Trolley Fails, Nose Posing & The KW Pharmacy: Kingswood On The Road In Canada

It’s cold in Canada, colder than Ballarat cold, but snowless so there is no payoff. It’s easy to strip down to your jocks and weather the cold when you can Goldberg spear tackle a snowman to the ground. We are however, very pleased to once again be in Canada. It is a beautiful country full of kindhearted, content people, who love their Prime Minister like the Thai love their King… Loved.

We are here to play seven shows as main support on the July Talk tour. The band and crew were a tremendous bunch of people that put on a great show and looked after us on and off the stage. Canadians certainly drink like Aussies, so we all got along swimmingly.

The shows went well above our expectations. People filled the theatres every night as soon as the doors opened, so by the time we went on the rooms were well into party mode.

We spent most of our time in Toronto, driving back after the London and Waterloo shows — we love that city. We’ve been and played there before so its becoming evermore familiar. There are parts of the city that feel like Brunswick Street, in Melbourne, so we felt right at home, and it has a pretty sick live music scene. On our only night off for the whole tour, our friends The Dead Loves, a band from Sydney, were playing down on Queen Street so we caught their show and caught up with The Lazy’s too who are recording a new album in Toronto. So really, on our day off we went to a place that feels like Melbourne and hung with a few Aussie bands.

After the London, Waterloo, and two Toronto shows we headed east to French Canada. Montreal is a city I want to spend more time in, it has a grungy ghetto feel to it. A city where you have to know the right places to go or you can think you are in a post-apocalyptic film. But it has a strong arts and youth culture and even an area called Gay Town celebrating the LGBTI community. Outside the Ballet Theater a group had set up an area where you can sit opposite a stranger and gaze into their eyes without talking as a means of connecting without speech or text or touch. On the other hand it’s a rough town, the lads from Sticky Fingers played the same venue (Club Soda) a week before us and warned us, as some dude ran into their bus and stole a bag, however just before he jumped out, a car rolled by and took off the bus door nearly killing him. They got their bag back, but the door didn’t make it.

We were pretty much in and out of Ottawa, so not much to report here I’m afraid, but if I did it would surely pale in comparison to Quebec City, my favorite place in Canada for sure. This place is very French, only two years ago the state of Quebec nearly voted for its independence. Montreal is more half half, but Quebec City is totally French town. Alex did a fantastic job in learning a few French sentences, which the crowd appreciated; I still don’t know what he said. Maybe they don’t either, maybe they were just being kind. Anyway we finally found good food, good coffee, the cobblestone roads lead to cocktail bars and restaurants and little boutique shops. It was our last show and we had grown close to the July Talk team, you should all check this band out, they should be releasing and touring here soon and definitely worth your time. We had goodbye drinks till the early hours then drove to the airport and slept in the car before our flight home. Quebec – Newark – Los Angeles – Bris, where we landed at 6am, drove 4 hours and played a show in Chinchilla, QLD.

Canada was too short, but we will be back there next year after the album is released. We had a ripper of a tour and miss that place still, but it's always the greatest feeling to come back home and go straight into a tour playing for all our friends and fans who built this circus and continue to make it roll around.

Kingswood have just announced a new album and tour dates.