Tora On Sleeping In The Mud And Sharing A Stage With The Dalai Lama

Tora have lived quite a life in their seven years as a band.

The Byron Bay-founded four piece have won acclaim for the innovative, sultry style, racking up some 120,000 plays on their early song ‘These Eyes’ in a matter of days. And they’ve only gone from strength to strength since then too, touring with beloved acts like Miami Horror and appearing at Britain’s beloved Glastonbury festival. Their latest album, 2019’s Can’t Buy The Mood, is as sophisticated and self-assured as they come.

But it hasn’t all been smooth sailing along the way. For instance, the band had the world’s most disastrous time at the aforementioned Glastonbury, a story that they shared as part of The Artist Alphabet, a Music Junkee video series in which artists are invited to share their strangest stories.

See, due to a miscommunication, two members of the band attempted to return to their camper van, only to find that the group’s lead singer, Jo Loewenthal, had the keys. Distraught and unable to get into the place they were meant to be sleeping that night, they got down into the mud, and cuddled up underneath the van.

And when Loewenthal finally got back, things were less than chirpy between members of the group. “I just see the boys under the van,” Lowenthal explains. “And I realise that I had the keys the entire time.”

A couple of hours later, the band took to the stage and played their set. But as soon as they stepped off the stage, they.found themselves corralled into a shipping container by security, who said the group had to move “urgently.”

“Then the next thing you know, we just saw the Dalai Lama like walking onto the stage that we were just on. And [security] were like, ‘You have to stay here till he’s finished his talk.'”

Not many bands can boast of a sequence of events like that, I bet.

Watch the whole episode of the Artist Alphabet here, which also involves discussion of Berlin mansions and too much schnapps.