Bad pillows, rap festivals and a ‘sh*t-shelf’: Life on the road with Robb Flynn

Machine Head frontman Robb Flynn lifts the lid on the highs, lows, creature comforts and tour-bus weirdness of a travelling band... Warning: Lots of poop talk.

The thing I have to have on tour is…
“My own pillow. Believe it or not, hotels in other countries sometimes have the craziest pillows you've ever fucking seen in your life. Sometimes you'll get to the hotel and it'll just be a round, hard cylinder. Other times it's literally just a flat pancake. I'm not sleeping on that, so I bring my own pillow.”

The longest journey we’ve ever made for the least reward was…
“Well, on the Unto The Locust tour cycle in 2012, we did a festival run that went on for three months straight. We made $2.8 million dollars… and we spent $2.8 million. We came home with $4,000 to split between four band members after three months’ work and it was soul crushing. It’s why we basically stopped doing festivals.”

The strangest gig we’ve ever played was…
“When we were the only metal band on a rap festival in LA. How did we go down? Not good at first, but rap can be pretty aggressive, so we tapped into that. And we've played country bars in America before – literally line dancing bars. One time we played a pool hall. I remember once we played with a massive German band to, like, 125,000 people, and you could hear a pin drop. It was just dead silent. That many people staring at you for 45 minutes is pretty weird. Nobody would headbang or anything, no matter what I did. And the end I was like, ‘We tried!’”

The way to stay match-fit on the road is...
“Working out. We’ve been playing three-hour shows, so I'm fucking fit as fuck because of that! But even if I'm hungover from drinking, I'll go to the gym and fucking grind. On tour, you can't drink every day. You just can't. And before tour, you’ve gotta fucking train – play it hard in rehearsal like you’re playing to fucking 10,000 people. Rob Zombie heats up his room to 100 degrees and then runs on the treadmill – that's how he gets in shape for the shows.”

The place with the worst toilets is…
“Germany. I love Germany, but I hate that little shit-shelf. It's in the toilet that's got a little bit of water at the bottom of it. Dude, you don't know how much water covers up the stink of your shit. Oh my God, it's bad. And their toilet paper is brutal. It's brown and it's super scratchy. And then France has just got that hole that you have to squat over. I swear to fucking God, every time I'm squatting over the fucking little shit-hole my fucking hip gets a cramp.”

The best service station on Earth is…
“Pretty much anywhere, if you’re hammered. They're all good. I mean, if you're hammered and they got food, you're like, ‘Yes!’ Actually, Scandinavia probably has the highest quality places, where you eat a chicken sandwich and the chicken's really fresh even if it's 2am. Scandinavia, man, those motherfuckers have got some high-end fucking truck stops.”

The dressing rooms at Wembley Stadium are...
“Pretty nice, pretty big. They play soccer at Wembley Stadium, right? They were definitely better than other sports places. They’d made a section of dressing rooms for artists – it's not just the locker room like you get sometimes. That happens, so a lot of times backstage now we bring our own vibe. We'll bring, like, tapestries and lights with us.”

The best feeling during a gig is…
“Watching a whole crowd of people make a 150-foot circle-pit, or seeing all those people jump in unison. Or listening to the whole crowd sing along to a song with you, or sing along to a guitar line that you wrote. We've got a video of us playing in Portugal and we're playing the song Now We Die, and there's 5,000 people just going, ‘Ashes to ashes...’ It gives me fucking goosebumps.”

The stupidest thing I’ve ever said onstage was…
“I think I asked everybody at Bloodstock to take off their socks and put them on their cocks. It’s always dumb shit like that. And I have them put the fucking name of the town on my setlist, because a month into the tour you don't even know what fucking day it is anymore, let alone what town you're in. I got the name of my home city wrong. One time we were on tour with Megadeth in San Jose, and I called it Oakland. I got fucking booed for that. I definitely deserved it.”

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