment from the toothless punter who had no idea what I was on about but liked my shoes but none the less, it killed the K and Captain Funk is now in hiding somewhere west of Horsham too traumatised by the experience to face coming home... so here's hoping anyway!

OK, so I know I've missed a few days and its too hard to summarise things now but I will say, I found myself lying on a fold-out couch in the kind-of lounge room of a collapsing old people's home. My mate Carlo and his 'cant-look-him-in-the-eyes-he's-so-dashingly-good-looking' flat mate live there and only them. There are something like 25 deserted empty rooms all in varying states of decay... I'm fairly certain most of them have other-world inhabitants and I'm quite terrified to venture too far past the door way in fear they may spiritually grab me by the wrist and make me sit down and have tea and stale cake whilst having to listen to their stories of war and knitting woes.
Anyway, where was I... I woke up, tired and under slept, hungry and hung-over. The sound of my snoring guitarist was coming from around the bar and the too-bright sunshine was beating down on me from the skylight above. I had to search my brain carefully to reconstruct the events of the previous night and it was at that moment, as I scrambled for water to relieve my parched mouth and a pillow to block my already glued together eyes (a result of not washing make-up off the night before)from the light, that I knew that I was really, definitely, on tour!
Parent count: zero!!!!

Who needs the prodigy when you have afternoon tea...

To illustrate the reoccurring theme of this tour, I shall share the story that was both the highlight and low light of my day...
I had a 3 o' clock with a man from Edinburgh fringe to pick his brain and find out how one gets their show over there and after a beer and more than one laugh between us, he invited me to join him and his husband (the Scots are a little more liberal and open-minded than us silly silly Aussies when it comes to gay marriage it seems) to a secret music festival with the prodigy headlining. I had to decline as i was due for afternoon tea with another friends parents....
Don't get me wrong, afternoon tea was lovely and we shared a magnificent bottle of bubbly while I learned in detail how a water bed is made... but The Prodigy??!!! I didn't even know they were still together! Something has to shift on this tour that involves a stronger influence of the younger generation and less of the oldies..
Parent count: 3 mums, 1 dad and 1 step dad, 0 music festivals = tucked in to bed safe and sound before midnight!
Opening night tomorrow... reviewers, judges, tour producers... first ever show with Gumpy, the new Captain Funk... nervous? What's there to be nervous about???!!!

Day #3: One step forward, two steps back...

Thats what today felt like... a comedy of errors quite frankly!
Painted the hills in K posters and hopefuly drummed up some more interest for the Mylor show (they could still do with selling 20 or so more tickets to take it to thier 90 head projection)then headed back into town where the souls of my feet cringed at the prospect of being dragged all over this small, but very big when on foot town. We failed to find the Adelaide festival hub where we thought we'd find droves of baby boomers just licking thier lips in anticipation of some high brow cabaret to attend. Instead we found a pathetic cafe that did NOT sell milk shakes or iced chockies to those of us too immature to ever appreciate the taste of caffeen. (sulk)
The enterance to Womad proved just as fruitless as I began to feel more and more like I was trying to sign reluctant passer-byers up to my new religious cult. I am just no good at this flyering business, I need to hire a cute teenager next year and be done with it. (Note to self, look into that, child labour's not so unpopular these days is it?.. what with the economic downturn and all, adults are more than happy to hire their kids out, or so I'm lead to believe...) We tried to attend but I stuffed up the times of the shows we'd thought we'd see and we headed for the hills with Mum behind the wheel, me gripping the door handle and Mylor quietly calling us back to its windy clutches. It seems at this stage, I do parents better than fringe... now thats a bit sad! sigh

Day #2: The PR campaign begins....

I'm fairly convinced that Mum is dead... well at least her phone is... either way, I'm stuffed. I've sent her off to explore some park that's supposed to hold all sorts of events for the Adelaide Festival. Now this is not to be confused with the park that's holding all sorts of events for the FRINGE festival or the park that's hosting WOMAD all going on at the same time. This town has nothing on 11/12's of the year, but decides 3 arts festivals and a massive car race all this week is a good thing. Interesting planning I must say....
Anyway, I was reaching the point where I was going to kill my mother so thought it best to suggest we split up for a few hours, not meeting up again till 6pm (a nice juicy 4 hours alone time)
Well 2 hours into the arrangement, I felt revived and a tad guilty so decided to go find her and see what was happening in her particular park... phone's off and its pissing down. I walked and walked and got wetter and wetter and never found the park, searched every coffee shop I came across (the odds were high she'd be in one) and eventually gave up and went to the pub. It was there that I sat at the bar and went through possible scenarios of what to do when she doesn't materialise at 6. Would I call home and admit I'd lost here somewhere? Would I call the police and explained like a pathetic 5 year-old that I'd lost my Mother, would I call my hosts and get them involved? Luckily, after meeting a 'delightful' bogan couple here to grab some 'culta' and a couple of lesbians who kept feeding me chips, she called and came met me at the Exeter. I got over the drama by getting slightly drunk which felt weird but liberating in front of my Mum and we set off to get some 'culta' ourselves. We'd proven ourselves to be absolutely shit-house at handing out flyers, its so intimidating and embarrassing and I'd covered the town K in the form of posters so the next best thing, is see what other people are doing and steel their ideas, snap!
Saw some free stand-up comedy, (I didn't know Adelaidians hate Melbourneians! Jealous much?)I then remembered I'm not a fan of stand-up, I think I require my comedy to be wrapped in a character and within a story, hence the lean to cabaret and then the best piece of theatre I'd seen in a long time: Scaramouch Jones or how ever one spells it. It was so good, I was done for the night and didn't want to taint it with anything else. Home to Mylor to hear in detail where Leonie sits in a loooooooong branch of her family tree and watch footage of mad Melbourne rain. (Brian and Leonie have one of those digi thingis that can allow you to record shows and watch them later... they use it for the news.) Wow, go Melbourne, you rock even more than my tour is at the moment, and that's got a pretty strong element of rock I'll have you know! Parent count: still 3 although I thought it was down to 2 at one stage today... nigh night.

Day #1: Road tripping

Well with 2 guitars, 1 amp, 1 speaker, 3 over-stuffed bags of belongings, 1 banana lounge, 10 apples (to be madly eaten before the boarder... forgot about that technicality), 10 pairs of undies each and one very exited Mother in the passager seat, we set off at the crack of 11am on our great Badeladian Adventure.
A phone call from McLaren Vale (one of my show stops) to say ticket sales are low was somewhat sobering but I'll tackle that problem tomorrow, today is for driving, tomorrow the PR campaign begins, 4 days beforeopening night, Perfect!
3 stalls in Stawell (I thought it was fitting) and some skids in the growing rain puddles, but otherwise Zap, the corolla was loving the open road. I wondered by about midday when Mum was going to run out of stories about other people's kids and move onto my (non-existant) love life, but by about 3pm she did finally settle into the beautiful peace that is a road trip and a damn fine selection of CD's... well except for her Tracy Chapman CD that may have to tragically disappear at some stage... (note to self, make that happen!)
Arrarat failed to provide us with lunch and we left with nothing but the ringing of tray travelling yap yap yapping farm dogs in our ears and a toy frog I bought for a buck, it is now our tour mascot and I have named it 'up' as I know my 1.5 year old niece would have.
And so, hours later, we mananged to just avoide the bickering stage and made our way into Mylor in the gorgeous Adelaide Hills where we'll be staying with Brian and Leoni Barker, parents of my good mates. Parent count: 2 Mums and 1 Dad, this tour is going to R-O-C-K!!!