taken into little booths and questioned. They want to make sure that you’re not going to try and overthrow the established order. I ticked a box on the immigration form that said this was not the purpose of my visit, but the official was suspicious. And I suppose she was right. As I stood outside the airport, waiting for the next thing to happen, I started to feel that travel is the great adventure. I was glimpsing the world beyond the one that I knew and getting a sense of how big it might be.
A sense of vastness looms in Canada. We mainly have towns in the British Isles. Even London gives the impression of being a town. It’s built on the human scale. In North America they mainly have cities. Even places that could really be quite small are built along supergalactic dimensions; skyscrapers and ten-lane road networks with flyover systems that look like scribble. I’d never thought of Toronto, particularly, and here it was, enormous, in an enormous country.
I went down to the hotel restaurant for breakfast, alone. I was trying to work out what an English muffin was, and whether to have that, or an omelette. It was nice to be ordering breakfast in Canada. I was quite content there, alone, studying the menu. Someone was looking at me. He came over and said he was from the record company and hi there. I said oh, hello, I was thinking I might just have a look around the city today, and wouldn’t that be nice? He straightened up and said, ‘Well, sure thing. Perhaps we could do that after dinner and before the show.’ And gave me a list and said, ‘Here’s your promo.’ It said something like:
ALEX JAMES PROMO SCHEDULE, TORONTO, OCTOBER 1991
Press
0930 Scenester , music glossy - 45,000 readers
1000 Toronto Sun , daily broadsheet -1 million readers
1030 HMV In-store magazine - record store giveaway
1100 Glitz n Bitz , women’s glossy - 120,000 readers
1130 Break
1145 Phoner with Halifax Echo , regional daily -100,000 readers
Radio
1200 Alex and Damon to CFNY, syndicated national radio I/V
TV
1330 Meet Dave and Graham at MTV for acoustic set
1500 Arrive venue Lee’s Palace for soundcheck
At Venue
1700 Meet and greet with competition winners
1800 Dinner
2100 Showtime
After Show
Meet and greet with EMI staff and key media.
It was only 0900 so I went back to my room and called Cousin Dick, who lived in Halifax, Nova Scotia, a couple of hundred miles away. I hadn’t spoken to him since I’d sat on his knee and watched Tom and Jerry . I said, ‘Dick, it’s Alex James, Jason’s son. I’m in Toronto!’ He said, ‘I know, it’s in the paper.’ We were evidently quite famous in Canada. That didn’t make any sense at all. We’d never been there or anything. I went upstairs to be hot-wired to the media main.
Journalists are all quite clever, often cleverer than I am, I find. When they don’t like me it really annoys them that they are clever and they are getting fifty pence a word and I’m an idiot with a fancy haircut and getting all the money and all the girls. It’s best not to talk to those ones. Generally the cleverest ones work for the papers with the stupidest readers. These papers have the biggest circulations, so they can afford to pay the most. That’s how it works.
There is a knack to doing interviews. It’s mainly a knack thing, the interview, like playing the bass is. We didn’t quite have the knack, yet. It takes a while to come. For addressing the press there was a big suite on the top floor of the hotel, The Plaza on Bloor Street. I like that hotel. It’s a tall building and the sun screeches in. The first interview was with a music journalist, and we talked about the Undertones for ages. He loved the album, and couldn’t believe he was being paid to talk to me. I ordered some Bloody Marys for us. It was nice.
The man from the Toronto Sun was interested in our controversial artwork. I said it wasn’t controversial, it was a pair of tits. He wrote that down. I
A sense of vastness looms in Canada. We mainly have towns in the British Isles. Even London gives the impression of being a town. It’s built on the human scale. In North America they mainly have cities. Even places that could really be quite small are built along supergalactic dimensions; skyscrapers and ten-lane road networks with flyover systems that look like scribble. I’d never thought of Toronto, particularly, and here it was, enormous, in an enormous country.
I went down to the hotel restaurant for breakfast, alone. I was trying to work out what an English muffin was, and whether to have that, or an omelette. It was nice to be ordering breakfast in Canada. I was quite content there, alone, studying the menu. Someone was looking at me. He came over and said he was from the record company and hi there. I said oh, hello, I was thinking I might just have a look around the city today, and wouldn’t that be nice? He straightened up and said, ‘Well, sure thing. Perhaps we could do that after dinner and before the show.’ And gave me a list and said, ‘Here’s your promo.’ It said something like:
ALEX JAMES PROMO SCHEDULE, TORONTO, OCTOBER 1991
Press
0930 Scenester , music glossy - 45,000 readers
1000 Toronto Sun , daily broadsheet -1 million readers
1030 HMV In-store magazine - record store giveaway
1100 Glitz n Bitz , women’s glossy - 120,000 readers
1130 Break
1145 Phoner with Halifax Echo , regional daily -100,000 readers
Radio
1200 Alex and Damon to CFNY, syndicated national radio I/V
TV
1330 Meet Dave and Graham at MTV for acoustic set
1500 Arrive venue Lee’s Palace for soundcheck
At Venue
1700 Meet and greet with competition winners
1800 Dinner
2100 Showtime
After Show
Meet and greet with EMI staff and key media.
It was only 0900 so I went back to my room and called Cousin Dick, who lived in Halifax, Nova Scotia, a couple of hundred miles away. I hadn’t spoken to him since I’d sat on his knee and watched Tom and Jerry . I said, ‘Dick, it’s Alex James, Jason’s son. I’m in Toronto!’ He said, ‘I know, it’s in the paper.’ We were evidently quite famous in Canada. That didn’t make any sense at all. We’d never been there or anything. I went upstairs to be hot-wired to the media main.
Journalists are all quite clever, often cleverer than I am, I find. When they don’t like me it really annoys them that they are clever and they are getting fifty pence a word and I’m an idiot with a fancy haircut and getting all the money and all the girls. It’s best not to talk to those ones. Generally the cleverest ones work for the papers with the stupidest readers. These papers have the biggest circulations, so they can afford to pay the most. That’s how it works.
There is a knack to doing interviews. It’s mainly a knack thing, the interview, like playing the bass is. We didn’t quite have the knack, yet. It takes a while to come. For addressing the press there was a big suite on the top floor of the hotel, The Plaza on Bloor Street. I like that hotel. It’s a tall building and the sun screeches in. The first interview was with a music journalist, and we talked about the Undertones for ages. He loved the album, and couldn’t believe he was being paid to talk to me. I ordered some Bloody Marys for us. It was nice.
The man from the Toronto Sun was interested in our controversial artwork. I said it wasn’t controversial, it was a pair of tits. He wrote that down. I
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