Prima Queen – made up of core songwriting duo Louise Macphail (Bristol, UK) and Kristin McFadden (Chicago, USA), plus their three live pals – have not long got back from a lovely jaunt around the UK with recent Dork cover stars, The Big Moon. They had a great time, and offered to put together a tour diary for us. So we said yes please, and ta-da – here it is. You can catch the band at London’s The Shacklewell Arms on 29th April, and at Green Man this summer. Keep an eye out for a new EP, too.
We started the tour in Bristol which was amazing because Louise is from Bristol so we felt like we were on home turf. We’ve been fans of The Big Moon for a long time, so felt very nervous as you can see from the picture of Kitty trying to be chill in our dressing room before we played. Even though the whole tour was completely sold out, we didn’t know how many people would get there early to catch our set, but when we walked on stage we saw that the room was packed. One thing that we learnt on tour was that The Big Moon’s fans are all really really nice people and are such great audiences.
This was the first day we had our van and Tour Manager, Charlie, who started calling himself ‘Papa Queen’ as a joke. Unfortunately for him it really stuck throughout the tour and we kept forgetting that it was a bit weird and would call him that when we were out and about (and got some weird looks). We’ve never had our own van before so that was really exciting – especially because it had curtains and a table we could sit around (which Louise promptly fell on/broke somewhere between Liverpool and Edinburgh so we had it confiscated by Papa Queen). After the set, we were packing up our equipment backstage and someone from the crowd came up to us and said: “my girlfriend is a big fan, would you mind if we got a picture with you guys?” (which we thought was really nice, but were surprised about). After we took the pictures they said, “We really love your second album!” and held out The Big Moon record for us to sign. Suddenly we realised they thought we were The Big Moon and we had to awkwardly tell them they’d got the wrong band, haha.
The drive to Edinburgh was gorgeous and it was snowing as we drove through the Lake District. We didn’t get to spend much time in any of the cities but definitely know a thing or two now about motorway service stations, the best being the legendary super fancy Tebay which we highly recommend (shown in the pic above). Our bassist Kitty broke up with her boyfriend 20 minutes before soundcheck, which she was really upset about but we consoled her and told her it was very rock and roll. Onstage we told the audience what had happened and asked them to buy her a drink and we all tried Buckfast for the first time after the show.
We ate a lot of food on the way to Nottingham – the most questionable being the poached eggs/nipples (seen in the pic above) from the cafe in Tesco (3/10) and the best being either Subway’s Meatless Marinara (6.5) or Burger King’s Rebel Whopper, which we rated a whopping 7.5/10.
Louise’s film camera got messed up somehow and about six pictures combined in the picture above. If you look closely you can see a cowboy hat, us playing in Nottingham, and something Big Moony in the top right corner. Kristin is also holding our beloved Kit Vision (a knock off temperamental GoPro donated to us by Lucy’s dad) which you can expect to see some footage from soon. We didn’t really know how to work it for the first couple days so there’s quite a lot from the insides of our bags and some very close close up upside down candid shots of Lucy trying to turn it on.
In Oxford we ended up going full-on fangirl for the show and all wore our Big Moon merch in celebration/sadness of it being the last night. It was probably our favourite night of the tour because The Big Moon invited us on stage to sing with them during their song ‘Waves’. Little did they know we had been singing that song all week in the van with Papa Queen, so luckily we were all quite well-rehearsed. The best part about the tour was probably getting to watch The Big Moon play every night – we feel like there’s a Big Moon-shaped hole in our hearts now that it’s over.
This was the first day we had our van and Tour Manager, Charlie, who started calling himself ‘Papa Queen’ as a joke. Unfortunately for him it really stuck throughout the tour and we kept forgetting that it was a bit weird and would call him that when we were out and about (and got some weird looks). We’ve never had our own van before so that was really exciting – especially because it had curtains and a table we could sit around (which Louise promptly fell on/broke somewhere between Liverpool and Edinburgh so we had it confiscated by Papa Queen). After the set, we were packing up our equipment backstage and someone from the crowd came up to us and said: “my girlfriend is a big fan, would you mind if we got a picture with you guys?” (which we thought was really nice, but were surprised about). After we took the pictures they said, “We really love your second album!” and held out The Big Moon record for us to sign. Suddenly we realised they thought we were The Big Moon and we had to awkwardly tell them they’d got the wrong band, haha.
