Guest Diary: Official Secrets Act

For the duration of their three stop Irish tour, Lawrence from Official Secrets Act (OSA) will be writing a tour diary for my lovely blog here. It starts today! Enjoy!

Wednesday April 15th

So our dear old transit Denise died at the weekend. After a year of pretty much no stop touring her head gasket went boom, and the end of a long and fruitful love affair was upon us. Crawling back from Milton Keynes at 30mph we all shed an OSA tear for our beloved girl and prepared for a Deniseless future.

Mario our tour manager and all round OSA hero bartered and haggled and got us a rather tasty Merc splitter in which to get to Wales and Ireland, and now here we sit, traffic surrounding us on a trunk road into the promised land of Wales, en route to Holyhead to catch that fabled ferry over to Ireland. We've never sailed across that salty wind swept sea before and anticipation is high. We start in Galway tomorrow night at the Roisin Dubh (16th of April), then hit Auntie Annies in Belfast (17th) before finishing in Dublin at the Academy 2 (18th).

When we got talked about among the great and the good we always get called a North London band, but this is confusing for us as we all met in Leeds, formed the band in a deep dark squat in Manchester one rainy summer a year and a half ago, and half of us come from Scotland. Factor in that we've been to 11 countries in the last 2 months and we feel like we come from nowhere. So after 2 days in Galway we'll probably start putting down roots, it'll be the longest we've stayed in one place for 6 weeks (Leipzig is a beautiful town but it's hardly home).

Here are hopes for our short stay in Ireland.
1) To play some lovely shows and bring some star shining escapism to the stages we grace
2) To not be total tourists while we're traversing the lands of the emerald isle (Using the phrase "emerald isle" probably immediately puts us in that category!)
3) Make some friends for life, cause we plan on coming back many many times.

At times like this you end up sitting in the van making up stupid lists about the places your going (The famous Belgians list is always the hardest, especially if we ban sports stars). The big in Germany list is pretty normal, famous Scottish female actors was good fun (CLARE GROGAN I STILL LOVE YOU!) and bands from Birmingham lasted a very long time. (Ocean Colour Scene, Black Sabbath, half of led zeppeling, sort of). Actually bands from London is a much harder list than you think, so many people move there but so few are actually from there. Even half of Blur come from the south coast. We'll work on some Irish Band Lists, but it's pretty easy cause like Scotland and Wales it's always produced so many amazing bands and singers. (Our scottish band list started last december and is still going so the gauntlet is thrown).

We're stuck in a traffic jam somewhere near Birmingham at the moment so we'll love you and leave you till tomorrow.

Love and Respect of Soviet Proportions

Lawrence Diamond
OSA


www.myspace.com/officialsecretsact