This is the final call for Passenger Lel Arad, Layal Arad? This is the final call. Lel Layal Arad was waiting at the wrong gate in Dublin airport. She did not clock that nobody else was waiting with her, or that the flight was due to take off in ten minutes. She did not clock this because the clock said 06:45 and she’d already been awake for two hours, after only three hours sleep. She was no longer built for this rock’n’roll life. I’m so sorry, she mouthed to the woman at the gate. Her voice had disappeared completely at the start of the tour. In real time, on stage in Manchester, somewhere during verse two of Big Yellow Taxi. You don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone. Thankfully it was coaxed back with copious amounts of steaming and Manuka honey by the time they got to Bristol, but it was still pretty husky. Think late era Joni. Especially in the mornings. Especially on little sleep. She did not bother explaining all this to the woman checking her passport. Instead, she gave her a thankful thumbs up before running the wrong way across the airfield and almost getting on the wrong plane.
Finally in the air, hopefully homeward bound, she fell asleep and dreamt of the previous night, of the luscious, red and gold Olympia Theatre, 1000 people singing along to songs that never get tired, of new friends and upstairs choirs, soda bread and Irish stew, guest lists and mailing lists and price lists and set lists, and the fine white lines of the free freeway. She woke up in London. London, where in ten days time the tour would reunite to play Shepherds Bush Empire, the venue where she’d seen some of her favourite ever concerts — Jonathan Richman, Ezra Furman, Camille. London, where her four-year-old had also been awake since the early hours, too excited for the return of his mama, and for Halloween, in equal measure.
Lel Layal Arad hopes to see you in London on November 13th. Or in Paris on November 17th. Or Vienna on November 20th. If the tour so far is anything to go by, she thinks these show are going to be very, very special.
The upstairs choir, 3Olympia Theatre Dublin, 30.10.25, soundcheck:
In Berlin (where everybody is not going), alas, on that London day. Life on the road...