Pellavarock and rehearsals

Pellavarock, Lammi, Finland. Nice little one-day festival at the lake side. Last time we played there was in 2005 and from there we left for our first although short European tour which included Summerbreeze festival as well. Three years later it happens again, first Pellavarock and a week later Summerbreeze. Coincidence? Yes.

Anyway, I drove to Pellavarock myself. It's only about an hour drive from my home and we left around 14.30 which felt a bit strange since we were supposed to play in like three hours or so and it didn't feel like a festival at all. It was nice to meet some Finnish friends for a change, like Janne from Rytmihäiriö/Moonsorrow and the festival guys. The festival itself had two stages, we were on the small one. The basic idea was that there were no big gaps between the bands. When one band finishes the other one starts on another stage. This also meant that the change over times were really long. I think we had something like 1 hour 20 minutes or so. And still we manage to be ready just in the last minute. That wasn't entirely our fault though. There seemed to be quite a lot wrong on the stage and for example the bass setup which usually is the fastest took really long. And we didn't have our own stage guys either. Paukku was giving a hard time for the festival crew and the stage tech got so pissed off that he walked off the stage. FOH tech brought him back and together they managed to get the stage done.

We played our normal set once again. No changes whatsoever. From the stage I noticed some familiar faces in the front row. Of course there were the "local guys" as usual but also some old friends from Italy and UK which was a nice surprise. I hope they had a good time in Finland. After the show we spent a while sitting at the backstage but quite soon left and drove back home. So nothing spectacular in this festival trip.

We've been playing basically the same set from the Paganfest till now. Only small changes every now and then, mostly when we have had to adapt to shorter sets. However we've been talking about changing the set a bit and it's finally happening. We've been rehearsing quite well in the past few weeks. I guess we're going to continue with the same set through the festival season but later this year there's going to be some changes. We've been rehearsing four songs that have never been on the set list and three songs that haven't been there for a while. One of them is so old that Juho and myself have never played that live. Oooooh, the excitement!

Anyway, we're leaving tomorrow morning at 2 to Germany again. Maybe I should get drunk today. Paukku can pick me up from a bar. Hmm. Interesting.