Paganfest

Resurrection! The blog is alive!

It's 8:35 in the bus and we're on tour. I just put some Neil Young in the DVD player and started to write this. One of the Alestorm guys is sleeping next to me. I guess he never managed to get to his bed last night. The Neil Young DVD is by the "Weld" from 1991 that was never even released on DVD! I had to download a DVD copy of a Japanese laser disc! Release it and I will buy it!

Anyway, the first date of European Paganfest is over. That was Münich, Germany. The venue was Backstage where we've been a few times before already. Excellent venue. It is nice to show these European venues to the guys of Swashbuckle after the shit holes of the North American tour. We have six bands on tour. That's a bit too much. All the guys seem to be quite nice but it's a terrible job to headline a tour like this. Last night seemed to go on forever before it was our turn to get on the stage.

We were, or least some of us were a bit worried about the German dates since we have Die Apokalyptischen Reiter on tour and they are huge in Germany. We weren't so sure how it's going to work for us to be on the stage after them. Last night they had a huge pit and the crowd was practically eating from their hands. We were watching that and wondering if there will actually be anyone left when it's our turn. There was. We had an excellent night. Our change over took really long. I really can't understand how the fuck it can be so difficult to get the violin working. After all, the tour crew knew that we have a violin. They've had our technical rider for months and we've actually been with them like 30-40 shows before but still they don't "know" that we have a violin. Bollocks.

As I said the show was good. Excellent audience and the band was in fine form. We did quite a basic set. Same songs that we've been playing for some time now. The set list has three songs from the last album and this is the first real tour with them in the set so it wasn't just "the same old set" for the audience. I'd say the funniest moment of the night was during Crows Bring The Spring. There's a part where Juho and Hittis are supposed to trade solos. For some reason Hittis missed that and was just sitting on the drum riser drinking beer. Juho saw that and just did the whole solo by himself. Except that at one point Hittis got up and went to the vocal mike with the beer bottle and started to blow into the bottle. I don't know if he managed to get any sound out of it but it looked like an excellent solo!

The DVD player didn't want to co-operate with Mr. Young. It's Thin Lizzy time then. No one can hate the Irish. Not even a German DVD player.


10:30 in the bus on our way to Berlin. Yesterday we were in Leipzig. Or actually in Engelsdorf or something like that. The venue "Hellraiser, Leipzig" is actually located in a mostly abandoned industrial area about 20 minute drive away from Leipzig's centre. For the first time ever I have my skates with me on tour. This summer I didn't skate as much as I would have wanted and the season in Finland is pretty much over so I thought that I'd continue my season in the central Europe. Well, the small towns in the former East-Germany are not made for skating. I managed to do a pretty long trip though but it included a few near death experiences. There's not that much sidewalks to skate, streets are really narrow and the people in their cars seem to think "who the fuck is that hippie and what the hell is he doing on the street. I'll just drive over him."

We had plenty of time again and actually took a local bus to the Leipzig city centre. It was Juho and the lady, Matson, Jonne and myself. First things first: we went to Saturn store at the railway station and bought the active speaker system with subwoofer so we can finally hook up all our various mp3 players to that and blast some music in the dressing rooms. we didn't really do much sight seeing. We walked to the old centre and when I saw an Irish pub I said that I'm not going anywhere else if they have some decent cider. They had Stowford on tap. We didn't go further. There was a small Chinese restaurant next to the pub so I got myself some tofu with fried vegetables as well. We did walk a bit further later and went shopping with Jonne. It was a ladies clothing store but we managed to find really good looking hippie jackets or whatever they were. Size XL was perfect for me. How big are the East-German women?

The venue had gone through some changes since our last visit. Our dressing room was for example at the downstairs where there was no dressing rooms before. We even had TV and DVD player there. DVD player refused to play our Popeda DVD though so me and Matson sneaked into Unleashed's room and stole theirs. They still hadn't fixed the bigger issues at the venue though. They always run out of water at some point of the evening so it was a bottle water shower again. Luckily I got used to that in the US of A.

We did a pretty good set again. We are changing the set each night so that the people who come to see several shows will see a bit different show each night. Die Apokalyptischen Reiter played a good set to a really responsive crowd but I guess it was our crowd after all. That was nice. Although I remember watching Ensiferum headline the first Paganfest and thinking that it must suck to be the headliner when you have four bands before you and the audience is already getting tired. Now we have five bands before us and we haven't seen a tired audience so maybe it is something that you don't see from the stage. Or maybe the audiences have been different.

Our bus driver had his 24h rest yesterday. That meant that we actually spend the night behind the venue and left this morning at 9. It's only a three-hour drive to Berlin anyway. We should be there in a half an hour or so. I just hope that this time the venue is closer to the city centre.