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For many years I’d made regular surf trips to the Basque country of France and Spain. Most years I’d travel with the same mates who shared the same tastes in music, so we could cruise along the coast checking out the surf and having a groove. The other thing we had in common was that we all played in a band, so it was only a matter of time before we managed to put two and two together and come up with a surf trip/band tour in which our virtuoso evening performances at the bars, clubs and street corners of Euskadi (as the Basques call their homeland) would pay for us to ride waves all day.

But nothing in life is that simple, and if you consider that surfers and musicians would probably make a strong showing in a millennium list of the ten most unreliable types of people in the world - well, it was never going to be an easy ride, was it?

Things got off to a bad start before we even left England. With a stack of surfboards, drum kits, double bass, pa systems etc we were travelling in three vans, two slackers per van, and had arranged to meet at a pub in Portsmouth two hours before the ferry left. The result was two vans at two different pubs and the third broken down somewhere in Kent as the ferry sailed without us.

It was three days later before we all managed to congregate at the same place, the surfside town of Lacanau, just south of Bordeaux. Funds were tight, we needed to gig, so we decided to head up the coast to the pleasant but surf-free settlement of Arcachon and try our luck. It seemed to be buzzing outside the town hall, so we set up there, played about three notes and were moved along by gendarmes.
However, although we may not have attracted much cash, we had attracted plenty of attention (believe me, a six-piece band sprinting around to set up on the street before their vehicles get parking tickets always attracts attention), and fortunately someone told us of a bar just outside of town which employed live bands.

Several wrong turns later, and after a stilted conversation in Franglais we had our first gig. They were even going to pay us AND provide free beer. I can’t actually remember the name of the bar, which shows how much we focused on the ‘free beer’ part of the contract.

The strange thing about our band (the name of which I’ll relate in a moment) was that we generally seemed to play better the more we drank, so free beer wasn’t always the mistake it might have been. On the other hand, waking up with a hangover at 10.30 am in a roasting-hot, sour-smelling van in SW France in mid-summer is a mistake, because not only is it a most unsavoury start to the day but if you’re there to surf you also miss the best and least crowded waves.

But we were on our way, we’d played our first overseas gig. If it had worked in one town it could work elsewhere, so we went back to the coast, put up a few hand-made posters and started pestering bar owners to employ us. The initial reluctance of many of them, we later came to realise, was our name - The Crazy Moules. Being a jazz/Latin-type combo, and having heard some old French geezer call out “Eh, crazee moules!” as we played on a street corner one day we had taken on the name thenceforth on the basis that it sounded jazzy and French. The only problem was that whilst ‘moule’ is French for mussel it’s also French slang for a part of the female anatomy that rarely sees the light of day in public, even on French beaches.

Still, it brought us attention, and that was what we craved. After about two weeks we actually got a regular early evening booking in a bar called Le Convivial in St. Jean de Luz. I was going to say the money kept us off the streets, but it didn’t - in fact a good day’s busking in town followed by the evening gig, which usually included food and drink, saw us earning enough to live on - just. We weren’t doing anywhere near enough surfing for my liking because we usually ended up hungover and miles from the surf after each gig, but hey, it beat working in a office, which is what I’d been doing before.

Being a Crazy Moule was also a great way to meet the locals. We’d get invited back to parties - even invited to play AT parties, and I’ll tell you what guys - playing in a band we met more French chicks (and Spanish and Swedish for that matter) in one summer than in half a dozen previous trips to this part of the world.

By the time we crossed the border into Spain we’d been gigging together for three weeks and were actually quite a tight outfit - playing twice a day minimum it’s inevitable that you’re gonna make some sort of musical progress. The authorities didn’t always feel that we were doing our bit for cross-cultural international relations though - one evening in San Sebastian, for instance, the Spanish police moved us on in no uncertain terms. We had quite a crowd moving to the rhythm by then, the members of which didn’t appreciate the heavy hand of the law, and a mini-riot almost ensued.

After about a month on the road we rolled into the fiercely Basque town of Lekeitio, to the east of Bilbao. Basque graffiti covered the walls, Basque flags fluttered in the sea breezes and you were left in no doubt that this is not Spain, this is Euskadi. Here we were made to feel more welcome than anywhere else we’d been. Partly because we were from Wales (though not all Welsh) which the Basques consider to be a fellow downtrodden nation, and partly because by this stage we were actually a half-decent band.

We got a nightly gig in a local bar, and were making enough to live off. Although there’s no surf in Lekeitio there were waves for the taking either side of the town. We could head up into the Pyrenees for a change of scenery; we were greeted like locals on the street; hell, we could have lived here.

Come to think of it, our keyboard players does - with a girl he met at one of our gigs, which means, of course, that The Crazy Moules are no more. But it was great while it lasted. If you’re lucky enough to be a musician, take it to the people when you travel - they’ll love you for it.

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