Reid Bateh is only half joking when he admits that he’s currently checking his phone every five minutes, anticipating a flurry of notifications that will crush his soul. His band, Bambara, kick off their European tour in Paris this month, but as regulations related to minimising the transmission of COVID-19 across the continent remain under constant review and subject to revision, he and his bandmates, his drummer brother Blaze and their bass-playing childhood friend William Brookshire, are stealing themselves for potential 11th-hour blows. This anxiety is understandable, given that Bambara’s last scheduled European excursion, booked for the spring of 2020, fell victim to you know what, killing the hard-won momentum they’d accrued over a decade together, culminating in rave ...