Archiv für die Kategorie „tour diary 2009“

We had a bad and a good start in our third day. Bad was that out of 5 alarm clocks only one did its job. So the bigger part of the band woke up late and started working sleepy. However we managed to finish 2 new songs in our first songwriting-period.

One song (Song12) is a fast, straight forward hardcore track with huge mosh and a heroic endpart. The other song is a thoughtfully composed pop-song with a strange “5.5 tone” (philips tab-system).

We have scheduled two more songwriting-periods for today and 2 more songs planned. Ambitious, we know….

Later!

C.

“18-hour-trip” sounds kinda threatening but what it REALLY means to sit in a bus for a whole fucking day or night is indiscribable. No way to sleep, no way to read, no way to work, no way to relax, no way to even move at all. One last time: Overnight drives are so much of a pain in the ass!
First we dropped off Pid in London, then Rob in the middle of buttfuck nowhere (also for the last time, promise!) before we tried catch the train via the Euro-Tunnel. We arrived at 4am, boarding was at 6am. What else. All the shops and fast food booths were closed, so we tried to kill time with arcade games and coffee machines. The last coins were PRECIOUS and a lot of immoral offers were made to gain them. I fell asleep somewhere in the tunnel and woke up in Belgium (?) I think. I felt so dizzy in the head, just like one big hangover. It took us another 11120000 hours to finally reach Munich and after unloading our gear and cleaning the van I was at home (yes, at HOME… crazy!!) around 10pm. My girlfriend was at the Comeback Kid / Bane show, so I had some time to acclimatize with my old/new envrionment. I piled up all the presents I bought, took a shower and painfully embraced real life the next morning at 7am when my alarm rang. At the latest NOW tour was over.
(Chris)

Norwich was the last show on this incredibly long tour. We had some time to hang out at the citycenter and I must say that this is a crazy place. There were many discos and clubs which opened very early and thus the people started partying very early, too. The atmosphere was very aggressive. We recognized a twosome fighting each other with words and action and there were about 4 cops in every street.
The venue was the smallest of the whole tour and so was the stage. I prefered the floor then. We had 2 songs left when Phil screamed: “Fuck! I have to take a shit before my pants are full of it. Let’s finish the set NOW!” We played the 2 songs and along the way Chris farted very badly so Eric thought Phil had shit his pants. Eric couldn’t stop laughing and Chris tried to cover Eric while we finished our set. Holy shit! By the way: Every drink was served out of a tube with thousands of different drink buttons. Crazy! After the last show we said goodbye to THIS IS HELL and DEAD SWANS. Then we had a 15 hour drive home coming up.
(Raphael)

I had the most embarassing tiny 5″ pizza in Norwich. 5 inches… I swore not to tell anyone (so did Raphael who was with me) but it’s been aching inside of me so badly since then, I HAD to come out with it. Show was kinda weird, everyone was completely worn out and tried to give it a rest. This Is Hell were amazing that night, they played their whole set and added Beastie Boys’ “Fight For Your Right” plus an extremely tight version of Earth Crisis’ “Firestorm” with Travis on drums. The perfect musical ending for the tour. We shot a crew photo and then it was time to say goodbye to everyone. We had all grown pretty tight on this tour and in some cases it was kinda sad to realize that one wouldn’t see the other person for months, maybe years.
(Chris)

Yesss! This show was cool as hell! Because of a tight time-schedule we could only play 6 songs but the venue was sold out and the kids went crazy when we started rockin’. There were grunge kids, punk rock kids, metal kids, rocker and hardcore kids. I love such shows. This was not a shitty fashion show where style and clothing counts in the first place. After this party I got to know a few kids from Southampton… really nice people.
(Raphael)

Most of the times it is shows you don’t expect anything from that turn out the best. Southhampton was one of these shows. A really run-down place with a nice stage and the most “on the ball” soundguy ever! (”Er, guitar-guy, please turn down your mids to 12 o’clock and give it a little more presence!”). Every band got a limited amount of free drinks at the bar. At the end of the show all credit of all bands was exhausted. This is Hell: 2 cokes, Blackout Argument (minus Feivel and Eric): 3 cokes, Dead Swans (plus Feivel and Eric): 46 shots and 29 beers (rough approximation). Show was great, we got an amazing reaction from the crowd. Curfrew came and Pid (Dead Swans) was completely going overboard. He was obviously drunk, did summersaults on the ground, tumbled around, screamed “Hell yeah, last day of tour!!!” (… oh really, is it?!) and finally picked up a fire extinguisher which he used to flood the whole club, including my pants. The answer came in the form of a flying glass of jackie-cola which was heavily critizised by Ben whose shot it was (well actually is was MINE referring to the calculation above). We drove back to Benny’s place and once again rough-handled his family’s hospitableness. Thank you SO MUCH!
(Chris)

Our bus was not the only target on this tour. A glass on the side of the British bus got kicked in and some private stuff was stolen, including Travis’ dirty underwear. Sucks! We tried to relax in the huge “backstage room” (it was was more of a student leisure center). The show started very early and and a lot of young kids came out, which is a cool thing. One of the kids was only 15 (!) years old and enjoyed the hardcore show with his older sister. We did the “zombie prescription” cover of SNAPCASE again and this night was the first time a kid knew the song AND sang along. we gave him a free shirt for that, haha!
(Raphael)

Just like Leipzig. London was one of the highlight shows everyone was looking forward to the whole tour. Dead Swans sold out the Underworld earlier this year and so did This Is Hell last year, so everyone was expecting quite an amount of mosh that night. Don’t know how many kids were there in the end but the place was pretty much packed. The Goldust / Attitude tour package we had already teamed up with for the Essen show opened the night and it was good to see that the guys in Goldust seemed to be even more fucked up after a 3 weeks tour than us after 4! Goldust pretty much rocked a lot, Attitude didn’t really leave an impression. We were up next and there was a certain excitement present within most members of The Blackout Argument. We played a great set, felt pretty intense on stage, I guess we cranked the max out of our worn out bodies and instruments. Nanouk commented our set with the words “It’s quite obvious you guys have to work really hard to prove yourself in the UK, which you did well tonight.”, which is exactly how I viewed our stage debut(s) in England / Scottland / Wales.

There’s show and there’s… food! Just kidding, this next paragraph is not about food but about shopping hahaha! Everyone in the band has wonderful but demanding girlfriends so we all did our best to satisfy them with presents from the shopping capital of the world. Fortunatelly the Underworld venue is situated in the middle of Camden, a part of London that is famous for its shopping opportunities. We bought shoes, shirts, bags, jewelry, candy and media to ease our girlfriends fury for leaving them alone for a whole month of touring. I guess everyone will be happy, at least I hope so (another 5 hours to go until we’re back home and hand over our presents).

One last paragraph about our sleeping places for that night. Just like in the USA most UK promoters don’t feel responsible for bands’ accommodation, so we had to sort out things by ourselves every night. As for London we didn’t really have any options and planned to check in a travel logde or hostel until Raphael’s aunt’s friend Mariko offered us to stay at her place in Notting Hill (Yes, Notting Hill, just like the movie…). Apart from unexpected sleeping places we also had the luck to get to know one of the most positive, funny and flamboyant personalities in whole London! Mariko is one hell of a lady and we heartly embrace her as new member of the hardcore community!

Quite a long one, time to come to an end. I think eveyone felt London to be the last show on the tour althought there were still 3 more to go. We gave everything and regained even more.
(Chris)

Feivel and Eric discovered the Primart in Leeds and sold it out. Marius fell in love with some books for kids and bought them for his girlfriend. The band OUTCRY COLLECTIVE opened the show that night. They play some kind of every time I die style and they fuckin’ rock. We were next. It was the lowest stage I’ve ever played on and in the front there was a big pillar. How stupid’s that?
(Raphael)

Just like most medium-size UK cities, Leeds has a very special charme that really attract mainland Europeans. It was all about shopping and eating and I got the best chinese noodles of my life (and probably the next). The club was a typical pub kind of venue with no backstage area but all in all it was a neat place. Me and Marius were checking the van for further damages around 11pm when an “Under Eighteen Party” at a club down the street just ended. There were THOUSANDS of teenagers running through the streets, screaming, crying, laughing, singing, dancing… it was like the worst Romero zombie scenario and Marius and Me stood closely to the van to avoid damages (I am talking about human damages, not the van). We were lucky that a really nice girl let us stay at their parents house, otherwise we would have been stuck with some kind of travel lodge which nobody of us wanted to spend money on. Slept well, got out of the locked house through the window and got some breakfast at the cheapest supermarket. Back in the Van. London up next.
(Chris)

Ugliest city we’ve ever seen. The venue was in a tacky alley but inside it was nice. After the show we started loading and when we Eric got in the van he noticed that someone smashed a window in the back. We were totally pissed of. Fortunately nothing was stolen ’cause there’s a wood plate behind the window. We left our backline in the club and drove to a police station to report the damage. After that we tried to fall asleep in a hostel beneath a hundreds of other travellers.
(Raphael)

Worst show ever. Got our window smashed in, literally sold NO merch at all, played a show behind the largerst barriers ever put up in a pub and slept at a run down youth hostel with loads of sexual intercourses going on everywhere. Words cannot express how much I hated that night.
(Chris)

This city rules. We arrived very early and had time to hang out in this awesome city. When we took a look at the city map we got scared ’cause some dudes next to us were chatting in German. So far away from home and still not German free. Eric completely fell in love with england and he got so horny that his eyebrows started to wince. The venue was dark and smelled extremely like chlorine cleaner. Philip said it smelled like sperm. The backstage was a 2 qm² dustbin so we dressed in front of the stage.
(Raphael)

Wrexham was the first show for us in the UK. Wales is a beautiful place so we enjoyed the ride through hills and meadows with many sheep. The venue was kind of an irish pub with a second floor where the concert started with 8 (!) bands. We were fucked up and slept on the couches in the backstage. The show was great, more than we ever expected for the first show in the UK.
(Raphael)