VS LONDON IV show details

WHY MUST EVERYTHING HAPPEN ALL AT ONCE

VS LONDON IV: THE LAST STAND

no time for introductions, all these bands are rad and you'll regret missing them. unless yr already coming, in which case everything is totally fine between us and it's you that's making a THING about it.

Stephen H Davidson - him from Tellison, all heartybreaky ahhhhh

The Spills - THE GREATEST BAND IN THE COUNTRY RIGHT NOW STOP ARGUING WITH US AND LISTEN TO THIS

Evans The Death - stunning fortuna - grrl - pop with melodies that make the 90s seem kinda embarrassing

"unspecified ironic london 2 piece" - oh, those guys.


ALSO: MASKS:

see here now, it's halloween and we want to dress (you) up. you be the ghost:

lewes has asked me to remind you all that IT IS MISSING A MOUTH and you have to DO THE MOUTH YOURSELF.

DO THE MOUTH, GUYS.

also, feel free to colour in. or add horns. ghosts don't have horns, shut up alexei.


go here for a large printy version

how rad it will be if you all print out and make them and the front row is all ghost faces. excited! You will need string to thread thru the holes. and scissors for cutting. and a responsible adult. hey i can cut a fucking ghost out on my own, mom.


there's a few tickets available here and there should be some at the venue too. probably.

sorry to wait so long to divulge all this. it wouldn't be us if it wasn't delivered last minute and sweaty right?

xoxox SEE YOU SATURDAY LONDONTOWN

post tour verbal emission

O GOD SO MANY THINGS

the end and everything after: it's just gone 1am and it's mostly over. The venue is empty, erie dark and silent. We've finished loading out and go back in for goodbyes. We're slightly drunk and slightly high and still damp and dazed from the show. The bar staff are sitting round a table downstairs, smoking and waiting for us to clear out. One of them has a big fur coat like richey manic. I wander over to borrow a light. - and then we'll be out of your lives forever, i say. She looks me in the eyes, and, in the most bored voice in Nottingham tonight, sighs - excellent.

and our tour is over.

The worst part about being a touring circus, easily my most heart busting problem of being in a band, over money, sales, money or whatever, is leaving places. and the better the show/scene, the nicer the people, and the more we do it, the harder it gets. It's like being trapped in some terrible indie quantum leap episode, where every day you wake up in a new town, make new friends and see new bands and then come midnight you drive to the omnipresent magic travelodge. and when you pull out of the carpark the next morning, you have to start all over again. 

THIS MONTH HAS BEEN THE WORST FOR THAT.

by which i mean, the last month has been the most positive and awesome time ever. I don't just mean the usual; many people came and everyone had fun speech, tho that happened mostly everywhere and everywhere respectively. 

October is bands on tour season. we peek at each other thru blacked out splitter van windows in service stations at 3am. After a few days on tour, you can start to feel kinda processed; no matter how awesome (you think) your little circus is, yr still just venue fodder, calender filler, a bubble easily burst by one bored barmaid with an excellent coat and the only lighter. 

bar staff of the toilet circuits of the world, this time you were too late. We have consistently had our minds bent out of bitterness on this tour. We didn't have to argue for a bottle of gin once. That's never happened before. We've met bands that we've never heard of that are A M A Z I N G. We've met promotors that promote! Promotors that love what they do and want to be proud of their local talent and fucking work and flyer and network and help and foster a scene and make it look like the easiest, most natural thing ever. In that way, this tour has felt like a succession of party crashes, where, up until we play, we're never quite sure if people are there because we are, or there because it's clearly the best place to be.

It's also been the total opposite of that. I told you our minds were messed up. It's not just being overwhelmed by so many familiar faces, it's that all you faces seem to know each other, or have come to visit each other, or are-dating-and-blatantly-in-love-with each other. It feels like some massive messed up beautiful family reunion and we got to play prodigal son each night. So many alternate universes we could settle down in..

I'd like to think that this is no fluke. That we have left behind the world of promotion being a 3 year old black and white photo of us in a window, and local support bands who want to be lost prophets or whatever.  I'd like to think of this tour as a statement of where/what "our" scene is, post crash, right now. And, best of all, it really has fuck all to do with us. Most of these shows would have been awesome shows even if we never turned up. A whole bunch of thriving communities starting to see the rewards of the last few years graft. People proud of -their- bands. For all the cynics in this industry that are my age or older, THE KIDS ARE GOING TO SHOWS AGAIN.

So this tour ends on a small piece of forgotten grass just outside Birmingham city centre by the abandoned old train station, us and playlounge lighting the last of our sky lanterns and watching as they sail out of view over the skyline. urgh hippies. 

this tour never ends. 

thanks for your time.

UK tour merch + you

Hello! Presenting to you, our October 2012 merch collection.

It's all limited runs and we're not going to get them till the weekend, so we've put a bunch on big cartel to avoid disappointing those who come and want to buy new merch (or the 45923987235 other places in the world we're not playing)

 Buy now and, and we'll send them out by the 8th October. Please don't shout when we get to yours in two weeks time and we're out of your size. Click on what you like, or go here to browse round our store. We have a couple of red shirts and one white left, and other fun stuff too. BUT IT'S NOT NEW AND EXCITING LIKE THIS IS:::

all funds, as ever, get pumped into the Americanadian Dream.

I (ghost) JF Tote Bag, Silver on Black

over-size crest print shirt, black on blue softstyle

Octobering the Edges, A3 UK tour poster

K cool. That concludes today's presentation. Thank you for your continued support, see you soon!

xoxo

transatlanticism

hello!

On the eve of our UK tour, we'd like to do some announcery. actually i guess, part one of a two part announcery. This is the one that sets the scene, and you can expect plot exposition in a weeks time.




first, some more tour dates:

Johnny Foreigner Vs The Atlantic

OCTOBER
30th Satellite | Wilmington, NC w/ Hammer No More The Fingers

31st Pinhook | Durham, NC w/ Hammer No More The Fingers

NOVEMBER
1st - Republic | Richmond, VA w/ Hammer No More The Fingers

2nd - Velvet Lounge | Washington, DC w/ Hammer No More The Fingers

3rd - Golden West | Baltimore, MD w/ Hammer No More The Fingers

4th - The Fire | Philadelphia, PA w/ & Hop Along, The Sidekicks


6th - Glasslands Gallery | NYC, NY

7th - Great Scott | Boston, MA - Clicky Clicky Music Blog Show Spectacular

8th - TBA | Northampton, MA
9th - Binghampton University | Buffalo, NY

10th - TBA | Pittsburgh w/ Nervous Passenger
11th - TBA | Athens w/ Nervous Passenger
12th - TBA | Toledo w/ Nervous Passenger
13th - TBA | Kalamazoo w/ Nervous Passenger
14th - Sound Cellar | Chesterton, IN w/ Nervous Passenger
15th - JOHNNY FOREIGNER VS CHICAGO - w/ Water House, Nervous Passenger, My Dad @ Subterranean
16th - The Sett | Madison, WI w/ Nervous Passenger  
17th - JOHNNY FOREIGNER VS SWERP - Johnny Foreigner, Noumenon, Nervous Passenger, Scoundrel

!HOLY SHIT THATS AMERICA!

Well, some of it. The west coast, we're sorry, we just can't afford you yet. S'not like any offers have been beneath us, but airfare/backline/van, it's just out of our reach at the moment. If the last couple of weeks have taught us anything, it's not to base geography or distance on perceptions honed playing Turbo Outrun. It will happen at some point, we promise, but that doesn't mean we're not going to nag you all to ROAD TRIP over to see us.

We're hanging out with some awesome bands too; we're supporting Hammer No More The Fingers for a few shows, and be supported by Nervous Passenger at a few more.

Canada, You are happening too. We're going to be homeless tho so be gentle. Come back next week when we'll be adding shows and confirming the TBAs.

ANYWAYS RIGHT, none of this would have been possible without Swerp. What a great segue:





Secondly, we'd like to tell you about our new American label! Our second American label. Seriously right, in 2008 we sat in a boardroom high above Manhattan and signed contracts for provisional 9 month tour commitments to the same stable as Avril and Fallout Boy. In some alternate universe, our definitions of punk were alligned and at least one of us is married to Nickelback.

What really happened next is we met this guy J Matthew Nix. He was into our band and became our friend when he brought us coffee. We made each other videos, it was kinda like romance. The kind of romance where 18 months in one of you starts a party fuelled record label to promote bands you love and the other one is in a band looking for a label (but you also live in a different country)

That's happened to you before, right?

This kind of magic only happens in Chicago. Please take this as a formal transfer request from one twin city to the other. Swerp is pretty much our punka saviours helping out with our American tour, (which we hereby christen, Johnny Foreigner Vs the Atlantic) but we hope it leads to more adventures and better metaphors. Our first new Swerp release will be in partnership with Alcopop. and it will be called [better segue]

sweet

NAMES

magic-infused Herio Braker, 2d realm variant

Hello the world.

we would like to tell you about our new record / EP / badge set / tshirt / pretentious transatlantic art fag project.
and it is called NAMES.


We made it in the small hours of last week in our super secret Digbeth studio, with our long time producer Dominique James. It's our first recordings as a 4 piece, so it's totally appropriate that, as the first release with our Swerp, we now sound even more like all them American bands people say we sound like. If certain songs ended up as our Kieron Gillen style parable, and vs everything a Grant Morrison sprawl, then please let this be our Warren Ellis run.

NAMES will be available from the 27th October, (which is our last Vs London show) and you can buy from either label. They're the same but different.

There are four songs. one is for Swerp, one is for Alcopop, one will be communal and one we're literally going to give away for free next week like the net-savvy musicians we are.


So, in the UK, Alcopop will be releasing a fancy set of 6 38mm badges (pre order now!!), and in the US Swerp will be releasing a NAMES Tshirt hand coloured by us.

Each will come with a download code for their 3 songs. We'll be selling them on tour too, OBVS, and if you've had enough of us playing silly buggers with formats, you'll be able to dl the country-specific songs separately for £99.

Ok. SO, meet you back here next week with Canadian shows, new songs, and more details about the NAMES releases. Going on tour now, BYE

xoxo