Beastie

What the FPDM?

Perfect smuggling vehicle

Oh hi, it’s you, you look great, have you lost weight?

So where was I? I know, I was about to fill you in with some info on that car scenario I teased on the last post. If you don’t remember or you didn’t read it - we broke down in the middle of the night in Denmark, -11 degrees and the engine just died, 4 men from England vs the worst Danish winter in living memory. Who would we eat first? (Steve).

Some background on the main character; Beastie is a 2004 4.6 Ford Explorer V8 _Eddie Bauer Edition (no idea who Eddie Bauer is/was) I bought in January from a Geordie called Iain as part of my project “getting to know more Geordies".

Why on earth did you buy that I hear you sniff. Well Beastie has a super power, actually at least 2 - Firstly Beastie is not a van but has the capacity of ,almost a van. Why this is useful when touring in Europe is the point. Over the past few years I have learned a few things about smuggling oneself and a band over the oceans and borders and into Europe without arousing the suspicions of border gendarms and their ilk. I think I might be an expert. Here’s my advice:

Get a vehicle that looks like an awkward, older, family camping/touring situation, especially if it’s american - they don’t want to know. They really don’t want to know if you adopt a really excited smiley demeanour when presenting passports and try to speak French even when they speak English back to you. The other super power Beastie has is the LPG system hidden within, making driving in Europe very cheap (LPG is still only about 85 euro cents a litre and is widely available until you get to Sweden, but we forgive them).

(this is alright isn’t it? why not subscribe?)

So there you go those are the very sensible, practical reasons why I swapped Bev the PHEV (2014 Mitsubishi outlander, RIP BEV, 220k miles is a good innings). I appreciate I might not convince Gretta T-Bomb that it is a good longterm solution but when I can afford it I will send Beastie to get fitted with a nice new rainbow engine that runs on love hearts and only emits bubbles and kittens - until then it’s me and the LPG. And it’s just a coincidence that Beastie looks cool.

On a serious note Iain the Geordie was crying when I drove away from his house in Gateshead having done the deal. He had bought Beasite just before his wife passed away 8 years ago and they had hoped to tour Europe together in it. He was happy that Beastie would get to the continent and took great care showing me how everything worked and telling me about some of the things he’s recently done to keep the car in perfect working order, I wish he had told me the aircon was kaput but hey ho. He was coming up to retirement and couldn’t afford the cost of fuel as his local LPG station had closed and was changing his car to ironically a Mitsubishi Outlander PHEV, great car I told him, but he would not be able to fit his band in it.

So Beastie is the perfect band runner and so far LPG hasn’t been going up as much as petrol has so all things considered I think it was a good choice. Unfortunately Danish garage prices had other ideas. After running like a dream for the first part of the tour Beastie died in the road to Copenhagen:

The engine just died, no warning light or weird noise and it would not come back on. We rolled to a halt on a fast corner in the middle of nøwhere next to a snow drift that blocked me from opening my door. It was -11 degrees and Denmark was enjoying her deepest snow for 25 years. What happened next was somewhat miraculous. A pimped-out BMW 3 series pulled up, 2 big lads got out looking like a right pair of Schmeichels and approached the car, I had climbed out of the window into the snow drift and propped the bonnet up. As they got closer I was scratching my chin hoping for the chin fairy to pop out and fix the car. I puffed out my chest when they arrived and muttered something like “it’s the engine”. The two youths then spent the next hour trying to fix the car, several more Danes stopped to help. It was now 1 AM and aside from the odd remark that this was, the most dangerous place in Denmark to break down, everyone was quite jolly. One Dane took Matt to a garage to buy oil to see if that was the problem and I wondered if we would ever see him again, A new pair of Danes arrived and took the battery out of their car and plugged it into ours.

“What will you do if this works” I asked tentatively.

“you won’t survive this night, I will” said the Dane.

The engine fired up.

I gave him our hotel details and we said our goodbyes.

Beastie before disaster struck

We made it back to our hotel, The Scandic in Copenhagen, parked the car in the pick up space out front and then the engine died again. At least we made it back to the hotel and could get out of the cold. In the morning I went into survival mode and after a lot of phone calls and internet searches a plan was made, the RAC Euro people took the car away on a trailer and our insurance organised car which they promised would be big enough. It wasn't .

What arrived was a Cupra sports Golf sized number. We had a long drive to Asendorf and the next show so we had no choice but to leave the drums and as much other stuff behind as we could and then hit the road. The hotel were cool about us leaving their storage room full of musical bits and bobs despite there being a conference on which was nice of them.

What followed was a fairly hairy drive from Denmark to Germany including a slow, snowy ferry crossing and some sliding around on the autobahn. It’s a well known fact that the fastest car on the road is a rental and this was no exception. Jeremy Clarkson would probably describe the Cupra as an angry little monster, in between angry chuntering about his tax bill, and Donald Trump would like it because inside it was “all computer”. It was fast and we made it to the show.

Frozen sea between Denmark and Germany

We played the rest of the tour in a sort of stripped back mode but thankfully all the venues had drum kits and everything else just worked, the band rolled with it like the pros they are. I Dropped the them off after the last gig at Schiphol airport and they flew home while I did the drive back to Copenhagen. When I dropped the rental off the chap was rather surprised to see that I’d driven 2500km in 4 days and took a sharp intake of breath before realising I did have the unlimited miles option, phew.

I then spent another 2 nights in the hotel waiting for Ford to fix the car.

They didn’t like it, they couldn’t fix it but one Portuguese mechanic took pity on me and explained that the FPDM (Fuel pump driver module) was the problem and he could bypass it which would give me enough time to get home - he thought. 3 hours of labour and £900 later I was on the road home. The Dane in the garage didn’t flinch when I asked if the price was correct, 3 hours labour, no parts 7788 DK? Shrug, yes, he then asked how much labour was in England and I said Wojtek at American Autoparts in Redhill is £70 an hour. We stared at each other for a while but to be honest I was tired, having driven from home to Västeras in Sweden down to Belgium and then back to Copenhagen playing shows every night (12 in total) and was looking at the drive home being another 1k miles at least, all in the snow. I needed to get going.

Touring is not for the feint hearted.

It’s not all bad though, sometimes you need to draw on experiences to deliver an authentic performance. Here’s me channelling the situation at our show in Goes (pronounced Goose - its in the Netherlands):

Ironically last night on a trip to pick up Ludo and Ellie from the station Beasite rolled back the weeks and conked out again. 3 hours and an RAC man later to was established that the Fuel Pump is now knackered and I am awaiting a call from Wojtek to get it sorted.

If you would like to support our forthcoming new record and all our general endeavours consider a paid subscription - if you subscribe I’ll send you a preview of our new single. You can also buy tickets to the launch shows and a limited 7” record here:

Enjoy the roads folks and stay safe.

AL