It’s well-documented that life on the road can be tough for a band. You pine for home comforts, you’re driving for several boring hours at a time, you oscillate between fart-scented tin can vans and unecessarily expensive hotels, and everyone sets up home in each other’s pockets.
Now try adding to the mix the practical issues of being female, and you’ll get an idea what it’s like to be a member of Australian kooksters The Grates.
“Like, I started my period today,” begins the wonderfully-named Patience Hodgson. “John [Patterson, guitar] kept teasing me because I cried watching The Adventures of Greyfriars Bobby, the story about the dog who sat by his owner’s grave for years after he died. That was embarrassing; I’d have privacy enough to hide my PMT if I was at home.”
And in terms of, er, its practicalities?
“You just get by,” she shrugs. “Thankfully we don’t have a sleeper bus, so we spend most nights in a hotel which means we can have showers. It’s only really difficult if you’re not properly prepared. You say that you really need to go to a shop and everyone ignores you, so you have to say, ‘No, I really really need to go to a shop’. It’s normally for painkillers or pads. Or sometimes I’d need a sewing kit because I’d rip a dress that I was planning to wear – that’s another girlie thing that gets to me.”
On the whole, Patience believes, the good aspects outweigh the bad, even when she’s travelling so far away from home.
“It’s much more of an interesting life than sitting behind an office desk. In fact, going back home is actually the hard bit. You don’t have people around you all the time to keep you company, or a tour manager to tell you what to do and hand you money for food.”
That’s not to say the band, completed by Alana Skyring (drums) don’t take the benefits of their debut album Gravity Won’t Get You High back home with them.
“We just toured around Australia, and because we were supporting the Arctic Monkeys, we got a decent rider. At the end of the each show, we’d put all the spare beer and spirits into a box and take it with us. So when we get back next we’re going to throw a huge party.”
While their August show at Whelan’s was their first, the band’s fun reputation certainly preceded them. Apart from their quirky alt-pop tunes, all their imagery is eye-cathcing to say the least.
“We do it all ourselves,” Patience proffers. “John is the one doing it all on the computer, and we’d be sat either side of him. We make sure we do it all ourselves – from T-shirts, to ads to mailouts. We do it because we enjoy it, but also we’re really picky. We think we do a much better job of it than anyone else would do.”
And we’d second that.