Tour Diary: Montaigne & Her MonTeam Tear Up Western Australia

Montaigne is currently speeding round this wide brown country of ours for her Clip My Wings tour and has put together this frank tour diary of the Western Australian leg, exclusively for Music Feeds! Grab the rest of her tour dates below.

The first show of the tour at Jimmy’s Den in Perth! I’m probably talking about how I got stuck in my room and ate glass oatmeal that morning. I’d also left all my stage clothes at home. At least I remembered to bring that nice crop Beginning Boutique gave me otherwise I was wearing my pyjamas on stage lel.

Band setting up all the stuff at Mandurah Performing Arts Centre, the second show of the tour, while I sit and read my book. Listen, I ask them if they need help every time, and they always reject it. A bit sexist, really.

Meeting some fans after the Mandurah show. Well, are they fans? I’m pretty sure they didn’t know who I was before I played, but then they heard me play and now they’re asking me to sign a bought EP. Maybe they are fans now. Yeah, I guess so. These were all lovely people and I chewed their ears off with my prolonged conversation. Thank you to you guys for coming and letting me do that.

This was the morning of leaving for Mandurah – Niall (my keyboard player) has a mate named Dom Monteleone who owns this studio space called Kingdom Studios – it was super epic. Very inconspicuous on the outside. They talked in numbers while I admired the colour of the paint job and the number of buttons and knobs and dials in the room, because in all things engineering I am inept.

Our flight home from Perth was delayed so Miles had a bit of chill time on the floor of Virgin Lounge.

Here I am performing at Lake Kawana! This was a cool gig. Nice stage. I liked the clothes I was wearing too, the sleeves made me feel fancy. (Top from Georgia Alice and pants from Thursday Sunday).

This young lady took photos at the gig and also declared herself a big fan. I love meeting people, we had some good chats.

Part of my rider at Lake Kawana. My rider was $100-150 with no alcohol allowed (I don’t drink it anyway) so the band brainstormed what we could put on. We put on reasonable things, and then things we put on for fun because they were unorthodox rider requests, and they got us all the things anyway, including tennis balls, toothbrushes, saffron, pine nuts, and all the things here which I now eat for breakfast daily back at home in Sydney.

We had a seven hour drive to Rockhampton from the Sunshine Coast. Miles thought this was pretty funny. If there’s one thing I know, no one wants to get off at Cockburn Central.

We have a tradition of taking two types of photos in the Monteam – ones of band members sleeping, and ones of band members when they are unaware that a photo is being taken, and we then zoom in unflatteringly on certain facial parts in the photo. Here’s Miles asleep on the road trip.

And here is me asleep on the road trip. My lower back has been injured ever since.

The only photo I saw surface from the Rockhampton gig. The Pilbeam Theatre is very beautiful, and we played to it in reverse – the audience sat at the back of the stage, with the tiers of seating behind us. This was a wonderful gig to play, because everyone was right into it, including an 11 year-old girl named Kyah, whose first live gig EVER was this one. Really nice.

(This one might be a bit much but I’ll throw it in just in case). Gus used to play for Papa vs Pretty and he told us that whenever someone was late for lobby call, everyone used to text the tardy party “now cunt”, and so a subconscious decision was made by all to appropriate the gag. It happens that Gus was late to lobby call on the morning of our flight home. Voilà.