Europe and Chelsea
What a thoroughly wicked weekend that was! It started with a very plush show at Stanford Bridge supporting the bossers’ boss, Miss Joss Stone. As you may or may not know Yes Sir Boss is an Arsenal band all the way up the Arsenal so playing a gig at Under the Bridge, the Chelsea Stadiums nightclub, was slightly sacrilegious However, we were very grown up and just got on with it (apart from breaking into the stadium to moon the pitch and being threatened by security guards with a lawsuit if the picture were ever posted: see images below.)
The next stop was Woodstock 69 just outside of Amsterdam. This was probably the coolest venue we’ve ever played. Imagine the Hollywood set for the Simbad films of the 1950’s full of 1500 Dutch beach loving party-goers and there you have our gig. An enormous 2-D sultans palace with sand underfoot, shrouded in Shisha smoke with the setting sun visible from stage; you can’t really go wrong with that!
Check out some footage: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PPSGwcluBuA
So apart from Reuben trashing the side of the van by driving through barbed wire and Matt and I narrowly avoiding hypothermia from swimming in the sea in our pants the whole thing was a great success.
As if the weekend wasn’t going amazingly enough we then had a show in Germany at Ulmer Zelt festival near Munich. We’re generally billed as a party band and as such tend to gauge a gig’s success on how hard people stomp and how mental they go. But this crowd was different. For a start they were older then our usual crowd, maybe 30 +. They were also sober and the gig was early. They stood and watched and listened. They were scrutinous and we really felt as though we were being graded. I know this sounds really unpleasant but actually it was so refreshing having to earn a crowds appreciation through pure musicality as a pose to winning them over with the ‘scream if you wanna go faster’ approach so many festival bands employ; shout at them and they shout back kind of thing. As a result we stepped up and played harder and tighter and more tastefully then we ever have before (if I do say so myself!). It worked and we won them over and had to scrabble through the back catalogue side stage for as many encores as we could muster because they just wouldn’t let us leave! We were also fed succulent steaks, filled with German beer and then send off to a lush hotel with a pool and sauna. We liked Germany.
