This place is awesome. A strange, funny, drunken, sad, noisy week with The Dreadnoughts

Before five star hotels and personal jets, before regular hotels and economy class seats, even before Motel 6 and tour buses, there is "the tour van". The mobile circus that serves as transportation, bunk bed, dinner table and rec room for hundreds young musicians. What does it do to the psyche and behaviour of five, otherwise intelligent, young men to live, sleep, and frequently eat in a small van with no windshield wipers and a dubious insurance policy? Why didn't any of them have a cell phone? How do you get through eight gallons of potent West Country before you have to cross the border back into France? Exactly how drunk do you have to make climbing the exterior walls of a 14th century castle at 4 AM seem like the right thing to do? In 2009, music photographer Adam PW Smith flew to England to spend a week touring with the Vancouver-based celtic-gypsy-polka-cider-punk band The Dreadnoughts in the middle of their first European tour. Smith was there in the thick of it, suffering all the standard indignities but one. The result is a book that reveals much about life as a young, touring band who bring real meaning back to the DIY ethic, and a few things about what it's like to be a 43 year old trying to survive in that environment.