Europe!
Bonjour!
We are writing from our friends’ place in a little ol’ village called Feluy in Belgium. It is grey, windy and wet outside and we are quite content to sit at our computers for a day after a 6 day stint across three countries.
Full house at Pferdestall in Bremerhaven – great start to the tour!
It is no exaggeration to say that we are having a wonderful time touring in Europe. The shows have been great right from the start with big crowds, friendly venues and great sound. We’ve had so much lovely company along the way, stumbled upon wondrous places, eaten too much good food and also felt rewarded for our efforts.
In September we attended and performed at the Reeperbahn Festival in Hamburg. It’s a festival and conference all in one, and we got to put our manager hats on for three days and talk to people from all over the world working in all areas of the music industry. It was a great experience for us, something that we’ve always dreaded, probably like most musicians, and surprisingly enough we really enjoyed it! Our showcase went well, in fact we had a full house there too, and we also played a couple of impromptu songs on a double decker bus for NDR radio!
Just finished playing on the bus and about to jump in the car to go to Bremen for the evening’s concert.
We’ve had the usual issues – sickness, traffic, and the dreaded car break-in! Yep, it happened again! Same country, same point in the tour, different car. Only an hour before our performance in Liege, Belgium, someone smashed the window of our car only to find that Nick was asleep in it! Luckily he fled, obviously intimidated by Nick’s size (!), without the computers he was about to grab. And with a lot of help from our friends at Le Tipi we could store our gear for the night, park the car safely till the next morning when Carglass had express-posted a new window to Liege. All within 24 hours… it beats the 4 days it took last year! Don’t think we’ve ever had such a low-stress emergency before!
Our old friends at Carglass. Possibly the most profitable business in Belgium!
After hours on various highways and Autobahn routes, it’s always a welcome break when we do a gig somewhere in the countryside. Here’s Nick revisiting his childhood whilst saving us some food money on the road… Why don’t we have fruit trees along the roads everyhwere??
One of the most exciting parts of the tour was our live performance on WEO TV in France. We turned up not quite knowing what to expect and never having performed on TV before, and as soon as we got there realised it wasn’t just some amateur local station but a proper studio with a full-on set and a whole line-up of special guests sitting out the back getting their make-up done! We were happy with our performance and the little interview that followed – in French – with Nick nodding and smiling while I fumbled with my words! You can view the performance & interview here (it starts around the 15 min mark towards the end).
No, it’s not a real bar… it’s the set of our live performance on WEO TV, France!
There’s been so many highlights on the trip already and we feel this blog doesn’t really do them justice. But it’s a taste of the experiences we’ve had, and if we haven’t shared them with you on here, maybe we shared them with you on stage, or after the performance, or simply on Facebook!
Thanks for reading about our adventures!
Nick and Liesl 