Our first European Tour
Well we have returned happy and exhausted from our first European tour. The tour began in London with a Canada day performance in Trafalgar Square. Thousands of people flooded the area for a daylong event that included such quintessential Canadian pastimes as street hockey and lining up at Tim Horton’s. It was good to play with old friends John Wort Hannam and Kim Beggs as well as make new friends like Michael Kaeshammer and The Canadian Tenors.
The day finished with a rather lame party at Canada House. Most of the musicians ended up stairs in the greenroom scrounging for sandwiches and gorging on free Guinness. Security kicked us out at midnight and we ended up stuffing our pockets with beers and drinking on the steps of the embassy before stumbling back to the Charing Cross hotel lounge (where coffee costs 4 pounds 20 the equivalent of almost $10)
The next day we took a train to Croydon for a gig at the Green Dragon. Everyone we met in London felt the need to warn us about Croydon and we did see some colourful characters there, namely a guy dressed as a druid priest in a full length purple cape and someone else giving a hair cut on a park bench.
After Croydon we flew to Amsterdam and finally met Bert De Ruiter from our record label Corazong. That was a long day that saw us first take a cab from our hotel to Victoria station where we boarded a train for Gatwick Airport. After the short plane ride, we hoped in Bert’s car and he drove us all the way north to the ferry terminal to the Frisian Islands. We played 5 songs for a radio station on board the ferry before returning to dry land and driving to our destination for the night, the Bremen Hilton in Germany.
We did a 2-hour radio interview and played a fabulous riverside festival the next day where we met the fabulous Martin Gallop and his band. For our first German gig it was pretty validating, we had our own private trailer (a first) and the crowd demanded one of most sweaty rock and roll performances to date. Running back on stage for the encore some guy was waving our poster above his head (another first)
We motored on to gig in Hamburg at a small intimate venue called Music Star run by a great guy named Wolfgang. A great bunch of music fans turned up to show us some love. After Hamburg Bert drove us to Hanover where we did a radio show with Stanley, the indelible Duke of Linden and played a small show in a restaurant.
Next the tour took us to Berlin for a whirlwind day that included a radio interview, a television show and a gig in a tiny dark bar in Prenzlauer berg in what was once East Berlin. We hung around Berlin one extra day for another television appearance on a late night German Talk Show.
The final day we drove from Berlin to Amsterdam in time to play another 3 radio shows before sleeping like the dead.
It was great to have a label working for us for the first time. Bert accompanied us everywhere and in most cities we met up with the local promoter hired by Corazong. It felt as though we had an entourage the whole time driving us around, translating for us, loading our gear and doing odd jobs like fixing Brandy’s boot. In comparison to our North American tours, it was certainly a tour of firsts.
Bert says we’ll be back in Europe for another longer tour in February 2009
-Dave
-- Dave
July 11 2008
