“Munich” was suggested by SDIR super-subscriber Scott Kelsall during our last Great Apes survey. We’re going to open up a new recommendation window next week — make yourself or your AI Agent a paid subscriber to participate in the shaping of history 🌍
We’ve made many good musician friends plying this trade, but the ones you meet in your early days leave the deepest mark. Wet behind the ears, excited and terrified in equal measure, hungry for knowledge, or even a sip of broth, the young band is terribly impressionable. Early support tours can just as easily forge a gaggle of goons as they can a gang of gentlemen. Woe unto the baby band who falls under Morrissey’s sway. Say a prayer for the fledgling musicians who end up on a Jonas Brothers tour.
We got lucky. Two tours with Editors in our first year out of the gates taught us The Knight’s Way. Honor, justice, mercy in strength and courage under fire: such was their code, instilled by a firm hand. We learned it well. It’s why we are, to this day, considered the nicest and humblest of the “very handsome” bands; why we’re always ready to share our beer with an orphan.
Please enjoy today’s trip to Munich — not Munich, Germany, but rather, the Munich of the mind 💭
CHRIS: Keith, it was back in the sepia-toned, simpler days of 2002 that an unassuming student act going by the name “Pilot” played their first adorable little show to friends from the Staffordshire Uni Music Tech program. A few beers, a few laughs, certainly some promise, but after all, how often do these things really lead anywhere, you know? Huh? How often, really? Pretty much never, right? Chances that this band would amount to more than a pile of dry beans: basically zilch. Can we agree on that? I mean, YOU certainly believe that to be true, right?
THAT BAND WAS EDITORS.
Keith, ya frickin’ dumb-butt. “Pilot” would go on to become “The Pride,” who would change their name to “Snowfield,” who would finally, like Leonardo DiCaprio in The Man in the Iron Mask removing his mask to reveal that he is Leonardo DiCaprio, become E•D•I•T•O•R•S. (I saw it written that way once on a shirt.)
Yes, the boys from Editors met at uni, in this case in Stafford, England, not too goddamn far from Birmingham, while studying in the Music Technology program. Two years of incubation and rapid-fire name changing was all it took before these dudes had inked a deal with bitty-label Kitchenware, and in January, 2005, they released their debut single, “Bullets.” It did juuuuuust fine, teeing up its LP-mother The Back Room nicely (which entered the album charts at #13), and they were all psyched up and ready for their first proper tour that April, which would be a co-headline with hotshot Los Angeles dance rockers The Moving Units. Yes, and they had an ace up their sleeve: their new shockwave of a single “Munich” would hit the airwaves during the tour, and by god if that wouldn’t splinter some skulls.
Except then the impossible happened, Keith — or at least what looked to be the truly unfortunate. Moving Units called, on a Tuesday, I’m guessing, and they didn’t want to know if Editors were interested in grabbing a getting-to-know-you pint before the first show in Cardiff. No, they wanted to tell Editors to fuck off. Perhaps not in so many words, sure, and perhaps it was their agent who called, sure, who was probably calling Editors’ agent, Steve Zapp, sure. In my experience, you can put any hat you want on a pumpkin-size pile of human excrement, Keith — be it Borsalino or Stetson— and it still smells like shit. The Moving Units were pulling out of the tour.
Moving Units wanted Editors, né Pilot, to eat a bowl of putty bolognese. It’s ironic, or at least surprising, that they ended up feasting on veal. The tender calves in question were, of course, We Are Scientists. Already scheduled to open the tour, we gamely jumped into the main support slot, and the rest is QUITE LITERALLY history. No headliner would ever speak four words to a lowly ‘first on,’ so if Moving Units hadn’t dropped out, we’d probably never have really known the guys from Editors. Instead, as main support, we emerged from the four week run their friends, their counselors, their co-dependents; their students, their teachers, and their spiritual husbands.
I distinctly remember walking into the room at Stealth, the tiny club that’s I believe still part of the Rescue Rooms–Rock City complex in Nottingham, and hearing Tom soundcheck “Munich” unaccompanied on the mic. “Boys got a set a’pipes!” I said to you, with a glance instead of words. And, then, by raising my eyebrows a fraction, “Cool song.”
What do you remember about that tour, Keith?
KEITH: Chris, I hate to contradict you, boy oh boy. You know I hate to — I’m justly famous for my deep humility. I don’t relish my always being right. “Just because I know it all doesn’t make me a know-it-all,” I say to the throngs assembled before me, etc.
But I gotta say, I think you may be misremembering the chronology, here. We did play Stealth on that tour, and you did comment enthusiastically about Tom’s vocal soundcheck, and you did later apologize to the Nottingham crowd during our opening set because “our guy can’t sing like that, not if he took a thousand vocal lessons.” But I’m pretty sure that Stealth wasn’t our first show with Editors on that tour; I think the first show with those boys was at the Oxford Zodiac, and the reason I remember that is because the Oxford Zodiac is where my amp exploded.
This was our first UK tour, and, frankly, we were a bunch of goddamned rubes. We didn’t know about Pizza Express, for Christ’s sake (the first Pizza Express for WAS was the Marylebone franchise across the street from the Baker St. tube station — for a bunch of PE virgins coming straight from Heathrow off a trans-Atlantic red-eye flight, it tasted like a 10/10). To save a few pounds on a hotel, we booked rooms at a place in Battersea, not anticipating that the decision was ultimately going to cost us hundreds of pounds in cumulative cab fare. And, perhaps most idiotically, we assumed that a US-to-UK plug adapter did more than just change the shape of the prongs. At the Oxford Zodiac, I plugged the amplifier I’d flown with us from New York (WHY??) directly into the wall, and 220 powerful British volts promptly fried it to hell.
In our first glimpse into the magnanimity of Editors, they immediately and unreservedly offered their aid. Guitar-guy Chris Urbanowicz generously granted me the use of his very fine Vox AC-30, and because at the time I was using the built-in drive channel on my Fender Deville for distortion, he also loaned me his Ibanez Tube Screamer overdrive pedal. If anyone noticed that Editors and We Are Scientists had the exact same guitar tone on that tour, they were too polite to mention it.
But, Chris, something else I remember about that tour was the first instance of We Are Scientists covering “Munich.” Do you recall the scenario? Hint: it was not at Stealth, in Nottingham.
CHRIS: I think I just hadn’t listened to Editors’ set at the previous three shows, so had literally NO CLUE what they sounded like when I shuffled through Stealth’s stage entrance that afternoon, a Vantablack pair of extra-large sunglasses keeping all but the faintest light from reaching my swollen ‘balls, my guts audibly sloshing gastric juice flavored by the previous night’s Lambrini (like the Tube Screamer, courtesy of Urbanowicz) — hung over, in other words, and badly, from several days of unrestrained living. It was in that state that Tom’s angelic baritone pierced my cage of pain and gave me the first taste of diurnal pleasure I’d had since crossing the Atlantic. He may have saved my life. I changed my ways; been sober ever since.
Well, okay, I did keep drinking some, so I’m not entirely sure about this performance of “Munich” you’re referring to. I remember that Tom maybe lost his voice one night and we played an extra long set…? in… Lincolnshire…? Was it something to do with that…? And the thinly-sliced rider meat we cast into the crowd?
KEITH: I might be wrong, but I think that fateful, meaty (to help assuage the pain of Editors’ last-minute cancellation, we played a full set and threw Editors’ hospitality rider cold cuts to the crowd — they ravenously devoured both) Lincoln show was on our second UK tour with Editors. But I’m being a pedant — an ignorant pedant, and that’s the worst kind.
But yeah, we wasted no fucking time covering “Munich.” We heard it once and knew it would be the perfect song to pad our set, which at that time (months prior to the release of With Love and Squalor) was maxing out at like 35 minutes, tops. Obviously, playing the headline act’s big single moments before it was going to anchor their own set is a major tour faux pas. We may have been idiot babies fresh from suckling our first Lambrini, but even we knew that. So we saved it for our one headline show on that tour, which just happened to be on a day off in Editors’ hometown, Birmingham.
Why the hell we played our own set in their town in the midst of a full Editors tour, I have no idea. Maybe they had some sort of radius clause due to a big hometown show on the horizon? Maybe they couldn’t play in town because their creditors would see the ads in that week’s NME and swoop in to collect their cash or pound of flesh? Who knows.
But the Editors boys were there. All tour, Russell (bass guitars, hearty laughs) had been thrilled at the prospect of teaching his new idiot pupils about Birmingham’s famed Balti Triangle. After our soundcheck, he walked us to the storied neighborhood of densely-packed god-tier Indian restaurants, and we feasted. Coincidentally, that was the day we learned maybe the most important of tour lessons: you never eat a curry within like twelve hours of showtime.
Afterwards, the whole Editors gang came to the show, making up about a third of the total crowd. And how did we thank them for their kindness, their generosity, their tutelage? We played a half-assed version of their golden single, having “practiced” it only verbally on the van ride to the venue. Russel’s laughter competed with your thunderous bass. Chris Urbanowicz gawped and gasped at my guitar heroics. Ed, Editors’ extraordinarily polite drummer, called out corrections to our time signature. Tom grimaced at my castrati’s equivalent of his baritone bellow. The audience, recognizing that their local heroes were in the room, pretty much spent the performance watching them, ready to flee if one of Editors flew into a rage and decided to burn the place to the ground.
But I think they loved it. Surely, we were the first band ever to cover an Editors song. And, honestly, in my demonstrably-crumbled memory, Editors played “Munich” with twice as much ferocity at the next show. They knew they had competition.
