The tour bus WiFi is a cruel joke: Theoretically present, realistically nonexistent, and guaranteed to turn even the most grounded band member into a twitchy-eyed, data-withdrawing gremlin halfway through a six-hour bus ride through rural nowhere.

This is not a glamorous story. It’s not “oh, we were doing rails with Bowie’s ghost at the Chateau Marmont.” Nah, this is four sweaty individuals trapped in a tin can on wheels, having an argument about whether Wetherspoons does vegan cheese and stress-buying glow-in-the-dark Crocs off a 2-bar hotspot.

Real world tour life

Tour life, for most up-and-coming bands, is a cross between Groundhog Day and low-budget chaos. You wake up in a hotel that smells of damp and haunted dreams, lug gear up three flights of stairs because the lift’s “out of order (again)”, grab something vaguely beige from a motorway service station, play to 32 people (five of whom are only there for the bar), and then pile into the van for another poorly-slept adventure. And in the eye of the storm? The WiFi.

Not enough has been said about the psychological warfare of trying to get on a Premier Inn router at 3:17 AM while your drummer is freaking out about having lost their charger and your bassist is engaged in a Reddit thread about toe fungus (don’t ask). That in-between time between shows is where boredom gives birth to its strange, stupid children.

The scrolling starts

It always starts innocently enough. You’re lying on a bed that’s maybe filled with vintage newspapers, and you’re like I’ll just check Instagram for five minutes. Cut to two hours later, you’re watching a video of a raccoon learning sign language, your guitarist is buying a 3D-printed sword on Etsy, and somebody’s Spotify is malfunctioning so badly it’s only playing slowed-down German techno.

There’s always one member in every band who turns into a weird little nighttime goblin when the WiFi gets worse. Ours is Liam (name changed to spare the guilty), who attempted to FaceTime his ex in the middle of a Romanian gas station once because “the vibes felt right.” They didn’t. He also once attempted to order pizza from one of these adult chat numbers by accident. To this day, we’re not sure if he ever got his stuffed crust.

Shopping cart confessions

Tour-boredom e-commerce is a slippery slope. There’s something about the haze of a 14-hour drive and not sleeping properly for days that makes £45 for a “limited edition” Yoda lava lamp seem completely reasonable.

I once purchased a samurai sword keychain, three tubs of protein powder (I don’t work out), and a book entitled How to Meditate in the Back of a Van Without Losing Your Mind. It never arrived. The universe knew I was full of it. Our drummer is the midnight regret purchase king. On the past two tours, he’s purchased:

• A bird whistle (we don’t tour with birds)
• A pair of rollerblades (he can’t skate)
• A vintage 2002 Nokia “for vibes”

He now carries all of this in a leopard print tote bag he found in a charity shop in Glasgow. It’s his emotional support bag, apparently.

The hotel room chronicles

If you think the life of a band is penthouse suites and minibars, let me burst that bubble right now. Most nights it’s Travelodge. Occasionally, it’s a sofa. Sometimes, a floor with mysterious stains and a guy named Dave who “used to be in a band too” and wants to play his SoundCloud to you.

Hotel WiFi is another beast. The kind that demands you input your email, your soul, and an essay on why you deserve 1.5 Mbps. Half the time, the “login portal” is just a JPEG of a smiling receptionist and a spinning wheel of doom. You’ll try everything – restarting the router, sacrificing snacks to the tech gods, whispering sweet nothings to your phone – but all you’ll get is a half-loaded YouTube video and 37 notifications from the group chat back home where someone’s dog just learned how to sit.

The worst moment? That’s usually when bad decisions happen. When your brain’s fried and your phone’s at half battery, and you’re thinking maybe I’ll text my ex. Don’t. Just don’t. Put down the phone. Or at least throw it to the rear of the van where it can sit in shame with the broken snare stand and empty Monster cans.

The soundcheck spiral

Soundcheck is supposed to be functional: Plug in, line check, levels. But there’s always a void. That dead hour between soundcheck and doors is a black hole where time goes to die and phones go to die. You’re not hungry enough to eat yet, and you’re definitely not going back to the van, so you sit in the green room – which is actually just a converted janitor’s closet – refreshing your email like it owes you money.

This is also when the “weird content” gets shared. Someone finds a cursed TikTok of a dog doing interpretive dance. Someone else shared a screenshot of a Tinder bio that just says “Don’t message me if you’ve been to the Reading Festival.” Deep philosophical debates break out over whether Pringles are technically crisps.

The gig ends, the loop continues

After the show, after the pack-down and the courteous thank yous and the two sweaty hugs from people vaguely remembered from uni, it’s back in the van. The journey is long. The atmosphere is odd. Somebody’s playing ambient whale sounds through the Bluetooth speaker for reasons nobody wants to talk about.

And still, someone is trying to get WiFi. Because hope is eternal and because someone needs to order a headlamp for no apparent reason.

We’re all just cracked screens and bad decisions, tumbling through a half-loaded tour schedule, chasing signal bars like they’re going to fix the existential dread. But hey, at least the lava lamp looks cool in the van.