Gay party in Eindhoven

Backstage of Longhorn LKA in Stuttgart at 15:45. Outside of the backstage to be exact. A couple of Swedes next to me. We just witnessed Einherjer to walk out with their guitars and stuff so I guess their little encounter with the tour management in Antwerpen turned into a cancellation. I've heard two stories of the incident there and since they are quite contradictory I will not get into any details since I really have no idea what really happened.

Two days ago we played in Illingen. The place wasn't even half full. That was a bit of a disappointment. We did a good show again and the audience was into it so it was still ok. It was good to see the woman from the catering in the audience enjoying the show. They see all the shows there and yet she found us entertaining.

Next day was Effenaar in Eindhoven. That is a brilliant venue. We've been there once before on our own on the smaller stage. Paganfest was at the bigger venue of course. We had our own dressing room for a change. Nice corner room with windows from floor to the ceiling. We moved the table next to the window and I set up my office there. It was time for the accounting again which took a lot longer than usual since we got a shipment of new shirts the day before and I had to add them all to the stock. Office was nice though. We had cold Corona in the fridge too.

The smaller venue was hosting a gay party at the same time. That's where we got the idea from. We went out to buy some stuff for the evening like a mirror ball. We managed to hang that with Matson's flashlight to the ironing board. So in the evening we made the room dark with just a mirror ball lighting the room and started playing 70's disco music and dancing without our shirts on. So others joined like our bus driver John. I think we were doing that like and hour and half or so until it was our show time. Hilarious. The best night of the tour so far. And all male. We even had a sign on the door which said "No women". Although we have that rule nowadays anyway. If we're not sharing a dressing room with someone we're not allowing anyone in something like 2 hours before the show and not at all after the show. Wifes, girlfriends: learn the new rule.

The show was a blast again. We were a bit disappointed after Haarlem since The Netherlands have always been really good country for us. Eindhoven proved that they still are. It was our audience. I loved playing yesterday. Or maybe it was because of the warm up gay party... Anyway, our bus driver had a day off and even he stage dived! He did admit later that it hurt a bit. Usually people are ready to catch you, in Eindhoven they just made room for a landing man.

We had to leave early but we did have some time to continue our gay party a bit. This time even more people were present since during our show the other bands had gotten drunk enough. Good party. And Tomas from Unleashed went for food hunting and brought me an excellent vegetarian döner. Last night was a good night. In the bus I actually had a loooooong chat with Maurizio of Ex Deo/Kataklysm about music business. He runs his own management company and seems to be quite a clever person in that.

Today's been a boring day. I slept late and forced myself up from the bed a bit after noon. Did the accounting for yesterday and generally just hung out at the venue. It's way too hot inside but luckily the network reaches the yard too. Moonsorrow is with us again. I just like the atmosphere more when they are here. The Germans/normal people ratio is just so much better.

Einherjer just walked back in. Maybe they are playing after all. Battery is getting empty. Over and out.

Pratteln & Illingen

Today's been a boring day. This is a really small town with an excellent venue. The venue is probably the only interesting thing here. I tried to go skating since the street next to the venue looked promising. I managed to skate something like 200 metres. That street was the only piece of decent asphalt here. Then I went through all the merchandise calculations once again. Found one missing girlie shirt. The merch dude only owes us now 1020€ instead of 1035€ calculated yesterday.

Yesterday we were in Switzerland. They have their own money. Today I added yesterday's sales to my way too complicated OpenOffice chart. In the end I noticed that we had 200€ too much money when compared to what was sold. After being an idiot for a while I realized that the prices were of course changed to different currency and rounded up. Swiss people are filthy rich, you see. So I had to add even more rows and columns to my chart for Switzerland. The same will happen in Czech Republic and Hungary. Damn you non-euro countries!

Show was really good yesterday. The venue Z7 is huge and it was full. I think we kicked some German ass yesterday evening. Reiter was again the second last band after Unleashed since we were in a German speaking country. I think the crowd was ours. We had a blast.

Right now I am sitting at the backstage. It's 21:00, Unleashed are on stage and I am wondering how the hell can I stay awake till our showtime. I really don't want to start drinking vodka right now.