Quite a few more updates for the week. These are in chronological order starting from the top to bottom.

BRIGHTON- Upstairs at The Albert Buzz put this one on so it was great of course. There were about 65-70 people there, and the room was a perfect size for a solo show. Everybody was sitting down at tables with candles on them, pretending to be civilized. The guitar player from the famous Brighton band, "Anal Beard" opened up followed by the Flying Marrows. The Flying Marrows, myself and Buzz are all heading out on tour together in a van that we rented from a friend of Buzz's. More on that later... I think I'm over my nervous hump as of the Brighton show, and I feel like I'm settling into the groove of being on tour again. The reception at the Albert was great. The Flying Marrow's mom and dad came to the show and gave me a cheese sandwich. Thank you. It was delicious. Their mom also requested "Favorite Song which I was more than happy to play for such a fine sandwich. We somehow managed to cram all the Marrow's gear and my gear and all our cd's and t-shirts into a cab after the show, and headed back to Buzz's house after the show.

Southampton- The Joiner's Arms
OK, so me, Buzz, and the Flying Marrows are officially on the road now. We drove to Southampton in our rental van, and the show was great. This guy John promoted it. He's a great guy and he's done lots of MU330 shows in the past. They fed us a pig plade of spaghetti and veggie chili. YUM! Southampton crowds are always freakin crazy. It was the first time I've ever had a pit at a solo show. It wasn't a violent pit, they were just kind of bouncing off one another gently, but it was still a pit, and it was really funny.
After the show, I drove back to Brighton! That's right, they let the American drive. I've never driven on the left side of the road. It was crazy. On top of that, the driver's side is on the right, and you've got to shift with your left! Crazy! On top of that, it was nightime, and pouring down rain! Yikes! We're still alive, but I really still can't believe it.

Newcastle Mean Fiddler
More driving, the longest drive of the tour was up to Newcastle. It wasn't really that bad though, and the show turned out great. It was in a little tiny basement, and I played without the PA. I just stood right down by the tables and sang. I like doing that, because it's more personal and I don't feel tied to a microphone or a guitar cable so I can move around a bit. A great band called Mavis opened up with an acoustic set, and we spent the night at the promoter's girlfriend's dad's house which was excellent! She made beans and toast for all of us when we got back to the house. Yum!

Darlington- Tap and Spile
Darlington was the smallest show so far, but one of the most fun. 46 Itchy opened up and they were funny and really a good,catchy, poppy punk/ska band. They would go over great in Japan I think. I played PA-less once again, and it was really fun.

Ok, so that catches us up. I'm in Stoke tonight at the Talbot... Well actually right now, I'm right across the street at an internet cafe. I'm not sure how tonight's show will go. Last night, Big D played, and tomorrow 5 knuckle are playing, so I'm kind of sandwiched between two kind of big shows for Stoke. We'll see! Love, Dan P.

Kingston
Last night I played with the Flying Marrows at a club called "Bacchus". It was weird being in that club, because MU330 played there on our very 1st Europe tour. Whenever I walk into a building that I haven't been in for years, I always get these flashes of memory that I thought were gone forever... details about the crowd that came to a show 5 years ago, or something funny that happened that night. It's strange, but for a lot of the tour, I've felt really close to the other members of MU330, even though they are on the other side of the world. I think I miss them all a lot, and I can't wait to see them in Dec.
The show went great. I went pa-less again, but the crowd was really big, so I really had to belt it out. There was a ska dance party after the show, and they were playing stuff like Catch 22 and Reel Big Fish, and then they played an MU330 song, LA, and eveyone was dancing and singing along. It was weird. A girl came up to me and told me that MU330 was one of her favorite, "Old School" ska bands. WEIRD!

What's in the Pasta?
So, here's an interesting touring story. MU330 first came to the UK/ Europe in 1998, and we played in a certain northern England town (which I won't mention) and had a really good show, and this one guy came to the show and had a really good time and danced around and was friends with lots of people in the punk rock scene in this Northern England town, and then MU330 spent the night at someone's house, and then MU330 went on about their business, and then the one guy eventually moved into the same house that MU330 stayed at, and then some switch got flipped in this one guy's brain, and he decides to chop off his girlfriend's head and keep it on the nightstand next to his bed for three days and eat a little bit of her with pasta, and then years later, after this one guy has gone away to jail for a really long time, Dan Potthast goes to this same small northern England town and plays a show and Dan and his friend Buzz and the Flying Marrows stay at this really nice girl's house, and Buzz asks this really nice girl about the crazy guy that ate his girlfriend and the really nice girl says, "yeah, I used to go out with him" and then she gets out newspaper clippings about the guy getting sent off to jail. Wow. Touring can be a bit strange.

Too Much Fighting on the Dance Floor!
So the other night, I played in Guildford at a community center with Ye Wiles (Who are absolutely amazing- the best ska stretching band I've seen in years and years!) and my buddies the Fabulous Flying Marrows. The place is totally run by kids, and there are no adults or bouncers or security people to keep watch over things, which is really amazing and cool and an ideal situation, until one asshole trys to ruin it for everybody. As the Marrows were setting up, some drunk idiot starts getting into a fight with his girfriend, and starts hitting her, and when people started trying to hold him back, he started swinging at anyone, and going after people, he wound up getting kicked in the head, and his head got split open, and he was bleeding all over the place, and they kicked him out and he wound up putting his hand through the community center door trying to get back in so he could hit his girlfriend some more. BONEHEAD! I hate any kind of violence, but especially violence towards women. It makes me sick... and I hate to say it, but that idiot had it coming. If you like to hit people.. DON'T COME TO MY SHOWS!!! I don't want you there, and nobody else does either!

Brighton - Concorde
The other night I played in Brighton with Big D, Ye Wiles, MDS, and Out of luck. The show was really amazing. I'm not sure how many people were there, but my guess is between three and four hundred. I love playing at the concorde. The last time I was there, MU330 played with the Subhumans, and it ROCKED, and this show was no exception. All the band were really great, and it was probably one of my favorite solo shows ever... ranking right up there with opening up for the Skatalites at the firehouse in St. Louis a couple years ago. It's weird to be overseas and have people singing along to my solo stuff... It's something I never in a million years would have imagined happening! Thank you's to Buzz for putting on an amazing show.

Gulliver's Travels
I went to the Brighton Aquarium today and met a seaturtle named Gulliver. He weighs 30 stone and they feed him broccoli and lettuce, because he's on a diet. He's in a tank with a lot of sharks, and sometimes he cheats on his diet if the sharks leave fish parts laying around. He lives in a big tank that you can walk right through in a tube, and he'll swim right over your head without thinking twice about it. Gulliver is an old man. In the 40's, he was the star of a palm olive commercial. The Brighton Aquarium is a spooky place. It's really poorly lit, and they play spooky muzak, and the fish and sea creatures just kind of float by and stare at you. It's a really old building and the ceiling drips on your head and the floor is wet in places. One of the rooms is really spooky. It's really dark and they have a model of a really huge giant squid, and these two tv screens that I think are supposed to be playing a movie about squid, but instead, all that was on the tvs was static! Polter-sqid! Spoooky!

Panic Room
Yesterday I had the day off and Buzz and Emma and Clive and I rented the movie Panic Room with Jodie Foster. It was no good. Clive thought Jodie Foster's daughter was a boy. That was kind of funny, but the rest of the movie wasn't that interesting. We should have rented that movie with the Crocodile hunter-guy.

Three news updates from the past week!

Big News! Sweets and Meats is here. It's 2 AM... I guess that means it's Halloween. I've spent the entire day packing, and I'm still waiting for my last load of laundry to dry. I leave at 6 AM. That's 4 hours from now. Crazy. I'm seeing stars. I don't get in to London until 8:25 AM on the 1st, so I pretty much just entirely miss Halloween, which is OK because I'm psyched to get back to the UK. Big thank you's to Miya at asian man. She really made sure that I got everything in time for this tour. Without her help, I never would have been able to get everything done in time. OK, I've got to go check my laundry. My dryer sucks and it's got to go through the cycle about 50 times to get the clothes dry enough to stuff into an already over-stuffed backpack. No sleep tonight. I will try and catch some zzzzzzz's on the plane. See you in the UK! Love, Dan P.

DP in the UK 2002
So, after spending the last four days hanging out in Brighton, trying not to get wet, I finally played me first show of the tour last night in Eastbourne. My friend Buzz and I hopped on a train to get to the show, and a couple of stations down the line, things started to go crazy. Loads and loads of people started cramming on the train. They were all headed to a town called Lewis to watch fireworks. It was Guy Faulks night. Evidently, in England, they have this holiday (which isn't really a holiday because they don't get off work) where people celebrate this guy named Guy Faulks, who threatened to blow up Parlament. They celebrate by blowing shit up themselves, and as the train got more and more packed, more and more explosions were happening, and I started getting a little nervous. Buzz told me that he went once, and he'll never go again. He said there was just this giant crowd of people packed shoulder to shoulder and fireworks were just exploding everywhere in the crowd and there was no place to duck for cover! Anyway, we skipped that stop, and continued on to eastbourne, and the people thinned out, and I started breathing easier, and I played a show in Eastbourne with No Comply at a small weird place to about 30 people. The show went well, but I'm not totally into show playing-groove yet, and I felt a little awkward and rusty, which I should get over in a show or two. No Comply graciously gave me and Buzz a ride back to Buzz's house after the show, and I slept under Buzz's steps, Harry Potter style. He's totally got the under - the - stairs cubby hole going on in his apartment just like HP. Well, I'm looking forward to the rest of the shows. Tonight I might hop up and play a few songs at the No Comply show at the Hobgoblin, but things really get kicked off on Frday at the Albert. Howzit! Love, Dan P.

A little bit of bad news...
The big show at the Garage with Flogging Molly... Well I'm not really on the bill. Turns out, I never really was. There was a bit of miscommunication. Flogging Molly is bringing their own tour support, and there's no room for me on the bill. Sorry to anyone who might have been planning on that show.
I hopped on the bill last minute at the Gargoyle in Brighton last night with NO COMPLY and MARTIN, and played a few songs in between their sets, and it was a lot of fun. The night was really perfect except for some crazy person who threw a gigantic brick through the front window of the Gargoyle, showering glass on a group of people sitting by the window, and cutting one guy's hand open pretty badly. Yikes! Looking forward to the show this Friday at the Albert. Love, Dan P.

So, last week was my second solo trip to southern California, and overall, it went pretty well, except for the first show in San Luis Obispo being cancelled due to a giant storm that knocked out all the power on the whole block that the club was on. Little boy Jason from "Short Round" and " the Chinkees" rode along with me and helped keep me awake while driving. I didn't know about the power outage untill after I had driven all day and stopped in town to call for directions. Thankfully Devon and a few bandmates from Saggin Bowl were waiting for me outside the dark club in the rain, and we went back to his parents house where his mom heated up turkey leftovers while we hung out in Devon's room playing super mario brothers and listening to almost every Asian Man CD in the Catalog. Thank you to Devon and his mom and dad for letting me and Jason crash on your couches.
The next day we met up with my frind Chris from Optimus Prime, and we hung out for a while shooting pool before we headed down to the Chain Reaction show in Annaheim. Thank you to Meryl for video-taping the show and sending me a copy. You are sweet! Thanks to Chris' ARA friend who let us sleep on his fold out couch and didn't even know us at all!
The next day, we had some time to kill, so we went to hollywood, and tried to find free tickets for a tv show. We found a guy that was giving out free tickets for the Tonight Show, but it didn't let out until 6:00, and we would have wound up showing up really late for the show at Filthy's in Lake Elsinore, and I didn't want to miss any of the opening bands so we had to turn them down. SHOOTZ!
The show at Filthy's went really great. It's probably my favorite record store in the World! We went out for Mexican food with the owner, Matt, and I had a big plate of enchilladas and rice and beans. yum! The opening bands were great, but unfortunantly, Immanag had to cancel last minute.
I drove straight home to Santa Cruz after the show in Lake Elsinore. (After dropping Jason off in Milpitas) and got home at about 6 in the morning. It was about a 7 hour drive, and Jason did his best to keep me awake by sleeping the ENTIRE way. Every once in a while he would snore a little bit too, to keep me from falling asleep and driving off the road.