The Big Show is Tonight!

It's now 4:40 pm and the van will be here to take us to the Festival site in 20 minutes, so I don't have much time to write this. Tonights show is a big one. This will be our fourth year performing here and we always enjoy this crowd. We play at 9ish and then again at 2am. We head back to Amsterdam at 5:00 for an early morning flight to Denmark to do a show there tomorrow night. We are gonna be exhausted.

So let me catch you up with the last few day. Last time I wrote was on Wednesday when we had a day off in England. It turns out that it was Brian McSweeny's Birthday. He turned 31. So after we did laundry, we celebrated Brian's birthday at the nearest neighborhood pub.



Oops! I guess I didn't mention what we did on Tuesday. Well, we left Wales for London by bus on Tuesday morning. There we met Jonathan Brown for Furious/Fierce Records. We loaded up into a van and drove a few hours to Kent. That night we played a show in a big tent for a camp meeting kinda vibe. After the show we loaded back into the van and drove back to Heathrow. That puts us back to Wednesday like I was talking about above, 'ya know with the laundry and Brian's birthday.

Ok, now that we are back on track....

Thursday morning we woke up early and took a cab to Heathrow. We knew it would be a madhouse there so we left three hours before our flight. It was as crazy as expected. No cars are allowed near the airport now, you get dropped off in the parking lot and then hike to the terminal. When we got inside there were crazy lines everywhere. In this advanced security state, extra workers are in place to point you in the right direction and give you assistance. We got in the que and were then "assisted" by one such worker. She looked at our itenerary and told us we needed to get out of line and come back in an hour. We attempted to argue with her, but she insisted. So we went downstairs and got a cup of coffee. We all disagreed with her thought process so after waiting only 45 minutes we went back upstairs to find that the line was much longer now.

The line moved very slowly. When we got to the check in counter, we could see the line for the security check growing and growing. After recieving our boarding passess and all our bags were tagged and put on the belt, they fast tracked us through security. Even the "fast track" line took about thirty minutes. Once through, we ran (like we always seem to do) to our gate. Thankfully the plane had not left yet, but we were some of the last people on. In spite of our attempts to get checked in early and not be rushed we still ended up getting on the plane 15 minutes late. We were very glad that they had not left. I guess they too know how messed up the system is.
The flight was only 50 minutes long. We landed in Amsterdam, loaded into another van and drove another three or so hours to Eindhoven. We arrived at the hotel around 8:00pm. That was one long travel day. We figure in the 13 hours that we had been working to get to our destination that only 4 were actually spent moving in the right direction. That's around 9 hours of waiting.

I must be honest, I had forgotten how much time we as musicians spend waiting while touring. It really can drive you a bit koo koo! No wonder when we slept till one o'clock this afternoon.

Here are some shots of our hotel hallway.


Here are some of Brian on his laptop and Ian waiting for the elevator.

I think they look a electro pop dou, like the pet shop boys or erasure.


They sure do like bicycles here.



Ok, that's it for now. I'll have more to share after the show in Denmark Saturday night. I'll have pictures from Tonight's show and more traveling stories.

Love to all,

Christian