After finishing the first album in Woodstock and getting Christmas and New Year sobered up, Travis resumed its touring schedule.
Various small tours had been set up prior to the first single 'U16 Girls' and in between the early Travis Toilet Tours, we had some University dates, one of which was Cardiff.
Andy and Dougie were quite enamoured with the venue because the fruit machines paid out ?100 jackpots. Meanwhile our techs, Nick and Johnny, had been assembling the stage set up, while the gear was being ferried from our tour bus, which at that time was driven by a small goblin-like man called Chris Lee.
Some of the drum kit was now in the lift in the loading bay area and a Cardiff University student crew were carrying the equipment to the stage. The lift the gear was coming up in was more of a catering lift and as such had double steel doors for safety.
At this time my ?400 Ludwig, Black Beauty, snare drum - which coincidentally was one of the best sounding drums I had ever heard - had somehow become lodged between the first steel door of the lift. A couple of minutes later one of the local crew assumed that the lift was behind the first steel door so he/she had pushed the drum back through and sent the lift back down to the loading bay. It wasn't long before we discovered our snare drum crushed by a half tonne lift crammed with gear.
I suppose it was quite a surreal and destructive image and even at the time we had to laugh at how stupid it was, but that's precisely why we used the drum for the 'All I Want To Do Is Rock' cover.