The past year has been monumental for Southern River Band, releasing working-class anthem Fuck You, Pay Me alongside the announcement of an Australian tour.

This follows the rock band’s first-ever international tour of Europe. Marking a milestone moment for the group, the tour not only expanded their audience but also taught them invaluable lessons along the way.

Reminiscing on the epic achievement, Cal Kramer of Southern River Band has given The Music an exclusive insight into what it was like to be a West Aussie on European stages for the first time.

Five Lessons Learned While Touring Europe by Cal Kramer

G’day! As a 26-year-old bloke who has lived exclusively in Thornlie my entire life, last year wasn’t only SRB’s first time leaving the country, it was also mine. Here are five things I noticed on our travels.

Honourable mention: It’s hell far away.

1. CARNET (pronounced Kar-Nay)

See, I was under the impression that once you were in Europe, you could pretty much go wherever the fuck you like. Turns out you still can, BUT, the UK is no longer part of the aforementioned Europe. So, if you’ve got a shitload of music gear (i.e. you’re in a band), every time you go between the two, you have to get a piece of paper stamped at both sides of the channel, and guess who else does? Every single fucking truck driver on the continent.

The British side are hell serious about it, too; we spent four hours sitting in Dover or some shit waiting behind literal truckloads of Balkan groceries just for the good people that hold the stamp to not even check our shit, bring down the all powerful stamp and send us on our way. On a lighter note, the French side was a breeze. 

2. In sickness and in, well, sickness

I fucking love vitamins, right, and I keep myself well-stocked at all times. Touring Australia, which is nowhere near as relentless, I make sure my immune system is firing at all times, to allow myself the moments of Mr Cool (AKA pissing on) and touch wood, haven’t had any real problems yet.

If ya get a cold or whatever, it’s gone in a day or two. In Europe, we were doing three shows on, one night off, four shows on, one night off for close to three months, so there’s not a whole lot of time to recover or even sleep, for that matter.

I’m not gonna throw anyone under the bus here, but our sound guy brought a hell lurgy over with him, didn’t tell anyone, and after the first show proceeded to hug everybody and touch basically everything. Two days later, we were all completely fucked, I lost my voice, drank nothing but water for three weeks, and recovered after a bout a month. No hard feelings, though, obviously. But yeah, if you get sick, you stay sick!

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3. Ask and ye shall receive… 

Like I was saying, I’ve lived in Thornlie my whole life and never left the country before. But I’ve also been a diehard Liverpool Football Club supporter all my life, too. I was talking to my mate Lee about how fucking unreal it would be to actually get to go to a game while we were there.

Come our Liverpool show in November, and having failed every other avenue to score tickets, I asked the crowd if anyone could help a brother out (much to the annoyance of the Evertonians in attendance) and completely forgot about it. Woke up slightly hungover at about 7 am and checked our messages, and I shit you not, our now mate Lawrence had messaged us saying if we were willing to pay, he knew a way. Fast forward to a great afternoon at the pub, Pat [Smith] and I sat in the second row at Anfield and watched Liverpool beat Man City. Fucking unreal. 

4. Any time of day

We played at the Sweden Rock Festival, and we were opening the entire thing. Suffice it to say, we were extremely nervous upon our Scandinavian debut, thinking that at the very least, there would be about four people there.

Well, I tell ya what, Euro Festies kick arse. We were waiting to go on and heard what sounded like a fucking LOT of people, peered through the curtain and the entire hillside and surrounds were filled people, most of whom somehow even knew our songs! Here’s hoping for more of the same this year!

5. Any day of the week

Much like the festivals being full from the moment the gates open, the good people of Europe aren't limited to weekends when they wanna have a good time. We’ve built SRB around being Friday/Saturday night in musical form, but over there, we had sold out goddamn rooms in places I still can’t pronounce on Mondays and Tuesdays. This may be wishful thinking, but fuck me it’d be unreal to see shit happening here in the land of Aus on any given night!

Southern River Band are touring Australia this month. You can find tickets on their website.

THE SOUTHERN RIVER BAND

2025 AUSTRALIAN TOUR

Friday May 9 - Crowbar, Brisbane

Saturday May 10 - Crowbar, Sydney

Thursday May 15 - Altar, Hobart

Friday May 16 - Max Watts, Melbourne

Saturday May 17 - Lion Arts Factory, Adelaide

Friday May 23 - Rosemount, Perth