Johnny Foreigner on hitting the road and revisiting the DIY circuit

I should start this off with a potted history of our band and how, all things considered, we shouldn’t really exist in 2025. I mean, we had a good run. We signed a Proper Record Deal in 2007, and within a couple of years had made two records in America with Grammy-nominated producers, criss-crossed the globe touring them and ticked off our teen dream bucket-list goals. We’d just about become used to referring to ourselves as “full-time musicians” when the magic supply of other people’s money ran out. I mean, it wasn’t all our fault as much as the machinery of the record industry itself collapsing around us, empirically devaluing songs as currency. But also, it is fair to say, we did not achieve the expected levels of fame and fortune.  

It’s a common and boring tale, and the point during most bands’ existence — most of our friends’ bands’ existence — where they’d accept that they had had a good run and go and get proper jobs. We collectively lacked that middle-class sensibility. We turned down an option for another album with our Proper Record Label, signed (actually, not even signed, just shook hands in a pub. And it was probably a hug not a handshake) with an indie label called Alcopop and made a 19-track third album in our practice space called Johnny Foreigner Vs Everything, which was released in 2011.  

We didn’t have the contacts, the career, or the pipeline to be the next Bloc Party (“guys, just give it another year…”), but we had enough demand to not quite run at a loss. Touring was restricted around part-time jobs, but we managed by sleeping on floors in the US, Europe, Japan and South Africa, powered by merch sales, goodwill, favours and an unhinged level of self-belief. But mostly merch sales. Our visual artist Lewes joined the band in 2012 as a second guitarist, we released two more albums, and had become what the music press called a “cult” band, which is a kind way of saying that our review scores were probably never going to backed up by actual popularity.  

In 2016, we were playing a support slot at our local, the Hare and Hounds in Birmingham. At the end of the set, I threw my prized white Telecaster, bought in Tokyo in 2009 with advance money, as high as I could into the rafters, sad but totally accepting that our journey as a band was over.   

It wasn’t just the money. We’d been broke-ass idiots for years before the band, adept at functioning on zero pounds and sleep, but a confluence of Real World Progress and existential crisis brought about our demise. Kelly was recently married and expecting her first child, while Junior’s daughter was at the “why are you ditching us to go away on tour, Dad?” stage, and it’s a crappy friend that insists they trek to Bristol to play to 30 people on a rainy Tuesday instead of, y’know, being a good parent and partner.  

Also, what is a 40-year-old failed musician supposed to write about? All around us, younger and hungrier bands, from Crywank to The 1975, had gone from being cute lil fans at our shows to making their own vitally relevant music. We were just taking up space, for egos. Me and Jun had a side project two-piece called Yr Poetry, and my persona in that band was Grumpy Bitter Alexei. I enjoyed that role. The Alexei of Johnny Foreigner, obsessive about girls and architecture and being a young hopeless drunk, was a dinosaur — just another cishet guy with silly hair playing a Telecaster and singing about being friendzoned, to diminishing returns on all fronts.  

We turned down so many offers of reunion shows. My real job is as a merch person for actual famous bands. I’d be there watching Pavement or At the Drive-In as they performed slightly slower, note-perfect renditions of the songs that built me, to a slightly bigger but slower, older, balder, fatter audience. Pop music — our music — was all about the hectic, magic now, and I never wanted to tarnish our legacy for anything so base as a bit of money, and I wasn’t really sure that I could write us the songs to buck that trend.  

Post Covid, two seismic changes happened. Alcopop got the rights to re-release our first record on 12”, and Jun nagged me enough to renege and do a big reunion. I agreed, with a couple of Grumpy Alexei caveats: to write two new songs a year that we could inhabit and promote alongside the nostalgia bait, and no more pressure. No more stressing ourselves out that we hadn’t booked enough shows, that we hadn’t made enough social media content to promote the shows, that we had to take shows we didn’t want in order to make rent or turn down shows we did want ’cos we couldn’t afford them (for example, show fee: £100, but van/driver/gas cost: £300, money lost by four people not showing up for their day job: £DoNotDoThisMath). If the whole thing failed, I could stick my fingers in my ears, say “I fuckin’ told youse” and just enjoy the 40 minutes of fun each night. Those two new songs kinda sucked, btw. You’ll never hear them, but the buzz from creating them — the ‘why we do this’ spark — hadn’t diminished, so we carried on for funsies.  

And then the second ground shift. In 2022, I fell in love. The kind of head-over-heels LOVE that makes you see the world brighter, walk lighter, make sense of the binfire we inhabit and sketch a bunch of songs about the weird magic of the universe. And there’s no one in the universe I trust more to turn those sketches into a living record than Jun, Kel and Lewes. Real punx don’t get to choose.    

So, we find ourselves at the start of 2025 once again with a Pitchfork-rated new album, How to Be Hopeful, having returned from a righteous Japanese tour, ready to dive into the decaying UK toilet circuit we once called home. It’s barely a tour by our younger selves’ standard, where we’d play 200 shows a year and still find time to write and record, but it’s still eight more shows than we ever really planned on doing.    

Jay from Crywank is a longtime friend and fan, and even though they know their band is the more popular, they book and promote the tour as a co-headline. It means guarantees are split, so we can afford crew, spares and pre-booked hotels instead of begging the audience for floor space. Crywank are a rare band, exemplifying the best of what independent artists can be and mean to their fans, while utterly rejecting the machinery that sees their grassroots-venue status as a mere stepping stone to the megadomes and radio playlists. We sound nothing alike, but gosh, we vibe hard.  

Our touring party comprises us four idiots, our old friend Evan from The Superweaks as driver and tour dad, Ben from Team Lazerbeam, our longtime VJ who transmits animations and imagery to a backdrop screen via sweat-drenched keytar onstage with us, and Pandora, the person I am wholesale besotted by/in love with/excited to grow old with, who is doubling up as merch guy. Even if these gigs are a bust, and we crash the van and lose all the money, this is going to be an insanely enjoyable and privileged holiday. 

The rented van is box-fresh. We do not have the best luck with box-fresh vans. This is mild foreshadowing. So, please join me as we take a trip down memory lane while making some new ones. 

LONDON

First stop, London. Not just London but Camden, the crass commercial historical capital of boys with silly hair and Telecasters where we have played 100 times before. Most of those venues are either gone or been rebranded now. The one where we mini-bussed our friends in to increase the audience; the one where The Proper Record Label first foresaw Big Things for us; the one where we had to take turns sitting in a freezing van ’cos we smashed the window ’cos we locked the keys inside; the one where Ben’s girlfriend and now-wife first befriended us and insisted we meet. And three Camden Crawl shows from 2009 and 2010 that we were never paid for, before the festival went bankrupt in 2014. 

Somehow, we never played Dingwalls before though. Like all first nights, it feels sketchy and unrehearsed and saved by the joyous enthusiasm of the crowd. We’re hyper aware that we are not the star turn on this run, the front few rows all being Crywank fans staking their barrier spots, so we’re trying to conduct ourselves like venerated cool old folks. Less in-jokes and indulgence, more smoothly play the hits and pretend we are professionals. We can’t afford to use the in-house projector system, so we set up everything onstage, rock out carefully, and drive back up to Birmingham to sleep in our own beds full of tentative, creeping realisations that this tour is actually gonna be awesome.  

MANCHESTER

 Next up, it’s the UK’s real second city, and thanks to a bunch of incredible Camden Crawl But Not Ass-style festivals, such as A Carefully Planned Festival and Manchester Punk Festival, somewhere we always felt confident schlepping to after we discovered there was so much more to the city than Oxford Road, which is home to all the Academy venues and Big Hands. Compare and contrast how MCR monetises and feeds back the hype from their local success stories to our Birmingham where we just… don’t.  

Rebellion is an awesome venue: the projection screen is huge, the stage is wide and sounds incredible, the audience wants to move and be moved. Even a support band playing at 7.45pm gets to feel like they’ve done something significant.  

We drive halfway to the next show and stay in a hotel that promises “excellence as standard”, and while that was a complete lie, it is by our standards. One time, we played Manchester on tour with The Futureheads, and asked the audience if anyone would let us crash. The first responder promised us a multitude of spare rooms, rich parents away for the month, then disappeared to party there without us. The second stayed till the end but then stole from the merch stand, so we slept flopped and cramped on van seats in a service station. Standards are relative.  

Evan really wants to see some Classic English Countryside, so in the morning we drive to a car park on the top of a muddy, rainswept peak and let him walk off that particular pipe dream. Touring is basically being excited to visit a place full of new sights and experiences, then not venturing more than a block from the venue.  

LEEDS

Not just Leeds, but the Brudenell Social Club, a family-run, independent venue that, for thousands of touring bands, acts as a glowing beacon on touring schedules. Venue owner Nathan will look after you: you will be fed; the show will be promoted and sound great. We have supported our heroes here throughout the years. It’s where I crowdsurfed and had my mic stolen, where we once had a 20-minute mid-set break, sharing joints and rider gin in the car park when our sound man pushed the PA a little too hard. It also has a piano in the corner, so we start the set there and make a beeline towards the stage; a (shameless stolen from The Mae Shi) trick that definitely works better when the room isn’t sold out and 350/400 people aren’t more confused than enchanted.   

At the end, Evan and I are packing the van, and turn round to see everyone else hugging folk and signing things — some dudes travelled from America to finally see us play, a few kids who would have been actual children when we first came here, and someone in full diy merch. I want to burn that image on my retinas forever.  

BIRMINGHAM

A local taxi driver once told me that you can never be a hero in your hometown, and he was right. I immediately get fined for smoking outside the loading bay. Brummagem will forever be the old — the place we’d return to after months on tour to find our social circles had moved on without us and our roofs were leaking.     

Our first manager Darren now runs a campaign to save Station Street, a historic city-centre strip that includes the shells of the Victoria venue, and the country’s first cinema, The Electric. We wake up to learn The Electric has been denied listed status and is now that little bit closer to becoming the kind of bland and well-out-of-my-price-range-anyway apartment high-rise that we have spent all this time writing pissy songs about. That’s Birmingham, bab.  

The Hare & Hounds, though, is a total jewel in a non-embarrassing bit of the city that we have collectively been playing for longer than we haven’t. Our “last” gig was here in 2016, our third in 2007, using borrowed guitars and piles of gaffer-taped-together books in place of drum legs. I first played on this stage, frivolously underaged in a terrible band, in 1996. It’s become our local for Christmas shows and album launches. Basically, this building has seen the absolute worst (and best) of every iteration of us, so it’s pretty glorious to get to play it with all our bells and whistles and Ben, and even more refreshing to meet folk after who ask if we really are from Birmingham, like we were just doing it for a bit.  

We might sound great, but I am, after all this time and cynicism, still caught out by breaking strings. My white Telecaster, now acting as backup and in an act of revenge eight years in the making, breaks right when I need it, so I use the backup brown one, and am very mindful to carefully wipe it down and recase it at the end of the night. We go home and sleep in our own beds — not very tour but a nice treat.  

TROWBRIDGE

An actual town we have never played before, possibly as it seems to consist of an island with a Toby Carvery, a Subway, and one-and-a-half venues. (“Venture no more than a block” — sorry, Trowvegas.) We’re in the half-venue which doesn’t have a bar or toilets, but does have an awesome PA, a balcony and an in-tune piano. I brazenly walk the balcony in the first song to find it’s just the spot where the cool kids hang out. I have this weird flashback to when I was their age and also hung out at the back of popular gigs in eyeliner and homemade T-shirts for bands you’ve never heard of, sassily judging the touring acts passing through. I’m a man in my forties singing a piano ballad about things you should have worked out in your twenties, so I definitely don’t score well. I retreat downstairs and excuse my way to the stage. It is (physically) tight and sweaty and joyous — what a rad venue.  

BRISTOL/SOUTHAMPTON

A matinée and an evening show on a route we’ve weirdly encountered before. Touring with Los Campesinos! in 2008 and barely surviving on the (generous by those days) £100 support fee, we played the last date at The Joiners in Southampton, then rushed to Bristol for a £600 Club NME late show to balance the books. The Los Campesinos! show was as predictably awesome as the NME show was awful.  

Bristol’s redeemed itself many times over with the Exchange though, and the inhouse crew is way more used to multiple shows in a day than we are. Everything runs so smoothly, we soon realise the only thing to worry about is if people will show up and, if they do, will we mess anything up? Then, 400 people casually show up at 1pm to lose their shit like it’s nothing, and we feed off that positivity and emphatically don’t mess up anything. We break down our gear outside in the sun as Crywank plays and cool Bristol people buzz around us. It’s such a lovely vibe. Being on tour is a series of discovering lovely vibes, then immediately packing your life into boxes and fucking off.  

Southampton is pure Groundhog Day, spent re-riding the rollercoaster we just exited: load in, rock out, leave. We’re big fans of The Joiners, the first place we ever saw graffiti of us that we hadn’t drunk-scrawled ourselves, and even though there’s not enough time for our traditional nap in the luxurious dressing room, the gig feels (musically) tight, and we squeeze out all of the fun. Lack of sleep has a stage banter quality all of its own.  

Evan wants to see some Classic English Coastal Town, so since today involves so much driving anyway, we generously let him take us into the night, to a halfway village with a name way too English to take seriously enough to remember. We’re staying in marina lodgings, so he gets to hear — if not see — the lapping waters as he navigates our huge van along pitch-black slipways. We have, weirdly enough, been in this exact situation before on the other side of the world. When touring America in 2012 with Los Campesinos! in a brand-new ‘Strictly Canada Only’ Winnebago, we ripped the roof off in a marina somewhere in Louisiana, only noticing when we finally drove past a streetlight that we’d developed a shark fin silhouette of torn and bent metal. It’s a worthy anecdote now, but it crippled us; that unexpected debt took 18 months of gig fees and T-shirt sales to pay off. In its own stupid, gargantuan way, that’s what taught us how to be self-sufficient, how to work as a DIY cottage industry with a mostly minus profit margin, and to accept that we might never actually see money from this band, but also that that isn’t necessarily a barrier. We can still, now as then, create something that we love, and that resonates with rooms full of strangers. DIY in this context stands for Do It With A Bunch Of Other Small-Time Nerds Who Are All Just Here For The Joy Of It, and it’s why tours like this, with the multiple hotel rooms and back-up amps and employing our friends and playing to full rooms of joyous strangers, seems like such a surreal privilege. What I’m saying is, when Evan returns the van and a few days’ later we get a £500 bill for mystery dents and scratches, it doesn’t even slightly kill the vibe — just a few more T-shirts to be sold. Any story with Evan in it is worth paying a premium for anyway — we’ve been so lucky to be reunited.  

BRIGHTON  

There is one last show, though! Brighton is where most of the new record is set. Pandora lives a block away from the venue, so obviously fate dictates this is to be our final stop. We have long been romanced by the gayest of British seaside towns, but it’s always too fluid to say we’ve established ourselves here. From countless Great Escape industry showcases to Alcopop’s legendary 16-hour residencies at the Pav Tav, to the Washed Out and Sugar-Free Festivals, we are veterans of these rooms whose names change every few years. We’re mostly sober these days too, so we can actually take it all in.  

For the last time, we peek at the barrier pre-show, and it’s full of eager Crywank fans packed into their spots and politely waiting. It’s been a different and thoroughly addictive vibe. This isn’t our audience that knows us, who will indulge in legacy banter and forgive us for momentum-killing technical issues. They know us mostly by lore alone and are fresh sets of eyes and ears ready to be impressed by something new. And after this many shows, we feel impressive — relaxed and capable.  

I want to remember more than I do. I want to feel all calm and zen onstage, watching the climax of this carefully orchestrated and planned and mapped and managed and rehearsed chaos, but I don’t. It’s all snapshots that my brain randomly saved while concentrating on pedals or tuning or pitching or not getting the chorus words to the big hit single wrong. They might well have leaked in from other gigs: the brim of Ben’s keytar, surfing waves of hands as he’s ten rows back and dancing; fleeting glimpses of Lewes’s smile onstage not corresponding with the amount of blood on his Telecaster; bending down to peer at a setlist, hoping my sweat hasn’t obliterated the pedal instructions I’ve obsessively noted in a quest to reduce “things I worry about onstage”, so I can, y’know, take it all in. It’s neither a hometown nor a home crowd, but such a warm and wholesome final night and one of our favourite (best) B-Town shows.  

And then, just like that, it’s over. Someone changes the WhatsApp group chat name from “Crywank tour 25” to “future tour”, and we are spat back out into the real world for the summer.

Taken from the June/July issue of Rolling Stone UK, out now. Order your copy here.