By DON McGLASHAN

Steve, our manager, has found us a practice room in the centre of London. It's more light and dry than the place we always used in Holloway Rd, but it still has pin-boards covered with the familiar tragic ads: "Kick-ass bass player wanted for up-and-coming band. Influences: Suede, the Beastie Boys and Janis Joplin. No time-wasters."

After a few days I go to stay with friends in my old neighbourhood, which means I'm coming into the city on the Northern Line again.

Rehearsals finished, we leave for five shows in Wales, Scotland and the North. The first gig is in Wrexham, North Wales. On the way, in the traffic jams around Birmingham, we pass a median strip with a stunted outcrop of shrubbery on it. Almost hidden in the bushes, we can see a tent, with gas bottle and TV aerial. Surrounded by miles of busy exhaust pipes, it's a strange symbol of grit and eccentricity.

Wrexham is pretty, if you don't count the people. It's Friday night, and I'd forgotten how large Northern lads and lasses like to squeeze themselves into undersize bits of latex and leather, get lathered, then stagger around looking for a fight, or someone to go home with, or both. We keep our heads down.

The gig goes well. Ross [the drummer] has given up smoking, and he's as wired as a suspension bridge.

That, and the energy that Andrew [the new guitarist] is bringing to the songs, makes us louder than we've ever been. While You Sleep is so full on that no one could sleep through it without industrial sedatives.

We drive north the next morning, through Cumbria, and heather the colour of rust. Dry stone walls marking divisions between long-dead neighbours - occasionally a tiny cottage with smoke curling from a chimney.

It reminds me of Central Otago, but I know it's the other way round. Generations of Britons went out and peopled the world, and we grew up stuck in their homesickness like ants in honey.

Onstage at the Liquid Rooms, Edinburgh, I'm having a bad gig. I can't hear which notes to tune to in the squalling, rumbling storm of each song; can't remember how to stand or think of anything to say to the audience. And yet the place is full and jumping, and people come up to me afterwards and rave to me about how it's the best they've seen us in the five years they've been following the band.

Scottish thriller-writer Ian Rankin collars me to tell me he's named his next book after The Falls, a song from our latest album. He's excited, speedy and wants to tell me the whole plot right there and then. Unable to quite follow his accent, and still cloth-headed from the gig, I mutter thanks and flee to the hotel.

In the morning I skip the traditional Scottish continental breakfast and go for a run up the Royal Mile, down past the railway station, across Princes St, to the New Town. To my right, every long street finishes in the pale, grey sea at Leith. The castle rises histrionically out of the rock like a Lord Of The Rings promo still.