The End Of Yet Another Tour: Stephen's Perspective!!!

Wrote this last week, before our last show of our tour:



Götenburg, Sweden. Kontiki bar. Our LAST SHOW will take place here soon....

My stupid "built-in camera" isn't working (with absolutely no explanation. It happens often) on my laptop, so I can't film any more today). I may have a small vlog, however... using the footage I filmed in the station earlier. Perhaps the camera will work later. Spent $2000 on this macbook and since the beginning the camera has been on and off; working at times and not working at other times. Sheer frustration.

I'm a wee bit tired, after spending 10 hours on the bus from Hamburg. Sleeping upright on a full bus is a HUGE CHALLENGE. Thanks to Björn, we both had small pillows, and I sucked back a sleeping pill around 11:30, just after boarding and watching half of "Ali" (w/ Will Smith, which gave me renewed respect for him ... and Ali himself). Slept a fair amount (five hours max), but we're both pretty bagged today.

* * *

However:

Yesterday was something special. As some of you know, we are "sponsered" by the German department of Yamaha. Thing is, Claus Kruse (who works in the product department) saw us play last year, loved the show and said he would give us a keyboard and if I liked it I could keep it. Thus explains the second keyboard. It's a magnificent beauty, with all sorts of dials and knobs so I can twist, morph and alter the sound in various ways. And a million voices. Yes, it breaks fairly easily, but when it works, it's a thing of beauty.

Xania, Björn and myself met him at the Yamaha offices around noon. He took us on a tour of the place. MASSIVE rooms full of grand pianos, brass instruments, a sound room specifically made to test pianos. He showed me an amazing keyboard. "You can combine different voices and add many effects, change the quality of the sound... basically create whatever sound you want to make." he said. He went on to tell me about how you have hundreds of drum voices, bass voices... anything you like. You can basically construct entire songs, tweaking every sound on this keyboard. AND we can borrow it for however long we need it, within reason. "Can we have it for three months?" I asked. "Of course" he said, scribbling down "October 31". HOLY SMOKES!!! We get a killer keyboard, a massive mixing board compatible with Cubase with really great pre-amps and compression, a microphone, cables and any other trinkets we may need. For a poor band travelling Europe like gypsies, this is a magical opportunity to make a really nice album with great sound. Forget the last album with its many trials and tribulations. We need to make something from scratch... Not to say the last album is a waste of time. Perhaps we can release it later as alternative versions of the songs we recorded.

So that's what we'll do. We'll take a break from touring. Three months, with two small touring breaks in between. We'll stay in Copenhagen for a few reasons:

a) we're hoping to woo Crunchy Frog (label), or at least milk them for advice on what to do/ where to go from here
b) the various venues and venue owners in town that we have already made a connection with when we popped by Copenhagen a few months ago.
and
c) because our lovely friend Oliver has offered for us to stay at his place for the first two months! in return, we cook him meals. I have some sweetass breakfast ideas in mind: banana pancakes, just to mention one.

* * *

We are sitting in the Kontiki (a bar with a Hawaiian feel; bamboo everywhere, soft square cushion-chairs) and the soundguy repeatedly tells the sound check-ing band they're too loud. "There is a neighbour upstairs" he announces. "I play guitar too, and I understand the desire to make it loud, but... come on, kids" (kids? I scoff. He's the same age as them!). Tonight it's our last concert of our second European Tour. We are doing two more very small tours in one month and two months, respectively, but this is the END of six months of pretty much straight touring. Many many many UPS and DOWNS:

* 2000 euros was stolen
* Video camera, microphone and very expensive photo camera were stolen
* Many gorgeous shows: better pay, more people... way way way more better ones than last tour: Zagreb, Berlin, Austria, the Wilwarin Festival.
* We were on a label for six days before they folded
* Had a driver/documentary filmmaker for three months (Ineke), then got big muscles in the 3 months of touring since then.
* Saw more art this time. Saw the Egon Schiele exhibition in Vienna, the Kafka museum in Prague
* Had a number of good show reviews/ interviews from Macedonia to Berlin.
* Made back the 2000 plus a few hundred more... and hopefully we will only move up from here... also thanks to donations from lovely people (THANK YOUUUU!!!)
* FINALLY began selling our puppet CDs and T shirts online with paypal. YAAY!!!
* Wrote a handful of new songs
* Realized we need a BREAK!!! from touring. We NEED to record. We need control over our recordings. The albums I have personally recorded and produced in the past I am pretty happy with (The New Album, The Old Album, You Sweaty Thing and even the very lo-fi early stuff from "Zipperhead" - my previous project), and the fact is, I need more control over the recording and mixing process... and Xania tells me she has recording experience and knowledge as well, so we'll see how it works with the two of us hammerin' away at the tunes. We chose about twenty but I think we'll choose ten more, record them all and see which ones will fit well on our first PROPER RELEASE. SInce this is our first "professional" recording, we want to redo a number of previously recorded songs (Do The Trikey, Bring The Shit Back) and others that have never been recorded... send the files off to others to remix, and do a real, sexy, souped-up album.

We just did our sound check and my new keyboard started giving me grief. "This is HOGWASH!" I screamed, using the same phrase as my dad used to say, whenever the car wouldn't start or Peter and I would stay up late, lying in the hallway watching TV movies playing in the living room, unbeknownst to my parents. However, after sound check-ing "Love is a Temperature Thing" to a sea of happy faces, without too much hassle from the new keyboard, we realize we sound fine. I return to the task of writing this blog and making CDs that simply don't want to burn.

(postscript) After this blog, we played our show. It was fun. Not the best show we've had, but fun... A pleasant end to a long long looooong tour....

more to come.

For now, feast your eyes on this: