SEA TO SHINING SEA

AMERICA (and CANADA)


 and it starts like:
 

 If you book us, we will come, right? Well don't get yr hopes up just yet, there's a whole bunch of things to do before it happens. but happen it must, or we'll go batshit mental being stuck on this doomy grey rock.


We want to tour in late October/November. Is that good with you?

This is the for sure this seasons epic campaign. And obviously we're a punk band, which is a cooler way of saying SHIT WE NEED YOUR HELP:

If you're a gig promotor, college radio type, agent or basement show guy, someone who works in a cool indie store, person in a (good) band whose going to be playing around the same time, Mac or Laura from Merge, hipster blogger, anyone in the touring and banding business who could help us out in any way, or anyone interested in sponsorship, then CALL THIS NUMBER NOW:

 johnnyforeigner@hotmail.co.uk

 and put COMING TO AMERICA in the title so we don't send you off to the spamyards.

Also, if you know someone like any of the above, please point their eyes and ears to us, and exaggerate ridiculously about what a big draw we are.

All you other people who don't care so much for the details but just want to see us play, plz read this:

 :: we want to play everywhere, forever. please don't comment our facebook / twitter saying - HEY YOU SHOULD PLAY FANTASTICVILLE WHERE I'M FROM - because it just makes us sad that we're not U2. and noone should have to feel that, ever. A much more practical and positive thing would be to direct those feelings towards whoever puts on rad shows in your town. hook us up, maybe. then when we do play you can be all smug about it, and we'll think you're the king or queen of fantasticville. ::

So yeh, this is the start of our beautiful plan. In a few weeks we'll start sticking flags on a map and working out how much is possible. Then we'll work out all the awkward questions like money and money.

We don't usually ever say this, but, whatever social network brought you here, we'd be very much obliged if you shared/RT/reblogged/tumbler-steal the link so's we can cast our info net as wide as possible. and also in case you're friends of friends of Mac or Laura from Merge.

If this doesn't happen, we will kill ourselves. xoxoxo

Letter Circle Jerk

I meant to post this semi coherent thing below last week but didn't cos I hadn't spellchecked it or owt. Couldn't sleep so I thought I'll just do it now. and now it's 7am and I'm hella tired and I haven't even written the post I was supposed to writeMYLIFESUXXXXURGH. ps thanks to everyone whose bought this; I dunno if I ever told you but making money from music is kinda my dream, so, flattered, thank you. The stuff I was going to write will for sure come tomorrow. Probably. I have to rehearse and go to That London and play a show and get my OHLIMPICK ACCESS PASS and really, staying up was the worst idea ever. 

oh quickly, bad news / good news

the first 100 records are going to probably ship a week late. DO NOT SHOUT AT JACK FOR THIS! IT IS OUR FAULT! who knew that making a sticker book and stickers would be so much art work. 

BUT

softening this blow is this fact: each one will ship with 20 stickers, not 5 like we said before, thus saving you from buying more from us should you wish to keep indulging our vanity. They'll be blindpacked tho, we're not going to make it too easy.  

i hope this is an acceptable state of affairs to you all. 

xlex

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Bandwagon jumping, but y'know, every old male musician should write a letter to Emily White.

Dear Emily White

You're not saying anything that like, 99% of your generation hasn't thought or said before. seriously. My mate Alan's music collection eclipsed yours in 2002 and the only musician he'd ever buy cds from was Sam Zurich. You just got noticed and picked on cos you work in The Biz and not the real world, and, obviously you're new here, but it's bad form to be so open about it. The old ones get stroppy. 

It would be nice to think that the people who actively pursue careers in the music industry would also be the people who have bought more than 15 physical releases in their life, but whatevs.  It's sort of like when I used to have 15 different games consoles and related carts and controllers littering my front room, then one day I got an xbox and the big ass emulator discs and stuck pretty much everything else in the loft*. At least yr not pretending to care..

I like to take pride and boast about those consoles tho**, and thats the difference between us. 

It's that big split that I'm always boring people about; how music will look in 50 years time; there'll be commercial mass market tesco bands and there'll be grass roots working bands. we're clearly gonna be on opposite sides of this darkest timeline, but that's no reason we can't coexist. We'll make our money from small runs of novelty media, tour reputation, and sheer human kindness, and you guys can make yours from the all format song/royalty distribution machine you wish for in your letter***. Every now and then we can do a trade, you give us an ironically fashionable girl band / dangerous black guy*** and in return we'll give you the bloodied corpses of kurt cobain, elliot smith and mark linkous **** to apply some of that hologram magic to.

2) Letter to David Lowery

I agree with pretty much everything you say, but it's so patronising it kinda verges on creepy. I didn't feel that she was positioning herself on a particular side so much as saying the truth as it was to her. Not saying that's better or worse, just that it seems silly to try "recruit" her cos she isn't the one with the battle to fight. You're right to say that it's wrong for people to accept illegal free music, but that battle, that human impulse, was lost the first time one caveman said something funny and another caveman passed it on as his own*****. and, since the time of cheap recordable media in the 70s, your ideology has had to be legally enforced. If this was (insert name of whichever ---ball sport you follow) then the internet is the team made of robots from the future who also have guns and are more attractive to the opposite sex. dude, I'm so sorry, the war is over and we lost. 

It's ok tho. necessity is the mother of frisbee singles and sticker books and dozens more fun ideas artistic people can create. That's if you sign up for my new war. It's set 50 years from now and I think we'll be fighting holograms. The pay is shit, but that's not why we're here, right?  

Also, the public blackmail charity thing would be a shitty thing to do even if it wasn't a Teenage Girl on the Internet. I would have suggested Emily started an Oatmeal style campaign and backlashed you up, but then you explained how she was an accomplice in the murder of poor Sparklehorse.. WAIT NO YOU REALLY DID JUST GO THERE.  "if only Emily's generation hadn't  used the internet, then EMI would have been all like,  - hey mark, have loads of money and stop sulking. Unfortunately, her and all the other kids ripped the albums off napster, so EMI had to let him kill himself" is not a direct quote.

3) Letter to Travis Morrison

Omg you bastard. I was in Glasgow once with £8 to my name. and I found ! for £8, and guilted myself into buying it cos the only copy I had was a cdr stolen from an (undeserving) dj.  and I'd heard that you guys didn't make much $$ so I brought it, then we went to some fancy pub and everyone else had an awesome massive roast dinner and i had a cold sausage roll that I found in my pocket from the morning. and the waitress noticed and everything.  and I played it in the car on the way back and everyone was like, this is shit, did you not bring Is Terrified? So right now I'm filestube-ing the tits off your career, I hope your last album is better than Is Terrified.****** 

It's also sort of like when Dan told Lewes that he printed all his artwork of his blog and papered his room with it. Only less funny. 

**coleco-vision, 2600,  nes, snes, master system, mega drive, 32x, mega-cd, saturn, jaguar, cd32, cd-i, (ltd edition pikachu) N64, dreamcast, gamecube, ps2. and now i exclusively play grabbatron or pocket planes on ipod touch. urgh. 

***I couldn't stay awake fully thru David's lecture, but at one point I think my eyes wandered over a paragraph relating to this. anyway guys, the exact system you're describing actually exists right now at least once, in the hands of a South African start up media company whose name I forget. The trouble is, who'd voluntarily switch over to this model whilst Clear Channel and the majors control so much of the industry? The kind of bands you guys probably wouldn't care about, is who. 50 years, you'll see. 

****I have been exclusively listening to Azealia Banks for two months solid now so clearly I'm happy with a mix of both.

*****All major label suicides with looming financial problems and lifestyle related drug issues, and unique genius song-magicians. especially sparklehorse*. 

****** People talk about how home taping was the original file sharing, but I'm genuinely intrigued as to what happened before that. Like, in the middle ages, did people secretly copy musical scores and sell them off in the next village? What about before notation, in actual caveman time? Was there ever a caveman who came up with a particular melody, and then one day he was whistling it and another caveman who could whistle started copying him? and everyone heard the other caveman and praised him, and the first one was all FUCK THATS MY WHISTLE MELODY HE STOLE IT. I bet that happened. I would like to take a time machine back to that point, and I'd say, hey it's fine, this is how humanity is supposed to work. 

*******It's not.

* oh man, i really miss sparkleyhoss. 

preorder 12" gogogogoogooooooo

this is a very shrunk version of 1/4 of the rebuilt cover art for the 2x12 release of Vs Everything. We promised everyone we'd make this happen and cos jack is awesome it has. preorder linky is at the bottom if you want to skip the part of this where i moan about shit.

1) Brian Wood's new comic, The Massive, is just brilliant and everyone should go buy it

2) Bands reforming is kind of like exes coming on to you innit. Like, you were awesome and you probably are still but I've kinda moved on. and I feel guilty cos I was into those bands with all my heart and soul and wallet and they break up and I get all upset and then get over it and find another band to fall in love with and then they come back and they're all HEY GUYS WE NEVER REALLY BROKE UP WE WERE JUST DOING DIFFERENT THINGS! fuck no, you broke up. I remember where i was when I heard about it and I maybe cried.  I'm barely past teary eyed 4am youtube crushes and I just want to call bullshit: all you guys, you walked away from me, and now you have drunk nostalgia money eyes and you want me back.

I'd never be so rude tho, cos you guys are my actual heroes. You invented me.

 I loved you once. You were massive parts of my life. You lost it to whatever mundane reasons that eventually end bands; egos, boredom, bank balances. and nothing you did since caught fire like that again. You faded out, became replaced. Nostalgia is a sound business plan now. So you cash in. because fuck knows you deserve to be paid. You deserve infinite money for those goosebumps you raised on my arms; be they last night at 4am over my shitty laptop or a damp Thursday evening in 1998 at the Shite and Duck in Camden. Those feelings are literally priceless

I don't think there's any shame in that. Or that there's any shame for not wanting to play shows where the poster says  "[your new band] featuring [your name] ex-[your old band]" It's just a shame that this is what it comes down to; nostalgia fest & karaoke value. play your most famous album! play it in order! I've seen soooo mannnnnnnny taglines, fb statuses, press clippings: party like it's 1997/99/02/04. and I refuse. I refuse to be told to party like it's the past.

Don't get me wrong, this is My Problem. I'm stoked that 15 years  of word of mouth meant Cap'n Jazz could afford decent fees when they came over here. I'm happy and jealous that my friends got to dance onstage with the D-Plan, and I'm happy and smug that I got to be Pavement's merch guy. But there's so many amazing songs and records and tours being made by bands have something to say in the present tense. I don't want nostalgia. I don't want to remember the good old days, I want relevance and The Now. I want my artists to be making new shit, unfolding new real time adventures. Doing stuff that relates directly to other people alive on earth at this instant
I just don't want to see my heroes admitting they have nothing left to say to me. I don't want to see them as museum pieces when i last knew them as living breathing active creations.

Yeh this is cos of Cable. I don't want to go watch Cable. even tho, in their day, I would have crawled thru poo to have the chance. They'll be amazing. Their songs still sound punchy and clever and the lyrics are pure poetry and they have choruses as big as the atlantic. and they'll have a crowd as fervent as their heyday to play off. and I'll be at home bitter cos of this weird hangup.


3) I'm sorry for placing that rant in front of this all important link:

PREORDER JOHNNY FOREIGNER VS EVERYTHING 2x12" GATEFOLD SUPER - RECORD

Comprising of the complete "Vs Everything" album and all relevant b sides: Remember 2011, when we released that record? ahhhh It was ace weren't it. REMODEL REPACKAGE. Shut up, we've never had a proper record album before so we're clearly overcompensating with this. Excite!!::

Because we're (jack) is lovely, have a free downloadable song also.

Also note, the first 100 orders will come with this:

stickerbook! stickers! hells yes.

The street date, YO, is 16th July. but seriously, if we take an extra week finishing shit, you're not allowed to be mad at us.

Vs Everything 2x12" release

from this:

to this:




full details and pre-orders at midday our time next wednesday

EXCITE!

xx

ALSO, SCOTLAND!

right, every time we play scotland we always seem to meet someone whose like - o i can hook you up with a way better show than this.

and we go yeh, great, cos scotland is rad but a fucking mission to get to, so it means a lot that the gigs we do play are as awesome as possible.

so we take their emails and then loose them and spend the next 6,12,24 months going, yeh who was that guy, the one with the face and from scotland.

SO if that person is you, or not you but could be, or not you, then now would be a really good time to get in touch.
or if anyone has any opinions of rad venues we should be chasing or holes we should be avoiding, feel free to comment on one of the multiple social media nodes this text is going to port itself onto

thanks!

(not scotland)

anyone who provides information leading to capture of aforementioned awesome hypothetical scottish shows will be rewarded in guestlist, dressing room beer, and the merch noone wants to buy.

UPDATATRON

wow, remember the days when i used to write really long post here?

kinda stopped it cos it made more sense just to pile crap on facebook as it happened. Recently there's been a whole load of indignant fb protest and man tears, cos facebook changed the post ranking algorithm. I'm not going to moan (anymore) about it here, but the new system encourages interactivity a lot more and that doesn't really work so well for us; partially cos we hate everyone, but mostly cos we just kinda use it as a bulletin board; if we advertise a show then it doesn't matter how many "likes" the post gets, we just want as many people as possible to see the information. yougetsme?

so, we've set up this snidey system that'll publish links to this blog, meaning you now have to click thru to here to read it. and the facebook robot will add that click to our rating and thus think we're more popular than that annoying weird guy you're friends with whose pointless status updates clog up your feeds. HA WE SO CLEVER. actually we're not, anthony from our old label just sent us a massive pdf explaining how it all works. THANKS ANTHONY!

anyway, i'm going to assume YOU are one of the people who stopped seeing our updates and probably thought we'd called it a day. no such luck, suckers. here are things that have/are/will be happeneding:

1) LEWES HAS JOINED OUR BAND!

up until we made VS Everything, we totally had this mindset that we should only record what we could reproduce live. and then we made the record and overdubbed the shit out of everything, meaning we need extra guitar ballet to be able to play half of it to you idiots. The list of people who know our songs and can put up with us is tragically short and also, it's kind of a secret, but i'm actually an AWESOME guitarist. luckily so is lewes, and now he's in the band we can totally ride him for artwork. it's a success story all round, apart from 30 seconds of one song that i don't play on anymore and i'm suddenly really concious of having arms.

2) FESTIVAL SEASON, YO

K so no reading. but like, a really nicely worded no. and also, it's Jack Pops wedding so all alcopop bands are banned from playing. Jack and Kathryns wedding invite is a CD single. so, so kawaii. Me and Stagecoach are playing The Best Song Ever for it, if someone doesn't youtube us i will cry. anyway, FESTIVALS

We played 2 shows at Camden Crawl. It was, very camden crawl. Kelly made us all stand in a fridge.

We played Great Escape and it was carnage. We got showed so many post-mosh bruises we started to feel like abusive parents. Please note, stage invasions are always welcome as long as you don't kick the leads out of our pedals.

We played Long Division. a festival that's become as awesome as Wakefield is depressing. I puked in a bucket.

We played Banquets Big Day Out. I broke my crowdsurfing distance record.  So much love for Banquet, that in 2012 a community centred record store can hold an actual festival, with multiple stages in an actual field in the country.

NEXT::

we're at 2000 Trees, Tramlines and Truck and mayhaps some more. New songs, the future, etc.

3) B*TM*N shirts.

 The delivery company fucked up and we didn't get them till today. so you will get them shortly after we've s so sorry, it's totally out of our hands. ALSO we'll have 2 or 3 S, M and Ls extra, we'll put them up this week some point.

4) 12" VS EVERYTHING

This is going coming out next, it'll be the final release in the Vs Everything campaign. It collects the album and relevant Bsides on 2 x 12" vinyl record lp discs. Tom remastered the whole thing especially. this is going to look SO SO SO SO GOOD, Lewes went and gone done new artworks especially too.
also, the first 100 will come with a sticker album and some stickers to start you off. yes, that is a thing now. Will be shouting about pre-orders soon.

5) AMERICA.

o god. here we go again. stay close.


6) other little things: Hide and Seek gave us free clothes, THANK YOU. Anybody else want to sponsor us? we're aiming for full body nascar style coverage by the end of the year. We're going to do another Vs show in august in Birmingham and it'll be illegal and awesome. (secret) details soon. Our Youtube is now super smart with all the pop videos and things we've ever done neatly arranged.  I've started doing shit comics about my shit job and comics. also, capital-centric, this is the only Yr Friends show of the summer, it's come round way too fast and i'm totally unprepared so i'm probably just gonna read poetry over garageband or something.


 k, yay for social integration. see you soon xxx