On’t Road #11

By Luke Positive Bastard
www.myspace.com/positivebastard

This is actually the first issue of this zine, but Luke decided to just continue the numbering from the pervious zine he’d been working on. As someone who gives his zines numbers that don’t really correspond to when they come out I can fully support this.

Luke travels a lot. Or at least that’s what I thought when I first read through this zine, however checking again it seems that his adventures are spread over a couple of years, so he’s not going to other places constantly. Still, he clearly loves to travel and see new places, and his zine is a pretty good view into parts of his life.

The first part of his zine is about a UK tour Luke helped organize for the band Hero Dishonest. Later on there’s an account of the same band’s tour of the USA which Luke also went on. It’s interesting to contrast the two different styles of touring. Touring America mostly seems to involve driving for incredibly long hours, and eating lots of terrible food, while the UK is so small you can go home after shows (woah!). I’ve never gone on tour (or been in a band), or even gone on this type of roadtrip with other people, but they’re both fun reads.

Luke also writes about a trip he took visiting some of his friends in some countries in central and Eastern Europe. Reading it, and about all the European punk bands that tour Europe (including the UK), is kind of insane to me. Everything is so close together! It really drives home the isolation of the place in Canada where I grew up after my family left the UK. (It was over 1000km to the next town with more than 100,000 people).

There’s also an account of some of Luke’s interactions with the police over the years, some stuff about minor league football/soccer matches (Luke really likes football), and a bunch of album reviews I will admit I didn’t finish reading, as they generally go over my head.

Still, despite a few of spelling errors, On’t Road is definitely worth reading if you like reading other people’s travel stories, and I certainly do.