The latest story to come from the We The King camp will be sure to make your skin crawl a teeny tiny bit. The pop punk outfit was on tour in Malaysia when they very suddenly realised their driver was not who he was supposed to be, but rather a smacked-out junkie impostor who had the band fearing for their lives.
At first, the unknown man who was driving the tour van from the hotel to the venue seemed…somewhat normal, but nothing threatening. As frontman Travis Clark explains, the local man “was required to take us from Point A to Point B – that was his only job. And he took us from the hotel over to the venue, and he was sounding kind of crazy, but he got us over there”, he tells The Gunz Show. But it was on their way back to the hotel after the gig that things got a little too much like Taken. “I’m pretty sure that was the day that we were supposed to die. He took us in the car, and I don’t know what he had done within the three hours, but he was out of his mind. He was driving 60mph over the speed limit.”
“The man’s driving became erratic as did his demeanor, missing the correct exit, and rather than turning around further down the highway, reversed back down the ramp. When Clark explains how he checked in with the driver to see what was up, the driver responded, ‘Don’t worry about it man, this is normal driving over here, and anyway, I’ve been up for five days. I haven’t been able to sleep.’ And it was like, ‘What, dude? You haven’t slept in five days? What’s wrong with you?’ And he was like, ‘I don’t know man, there are some crazy drugs in the world.’
Eventually they were back on track and could see their hotel approaching in the distance, though much to the band’s horror, they also had to watch the man drive them straight past it, and keep going. The band at this point had totally had enough and called it to the driver’s attention.
“Hey, hey, you passed it.”
“Oh, don’t worry about it.”
The driver then chucked a fast 180 over the median strip into traffic on the other side of the road. Cars apparently collided with street poles and wound up in ditches to avoid hitting the van, though all of a sudden one of the cars in the ditch turned on their sirens. He cut off cops. Though that wasn’t the end of it as it should have been: “So he decides that he’s gonna try to outrun the cop in the van, so he’s swerving in and out of cars and it’s like a movie. So he pulls over right in front of the hotel. I think half the guys in the van were crying. The cop comes up to us and he starts yelling in their native language, and they’re yelling at each other and the cop says, ‘Passports’. And we’re like, ‘Oh my god, we don’t have our passports with us right now. They’re in the hotel room’. But he wouldn’t ever believe that. So our driver, who’s insane and out of his mind, grabs his wallet and pulls out all the cash that he has. It was like the equivalent of $500. And he hands him the money, and the guy drives off.”
Clark comments that this was the most illegal thing he had ever been part of. The band then decided enough was enough, saying they needed out of the van. Right now. The driver had a similar idea – ditch the van in an alley near by and throw the keys away. When the band eventually walked back to their hotel, their promoter asked what had taken them so long.
“’We got pulled over cause we had an asshole for a driver’. We were really upset. And he was like, ‘Sarah didn’t take you?’ And we were like, ‘No, we didn’t see Sarah, we just saw a van that said We The Kings on it.’ Apparently we got into a car that had nothing to do with us. [The promoter] didn’t know who he was or what he was doing, and better yet, the cops were searching for him all night around the hotel. We were almost kidnapped. But the cops saved our lives by being shady cops. It was the craziest thing that has happened to us in our touring career.”
Scary times indeed for the band, though I’m sure Liam Neison would have had them out in no time at all.
