It's sweeping us off down the beach!!!
From left to right: Darren, Joel, Jan and Joe
One of the most desirable destinations for everyone, from the elegantly rich to the indie souls to the disturbing sleazy beer-bellied men on a search for mail-order brides, Thailand couldn't have been a more perfect heaven on earth. Now that the summer has arrived, it's time you packed your bags. With help from SUPERSWEET, Shitdisco recount stories of their little gnarly expedition in Thailand with tips to tell!
Yeah, yeah, we all know how beautiful Thailand is and how every single person absolutely adores the country, and frankly we couldn’t have been more proud of our homeland. But do we really ever get told what’s so good about it? What are the darkest secrets that make Thailand so wrongly alluring? Or... without being ironic, what’s not to like?
“Loads of places to get ripped off by like taxis,” Joe Reeves (bass/guitar/vocals) recalls, “Me and Darren (Cullen, drums) were in a cab and they took us to this bespoke tailor shop, we asked them to take us to the market and they took us to the tailors and we were like, ‘We don’t want the suits,’ and he was like ‘OK OK’ and then we got taken back in the shop, it was a total scam and then he took us to a jewellery shop to buy a ring for each other. We were like, ‘No no no no no, we want to go to the market.' But apart from that I’d recommend it completely, just be careful when getting cabs, But yeah, it’s a beautiful city.”
Last year in November, Shitdisco were hired to play FAT Festival and a couple of Dudesweet parties in Bangkok. They got to spend a week there, and further 3 days on the beach. Surely they must have done some cool stuff. So Joe, how would you recommend Thailand?
“In every respect I’d recommend it, every person there is beautiful, the food there is amazing, the weather is amazing, the beaches are amazing. The city is really interesting, there’s loads of stuff going on. We went to lot of clubs there, there was the day time and the night time and lots of markets,” Joe remembers.
Thailand is known as a place to shop. Money is cheap, and so are things to buy. Bangkok, Pattaya, Phuket, Chiangmai and Koh Samui are a few examples of cities that that hardly sleep. There's something in the bag for everyone and there are constantly different things going on. And you’ll never starve there, food can be found 24/7, there are a handful of restaurants that go round the clock like Foodland. Breakfast stalls in the streets are usually open from 5 AM., night stalls are open till 3 AM. sometimes.
Shopping is another fun aspect there. There are international designers housed under one roof at Department Stores like Siam Paragon, The Emporium and Gaysorn Plaza if you're loaded. Markets and stalls in the streets have all the cool novelty stuff as well as clothes and the fake brandnames you want. Just name it: Chanel, Polo, Rolex, Louis Vuitton and so on. Once we found a replica of Fendi's famous Baguette bag, but unlike its classy beige/brown prototype, this one was all beaded in candyfloss colours. How imaginative!
As Joe warns, you don’t need a cab to get somewhere in Bangkok. There are some rather convenient and semi-luxurious means of transport like the BTS (skytrain) and MRT (underground) that link up all the important places together. And the more adventurous types are more than welcome to try the fun Tuk-Tuk's or bike taxis. If you have a bit more time, cruising on boat taxis can be fun too.
Apart from the things mentioned above, don't forget to check out all the touristy spots too like all the temples and the floating market. But what’s more important than the day time activities is the night time. Did they get to explore some? Now it’s Joel Stone’s (bass/guitar/vocals) turn, so let’s hear what he has to say...
“Bangkok’s red light district is pretty extensive and a lot more of an industry, a sex industry than the West and it caters for all sorts of tastes… We got Note (the promoter) to take us to the ‘Boy Town’,” he says, suppressing a smile. “Where you can watch boys swimming in a kind of an aquarium sort of thing and doing things to each other in the water. And so we saw these guys…” Joel pauses to laugh, “We saw some guys having anal sex while also the two of them were somersaulting, while the pair kind of doubled over.” He struggles, “I don’t know how describe… it’s really hard to describe,” Joel begins to crack up.
“You can only describe it, you can’t even imagine it. You can describe it but I don’t think my mind can ever come to imagine what happened,” Joe backs his bandmate up.
“There was this thing where we watched this guy stomping around whacking off his dick on the poles, like stripping dancing poles, making the poles wobble. It’s truly bizarre,” Joel blushes and Joe covers his face as he remembers musing “oh my God” to himself as he continues, “It was burning candles and there was hot wax involved and several men on men, it was bizarre…”
Joel claims, “It was more intense than anything I’ve ever seen, put it that way!”
Surely being four Glaswegian straight men lost in the homosexual limelight must have had some effects on them...
“Note was just giggling! He was in the element.” Joe says, “We weren’t altogether comfortable.”
“It was kind of amusing,” as Joel will put it. “It was weird, we didn’t make it quite till the end but we saw most of it. It was quite spectacular… It was a spectacular bum show!” He laughs.
“It was really camp though,” Joe observes, “But at the same time it was totally so macho, properly like muscly guys,” he laughs once again, “But the music was so camp but they looked so serious in the performance!”
“Gay for pay,” Joel says ironically before adding, “We’ve seen loads of British guys out there with under aged boys walking around, house boys. That was probably the darkest thing we saw.”
“That was totally the grimiest thing, the sex tourists,” Joe says.
But in the end, they all had fun. We’re sure there is more to that grime that they’ve left out for some parental control reasons. You will probably never get to read things like these in any fine publications, and we’ve already risking enough with the banning from the Thai Government from exposing the dark side of their country so let’s stop it right here…