In this special guest article, John Patrick Elliott of The Little Unsaid reflects on tour life . Their new album, Stay Fragile All Across This Cold Frontier (reviewed here), is out now (Order here: https://ffm.to/stayfragile).
It’s a grey winter’s morning in 2011, the end of my first successful band tour, and I’m ankle-deep in faeces on a pig farm somewhere off the M3. I’m about to get threatened by a farmer before eventually finding a working phone to call for breakdown recovery. We will then spend the entire profit from gigs and CD sales on getting towed back to London, because it turns out we forgot about breakdown cover, the van is truly knackered, and it’s a bank holiday, so no nearby garages are open. After my first taste of the adrenalized highs of tour life, it’s a stinking moment of back-to-earth realisation; the world owes you nothing for your precious little songs, and touring is actually really fucking hard.
Fast forward fourteen years to this autumn, and I’m on the road again. Older, marginally wiser, and with a different group of musicians that have been dedicated collaborators and friends for ten years of tour life. No more post-show all-nighters in dive bars, no more sleeping on the floor of the venue in a soiled rag. No more dodgy vehicles and pig farm reckonings. It’s so very un-rock-and-roll, but now it’s all about the purple-glow comfort of a Premier Inn bed, giving our best to the music and the audience, and Googling where to find the nearest decent coffee en route to the next show. And yet, despite more discipline, more know-how and a bigger audience, we have not reached the once dreamed of heights of luxury tours with a shiny tour bus, a crew and actual profitability. I’ve often felt that since my first tour, the world has been systematically rewiring itself to make touring life even more impossible for independent artists, and this is largely confirmed by our experience of touring as a band this autumn.
Since the massive shift in the live music scene post-2020, it’s been harder for bands like us to make touring feasible. The double whammy of post-Covid audience drop-off, along with an increasingly strangled arts sector, with small music venues and organisations closing or being completely unable to take risks with their programming, the odds have been stacked against independent acts that want to get out there and connect with their audience. We started making a new album in 2024 to celebrate ten years of us being a band, and when it came to booking a tour to promote the record we committed to a plan of eight shows in places we’ve had sell outs on previous tours, as a kind of victory lap and to show our love for the audiences that have supported us all these years.
So, after a two-year hiatus, myself, Alison, Mariya and Tim – joined by Ana on bass – pile into a hire van and giddily hit the road. Despite the victory lap M.O., the first gig ends up being in a town we’ve never played before. Ticket sales are low, but it’s busy enough to not feel as awkward as some shows we’ve done where the band outnumbers the audience (we will meet again one day, Aberdeen…). Almost all the people who’ve come to see us are new to our music. This is at first unsettling as we acknowledge we must try win them over, but it also fills us with hope. Here’s an audience that’s taken a punt on discovering some new music, and all of them come to the merch table to chat to us warmly afterwards. Amidst a live scene increasingly dominated by tribute acts, the fact that this venue has put on some independent alternative music – and that people have turned up to see it – is simply magnificent to us. Under a big orange half-moon, we load out in a state of exhausted satisfaction; we came to play and connect with people, and it worked. All is right with the world. We then crash back to earth as we arrive at our Travelodge and mine and Tim’s twin room absolutely reeks of stale piss. “Unfortunately, there are no other rooms available,” the receptionist tells us as she hands us a can of air freshener with an apologetic smile.
I remember tours of old where I had barely any sleep, drank far too much, ate nothing but service station sandwiches, and still managed to feel energised by the whole adventure of it all. Perhaps following my adolescent dream of existing outside normal society with its responsibilities and routines filled me with excitement and a sense of artistic purpose. The romanticised troubadour life seemed to offer a way of escaping the 9-to-5 trappings I’d feared since childhood in my small town. This was the life I’d imagined when getting lost in the mythologies of my favourite artists as a teenager; the rock star as outsider, as nomad, as ever-wandering pilgrim in search of those heightened moments of musical ecstasy. Touring has always been about the tension between that road-life myth and the reality of being a small, underground band self-managing a travelling small business, doing everything from driving to merchandise to management to promotion ourselves.
The first few days of the tour pass in a zombified daze as that familiar exhaustion kicks in and my body clock churns itself out of my new fatherhood schedule. Half way through every gig, I realise I’m up way past my bedtime and wonder if I’ll be able to sleep in past six tomorrow. Singing some of the older songs now in my late thirties is a physical feat too – all those quick-fire, high-pitched verses and belted choruses; what the hell was my twenty-something self thinking? Bastard. But a few days in, I suddenly feel my tour-fitness kicking back into life, and it’s both enlivening and strangely emotional to be singing old songs alongside new, and I sense some sort of strange narrative thread running through the patchwork of my songwriting from the last fifteen years. After the third show, someone approaches me at the merch table to tell me they saw our band on every tour alongside their closest friend, who has sadly passed away since our last show in their town. She says the music meant the world to her and she felt as though she was sat next to her once again tonight as she watched the show, and she grabs my hand with tears in her eyes. I well up too, and all my tiredness falls away as I remember that we are here in service of this magical thing called Music that guides us back to the beauty within life, death, grief, all of it, again and again. The strange liminal routine of tour life is now fully upon us, and we are all embracing it. Hotel checkout, countryside softly scrolling by at the window, a city emerging on the horizon, the burst of energy that comes with the afternoon load-in, soundcheck and showtime. It’s a feeling of restless contentment I will always love.
We’re sitting in the dressing room before the next show, me faffing with a broken eyeliner pen and the others getting dressed up and looking fantastic. Mariya suddenly looks up in thought and reminds me that the last time we played this particular venue, she had a major family crisis going on back at home in Bulgaria, and that I left the stage at the end of the gig to immediately drive through the night for a funeral back in my hometown. We sit in a shared moment of wonder at how our past selves got through a tour amidst so much personal upheaval, and I realise that touring is not an escape from Real Life’s obligations and obstacles at all. It’s a job, one full of heightened emotions and extreme experiences, but a job, which, like any other, you do your best to get done despite life’s heartaches. Our latest album, Stay Fragile All Across This Cold Frontier, is about the necessity of remaining open and vulnerable to that heartache just as much as life’s beauty. It’s about choosing to not close yourself off and harden in the face of the incomprehensible darkness we see in the world around us, especially in these times. The album’s words were mostly written in a kind of subconscious state, and only now, performing it on this tour, is the full weight of its themes coming into focus for me as we travel the country and fall into that state of natural vulnerability that tour life demands.
By week two, even after a couple of rest days back at home, I’m missing my ten-month-old son terribly. With a few hours spare between gigs one day, I hurtle back to London on an early train to grab a few hours with him. I’ve never experienced this kind of separation before, and it’s one of the reasons this tour is short. These first months of his life move fast, and I want to be around as much as possible. Extended tours are therefore a thing of the past for me in reality, at least for the foreseeable future, so this anniversary tour feels special, a kind of goodbye to an old chapter and a welcoming of something new. On the one hand, it’s a relief, but it’s also a sad farewell to a way of life that has been the foundation of my music career and my approach to living as an artist. I vaguely wonder to myself sometimes mid-gig, as I’m thrashing about and yelling into the microphone, when my son is a bit older, what would he think of his dad doing this? Will he cover his eyes and ears in embarrassment? Will he think I’m a cult rock star? Will he be totally indifferent? Either way, I know I’d like to retain some kind of aspect of this performer’s life as he gets older, if only to show him there are alternative paths to the ones presented to you by wider society and the education system in this country that is forever sidelining the arts (appallingly, some schools don’t even teach music anymore). He might not care, he might want to be an accountant for all I know, but that’s beside the point. I want him to see who I am, who I’ve been, how far I travelled to get here, and that there’s a value beyond currency in pursuing your passion with your entire being, no matter what the world outside tells you is the right path.
After a couple hours of reviving playtime and Wheels on the Bus renditions, I leg it to our London show, which unfolds like a raucous, booze-fuelled whirlwind in the gold-glitter shadows of the legendary Moth Club (another vital venue currently under threat of closure). The gig is sweaty and loud, my ears are ringing, but my tour fitness is in full swing now, and we’re feeding off the energy of this rowdy audience. Post-gig, we have to frantically break down our equipment straight away and get the hell out because the venue turns into a nightclub within one hour of our show finishing. This is less than ideal, but to our amazement, we manage it, loading the van within an hour of striking the final chord of our set. I remain endlessly proud of our little team; it’s all hands on deck every moment of every day on tour, and yet again, we work against the odds to do our jobs and leave all the venue staff with a smile and our thanks for hosting us. We make a point of acknowledging every single person we come across in all venues, from the bar staff to the cleaners to the ushers to the technical team. It’s just a natural thing for us because it takes every single person to keep these venues running and make the show a success. Some of the band stumble off into the Hackney night in search of kebab salvation, I take the tube home amongst the drunken nightlife of London and manage three hours’ sleep before my son wakes up and wants to crawl about and sing some more. I’m now truly exhausted and suspect I’m getting sick, but the journey is approaching its end, and as we make our way north for the final show, I scoff multiple easy-peelers and feel nothing but gratitude for this whole adventure.
Playing our music in various countries has been a ticket to some of the most wonderful, challenging, life-affirming experiences I’ve ever had, meeting people of all kinds who welcomed our little band with the sort of kindness and spirit that truly revives your faith in humanity. Tour life is a condensed kaleidoscope of experience, of highs and lows, failures and triumphs, mashed together in a whirlwind cocktail of compressed time and hyperactivity that is spiked with nightly shots of adrenaline to the soul. It’s a heart-filling headfuck, and it’s no surprise that it takes a toll on many artists’ mental health. Our band has struggled on with tours, and we continue to struggle because we live for the connection that comes along with it every night, and in acknowledging the murky mess of this kind of life, I’ve relaxed into that struggle so much more. If our faith in the music is the centre of gravity and we remain passionate to share it, the obstacles can be not only tolerated, they become part of the soul-growing journey of it all. The late great Anthony Bourdain puts it so much better than I ever could: “Travel isn’t always pretty. It isn’t always comfortable. Sometimes it hurts, it even breaks your heart. But that’s okay. The journey changes you; it should change you. It leaves marks on your memory, on your consciousness, on your heart, and on your body. You take something with you. Hopefully, you leave something good behind.”
Sheffield welcomes us with characteristic Yorkshire warmth and wry humour. We have fun bantering with the audience, and the gorgeous Lantern Theatre, with its old-school music hall atmosphere, has a beautifully surreal, David Lynch-esque atmosphere to end the tour in style. The audience are on their feet as we take our final bow, and I’m waiting for the sentimentality about this being the end to hit me, but it doesn’t for reasons I can’t quite pinpoint. Instead, I’m overwhelmed by a humongous shared sense of achievement in the band that we reached the end of the tour unscathed, and have sparked so much good spirit, imaginative energy and positivity from audiences and those people fighting the good fight in putting gigs on. All of those people who came out to support us, and those involved right from the stages of booking to actually hosting us on the night, are keeping the lifeblood of independent music alive in this country, and it’s utterly reviving to see it happening first-hand.
Touring is a vital part of pursuing the craft of music. Of course, you can make music and not perform it at all, or perform only locally to a familiar audience. There is huge value in this. But if you want your music to stretch beyond the boundaries of your own world and further into different communities, and to push your creative instincts beyond your own personal confines, you have to get out there and play for people all over the shop. The internet will not do this job for you, no matter how surprised we are to find our music being streamed in a country I’ve never visited. This is not the same as going to a place with your songs in your suitcase and sharing them openly with strangers night after night, and taking whatever response you get with you as you continue the journey. Touring has simultaneously almost killed my music career and saved my creative life, time and time again. Since I was a child, a life in music seemed non-negotiable, and travelling to play it for people just always seemed part of the deal. Even after some of the most brutal tour experiences, I never really questioned the ‘why’ of it all. I now believe you can’t truly embrace music’s full significance to our culture and our inner lives – celebration, catharsis, ritual, honouring tradition or pushing our imaginations into a brighter future – by just pushing a play button on your phone. You have to get out there and share it with other people in the flesh, in a sweaty club, in a pub, in a field, anywhere you can find it.
I think back to my pig farm epiphany at the end of my first tour in 2011 and get the feeling that I was right about touring in most ways. It always was, and still is, incredibly tough for independent artists. But this tour has completely reframed what that toughness means for me; I now believe that taking your own music on tour is a crucial act of surrendering to the vulnerability that is at the core of who we are as artists. Vulnerability not as weakness, but as a choice; to not harden ourselves in the face of adversity and the brutality of the world around us, but to head out with your wounds open to the elements as an artist should. As the poet David Whyte puts it, “When we run from vulnerability we run from the essence of our nature; the attempt to be invulnerable is the vain attempt to become something we are not and, most especially, to close off our understanding to the grief of others.” An independent artist setting out on tour to share their work is falling into the unknown, and so many factors are often working against them. Perhaps no one will buy tickets, and the resulting financial ruin will be a clear indicator of how little the world values the art you put your entire soul into. Perhaps people won’t respond to the music in the way you’d hoped, and it will be painful. Perhaps you will get sick, miss home, miss your loved ones, and amidst the great onslaught of global news with all its doom-laden ferocity, you can’t bear to be uprooted, exposed, and without your favourite slippers. And despite these risks, we still hit the road, because we have to. Should the world come crashing in and things go horribly wrong, we let ourselves get hurt, we grow, and, with any luck, our work will grow and evolve alongside us, too. If there’s one thing I’ve learnt from touring, it’s that we must embrace our vulnerability and use it as a force of creativity, empathy, and recognise its likeness in every single person we cross paths with on the journey. This is all part of the soul-growing job of being a lifelong artist, and, actually, just being human.
John Patrick Elliott
All photos by The Little Unsaid
Stay Fragile All Across This Cold Frontier (September 26th, 2025) Carbon Moon Records
Order here: https://ffm.to/stayfragile
