Welcome to Australia, we realise that you have been travelling for almost 40 hours straight now, have gotten drunk and sobered up three separate times, now if you'll just follow me, I'll bring you to your next flight, when you land you'll have an hour and a half coach journey to your final destination. As our tour manager frantically looks around trying to move all sharp objects out of easy reach, we smile wearily and order another Bloody Mary.

Call it delirium but upon arrival everyone is so nice that getting pissed seems the reasonable thing to do. We meet our Australian surrogate mom (imagine Pippa from home and Away holding 6 bottles of red wine) who tries to force feed us coz we need to keep our energy up and we look tired (no, you don't say!) The next day I actually don't feel too bad and let’s face it the weather is beautiful, this place is beautiful and the Aussies like their music so the gig is a good'un. Also get to see MC5, Ash and Jurassic 5 so ‘hooray’ for the Splendour in the Grass festival. Although walking back to the hotel in the pitch black we conclude a more apt name may be Snakes in the grass.

We travel down to Sydney the next day for the first of two gigs and meet the Keane boys for drinks (this is a bit of a recurring theme!) and a pool tournament, it’s a draw coz they are very good and we are very lucky. The gigs are great, cool venue in Sydney called the Gaelic club and with Keane supporting the crowd certainly gets a treat, can you imagine that line up in a 900 capacity venue in the UK? Weird thing is our guestlist is massive because so many of our friends have emigrated there, I meet up with five old school friends beforehand. Melbourne is the same, great crowd, Keane were great, Tony the Tiger was great, note to self, buy a thesaurus.

Now we're off to the Fuji festival in Japan, another ten-hour flight. You'd think that because both countries are on the far side of the world they'd be closer than that but no and exhaustion is really becoming a factor! So apologies to the nice Japanese fans who met us off the flight but you're not really seeing us at our best! But come off it, snap out of it man, you're in Japan playing Fuji rock, its been an ambition of yours for years! We are playing mid afternoon and we pack out our tent, the kids are literally moshing as we hit the first chord, its going to be a very cool experience!

Couple of relatively chilled out days in Tokyo before heading back to Europe.  Did an acoustic show and signing in the Apple store, did some exploring of both the daytime and nightlife varieties. This trip nearly killed me but I wouldn't have it any other way.

Love Markpatrol