Tracksuit bottoms, Nando’s and falling off the stage: Life on the road with Josh Franceschi

You Me At Six frontman Josh Franceschi lifts the lid on the highs, lows, creature comforts and tour-bus weirdness of a travelling band…

“Tracksuit bottoms. I have sharp clothes for onstage and going out, but for long drives and flying around, it has to be tracksuit bottoms. Are they fancy ones like Korn wear? No, but they’re really comfortable.”

“After our Hatfield shows this summer, we had [German fest] Rock am Ring the next day. We travelled for about 28 hours, and when we got to site we’d missed the majority of our show. We had to basically run out of the bus and go on. We managed about three songs. I even think Weezer’s crew helped our guys set everything up, and then they didn’t have the right power for all our gear. It was just one comical error after another.”

“A Christmas party for Noel Fitzpatrick, the Supervet. He’s a friend. It was bizarre, because it was also fancy dress, so we were playing to David Bowie and Freddie Mercury. And periodically throughout our performance, Noel would jump onstage. It was a strange one.”

“Going out and getting some time to yourself. In the touring environment there’s a lot of camaraderie and you’re all family, but it can be quite intense when you’re surrounded by people all the time. You wake up and in the first 20 minutes you’ve had six conversations. Your social battery gets exhausted, and that’s before you even go onstage and do your job and hang out with fans, and do all the fun stuff that comes with it.”

“A venue in Vienna called the Arena, although it’s not actually an arena. We used to have a couple of our crew guys who would document all the different toilets and showers and stuff. It would go in the WhatsApp group, like, ‘LOL, this is what you’re in for.’ They’d grade it out of 10, based on stuff like water pressure, how clean the toilet was, how many people had been in there before them. This place was given a minus-five out of 10…”

“Somewhere in the UK. I want to say it’s just off the M3. It’s got a Nando’s in it, and it’s got a pub. When we were touring in vans it would be the cornerstone of any conversation about where we stopped, and we’d know every single one. You’d be like, ‘We need a Greggs, there’s one coming up soon.’ But yeah, you can’t go wrong with Nando’s and a pub.”

“Really nice, and there’s loads of them. There’s this little bookshelf area backstage, but it’s basically a secret doorway into a really small bar. I think it was put in for Michael Jackson’s residency. When we did the All Time Low tour, we had people in there. There’s the big aftershow bar at The O2, which is great, but it can get quite heavy when there’s a lot of people in there. To have a little escape room is pretty cool.”

“When I feel the momentum ramp up. Sometimes you can walk onstage, and you either start with a bang, or you’re trying to figure the crowd out. My favourite part of the set is when we really hit our stride, and we’re really enjoying it, and then the crowd also let go of any inhibitions and go nuts. When those two things collide, it’s pretty special.”

“A long list of things. It’s probably more a question of, ‘How often do I come across like a well put-together human being onstage?’ We did a show at Gunnersbury Park, and I just completely overshot it throughout the day. When we arrived, it was getting a bit too close to the show for me to eat, and then I drank a little bit too much onstage. At the very end I jumped into the crowd, and I thought I’d just climb back up whilst the last notes were ringing out. As I started trying to scale the stage, I fell back to the floor in front of the front barrier. So I tried to do it again, and I fell back again. Eventually I just thought, ‘Fuck this!’ and walked around the side. Probably not my finest hour.”

You Me At Six’s new album Truth Decay is due out on January 27. The band tour the UK from February 1. This article originally appeared in the December 2022 issue of the magazine.

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