Sasha and John Digweed Tour: personal notes

Sasha and John Digweed Tour: personal notes

2 May, 2008 | 3.32AM

• Section: Music News Topics: Sasha & Digweed Tour 2008
• Written by: Industry Boy

Here’s the long-awaited, final wrap up of Industry Boy’s North American tour with Sasha and John Digweed. 

Below you’ll find his personal notes and musings on life on a tour bus with two of the world’s most renowned DJs.

Thanks for following Beatportal’s Sasha and John Digweed tour blog, we hope you liked the coverage.

Sasha and John Digweed Tour: personal notes from an embedded observer

When I was packing for three weeks on the road with Sasha and John Digweed I threw into my suitcase multivitamins, headache pills and hangover cures.

Did I need them? Yes; but not because the tour bus was a riotous, party central.

The pills and meds was simply a way to combat the grueling, intense travel.

Just being in a club five nights a week till 3am, then being couped up in a pitch black bunk bed all night to awake early afternoon in another city was enough to throw the body out of sync completely.

Add a Subway diet into the mix, truck stop grub and alcohol and what you were left with was a body in a mess.

Dehydration, lack of sleep and irregular sleep patterns just made things a bit worse.

But that is the lifestyle of the touring DJ and admittedly, it’s incredibly unhealthy.

What’s hard to believe is that we did it for just three weeks, whereas this is Sasha and John Digweed’s life.

Yes the Spring Club Tour was more intense and had more gigs and more travel than the average working week for the DJs, but all the same, it is amazing to think they’ve been doing this for the best part of two decades.

Sasha and John dealt with the pain of touring quite differently.

Sasha was hardly ever on the bus, and flew home to New York a lot after gigs to be with his wife and his newborn baby - the best way to deal with those long arduous drives was to not do them at all.

A running joke amongst the crew on the bus was the fact that Sasha was never there – on the second to last date Sasha even had to ask how to turn on the light in the bathroom which goes to prove how little he lived on the bus.

Both Sasha, John and the crew had hotel rooms every night and only Industry Boy slept on the bus.

“I think the last tour bus they had was real shitty,” said Blake the bus driver one day. “I think they thought this bus would be the same, so they booked hotels for the whole tour.”

Sasha’s lifestyle though has changed quite a bit since his marriage and the recent birth of his son.

Sasha has a reputation for being a hell raiser and stories and rumours have been circulating for years about missed flights, canceled gigs and rock star-style binges, but backstage during the Philadelphia show he admitted “I’ve calmed down a lot.”

A former PA to Sasha once told me that he quit because he couldn’t put up with being responsible for getting Sasha out of bed anymore, but Sasha was never more than 20 minutes late for a bus call during the tour.

During the entire four weeks of the tour, he partied just once – in Vancouver, after a set that he seemed particularly pleased about.

“It’s really bad, but I play so much better when I’m wasted,” Sasha said after his set.

“When I’m sober I think about so many other things before a gig like putting my friends on the guestlist, the lights, the soundsystem; but when I’m wasted I don’t think about anything except my set.

“All I think about is the next mix and building my set, and all my energy goes into the music.

“It’s really, really unhealthy but that’s just the way it is.”

After the Vancouver club closed, he dragged a group of us to a local’s house in the suburbs and we drank till dawn, but he still made the 10AM bus call.

That night was the only sign of Sasha’s former hell raising years and other than that, he was a quiet, reserved man.

On the days that he was on the bus, he’d watch football and cheer for Liverpool.

The only exterior emotions he’d display would be when he showed off photos of his son on his mobile phone whilst grinning – he’s a very proud father.

In New York just as the bus was about to leave for Washington DC, Sasha’s wife and their newborn baby turned up, and Sasha posed for a photo with his son next to the bus.

It was a touching family moment, and showed that beyond the world of DJing, Sasha has and wants to lead a normal home life.

John Digweed was nothing but professional during the tour.

He was never late, did the entire bus tour without complaining and after every set disappeared immediately back to his hotel room to get some sleep.

“I’m here to work,” Digweed told a reporter during an interview at Coachella Festival.

“It’s my job to be on time and to DJ to the best of my ability.”

Partying was definitely not on the agenda for anyone on the tour - in Toronto the tour manager was livid after he caught Industry Boy on the bus with some girls (well; somebody had to milk the tour bus hook up).

Later on the tour he explained his position.

“I’m not an asshole; it’s just that looking after nine people is a hell of a lot of responsibility,” said Patrick Tetrick.

“We can’t afford for anything to go wrong, and having random strangers on the bus is too much of a liability.”

There were no rock star moments, then.

The only time there was a full-blown party on the bus was after the final set at Coachella Festival.

With the tour over there was nothing left to do except celebrate, so the champagne and Patron flowed freely (one famous unnamed DJ unrelated to the tour ended up puking up in the bathroom, much to the dismay of the driver Blake).

I stepped off the bus in Los Angeles around 5AM on Sunday, and watched as John Digweed legged it into his hotel in a flurry.

Sasha was asleep in his bunk on the bus.

There was no big goodbye, no group hug or group photo.

I was a little disappointed as it was a bit of an anti-climax to the whole experience.

But as I sat in the back of a cab driving towards a hotel somewhere in L.A. pondering about those flying three weeks, I realised something.

This is Sasha and John Digweed’s life and for them at least, there was no point saving the memory or recognizing the end of the tour – tomorrow they’ll do it all over again some place else.

Industry Boy was merely an observer, a fly on the wall and as the sun began to rise once more, I popped a multivitamin and wondered if there would be a hangover tomorrow.

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