In the summer of 1998, I was in the process of recording my first record album.
Snorkie Release on D*Fusion Records
I was signed to ‘Amato Disco’ and had to travel down to London for recording sessions.
Meanwhile, my partner was becoming frustrated with living in rural Herefordhsire, so, I suggested she take ‘time out’ and join a friend who was about to explore Canada after finishing Universisty.
Contact was extremely difficult due to the vast distance between us, there were no mobile phones and no permanent address. After a couple of weeks I decided to join her, not wanting to miss out on the fun.
I managed to quickly scrape together the cash, and within a week, the tickets were bought, passport renewed and backpack & sleeping bags borrowed from my brother. The record album was put on hold, and some of my music equipment had to be sold to fund the trip.
Hawkwind
The Lakes from above
On the flight across, members of legendary space-rock band ‘Hawkwind’ were on the flight, and their groupies were getting drunk. We chatted and I handed them a demo tape of a friend’s band.
We touched down in Toronto and the coach soon departed for the city centre, I was greeted with cross town traffic, bumper to bumper.
The wide busy lanes reached out to the impressive hazy skyscraper horizon. I alighted at the busy downtown district and, racing through busy streets of suited office workers, with my heavy back pack on, beads of sweat dripped from my forehead. Would I make the last train to Montreal to meet my partner? She was keen to move on and I had no ‘plan B’.
The Wrong Backpack!
I missed the last train.. and the last bus, not only that, I had picked up the wrong back pack in the airport.
Hawkwind Spacerock
I resigned myself to catching the midnight coach and left a message with my partner’s youth hostel to inform her of the delay.
At the ticket office, I reached into the backpack to retrieve my wallet, but in its place there was a beige bikini top? It was an identical bag but with a Maple Leaf sewn on to the front – the thing had been on my back since the Airport.. I had collected someone elses flippin backpack!
Luckily, I had several hours before my new departure, enough time to hoof it back to the terminal and swap it for the right one. As I approached lost property, I was unnerved to see Hawkwind waiting there, thankfully, not for the bag I had picked up. The band’s guitars had gone missing.
I finally caught my midnight bus, and I awoke to a huge and intense sunrise as we cruised into the Montreal suburbs. I flicked through the radio stations on my Walkman for company, and as daylight broke, the neon signs blurred through the misty windows of the coach.
Montreal
Montreal Sunrise
To my great relief, my partner arrived at the bus station with a large grin on her face, we hugged, and then began the short walk back to the youth hostel.
The hostel was a basement of a hotel, and as I descended into the darkness of the male dorm, a smell of sweaty feet and farts overwhelmed me, bodies lay beneath a stillness of bed sheets in the crisp Canadian heat. My first job was to open a tiny window hidden behind security bars; the morning sunlight, and warm summer air, christened the stale fausty room!
Heatwave
There was a heatwave in Canada that year, and I discovered that you could run a cold tap as long as you liked in Montreal and it would still run warm, but I soon acclimatised to the heat, the city was alive, waiting to be explored!
Jello Jazz Bar
We toured bars and clubs at night, from dingy rock venues to dodgy hip hop joints, where the local rude-boys carried walking sticks and danced around them- we visited some great bars, playing cutting edge house music and drum & bass! Montreal is a diverse musical city. Rockerfella Skank by ‘Fatboy Slim’ had just been released and it could be heard everywhere.
We toured the city by day, sampling crepes and sipping coffee at the foot of skyscrapers, we walked parks and viewed the city from up high. But time was passing, and we decided to head back to Toronto.
