OXEGEN 2011: How do festival acts relieve the tedium of touring? From Kanye's and Beyoncé's Connect 4 dogfights to Fight Like Apes' shoplifting game and The Strokes' card schools, a bit of competition passes the time nicely. Well, it's better than taking drugs, writes UNA MULLALLY
CAST YOUR mind back to when you were a kid, and remember the long car journeys on family trips that were so mind- numbingly boring they required the creation of games that didn’t make sense but fostered some vague sense of competition and amusement.
It’s that atmosphere of unremitting tedium that sees bands and musicians seek fun as an alternative to staring blankly out the window. Being on tour, much like shooting a film, is 90 per cent hanging around, 10 per cent action.
The roads are long, the van is dull, and any sort of light relief or methods to escape the humdrum, becomes an attractive diversion from bum-paralysing bus journeys and microwavable service-station burgers. It’s one of the reasons musicians have a disproportionately large appetite for alcohol and drugs. Most of the consumption is done out of boredom. Acres of spare time is also the reason touring bands are some of the most film- and television-literate people out there. With hours of time that’s technically free – but can’t really be allocated to anything of great commitment – between travelling, loading in, soundchecking and playing, bands are bound to come up with various ways to amuse themselves. Enter the tour games.
Tour games fall into three categories. Number one: amusement laid on by festivals or promoters for bands so they won’t end up getting wasted out of boredom before going on stage, and just as a general nice touch to the backstage area. Number two: actual real games that bands play, from using the driver’s door of the tour van as a badminton net to becoming addicted to travel Scrabble. Number three: invented games made up by bands themselves, generally encompassing a variation on an existing sport or word game or something that involves an ongoing prank competition.
Over the past decade, it's rare to see a backstage rider that doesn't have entertainment among its requirements, especially among certain demographics. Boy bands, rappers and younger male solo artists need their Xboxes and PS3s. For a while Amy Winehouse wouldn't go anywhere that didn't have a pool table nearby (which explains why she ended up in the Palace on Camden Street in Dublin one night pre-Blake.) Juliette Lewis watches box sets of Family Guyback to back on tour. Lil Wayne watches American sports on a satellite feed to his tour bus, or springs his pop-up studio into action. Justin Bieber spends hours playing the NBA 2Kcomputer game series.
According to a previous rider, Oxegen headliners Foo Fighters like DVDs as long as they don't contain Martin Lawrence, Jamie Kennedy or sport. Arctic Monkeys, who play before the Foos tomorrow, are fans of word games. In fact, when Alex Turner was on holidays with his then girlfriend Johanna Bennett (now married to Matthew Followill from Kings of Leon), the song Fluorescent Adolescentwas developed from a word game, earning her a songwriting credit.
Keep the cards away from tonight’s performers The Strokes. Bassist Nikolai Fraiture is a poker fan – that’s how he met Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ Nick Zinner, who ended up working on his solo album.
As for festivals themselves, backstage areas tend to transform into teen playgrounds laden with amusements. The Benicassim festival on the Costa del Azahar in Spain remains high on bands’ wish lists of festivals to play thanks in no small part to its famous backstage swimming pool. At Oxegen this weekend, games will be laid on again for visiting bands, who will spend the weekend coming from or going to T in the Park in Scotland and elsewhere.
In the past, Oxegen has tried its hand at a variety of games backstage, including beach volleyball, which gale force winds and driving rain did their best to trash. The complex that houses the large network of dressing rooms and catering facilities at Oxegen comes equipped with computer games at console stands and table football. Kings of Leon probably spent too much time playing a car-racing computer game as headliners a couple of years ago, which makes a change from their off-tour penchant for horseshoe pitching. For a while now, the VIP area at Oxegen has been home to pool tables and a miniature crazy golf course – with The Temper Trap and Local Natives enjoying a few rounds last year.
* GET YOURSELF CONNECTED
One game sucks musicians in again and again, and that is, oddly, Connect 4. Kanye West and Common are big fans, but the leading light in Connect 4 is one of the most anticipated acts at Oxegen on Sunday, Beyoncé, whose abilities gained somewhat mythical status among touring musicians (as Kanye West revealed a few years ago, “every now and then people would speak of this legendary Connect 4 champion: Beyoncé.”
West played the game "for hours and hours – it helped me zone out" while on tour in Europe. In 2008 he got his opportunity to play Beyoncé in Las Vegas at Jay-Z's 40/40 club. Out of 10 games, Beyoncé beat him nine times. Subsequently, footage surfaced online of the rapper Consequence playing Jay-Z. Consequence later gave an interview to MTV on the back of promoting his debut album. "We went at it [Connect 4] when we was on the Glow tour [West's 2008 Glow in the Darktour, which featured Rihanna, Lupe Fiasco, N.E.R.D. and Nas]. Jay flew out for the show. I had just finished snappin' everybody. Shout out to Common, he took a whole bunch of ass-whippings. Me and Kanye go back and forth . . . Kanye is good. He'll play me until I get disinterested, then start whippin' my ass. Then I'll come back the next day and whip his ass."
Consequence was pretty much unbeatable, thanks to a strategy he formulated that saw him win almost every game until Jay-Z cracked his code. “It’s a brain game, like chess,” Consequence told MTV when he finally surrendered the Connect 4 crown to Jay-Z.
* APES ARE THE CHAMPS
Fight Like Apes, who play Oxegen on Sunday, have toured the UK extensively, and as their van rumbles down motorways, through service stops and into hotel car parks, it’s inevitable that such monotony and spare time leads to game- playing. “We used to play a game called Champ on tour,” the Apes explain. “We used to have a lovely tour manager called David Francis Patrick Broy, who was slow to temper. Every time we went to a shop we’d put random objects in his manbag: cheeses, dental cleaners, random stuff really. The idea was to find the stupidest combination of stuff for him to steal unwittingly. Things with tags were a necessity. Then you stand back and watch him trying to leave the shop through the security gates.”
The band is now on Champ 2.0: similar name, remarkably different concept. “This game also requires an extremely patient tour manager. You wait for any opportunity to get their phone. Send a message to every promoter or artist liaison on the tour saying how much you are looking forward to meeting them, how you had a good feeling about them and that you felt that you really connected when you talked earlier.
“Guessing their favourite colour in advance can also add a lot to the outcome. When you arrive at a gig you get to witness the sheer awkwardness of it all: your tour manager being really friendly and down-to-earth and the promoter being terrified and sketchy.”
The most ridiculous game Fight Like Apes have heard being played by other touring bands? “Having sex with each other. Loads of bands do that. We prefer Champ.”
* IT PASSES THE MINUTES
The Minutes, who play the Vodafone Stage at Oxegen on Saturday, are fans of "mind games" on tour, although they also admit to having a weakness for Fifa, Zeldaand slot machines. Sticking to computer games and gambling seems preferable to the strenuous game they heard Dizzee Rascal was playing recently.
“When he was on tour in the States, he would make the whole bus – band and crew – get out and do 40 laps around the bus every time they stopped at a service station,” The Minutes inform us, “because they were eating shite and playing Xbox, and Dizzee said no.”
The Minutes used to make up quizzes on tour, but not any more. “We tried to make up a game once on the way to Cork. The last question was ‘name all the parts of the fanny’. Never played that game again.”
So be it playing football with Delorentos or Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?on their iPhones with Royseven, stretching before going on stage with The Coronas via the art of hula-hooping, or trying to beat Twister experts Scouting for Girls, the art of the band game lives on, perhaps stronger than ever.
* The Strokes play Oxegen today; Foo Fighters, Arctic Monkeys and The Minutes play tomorrow; and Beyoncé, Fight Like Apes and Royseven play on Sunday
Banned games Worst tour games ever
The Crue versus Ozzy
In 1984, Mötley Crüe were on tour with Ozzy Osbourne. Cue some of the most ridiculous backstage games in history. After Nikki Sixx saw Ozzy drink his own urine off the ground, he had to take up the challenge to do the same. Fortunately for Sixx, Ozzy was so determined to win the duel that he got to Sixx’s urine first. Following that game, Ozzy asked Sixx for a line of cocaine, and upon hearing that none of the Crüe had any, he got back on all fours and snorted a line of ants.
“From that moment on, we knew there was always someone who was sicker and more disgusting than we were,” Sixx later wrote.
Doherty’s painting
Pete Doherty first started painting in blood on tour after a fan approached him and asked him to help him make some money. Doherty sent him a self-portrait signed For Alistair, Love Peter.
Led Zeppelin on their bikes
Racing of any kind by band members is probably not the greatest idea. But Led Zeppelin were never really ones for health and safety, racing motorbikes into the lobby of Chateau Marmont in Los Angeles in 1968.
Celebrity football tournaments
Anyone who pays good money to see Chipmunk, JLS, Robbie Williams, Dappy, Kasabian or The Cribs lump around a pitch probably needs to reassess their sporting standards.
