Politics & Power Quote by Jack Irons

There is a whole post-Cold War map hiding inside Jack Irons' breezy sentence. On paper, it is just a tour anecdote: an American band landing in cities that weren’t on the standard itinerary. In practice, it’s a quiet flex about access and a sideways critique of how “Europe” gets packaged for touring acts - a greatest-hits circuit of London, Paris, Berlin, maybe Amsterdam, with the continent reduced to a handful of bankable rooms and predictable press.

Irons’ wording does two things at once. “We got a chance” frames it as luck or invitation, not conquest; it softens the power dynamic of American music moving through foreign spaces. At the same time, “the usual European tour” exposes the industry’s laziness: promoters, labels, and agents treating culture like a route optimization problem. His emphasis isn’t on exoticism but on deviation, on the thrill of playing to audiences that haven’t been over-served by the same rotating cast of Anglo-American acts.

The subtext is about connection and credibility. Bands build mythology not only by selling out the big capitals, but by showing up where the infrastructure is thinner and the hunger can feel more real. For a musician of Irons’ era, that also nods to a particular moment when Europe’s edges (Eastern Europe, smaller Mediterranean markets, secondary cities everywhere) were opening up as viable stops - places where American alternative rock could register less as product and more as event. The line lands because it treats geography as meaning: where you play signals what kind of band you think you are.