Service Stations of the World

On the joys of eating badly in places-between-places

Here we are in a service station in Texas. Still taken from video by Elliot Arndt

There are two things I feel a small but sincere pang of patriotism for. The first is the British ‘Type G’ plug. Three equally robust prongs, always connecting flush with the socket. It feels smooth, effortless and strong. I have a multiway international adapter, and as I cycle through the options I can’t help but think things like: ‘flimsy’, ‘this is pathetic’, and ‘Type G is on another level’. In a hotel room in Paris, I once fell to my knees bemoaning the lesser Europlug when it repeatedly fell out of its socket as I attempted to dry my hair. America’s double-fanged ‘Type A’ plugs look dangerous and spikey, like the teeth of an electrical cobra. They also sometimes use ‘Type B’ which I obviously don’t care about, what with its incongruous central pin. Even Australia’s rare ‘Type I’ is subject to the occasional bent prong. I’m uninterested in the actual specifications of plugs, and voltage talk alarms me, but Type G has the look and performance history of a product at the very top of its game.

The second thing that I think is good about England is the service station. They’re actually world class. I did not always feel this way, but semi-success took us down international roads and changed my whole outlook. As a touring band starting in cars and vans we have seen the culinary offerings of many of this country’s fine motorways and they generally range from totally passable to very, very disappointing. They often have made-up names like South Mimms or Pease Pottage or Norton Canes and the vibe is liminal. When I walk past the ubiquitous casino, or ‘amusement with prize’ room, I am gripped by hopelessness, the machines buzzing with screens that say ‘Vegas’ or ‘Atlantic City’ but for some reason not ‘Leeds Skelton Lake’. Sometimes, to break up very long drives we also stayed at the corresponding hotels, usually a Travelodge or a Days Inn. The worst fever I have ever experienced was actually in a single bed just outside of Birmingham! I got sent home! These are not happy memories. But slowly, out of boredom and routine, I began to appreciate the individual character of the British motorway services, and I started to actually have ‘favourites’.

In an average service station you might find a chain coffee shop, a Greggs, and a WH Smiths. While I have deep, personal qualms with all three, they provide a foundation of sustenance important to weary travellers mid-tour. Perhaps a Subway, or a Burger King, or a Leon will also be in the arena, the latter of which has what I am confident enough to declare ‘the world’s worst chips’. There is often also a little supermarket which is good for when you’ve really had enough of all this. I was often heralded for my lateral thinking on these early tours, and in a technique I developed called ‘putting things into other things’ I would buy some olives and put them on top of my salad, leaving the remaining garlicky oil to sit, stinking, in a plastic bag in the back of the van. There is sometimes a sort of Asian-fusion joint, Chozen Noodle, which no one ever got except for Max who once had the unfortunately named ‘Big Boy Sushi’. That gave us ammunition for a few hours. We also ate a lot of yum-yums in those days, which are a sort of long-form donut.

Every artist touring the UK will have ended up piling into a Roadchef at some point. It is a great leveller. Justin Bieber has been to Beaconsfield services, Ed Sheeran loves that one too. In the 60s, The Rolling Stones, Pink Floyd, and Jimi Hendrix used to decompress at Watford Gap services between shows because it was open all night. The experiences of touring, of being a band and travelling as a group must’ve changed so much since this era, but there are also photos of the actual Beatles eating sausages and chips just off the M1. We all get hungry. And apparently, the talk about Watford Gap was so complimentary that Hendrix initially thought everyone was talking about a banging nightclub.

The jewel in the crown of British services these days is unquestionably Tebay, in Cumbria. Talk to any touring band and they’ll speak of it with total reverence. Tour managers will route drives to Scotland around a visit there. The stop itself is nestled into the fields and hills, and on a sunny day one can sit at a picnic bench outside and contemplate the sublimity of nature over a scotch egg. There is a lake with ducks in it, and a fresh, farmy smell in the air. The food is hot and totally fine, like a school cafeteria for fancy little boys, and you can get a full English or fish and chips or a sweet potato ‘tagine’. The coffee is also fine, and the tea is warm and wet. You eat inside in a beautiful hall, flooded with heavenly light. On the way out you’ll find a farm shop, where you can buy fair-trade chocolate or a candle or some other nice tat. It has a quaint little hotel attached, which feels like a countryside retreat with soft down pillows and silence and rolling hills outside every window. It is a destination in itself, like ‘the Cotswolds’ or something. If Hendrix once thought that the Watford Gap was a nightclub, then today he might have thought that Tebay was a celebrity rehab facility.

Of course, this is an exception, and for the most part I want to spend as little time at a motorway services as possible. My point though, is that even at the absolute shittest service stations in the UK, a hungry band can get their hands on a hot meal, a sandwich, a bit of fruit, a coffee, a ‘Pineapple Ice’ vape. If you’re a vegetarian, or have a food allergy, you can still eat something substantial. There are options. There is somewhere to crash instead of driving through the night, there are free, clean toilets. These are small but mighty mercies. Sometimes these places are depressing, sure, but there are some which are actually true credits to the area. This is not true of everywhere.

Our first actual European tour was as a support act for Hozier. It was in the middle of winter and everything was blanketed in the kind of thick white snow I’d never seen before. It was also our first ever experience with a tour bus. We were very, very excited. Going from a van to a bus where we had our own little beds and a mini-fridge felt very-proper-rock-star. The shows were good too, big arenas full of lovely young people with flowers in their hair. These were all very fortunate factors because the drives were absolutely brutal. For reasons no one ever explained, the routing looped us across northern Europe in geographic absurdity: passing Hamburg multiple times before playing there, driving through Vienna seemingly to use up a bit of spare petrol. On paper, it looked like a child’s drawing of a star. As our drives took us through the night and into the next morning we made semi-frequent stops at service stations. There is of course a toilet on tour busses, but this is very strictly only for liquid waste. Sometimes I think that when people look at a tour poster, or a festival run, they imagine that the artists simply spawn in the next city each night, fully rested, showered, pampered, and vibrating with excitement. The reality is laying awake either sweating or shivering for fifteen hours on a moving bus with sixteen other people on it, contemplating where and when you can next use the toilet in a serious way.

The ‘when’ question can only be answered by knocking on the driver’s door and negotiating a stop, a task which feels both embarrassing and really annoying. As for ‘where’, this is worse. Most mornings on this tour we’d pull in to a German petrol station which is mostly just one shop, sort of like a British petrol station but with fewer edible items and stripped of hope. You have to pay to use the toilets, which is only a euro but feels like a micro-extortion. The majority of the shop floor is just completely random junk. Novelty mugs, plush toys, rubber shoes, garden tools, the sort of items that would come in handy approximately zero fucking times on the side of the Autobahn. My morning routine consisted of scouring the fridges for anything resembling breakfast - there was rarely fruit, or yogurt, or even juice. Instead, behind a glass counter sit rows of enormous, sweating pork knuckles, and coiled wurst. Above are a few meek, emasculated bread rolls (lightly filled). This is standard across this part of the world, and while the range is really funny, I was always tired and hungover and all I wanted was an apple, a sparkling water and a tuna sandwich. Instead, this time I find a litre tinny of a very strong beer called FAXE, which my boyfriend once drank in Budapest and disappeared for several hours. Instead of that, I normally settle for a coffee that tastes like Doc Martens.

Breakfast time!

France is better, par une marge. You can get a decent baguette with a nice filling, even as a vegetarian. Perhaps also a quiche or a croissant or lovely buttery biscuits. If you’re gluten intolerant you can go fuck yourself, say the French rest stops. I tolerate gluten just fine, it actually really agrees with me, but sometimes a little salad would be appreciated. The one Japanese service station we’ve been to on the way back from Fuji Rock was predominately elaborately wrapped rice crackers and gifts to save people from arriving to greet family or friends empty-handed. Another country with a good servo culture is Ireland, where you can get a genuinely appealing ‘chicken fillet roll’ among other carby and sincerely tasty looking items. North America is another story entirely. On the east coast is something called Wawa, which is beloved by locals but confronting to the British/Australian psyche. I was told the mac and cheese is a ‘must’, but it was really just so not what I was expecting. It turned out to be an extremely loose, wet cheese sauce with maybe ten macaroni pieces congealing at the bottom of a paper cup. You could also get ‘hoagies’ which could be fine but the name is quite clearly not. Pizza and burgers and chicken made the whole experience feel like one of those ‘all-rounder’ kebab shop at 3AM, but with the lighting and graphic design choices of a chain supermarket. I abandoned my chipotle mac and cheese in the bin before we’d left the carpark. It was so bad that it was a little shocking, exciting even, and we discussed the experience all the way to Philadelphia. America is full of nice surprises too though, and sometimes being transient means finding little pockets of wonder and delight along the way. It was actually inside a petrol station in Palm Springs, pre-Coachella, that we had a sit down meal at a Mexican family restaurant called Dino’s, with some of the best tacos, coldest Modelos, and sweetest people I’ve ever met.

While we have definitely visited some fairly normal ‘service plazas’ with a range of amenities almost like the UK’s, nothing could prepare us for what we experienced in Texas. After our show in Austin, we dipped around the corner to a bar with live blues and got spun around by a man we thought must’ve been a beautiful dancing cowboy. Turned out he was from Reading, Berkshire. Disappointed, we went outside for a cigarette and ran into some fans. We were complimenting them on their excellent city, and in return, were frequently met with; ‘have you been to Bucky’s yet?’ We would be sure to stop on our way to Dallas, we promised. Its amazing, we were assured, with Tebay-level reverence. ‘Try the beaver nuggets’. The following day we did.

The first thing of note is that it is actually spelt BUC-CEES, which was unexpected. ‘Haha, bewseees!’ we laughed, although we weren’t laughing for long. The mascot, a buck-toothed beaver, loomed over one million gas pumps. The carpark was so large and so very full, like it was DisneyWorld. I had never felt so distinctly foreign. Inside was the most air-conditioned shrine to Big Gas I had ever seen, and it was absolutely buzzing with intriguing activity. The first thing we noticed was that this servo had ten times more branded merch than any historic London attraction. Buc-cees shirts, hats, shoes, mugs, keychains, wallets, socks…Okay. Fine! The Buc-cees swimwear range was as bizarre as it was genuinely frightening, but I was amused by a cheeky red bikini with a smug, grinning beaver emblazoned across the crotch. The massive display of baby clothes was where I started lose faith. I tried to imagine a British person putting their newborn in Shell Garage booties. I left the Buc-cees merch, straight into a section of the shop dedicated to a potentially even more beloved brand. Jesus Christ, literally. It was like Primark, but more holy I suppose. So many general items, covered in slogans about God and love and church and family. I watched people fill shopping trolleys with Jesus socks and The Holy Spirit barbecue sauce and sincerely wished I cared that much about anything. Between the men’s and women’s toilets was a graphic t-shirt display. The shirts read ‘He is risen’. It was a foreboding place to to be told the good news. Over on the other side of this immersive experience was the food, which was largely meat based. I was told, with zeal, that they make their own jerky and brisket, two things I don’t eat or understand but were apparently actually incredible. I hit a tolerance threshold looking for something to eat and finding only extremely heavy foiled-wrapped burritos of some kind. They were small, but incredibly dense. I left mostly empty handed (except for a Buc-cees t-shirt that looked like a tour poster), but luckily someone had remembered the beaver nuggets. They came in an enormous bag and tasted like packing peanuts that were deep fried in some oily runoff. A piece remained lodged behind my permanent retainer for several weeks and may still be there. We had quite a few.

Joyful typefaces and sentiment by the men’s toilets at Buc-cees

The Kinks wrote a whole song about all this, called ‘Motorway’, and is a mock-Americana elegy about touring as a band and eating in transit. It’s very obviously taking the piss, but it is also specific and experienced, about weak coffee and stale cakes and toilets so gross that they put you off your food. Under the jokes, the song captures something more about touring life, how the freedom and excitement of being in perpetual motion is punctuated by the limitations of being human, an unmechanical messy thing that needs to rest and eat and shit all the time. ‘Ain’t it a thrill to be so free’ is sardonic when followed by lines about being tired and ill and drinking tea at four in the morning, but the mundanity and depravity is a thrill of its own kind too. How did I find myself here, at the side of the road in a foreign country in the middle of the night, eating something I would have never chosen at home but is a reminder of how extraordinary my life is? These places-between-places are terrible and wonderful and boring all at once, like a microcosm of the work we do.

Outside a service station in somewhere in Germany, the morning after a big session on the bus, our monitor engineer gleefully produced a large, glistening patty from a paper bag. She described it as a cross between a sausage and a burger. ‘Is it warm?’ I asked. ‘It’s meant to be’, she replied. I tried, and failed, to plug my phone in at the wall while I waited for my coffee. I returned to my tiny tomato and cheese roll, yearning for those dreadful Leon waffle fries and the bountiful cornucopia of a British servo.

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