Autogigography, 11 December, Metalbash Preliminaries at "de Pul" (Uden, NL) You win some …

I have been ill all of last week. I had a rather serious case of influenza that didn’t seem to want to let up. It wasn’t until Friday evening that my legs stopped feeling like rubber bands. This may be due to the intake of Oscilloccinum. It’s a homeopathic and it has never been proven to work. Still, the placebo effect cures about 40% of all people including curable Alzheimer patients and people who suffer from heart diseases.

Anyway, I couldn’t sleep Friday night. I had slept too much during the week and the added thought of performing at the Great Metalbash caused me to toss and turn until I decided to go downstairs and play another hour of Final Fantasy XII. It must’ve been about 3:30 in the morning when I finally fell asleep.

I was up and running the next morning at 09:00. I wasn’t feeling healthy but I wasn’t feeling sick either. The adrenaling cured most of what was left of the influenza and I methodically kept taking the Oscillococcinum.

By 14:30, I left for Mac Donalds to get a quick lunch (Yay! Rockstar food!) and a full tank of gas. I was at our rehearsal space by early 15:00 and started loading everything up. Joop arrived about 10 minutes later. Me and Joop were gonna haul a lot of stuff in the back of my nice and big Volvo while Kace and Rene would drive together, leaving from a different town. We’d pick up Carmen somewhere on the way.

And so it was done. We picked up Carmen along the way and were way too early at the venue. By way too early, I actually mean waaaaaaaayyyyyyyyyy too early as in 2 hours early. “Band Arrival” was scheduled for 19:00 and the clock displayed a merry 17:00. Kace and Rene were already having an early dinner at a local cafetaria so we decided to join them. Of course, being the Rhythm Section, they did not choose the obvious and blatantly in-your-face cafetaria nextdoor to the venue but chose one that was a 5 minute walk away. I whined something about ringing my limo but continued on foot anyway.

We had a very uneventful and tasteless serving of cafetaria food. By tasteless I do mean “lacking taste” as in “could’ve been chewing a piece of paper which would ultimately have been healthier and at least as nutritious”. We got back to the venue and to our luck, they were opening the venue up for sound engineers to come in. We managed to slide in and haul all of our stuff out. It’s 18:30 and we play at 20:50. Did I mention we were early? We were actually so early people started joking around. The last thing I heard our early arrival mentioned, the story had it that we arrived about 12 hours early.

We would be sharing “our” dressing room with the guys from Fuelblooded (NL) while Diggeth (NL) and Herfst (BE) would be sharing the dressing room opposite ours. Halfway the evening, I shouted something in Flemish to a girl wearing a very obvious Herfst t-shirt who looked as I was speaking in tongues and stammered “B-b-ut I’m from Holland”. Yes, people, Dutch and Flemish are supposed to be the same language but we sometimes have trouble understanding each other.

Anyway, we got to play, eventually. But not after I found out I had everything with me, literally everything including stickers and peppermints, but I left my Pod XT Live at home. Cue panic and a nicely churned stomach. I managed to fix a Koch Powertone Amp but, still, that left me with a different amp, a different sound and most importantly: a different footboard with substantially less features than I’m used to. Still, I tweaked it right rather quickly and then went to play. Everything sucked. I mean: sucked balls. I mean: sucked such big balls that Saturn now has under 40 moons instead of the usual 56.

I’ve played a lot of different venues (okay, a few tens) and the monitormix was the worst ever. Most of the time, we had no monitormix at all. Or one instrument would drop from the monitormix and be added later on but twice as loud, thus replacing all the other instruments. Carmen’s microphone cable just dropped from her microphone while she was singing. I got unplugged in the middle of a song because I did another powermetal powermove with my guitar and the wireless set attached to the strap decided that move was most definitely too Eighties and it unplugged me. The sound off-stage got slightly better near the end, but most people complained about bad sound and an omnipresent unbalance between the instruments. And I believe the audience was made out of cardboard and Eunuchs. I mean, NO ONE and I mean NO ONE can just stand still and occasionally yawn when Carmen is crawling all over the stage in a tight dress and wearing stockings.

Anyway, needless to say we didn’t really perform well - or at least my performance was sub-par. We came in last of the four bands of that evening but we must remind ourselves that we were one of the 16 chosen out of 180 entries.

After the show, me and Joop left Carmen in the good care of Kace and Rene and went for a midnight snack after which I dropped Joop at his place and parked my car in my garage and stumbled to bed. But not before I placed my Pod XT in the middle of my living room, ready to go the next morning. THE NEXT MORNING? Yes, the next morning.

In the meantime, Kace and Carmen were spoken to by the representative of the Metal Magazine that organises the Metalbash event. Apparently, he was impressed with what we did that night. He gave us a few pointers and repeated that he was impressed and that he would very happily see us again next year. According to him, we have great promise. Great minds think alike. We also got a mention of being very out of place. While we’re definitely playing Metal, Metalbash is not exactly the type of Band Battle that’s easy on Symphonic, Prog or Powermetal. The bands that won the previous editions were Death/Trash metalbands with a possible exception that doesn’t come to mind right now and may very well never do so.

I’ll write about today’s gig later when my eyes stop trying to close.

Anyway … you lose some.

Setlist:

Calling out the Gods
Little Girl
After the Storm
Paradox
Endgame

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 10th, 2006 at 15:10:00 and is filed under Live performances. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.