In the final installment of her European tour diary, JESS CORNELIUS enjoys some Spanish hospitality in Lleida, plays a festival in Mont Blanc and catches up with Ned Collette in Berlin. Part one here.

Thursday, June 10: Lleida and Tarragona

Everyone seems to have a story about being mugged in Spain and I get so paranoid that I buy one of those nerdy little bum bag things to carry my passport in. (I wear it under my clothes so as not to relinquish my dignity completely.) But I’ve got my laptop out on the train to Mont Blanc and after an hour I realise the carriage has emptied except for a group of four men with busted faces. They’re staring at me from across the aisle, sporting the popular “shaved-with-a-handful-of-dreads-at-the-back” hairstyle common to the region. It’s like the scene in Point Break when Patrick Swayze gets accosted by Anthony Kiedis. Except nothing happens and I feel mean for being so suspicious.

Mont Blanc train station is the size of one of those snack carts at Flinders Street, but I still manage to get a tuna sandwich on a really good bread roll, and a chocolate milk. The merry old lady at the counter (you can buy booze anywhere here, and people do) wants to play my guitar. I think. She’s super excited about it anyway.

I’m eating my roll when the room goes dark. I look up and there’s a giant blocking the light in the doorway. He turns out to be very sweet and favourite band is The Scientists so I let him take my bag and we walk about five metres to his apartment, where his girlfriend is studying for her English exam.

Later he drives me the 100 or so kilometres to Lleida for the show. My non-existent Spanish means that I get a little confused about the details, but decide to just ride it out and see what happens. At this stage my main priority is dinner, but that happens very late here and Miguel seems bemused that I’m hungry all the time.

The inside of the venue is plated entirely in polished brass and mirrors, from the skirting boards to the stairs. It’s like a tiny 1980s casino with no slot machines. I’m billed to play last so I do a sound check and try to explain to the sound engineer in English that my drum machine is kind of crap and needs a fair bit of EQ. Eventually he lets me do it myself from the desk, and I feel like an arsehole, but he doesn’t seem to mind.

Finally, it’s dinnertime and we all troop out to the stock room, where we sit at a trestle table surrounded by towering boxes of Damm, the local beer. Hospitality isn’t taken lightly here, and tonight I eat the best food of my entire stay in Spain. One of the other acts’ sister has made plates and plates of food for the bands and their friends. There are homemade empanadas, potato tortilla, mussels, anchovies and melon with jamon (ham). We sit around and drink beer and someone rolls a joint; everyone’s cracking jokes. It would be quite a party except that I don’t understand a word anybody is saying.

Friday, June 11: Tarragona and Mont Blanc

I’ve grown accustomed to playing small, low-key shows with minimal equipment, so I panic a little when we turn up to the Teatre Metropoli for the Gea Festival in Tarragona, about an hour out of Barcelona. There is a grand piano on the stage and about 10 stage and lighting crew milling around shouting instructions at each other. Maria Coma, a Spanish artist, is soundchecking so I’m shown to my dressing room, complete with lightbulb mirrors and fruit platters.

I look at the empty coat hangers and realise I have nothing to wear for this occasion, so I venture out to Tarragona main street to buy something new. Unfortunately, the shops demonstrate a certain conservatism of dress, and the best I can do is a demure black frock that makes me look like Princess Di. I pay for the dress and ask the sales lady for a pair of scissors. She doesn’t understand me, despite my excellent miming skills. Across the road I perform the same charade for an elderly shopkeeper. She hands me a pair of heavy scissors and I set about cutting ten inches off the bottom of the dress, while her face breaks into a wide grin. She waves the forgotten receipt at me as I leave and then cackles hysterically.

The show goes well, but compared to the other shows the audience is rather restrained, and sits watching attentively as if at an arts festival. There are two acts from the states, including Dawn Landes and her band who provide welcome respite from awkward struggles in broken English. All my merch is gone, which is great because it means I don’t have to carry it across Europe anymore.

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The Montblanc Foes Festival gets rained out. Well, it only rains for an hour but by then it’s 2pm and EVERYTHING stops for lunch. I mean everything. All the shops close, and re-open at 5pm. Lunch is a big deal and there is always red wine. So by the time lunch is over I’m well on my way to Reus Airport to catch my flight to London. Flying is a big mistake. At Ryan Air (Europe’s supposedly cheap airline) the uniforms are made of plastic and you have to pay just to use the toilet. The airport is another country, one filled with thousands of fat, sunburnt English people – post holiday in Ibiza – eating fried chicken and screaming at their kids. The announcements aren’t even in Spanish, and the “food” at the terminal is so different from anything I’ve eaten in Europe. It’s virtually unrecognisable. However, I don’t die and none of my gear gets lost so I consider the trip a success.

Sunday, June 13: London again

You can be anyone in London. That’s not to say you’ll feel happy or part of something, it’s just that no one gives a shit. If you want to draw your eyebrows on with purple texta and replace all your teeth with scrabble tiles, that’s OK. It’s like my friend Simon says: If you wake up one morning and feel like being Catwoman, then you can put on a rubber body suit and no one will bat an eyelid.

I’ve relocated to Brick Lane in Shoreditch, which is full of Bangladesh eateries down one end and anorexic hipsters down the other. My previous digs in Hackney have come to and end so it’s a welcome relief when Simon from Philadelphia Grand Jury offers me a bed in the house they’re renting here. They’ve got wonderful manners and won’t even let me wash their dishes.

The show at the Old Queen’s Head in Islington doesn’t start well. I turn up at the venue to find a pink-haired girl in a leopard playsuit giving a talk on creative writing. Next up is a lanky dude in a backwards baseball cap reading a poem he’s written about drum and bass. Confused, I hunt down the promoter and introduce myself. He has no idea who I am.

“The airport is another country, one filled with thousands of fat, sunburnt English people – post holiday in Ibiza – eating fried chicken and screaming at their kids.”

Eventually it transpires that the gig has been moved back several hours and the real promoters are not actually there yet. I sit in the beer garden and bum a cigarette off a boy with long eyelashes who just happens to be playing the same gig as me tonight, and just happens to be Australian, and just happens to be an Australian Idol finalist. (He doesn’t divulge this information but I find out later.) He’s actually pretty good, with the evening sunlight streaming through the window and his angel voice. Later, we lose to Germany 4-0 in the World Cup.

The second London show is even better. There is no rider and certainly no home-cooked dinner, and since everyone in London is in a band there’s not much respect either. It’s vastly different to my experiences in the rest of Europe so far. Still, tonight’s line up includes an Italian hair-metal band, a Scandinavian dance-pop outfit, and a nice London girl who lends me her vintage WEM amp. (Traditionally, the touring acts provide the back line, because no one in London can afford to own a car and therefore they don’t own amps either.)

The Italian metal band, in mesh singlets and eyeliner, are “managed” by a walking stereotype with dark glasses and peroxide hair. He writes a setlist for them and gives them positive reinforcement in a thick East London accent. They all hug and high-five each other before leaping onstage for their 8pm set.

Still, it’s not a bad gig overall and I only get one comment: “Nice show love, but have you ever thought about a real drummer?”

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Then on Saturday we make four music videos. It seems like the right thing to do. The exceptionally talented Lucy Dyson gathers a small team of people at eleven in the morning and constructs a green screen out of cardboard. We eat seven bags of jelly snakes and some yoghurt from the Polish milk bar, and then I lip-sync to double-time versions of my songs for the next twelve hours. The crew are amazed at my great dancing, so amazed that the footage probably won’t make the final cut.

Sunday, June 20: Berlin

After a whole 90-minutes sleep the night before, I’m visited by the ghost of experimental musician James Rushford, appearing to me on the 7am British Airways flight from London to Berlin. He turns out to be a real person, on his way to Germany to play keys for one of Ned Collette’s shows. Lucky for me he (sort of) knows the way to Ned and Donno’s house in Schöneberg, which is where I’m staying. We part ways at the airport and I realise I don’t have a German phrasebook. I’m too tired to learn “sorry” in yet another language; I thank the bus driver in Spanish and order a coffee in French. Thankfully I’m in Berlin so no one speaks German anyway, everyone is from Melbourne.

That night we see Ned and co. play at NBI on Schönhauser Allee, and I meet some lovely Germans, most notably the unassuming Jan who is behind the Berlin Songs compilations and the annual Down By The River festival. I watch another band, this time a local one, and they’re somehow the epitome of everything I’d hoped for in a Berlin band: a mouthy singer with rainbow pants and ironic mullet; a guitarist with Kurt Cobain hair and a noisy Mustang guitar, also singing, or shouting, or rapping; and not a Cave-esque influence in sight.

The next night I play at White Trash, a place that interests me because I’ve heard such vary reports. Some have said, “Oh, it’s my favourite place in Berlin!” and some have said, “I’m sure as hell not going there to see you play.”

As it turns out it’s a bit like playing at a TGI Fridays. There are red-and-white checked tablecloths and American staff serving burgers and fries. Chinese lanterns, dragon sculptures and Christmas decorations adorn the wood-heavy establishment, jostling for room with fish tanks and pinball machines. If you’ve got time to kill you can even get yourself “inked” at their in-house tattoo parlour.

The show is fine, as far as restaurant shows go, which is normally badly. The DJ spins Soundgarden (yes, truly) between sets and some lovely Dutch people draw me a picture. Plus the venue really looks after its performers, which is a good thing in anyone’s language.

It’s World Cup season of course, and the whole city is watching it on big screens attached precariously to the outside of cafes and bars in Kreutzberg. The huge Turkish population here means that you can buy a perfect kebab on every corner for about two euro, and a longneck of beer from any railway platform for one euro, which would explain Berlin’s “cheap living” tag.

In terms of live music, it seems that you’ll be well catered for if you really, really like electro. And there’s a bit of an anti-folk scene going on too, apparently. But at this time of year, everyone is more interested in just hanging around and drinking on the street. I don’t blame them, considering the temperatures the locals endure in winter.

The last gig of the tour, at Schokoladen in Mitte, falls on my last night in Berlin. Indeed, it’s my last night in Europe all together, so luckily it’s a good one. The venue is booked by a Melbourne ex-pat (surprise!) called Sarah, and is softly lit and red walled, reminding me of The Empress in Melbourne. People turn up and there’s even a wizened old man heckling good-naturedly in German.

Afterwards a small group of us walk for a while in the perfect midnight weather, clutching our Radlers and eating currywurst. At 3am the sun rises and we head back to Schöneberg. Then one hour’s sleep and 38 hours of travelling later, I’m home.