Autogigography, 19 January 2007, Grote Prijs van Leusden, IJsbreker Leusden (NL)

Where do I start…

Photo courtesy of Erik Schepers.

I was feeling a bit (slight understatement) under the weather, most of the week. Yesterday, I took a day off to recover fully. I was playing Wii Pinball when I suddenly noticed the clock and the hands on it which indicated it was way past time to get ready. I hopped in the shower, hopped out again and ran around trying to find various items of my stage gear. I doublechecked everything twice (wouldn’t want to forget something) and left to pick up my girlfriend wife from work.

My wife bought special pants and a few tops (She calls it Emo-pants :D) to wear to our performances. She changed into her emo-clothes and we left to pick up Carmen, our singer. From there, we went to pick up more stage-gear at our studio and then left for the venue.

You’ll never guess this, but we were early. Again. Ah well, consistency is a good thing.

We hauled everything inside and had a light dinner with bread and cheese. We relaxed, tensed and laughed a lot until time had come to draw the order in which the bands would appear. We drew number 4. Nicely in the middle and scheduled to play at 23:15.

The order of play was:

Wool
Crayven
Blueshaker
Transentience
Mattock
Bend 66

Now, the backstage room is upstairs. So all of our gear was upstairs. To get ready for play, we moved all our stuff downstairs while Blueshaker was playing. Anne was our roadie for the evening and she got comments from the security guys: one hot female roadie, she was called. And she was! When blueshaker was ready, they tore down and we set-up. We had the usual difficulties with my set-up.

“Eh, you don’t need a DI box? Can’t we just loop it this way? Oh, you have a loop in your PA box. Oh, that one is a line-out”. Anyway, it got figured out pretty quickly by the stage hands. Carmen was a but worried since we didn’t get to have a soundcheck and so we had no idea how we would sound on-stage. I, of course, was supermetal and embraced the darkness and braced myself for impact!

Joop and Kace started “Calling out the Gods” and we were off! People reacted well, I tried to remember how not to fall wearing my boots. I missed a few chords but everything went well. Next up was Paradox. This is the one in which Carmen tears loose and shows everyone the inside of her lungs. People were blown away. Paradox has a few stops and after the first one, the crowd cheered and cheered Carmen on! They went crazy. After the second part, they cheered again! And at the end of the song, they cheered again! I didn’t know what was happening. This never happened to us, before. Sure, people cheered us on, but they never cheered in between songs. It only got better from there. We played little girl and all the evening and all through the set, I’d been telling myself “Don’t do the solo, just play the chords, don’t do the solo, just play the chords”. I had been telling myself that, right up to the part where my solo was. Now, I missed this solo about three times the past rehearsals! But I just bit my lip mentally, switched patches and played the solo. Flawless. In one go. And no missing the right patch when going back to the chorus. Endgame of course is still a great ending. We were cheered on, people asked for more, they wanted us to play more songs but our time was really limited to 20 minutes.

We tore down, moved everything back up and crashed. Another notch on my guitar, another job well done. Thanks to all our fans who showed up and to those who thought of us but couldn’t make it.

Setlist:
Calling out the Gods
Paradox
Little Girl
Endgame

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 20th, 2007 at 10:01:00 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.