Abridged excerpt from ‘You’re Doing It Wrong — My Life As A Failed International Rock Star (In The Best Band You’ve Never Heard)’
In the mid-00s I was in a much forgotten indie band from Glasgow, We Are The Physics. We spent weeks and months in a year crammed together in the back of a van touring the UK and Europe. Surprisingly, we weren’t really an argumentative ensemble or, probably to our detriment, a competitive one.
We were moody, and we’d bicker, but we rarely got into full blown arguments. Which, I’ve since heard, is incredibly rare for a bunch of people who’d been crushed face to face in the bowels of venues, and in the greasiest corners of promoters’ floors every night for months. And we’d rarely have disagreements with other people either. We just weren’t the sort of people who got into fights.
Except in Russia. In Mother Russia, fights found you.
During our time as a worldwide international failure, we managed to visit Russia three times. That’s more times than we ever visited Southampton. Each time we’d go, it was progressively weirder. The first time was almost like a school trip, where we accompanied several UK bands as part of a festival in Moscow. But on each return, individually or with other bands, new havoc would emerge.
I’ve never really been in a fight. Not really.
I’m not a very confrontational person. I’m a contrarian, but I somehow managed to avoid the majority of my potential physical altercations through a combination of charm, self-degradation, and cowardice.
Having grown up in the east end of Glasgow, a notoriously rough part
of the city even in the late 80s/early 90s, I was well accustomed to friends
of mine being jumped, attacked, or mugged. Coupled with my ingrained sense of hyper-vigilance passed down from my parents’ rough upbringings, I was usually cynically suspicious of anybody’s motivations, meaning I would swerve away from brewing dangerous situations.
At age eight, my friend Robert from the downstairs flat was kicked off his skateboard on a busy main street by three older boys who then ran away with his Argos wheels. Once, on my way home from school, I saw what looked like an army of men (in retrospect, they were probably all around sixteen years old) stalking another boy up the backstreets of Dennistoun in the shadow of the Whitehill swimming baths to the dour stretch of the Gallowgate, throwing stones and other missiles at him over a prolonged period of time like a siege on a castle, if the castle was wearing a tracksuit.
And I grew up in the murky rumoured mist of a girl at the nearby school who had apparently once stabbed a rival with a butter knife in a disagreement about chips.
My wee maw had told me never to go out into those streets where the tenements loomed over us, on that busy long road from Haghill into the town centre, because of all the bampots. Instead, we’d play in the close which, for the un-Scottish among us, was the entry hallway to a block of flats.
In the 90s, Glasgow was going through a cultural flux, having been named European City of Culture in 1990, much to the confusion of its denizens. Dennistoun was having one of its many promised, but never fulfilled, renaissances. Where I lived had an uncomfortable mix of upper working class flats, council housing, and middle class families who’d bought their tenement apartments outright, all in the same vertical building.
On the top floor, a council housed couple would routinely try to kill each other and their echoed screams would rattle the fading tiles in the close in the middle of the night. This felt at odds with the young, affluent family on the bottom floor who once, in a weird and surreal flex of status, gave the kids in the close a tin of salmon to act as a marker for a makeshift game of hopscotch, before the inevitable rain washed the chalk outlines away and all we had was this unopened tin of salmon.
Robert said if we buried the salmon, it would grow a river. He sold us the idea with such convincing whimsy, we had to comply.
“When we come back, there’ll be a river out of here,” he’d promised, “We can float all the way to America!”
So somewhere in Dennistoun, there’s an unopened tin of salmon buried that an archaeologist will one day find and attempt to attribute to it a narrative, but the truth of the matter is far stranger than any explanation they’d conjure.
The confusing melting pot of class struggles would trigger peculiar events that I would normalise, not understanding these things were specific to the odd vertical communities surrounding me. One thing I distinctly remember was the alarming amount of unwrapped Kit Kats that furnished the streets, scattered in the way you’d see discarded scratch-cards now.
My friend Fiona and I were once crouched in the close playing with toys when one of the resident drug users, a yellowed and thin vapour of a man who was perennially pleasant to everyone in the close, whispered his way in like the chill through a cracked window. He slammed the door behind him and clicked it locked, though the noise could’ve come from his brittle knuckles.
He pressed his face against the remnants of the thin strip of stained glass on the close door, the only remainder of the building’s fancier history. He peered out to the street behind it and, after several meerkat scans, turned his face back towards the stairwell and looked down at us with surprise. He toothlessly smiled and dropped us some Kit Kats, having tugged the biscuit fingers from their tin foil wrapper.
“Here you go, son,” he said to both of us, regardless of our gender, “Here’s some sweeties.”
The chocolate fingers rained on us, but our maws had told us never to eat Kit Kats we found or were given. As he floated up the stairs quickly like speedy fog, there was almost immediately a deep growl from behind the closed close door. A face had filled its long, perpendicular window, reddened by both rage and the stained glass, and we recognised it as Ahmed.
Ahmed owned the newsagents nearby, a burly but jovial guy who’d write our names on comics he thought we might like. Now though he wasn’t happy, scowling through the glass, steaming it up with the anger from his flared nostrils like a trapped bull.
“Yous,” he shouted, through the rouge slit, “Who stole they Kit Kats?”
His accusations were accented by a chubby wee finger dunting the glass, dabbing at it like doorbell, “Who stole they Kit Kats?”
We just sat there with skint knees, toys in hand and Kit Kats at our feet. Drug users, propelled by their addiction to gear, would seemingly steal Kit Kats from the corner shop for the tin foil wrappers that they could use in the preparation of their heroin fix. Presumably easier to steal than a roll of tin foil, Kit Kats tended to be the thing they went for and, as such, there was a distinct shortage of them in Dennistoun around that time, meaning if you wanted to have a break, you’d have to settle for a Wispa.
We never let Ahmed in, but it went around the school some time later that he and his brothers had eventually caught our neighbour, and battered the last remaining tooth out of his mouth. Probably an overzealous punishment for stealing an array of delicious chocolate biscuits, but the kids in the close believed our neighbour had no teeth because of all the Kit Kats he ate, so it served as a warning to us on several levels.
Even though I was surrounded by this sort of thing, and the overarching threat of violence, I never felt preyed upon at school. My contrary, insular, and oddly haughty attitude, combined with my self-alienating interests, meant I was rarely included by my peers, but it was unusual that I was negatively singled out by them either.
On the one occasion the toughest guy in the class tried to threaten me, I managed to escape. I can’t remember why I’d become the object of his ire, but he sprang at me ferociously. I say I can’t remember, but I can imagine I had been a dick in some capacity. His face mere inches from own, I somehow stood my ground. I stared straight back into his lawless wee eyes, and with every ounce of self-worth oozing from my tiny frame, I said: “I’m no’ worth it,” implying that it would be a waste of his energy to beat the shit out of me.
He nudged his head forward so I flinched, and he confirmed, “You’re fucking right you’re no’ worth it.”
He melodramatically turned away with his body first, and his eyes remained drilled into mine for a moment before those too chased the rest of him. Now anybody else would may have seen this as some dramatic failure on my part. I’d literally debased and demeaned myself just to escape pulverisation. How could anybody’s ego have survived such a battering? In truth, I was elated I’d evaded getting my head kicked in. There was no pride to debase, I was a wee specky idiot, it meant more to me to get out of that situation than to engage in a fight. There was no way I could’ve won that. So you could see it as cowardice, or you could see it as a successful strategy. Perhaps it was the opposite of having no pride, maybe I had so much self-belief that it meant nothing to me to debase myself just to escape. I had no interest in establishing any dominance over this guy. The problem with dominance is it has to be maintained, and I had a lot of other stuff on my mind to contend with, like ‘Thunderbirds’ and thinking about Jet from ‘Gladiators’.
But then I found myself in Moscow. On the other side of the world, behind a see-through iron curtain. To play music. In truth, Moscow’s backstreets reminded me of Glasgow’s housing schemes — from the ominous shadows of the towering tenements to the sharp tension and desperation hidden in the cold air; the feeling that something was always, potentially and certainly, about to go sideways. And not only that, in the dotted kiosks between the extremely rich and the extremely poor estates, we’d find Irn Bru sold more often than in London. It was basically Easterhouse with furry hats.
The gigs themselves were bafflingly unusual — we were routinely put on display like an oddity. The audiences we were paraded in front of seemed like they somehow had an idea of what rock music was but had never truly witnessed it happening and didn’t quite know how to respond.
One show was some sort of industry showcase in a bar hidden deep downstairs on a busy street in the middle of Moscow, not far from the ominous Kremlin wall. That wall was lined with soldiers, and the bar walls were lined with classic rock memorabilia, like replicas of the Rolling Stones’ equipment, but also military antiques like helmets and rifles which the audience could just pick up and play around with.
The gig itself was an uncomfortable mix of unadulterated excitement and genuine confusion from the, mostly seated, audience. At one point I leapt off the stage and, still playing, took a seat next to someone in the front row. Facing the band and with one foot stretched back on the stage in faux-relaxation, I looked round to the man I’d sat next to at the table, and he kept his head and eyes planted on the spot I’d come from, refusing to acknowledge that I was now right beside him. Just dutifully nodding to the beat, staring at a past that was no longer there.
Sweaty and bewildered after our set, we trundled off to the side of the stage and plonked ourselves down in a stairwell as the seated guests screamed for more. The promoter appeared as if from nowhere, face gaunt and worried.
“Encore?” he said, with a strange mimed clap in which his hands never touched.
I shook my wet head, “Oh, we don’t do encores.” I’d always hated the charade of an encore. Many artists now openly acknowledge the ridiculousness and pretence of an encore — keeping a handful of songs aside that will hopefully appease the overwhelming demand of the audience after a show has apparently ended. As far as we were concerned, the last song was the last song; we weren’t out to dupe anyone. On small stages that often didn’t connect to a backstage area, there was nowhere to go off-stage to wait for a welcome back, leaving us standing there, just eating up pantomime applause awkwardly, both us and the audience part of a horrible unspoken ritual.
Plus, even if we could exit stage right, there was always the fear that once we’d gone, the crowd would quickly realise the last thing they wanted was more.
“We don’t have any more songs,” said our guitarist, Chris, still out of breath from the stage.
The promoter’s eyes got worryingly wide like a rip in the armpit of a jumper, “No,” he said, “No, they’ll kill you. You have to do an encore.”
The way he said the word ‘kill’ didn’t seem like the way we’d use the word ‘kill’ back at home, where we’d say we were going to kill the person who hadn’t flushed the toilet. It felt like, in a bar lined with weaponry, we might actually get killed.
The roar from behind us had traversed through cheers to a deep and unsettling demand.
Panicked, we shared glances.
“We could just do the last song again,” suggested our drummer, Michael Drum.
“We can’t do that,” I snapped, then with slightly less assuredness, added “Can we?”
The promoter started to physically push us through the door, so as my feet took to the stage before my body. The crowd’s cheers crescendoed to a frenzy as glasses and fists pounded against the wooden tables. I could hear plates and bowls falling to the floor, but in my mind they sounded like guns being cocked.
As we lifted our guitars back to our bodies with a heaviness only reluctant duty can muster, I exchanged quick bounces with the eyes of my pals who nodded their exhausted frames, knowing what we had to do.
“Thanks so much for having us,” I said to the crowd, who began to quieten, “We really appreciate you having us here. I think we’re able to play one more song.”
The cheers bricked up the thick air between us and them.
Michael Drum counted four on the sticks, and we played one random note on our guitars, then threw them off.
“Thank you very much!” I shouted into the mic, but every syllable was quieter than the last as I was already travelling away from it to leave the stage as quickly as possible.
The room was absolutely engulfed in angry, jagged boos, and the promoter stood at the stage door, yelping “No, no, no.”
We got out of that one without a punch being thrown. The same couldn’t be said for the after-show celebrations at a bar down some alleyway later that night.
It started out friendly enough. The room was filled with bands from the UK, tourists, and Russian punters. But there was a noticeable tension in the air, the one we’d feel walking up Union Street in Glasgow just as the pubs were kicking out.
As I leant against the bar, my ear being chewed off by a seething UK promoter who was telling me how much money it had cost them to get all of us over to Russia, I caught something distant in my other ear. English words, with a Russian accent, menacingly declaring: “There are too many Western voices in here.”
Suddenly, a table was overturned. If there’d been a piano-player, he’d have stopped and someone would’ve swung across our heads clinging to a chandelier.
Drinks flew into the air like missiles. Someone leapt on the tables and started kicking people below while his arms grasped to find a suitable head to lock, like an un-choreographed John Wick.
I just stood at the bar watching it unfold around me like a western.
Someone appeared from out of nowhere with a jug of water and threw it on everyone, then every light in the room burst on, like some sort of show- stop procedure, as if a brawl happened every now and then and they had a documented process to halt it.
Like drenched cats, everyone scattered to the sides, then resumed drinking; the war quickly cooling and the tension returning to a constant manageable simmer.
While there has always been a part of me that feels inexplicably drawn to chaos, I just don’t like getting hit. My tendency to somehow be on the periphery of violence rather than at the centre generally served me well. I’ve never hit anyone, and I don’t intend to hit anyone.
As much as it could be the scariest place on earth, in Russia we met the nicest, most welcoming people. They would always introduce us to foods, their culture, and their history, sometimes with a mixture of pride and melancholy. They’d spend their time with us, they’d swap stories, and they’d drink just as hard as anyone from Glasgow could. The majority of the people we met were progressive and left-leaning, hopeful of a brighter future for Russia after the decades of gloom they admitted to inheriting from the fall of the USSR, and the corrupt mobs that followed.
When we’d turn up at shows, the excited promoters exuded a mixture of confusion and delight, frequently taking one look at our weary bodies and saying: “You look tired. Would you like some borscht?”
But it was tough to avoid the air of hostility that tended to follow everything around. There was always this weird sense that things were about to kick off.
A member of another UK band once made the mistake of going to the bathroom in a bar to brush his teeth because we’d all been sleeping in hostels or on trains, and had no other opportunity to do so. He’d been gone so long, I wandered in to make sure he was alright, and found him cornered by two angry cleaners, holding mops aloft, who were accusing him of being a ‘freak’ for having the audacity to value oral health. He glanced over at me, hoping I’d defuse the situation by involvement alone.
I shat myself, and just said, “It’s your round.”
One of the cleaners was wearing a badge that had the words, in bold Impact font, ‘I Love Tits’, and I figured if he was the type of person to wear an ‘I Love Tits’ badge to his cleaning job, maybe he wasn’t the sort of person who’d be too troubled about killing two foreigners in a public bathroom, so it was safer to leave.
We had wandered around Moscow by foot, taking in as much of the cold sights as we could, shivering as the gentle snowflakes fell out the white sky and tore our cheeks. Our guide had been a girl called Svetka, a painfully thin blonde with hair cut short against her head, who was planning on leaving Russia and living in the UK, seeing this is as a good way to test her conversational skills.
She patiently tolerated our idiotic questions about the place, the people, the culture, and we didn’t see her sigh in frustration once, which would’ve been visible given how cold it was. A guilty little cloud would’ve emerged from her throat like a kettle about to boil.
Actually, we did see that once.
And we deserved it.
A group of us had asked to visit the Red Square because we wanted to get a photo of us in front of the remarkable St Basil cathedral against its towers of colourful iced gems. We asked Svetka if she’d take a photo and she politely declined, shaking her head and ducking her chin into her tightly wrapped scarf.
Like proper tourist bastards, we’d bought cheap ushanka-hats, and t-shirts emblazoned with huge Russian Cyrillic that we didn’t understand, and we stood there with our breaths clouding around us, urging her to have a go.
Chris held up his camera, “It’s easy, you just press the button!”
Svetka looked down at the camera and then back at us, “I don’t know,” she said.
By this point, the rest of us had lined up in front of the cathedral. Chris shrugged, “No worries!” he said, looking around for a passer-by to ask.
“Excuse me,” he said, but nobody would even grace him with a glance.
They barged past and onwards to the horizon. The square was relatively busy, and most of the folks didn’t seem like tourists, but they refused to stop or speak.
Svetka lifted her head from her scarf and said, with that visible sigh, “I’ll do it, it is no problem.”
She grabbed the camera from Chris, and he thanked her, before stepping backwards to join our group posing.
“Why did she not want to take a photo?” I asked him, confused.
“I don’t know,” said Chris through his teeth, with a photo-ready smile beaming back out at Svetka.
It was then we realised.
Svetka lifted up the camera to her eye, and we saw that it wasn’t in her grip. It was precariously, but expertly, balanced on a prosthetic hand we didn’t know she had.
Click.
The photo of us standing in front of the cathedral accurately depicts a group of people at the precise moment guilt engulfed their beings. Literally simultaneously realising they’d forced someone to do something they didn’t want to do because we’d been so preoccupied with ourselves. A group of people absolutely mortified for the huge faux pas. A set of eyes filled with regret all staring back into that lens.
Svetka never mentioned it, we never mentioned it. The problem wasn’t the prosthetic hand, the problem was our irreverence, which summed up the oddity of being a band like us in Russia. A group of obvious tourists in ushankas, staring directly into the realisation of their own mistake.
Sorry, Svetka, I still feel terrible about that.
But I didn’t feel particularly bad about hurting the group of bald men in skinny jeans and braces that turned up at one of our shows in a town outside of Moscow.
I think our Russian friends who booked us had always felt bad about bringing us all the way to the motherland, and then having us only play in Moscow or St Petersburg. So they’d booked us to play in a place called Nizhny Novgorod.
We’d had a frightful journey on the overnight train from Moscow, which was a good six hours away on the Siberian Express.
Those overnight trains were like horizontal travelling hostels. Folks would come and go throughout the night, and passengers were at the behest of luck to find a bunk that didn’t already have a sleeping body in it. If a passenger boarded in the middle of the night, the cabins would be in complete darkness and they’d have to feel their way around the beds, to figure out if anyone was in there. It wasn’t unusual to be awoken by a grasping hand from someone either trying to find a bed, or cop a feel, using the darkness as an excuse.
Once, we boarded a train and found a drunken old fella on the bottom bunk of a cabin that, otherwise, would’ve allowed us all to sleep in the same place. The conductor said his ticket was only as good as that stop and he had to leave, but he was refusing. Our tour promoter was a white-haired and lovely Russian man named Dmitry, who simply adored rock music, so would continuously wear sunglasses regardless of how dark the outlook of his future was. He frantically pleaded with the belligerent old man to at least go to the cabin next door if he wasn’t going to get off the train. The old man would stand up, then sit down, grinning with glee at declining the request.
Sighing, and patronisingly assuming he wouldn’t know what I was talking about in my thick Scottish accent, I said, “Mate, please just fuck off.”
He flung his head round to me and with a deep, gruff voice, growled: “I’ll kick your fucking teeth in.”
Eventually he stumbled off the train, and as it pulled away, we caught a glimpse through the small, dirty glass window of Dmitry pouncing at the old man and grabbing him by his lapels. What happened next has remained an enduring mystery that I hope is never solved.
On this particular trip to Nizhny Novgorod, it felt safer not to get into a sparring match with any drunk Russian men, and we didn’t have a Dmitry to back us up, so we found free beds in separate cabins across the long train.
It had been so dark, I simply didn’t know what to do with my guitar case – a long, solid flight-case designed to survive the cruel brutality of Russia’s baggage handlers. So I ended up placing it on a free bunk, on top of which I clambered in distinct darkness and tried to sleep. If you’ve ever tried sleeping on a guitar case on the top bunk of a packed and dark Russian train, you’ll understand you’re getting six minutes of sleep in total.
So, by the time we got to play the show, we were a tired, sore mess, and it didn’t help that the promoter didn’t seem to understand that we weren’t a cabaret band.
“You’ll play for two hours, yes?” he’d said.
“Two hours?” I said, aghast, “We’re not that sort of band, we don’t have two hours of material.”
“We have booked you for two hours, you will play it.”
“There’s been some mistake here,” I said, “We play for twenty minutes, that’s our whole thing, that’s our act.”
And the more I tried to reason with the fact we’d travelled all the way to Russia, and six hours lying on guitar cases, plus six minutes of sleep, to play for twenty minutes in a bar who primarily put on covers bands, I realised how ridiculous this approach to our ‘art’ and the commitment to our ‘act’ was.
We eventually settled on doing a thirty minute set, then another thirty minute set later in the evening. By the time we’d started our second thirty minute set which, by the way, was identical to our first thirty minute set, the crowd in the otherwise high-market eatery had started to become visibly and audibly drunk.
A group of shaven-headed men in braces stood at the front, applauding loudly and screaming for more after each song, while placing their half-filled glasses on the edge of the stage. Rowdily, they’d reach forward and tap at Chris’ feet, pointing at his arms, lined with tattoos, then back at their own. It was then that Chris spotted the tattoos on their bulky arms were troubling — black outlined eagles, harsh lightning bolts with SS lettering, and the unmistakable boldness of a swastika.
Chris leaned over to me with a whisper, his face stern, “These guys are fucking nazis.”
Sure enough, they started to salute.
Ashamedly, I’ll admit, I wanted to ignore it. I just wanted to get this over with and get back on the train back to the relative safety, if you can believe this, of Moscow.
As we approached the end of our set, we could hear the group call louder, “White power, yeah?”
I wasn’t able to contain it anymore, and I spat back, “No. Not fucking white power, mate.”
But they cheered and goaded us more, saluting harder, “You’re fascists, yeah?” they said.
Chris was visibly angry, pulling further and further away from the front of the stage.
While we were only a few songs from the end of the set, each one truly dragged knowing the constitution of its listeners. I’d slip in lyrics throughout our songs to try to subtly combat the viewpoint of the audience, “Fuck off, nazi scum”, “Hitler’s only good idea was his last one”, and “If you’re a Marxist and you know it, clap your hands”.
But clearly the message of our liberally left-ish-wing-ish songs had already been lost on these people, so the addition of a more on-the-nose narrative wouldn’t have dented their demeanour.
Worse, I felt angered that they seemed to be enjoying it, and I was having some sort of existential crisis in the middle of our songs. Like, what was it about us that they saw as a reflection of their view? What were we conveying that was so the opposite of what we believed?
Over the years, I’ve tried to figure it out. I’ve looked over our songs, I’ve re-read our lyrics. I think We Are The Physics, with songs about the democratisation of technology, about the eventual obsoletion of the penis, about physical equity through artificial intelligence, about celebrating the underdog, about the horror of nuclear war, about the gloom in the shadow of losing my dad, songs written in a dark Scottish working class bedroom to drown out the sound of my maw’s howling grief, written to try and articulate a complicated feeling inside me that I couldn’t work out in any other way… What was it that they saw? And, truly, I think they just saw four white men with tattoos, and that was enough. And the ego in thinking I could conduct the narrative of that in a foreign country was troubling. The ego of four white westerners in Russian hats and Cyrillic t-shirts we didn’t understand, posing in front of St Basil’s Cathedral, forcing our new friend, who’d lost a hand due to an upbringing we were unable to adequately understand, to document it like we were at Disneyworld.
Chris couldn’t take it anymore, and on the last note of the final song, he launched a foot at the row of half-drunk glasses on the edge of the stage, and they crashed over the nazis, causing a shocked roar.
A massive fight erupted, as if all the tension needed was a lit fuse, and we leapt off the stage, throwing stiff fists into the faces of the nazis, smashing glasses over the voluntarily bald heads, wildly pulling at their braces and then letting them go so they sprung back and rattled their nipples with a cartoon-like boing, while we shouted ‘Take that, fascist!’
Except it didn’t.
Because we did what I always did.
We chose cowardice.
We quickly grabbed our gear and cowered into the safety of a locked room backstage until a taxi arrived to take us to the train station, while the unhappy nazis yelled in the distance and someone else had to deal with it. Of all the situations that could arise, getting arrested for fighting actual nazis in Russia would be a good one for the PR, but at the time, it felt like they weren’t worth it. Like the way I’d debased myself in school, I felt like they weren’t worth the hassle it would cause us to act upon.
It was a different era and, perhaps naively, fascism felt like something resigned to history — like we could joke about fascism, and Hitler, with mocking disbelief something like that would occur again. The boldness of their pride felt misplaced, pathetic and unusual, rather than an indication of the increase of the populism of their beliefs in a place such as Russia, with its history of communism and people-led revolution.
But that, of course, was the ignorance of its nuance. Looking at how global discourse has unravelled, in retrospect, maybe we made the wrong decision to flee. Maybe it was important to fight back, to assert those beliefs were no longer acceptable, and should not be allowed to bloom, that white power was not something to proudly declare as a viable opinion. But we just ran.
On the way to the airport to go back to Scotland, wearing those tourist t-shirts we bought at the Red Square in Cyrillic text we didn’t understand, our new friend Dmitry pointed and said, “Do you know what this means?”
“No,” we said in unison.
“It says ‘thank you’,” he laughed, “It says ‘thank you, Comrade Stalin, for our happy childhood.”
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