Rocking off the beaten track

This novel approach to touring promotes the band's equally novel approach to releasing music. Having declared that they will never make another album, Ash last month launched their A-Z Singles scheme, whereby they are releasing a single every two weeks over a 12-month period.

Each is coded with a letter of the alphabet and a specific colour. The band's front man, Tim Wheeler, claims that the songs were written with the colours very much in mind, although personally I'm not getting "pale yellow" from the latest release, single B, otherwise known as Joy Kicks Darkness, a full-on power-trio anthem with raucous guitars and rapid-fire drumming. On the other hand, its synth-poppy predecessor, True Love 1980 (or Single A) was perhaps a little bit pink. There'll be another one out tomorrow (Single C, obviously), so you can form your own opinion of how medium blue it is.

Ash's relentless tide of singles is a welcome change from the usual "one album every three years" rut into which the music industry has fallen, but their reinvention of the rock tour is even more welcome, because, for all the creativity and edginess that supposedly courses through the music world, remarkably few artists have managed to step outside of the dull routine of the bog-standard tour.

At either end of the success spectrum, touring is far from fun. On the bottom rung, the gigs may be great, but everything else - transport, accommodation, food, the endless waiting round - is dispiriting. Once you reach the top of the ladder, things flip over; the transport and accommodation become rather nice, but the gigs? Bono may love being worshipped by a stadium-full of people, but how do you think the Edge feels, knowing that all the subtlety and beauty of his carefully honed guitar parts and intricately timed delays are being lost amid acoustics that turn every song into a sludgy wall of out-of-time bass ricocheting round the retail-park architecture?

Of course, he can just shut his eyes and imagine the noughts on the cheques; but isn't the whole point of being in a band that you can avoid having a dull, repetitive, pointless, soul-destroying job? So, given that 95% of touring is dull and repetitive, and that when you get really successful - as the Beatles famously found out back in 1966 - the other 5% becomes pointless and soul-destroying, why not mix things up a bit? Why not do it all differently?

Jack White has a reputation for doing things differently, so it's no surprise that the White Stripes are among the select handful of bands who have gone out of their way to make touring a real adventure, rather than a checklist of the same old, same old venues. Their 2007 tour of Canada was remarkable, taking in the country's most far-flung corners on the "ocean to permafrost" itinerary. Rolling up in town, the band would contact an unlikely venue - a bowling alley, say - and ask if they could play. There was only one proviso: no media must be alerted. Audiences built entirely by word of mouth and frantic text messaging.

The smallest gig took place on board a Winnipeg Transit bus. The duo got on at one stop, played Hotel Yorba and, of course, The Wheels on the Bus, then got off again. As well as creating extraordinary memories for the lucky few fans, you've got to believe that Jack and Meg had a lot more fun on this tour than any band plodding their way through the same set of theatres or arenas yet again on autopilot.

While on the surface it was surely economic madness to play places such as Iqaluit, Whitehorse and Saskatoon, that wasn't the point. If a typical audience was numbered in the low hundreds, the efforts the band went to in order to make a connection with their fans won over a much wider audience than actually saw them. And, just as Ash's unconventional approach to singles and gigs provides an excellent way to drive traffic to their website, so the White Stripes' Canadian gigs - thanks to the camera phone and the internet - provided plenty of great content for fans to share and discuss online.

A tour doesn't have to be an end in itself. If you can make it enough of an event, it can feed your fans' online appetites for weeks and banish instantly every modern band's worst nightmare: the complete absence of anything interesting to put in their blog.

The Rolling Stones have been touring longer than most, and pretty much invented the characterless stadium gig, so it wasn't that surprising when they decided to ring the changes to celebrate their 40th anniversary. Officially, it was called the Licks tour, but Keith Richards referred to it as the Fruit of the Loom tour, because it came in small, medium and large.

To keep things fresh, the band played three venues at each stop: one their usual stadium gig, one in a more intimate arena and one in a very intimate theatre indeed - the kind of places they hadn't played regularly for decades. In New York, for example, they played Giants Stadium, Madison Square Garden and the Roseland ballroom. In the theatres, the band had to prove to the audience - and, you suspect, to themselves - that they could still cut it without the big stage sets, light shows and video screens that dominate their usual outings.

The range of possible venues is, in any case, gradually widening. Thanks to the innovative Get It Loud in Libraries scheme, fans of Florence and the Machine, Adele, Bat for Lashes and British Sea Power, among others, have been able to see their favourites play in between the bookshelves. The worthy initiative is designed to bring young people into libraries, although getting them to actually read a book is quite another thing. Yet Badly Drawn Boy might have expected more audience participation when promoting his Born in the UK album with a tour of the nation's fish and chip shops.

Surely there is scope for more bands to embark on equally unusual, yet appropriate, outings. Little Boots on a tour of shoe shops; La Roux coming on after the dessert in Michelin-starred restaurants; Madonna playing at sites where the faithful have seen incarnations of the Virgin Mary; My Bloody Valentine in branches of Clinton Cards; Kanye West popping up at other people's gigs and just taking over.

Actually, perhaps not Kanye. He just put a downer on another potential source of unusual gigs - the unexpected double bill - when his planned Fame Kills tour with Lady Gaga was cancelled. After his microphone-grabbing debacle at the MTV Video Music Awards, he may not be the audience-grabber he once was. Never mind, Kanye, you can probably still fill the West End Centre, Aldershot... or how do you fancy Zennor's village hall?