Mutton Bird up in the air

By DON McGLASHAN

On tour again. Will we have enough rehearsal time? Will Andrew Claridge, who's stepping in on guitar, fit in? Will anybody come to the shows?

First things first, though. The plane has to take off - in spite of it being impossible. They know it's impossible, that's why they get you drunk. It makes up for the sinister rattling sounds and the bad-tempered stewardesses and, anyway, it's traditional to consume all the booze and peanuts they can throw at you, at least on the leg to LA. Everyone knows that.

"The captain has turned off the seatbelt sign." Really? Why couldn't someone else do it? Shouldn't he be flying the plane?

Calm down. I wonder if anyone, ever, has locked an aeroplane toilet door behind them without thinking, "I bet they can see me from the cockpit," and scanning the ceiling for the hidden camera.

Back in my seat, and the inflight TV news is brilliantly inconsequential.

Here's a must-see: an item on an international finger-skateboarding competition. The thrill of flesh on 2mm plywood; the squeak of tiny wheels; the high-fives after a particularly tricky manoeuvre ... I'm so engrossed in that, I miss another impossibility. We cross the dateline and suddenly it's yesterday. Who are they trying to kid?

I begin to suspect that they're moving the seats together incrementally, a few millimetres at a time, so we won't notice. I'm sure my knees weren't touching the back of the seat in front when we left Auckland. I make a note to check in LA to see if they've sneaked in an extra row at the back of the plane.

It's been a long time since that bag of peanuts. What else is there to do?

The stuff you're given to read on aeroplanes is meant to relax you, make you feel affluent and sophisticated. There's a magazine called Long Haul Mall or something, full of the most amazing junk that you'd only want if you already owned everything remotely useful that had ever been invented - a CD player for the shower; an automatic rotating tie rack; a home snow-maker that connects to your garden hose.

Imagining buying these things makes me feel less empty-handed, more attached to the world, even though I'm stuck inside a metal tube 10,000m above the ocean, with no eftpos terminal in sight.

Brief touchdown in the US. Coffee, a magazine and a muffin costs a withering $NZ30. I sell the snow-maker to a passing religious zealot. He rips me off good.

Finally I get to London. I stay for the first few days in Wembley with Ross Burge, drummer. Even after four years living in this city, it all now seems unfamiliar; seething, exhausting, overwhelming.

Getting to Andrew's place takes an hour-and-a-half, which is most of the available daylight. He sounds great, though. Incoherent with jetlag, I dredge up everything we might play and a lot that we won't, but fail to find anything that he hasn't learned thoroughly. Aye, it's a wild and crazy idea, Captain, but it might just work.

Back down in the underground, the walls of the stations are covered with travel advertisements for places that the tube riders can escape to in their imaginations. Places filled with space and light, like the place I've just come from. That's impossible too, but I'm here.

* Mutton Birds' frontman Don McGlashan will be continuing his column on the band's British tour over the next few weeks.