You Me At Six: Dispatches From Warped Tour, Part One

Josh Franceschi checks in from the road during his band's endless summer, and in the first part of our web-only feature he tells us why the weirdness of Warped is perfect for him

Warped Tour, for all intents and purposes, is completely fucking ridiculous.

Pitched somewhere between a travelling crèche for man-boys (the bands) and a zoo where neon-clad zombies get drugged up on energy drink until their eyeballs fizz (the punters), it’s simply one of the most surreal experiences for anyone from the UK to dive into. Our festivals are either sweaty dustbowls or sodden mud-swamps somewhere near suburbia where barbarian hordes drink and do drugs until no drink or drugs remain, Warped is held in concrete car-parks near state lines and no one really gets pissed. Stand in catering for five minutes and the great and good of alternative music from the past 20 years file quietly past, holding out their plates for vegan burritos. Or you could wait until 10pm, when Bible Study starts.

“Play your cards right,” whispered Alexisonfire’s Wade MacNeill to me one evening on the East Coast – it might have been Philadelphia, or maybe New Jersey - last year, “and I’ll show you where the Satanic Bible Study class is held.” To this day, I never found out whether he was joking.

It’s into this ludicrousness that You Me At Six have dived into for the entirety of summer 2010. Many bands can’t handle Warped; they can’t deal with the fact that every day is exactly the same, the relentless heat, the boredom or the lack of structure. But Josh Franceschi is having a ball.

“I’m amazed at myself at how easily I’ve got into it,” he tells Rock Sound sleepily, having just woken up somewhere in Middle America. “I’ve not once looked at the dates, except when friends have been flying out. It’s amazing to think that in two or three days we’ll have been out here for a month. It’s going very quickly but I’m almost certain that before I know it it’ll be the beginning of August and we’ll only have two weeks left. Making the most of it is quite key.”

For Franceschi, as with many UK-based fans of punk rock, Warped represents something of a Holy Grail. One generation will look back to the Epi / Fat glory days of Pennywise, Lagwagon, Bouncing Souls and Face To Face, another will point to line-ups featuring the likes of New Found Glory, My Chemical Romance and Killswitch Engage while, over the years, bands as varied as Deftones, No Doubt, Jurassic 5, Green Day, L7, The Germs and even Bullet For My Valentine have undertaken stints. Last year the appearance of outfits such as 3OH!3, Jeffree Star, Millionaires and I Set My Friends On Fire raised traditionalist eyebrows; in short, Warped tries to be all things to all people in pursuit of whatever marketing craze is making parents across the US mop their brows.

Franceschi remembers what he thought the tour would be like, and tries to reconcile that with the reality of waking up in a different state each morning. “I remember when [esteemed label] Drive Thru had all the bands on Warped, and I remember thinking, ‘Wow, how cool must it be to be on that tour?’

“I’ve been trying to explain to my friend what it’s like, but it’s impossible to know what it’s like unless you’re on it. Every day you wake up and your bus is in the car park, and the show itself is in the car park of an amphitheatre. It’s massive: there’s a sea of bands’ merch tents and sponsorship booths and clothing companies, and all you can see is girls in bikinis and dudes in mosh shorts either with no shirt on or a hardcore shirt. And loads of people on little mopeds. It’s definitely a weird vibe. I didn’t know what I was expecting the first time I did it, because every time I tried to suss out a situation in this band before it’s happened it’s not like I’ve been disappointed, it’s just different to what I expected. This time. I just decided to go with it. I haven’t thought about it too much and that’s why it’s been awesome.”

Click here to read part two of the feature.

Ben Patashnik