Around Newbury I have a brainwave: maybe the broken heater is due to no coolant! Indeed, the engine is getting hot! Maybe that's why the oil's burning! Einstein and Sherlock fuckin' Holmes all in one, eh? It only took me a day and a half to suss that one. We pull in at a Tesco's - I buy coolant and yoghurt, the Rat buys prawns, George bloke buys crisps. George bloke is a vegan who doesn't like vegetables. On the tour he exists almost completely on crisp 'n' white bread sarnies, ribena and chocolate.

As we get towards Southampton I start to have some difficulty sussing out the route. I try driving and map reading at the same time, ('cos asking the stoned Rat for directions is too slow), I nearly get us killed with an artic truck up our arses. This scares the shite out of George and the Rat enough that they insist on map reading and slagging my driving for the rest of the tour - even in preference to "rolling up a little number".

We locate the Joiners easily by the simple method of "following the big roads" and George's guess work. George girl and Stuart arrive about ten minutes after us WITH THE TRAILER. Stuart managed to buy another wheel for a tenner(ish) when the AA man took him into Winchester, and they caught up with us 'cos of all the trouble with the van. Turns out there's four bands on the bill tonight and we're heading the bill, described by the Promoter who's heard the single as "the bastard offspring of King Kurt shagging Nick Cave" - nice one! The first band on have been put together by a bloke who's the ex-drummer out of the Sultans of Ping FC, apparently he's a bit touchy about this, so I don't go up to him and shout "Oi oi! Where's me jumpa!?!" in his face. The next lot on are called Inertia and they were pretty good, tho' I can't remember much about 'em.

Ztrange were the best of the lot, a great bunch down from Manchester, where they'd played to a packed Night and Day just the week before. We sit around talking to them over beer and rice and curry sauce. [Jon's tour tip: when you're ready to puke before you can eat another chip, plain boiled rice with curry sauce is the bizness and pretty cheap too]. They turn out to be the only other band on this tour (apart from us and TraLala) who actually bother trying to put on any kind of a show. I mean, we've got the mad-mask-wearing, howling, screamin space-punk Rat, and three weird as fuck 6x4foot backdrops and a strobe and a UV. And TraLala has the bonkers hardcore bass player and the lead singer with a megafone and their very own usherette (I shit you not). Ztrange have a gorgeous blonde lead singer who's wearing an amazing silk dress (mmmm... silk...) she throws some great shapes and she's got an incredible voice. The music is A1, mod / punkish and they also field a frankly-staring-mental keyboard player and a 6foot high multicoloured rotating swirly thing to make the audience ill. And did this audience deserve illness! Consistently throughout every song of every set of every band  four guys at the back of the audience shout "ARSE!" again and again and again. Tossers.

For once Broken Brow actually has some support in the audience (not enough people to call it a crowd tho', as the Rat says, we are the world's first UNPOP band) Stuart's mate Kirsty has brought a bunch of friends down. We're on the stage and the first three tracks are blinding, we're really playing here! Then I break a string... and nothing seems quite right after that. The timing's all over the bloody place! Stuart later 'fessed up that this was the one and only gig on the tour where he got on stage pissed as a fart. Apparently he can't remember much about it. We suck pretty badly all the way through to Seroxat when we do the weird spoken-word vocal canon right for the first time and then the Rat writhes around on the floor like an eel on 'roids - howling through the harmonica and gasping to the end.

At the end the soundman comes up and goes "I really liked that last one! Illuminati Punk!". He enthuses a bit more about our stuff so we give him a single by way of a thanks for the good sound he did for us.

So we load up in the pissing rain, and get our dosh. We get horribly fucking lost around the docks, but eventually we make it out onto the motorway and pull off at the nearest rest stop. At least me, George bloke and the Rat do. God knows where George girl and Stuart are. It's grim. I'm stressed and strung out to fuck. I hate fucking driving and it wears me right down. I've driven 900 miles or so in the last 48hours on about 6 hours sleep. I need to unwind a bit so we head into the plastic paradise for a cup of tea. The Rat's pissed up on booze and dope again and I tell him I need a bit of quiet to wind down, so he gets the hump and fucks off.
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