When last we left our hero, he was about to head to Antwerp for a house concert.
We left Karlsruhe much later than we had planned, due to a group insistence on finding food that was NOT made in a truck stop. A little side note about truck stops in Europe: Italian ones were the best, by far. I'm sure the French ones are similar (ie, they both serve the local cuisine), but having never actually EATEN at a French truck stop, I can't say for sure. The British ones are also good, provided they have an M&S in them. The food at the ones in Germany, however, is really pretty bad, and not only that, in Germany you have to pay .70 Euros to use the bathroom (although the machine then spits out a little .50 voucher good for anything there). Quite annoying.
At any rate, thanks to a late start and several GPS mishaps (she kept going temporarily insane and directing us off-track) we arrived at the show in Antwerp about 90 minutes later than we were supposed to, although it being a house concert it really wasn't a problem. Here is where I first learned that house concerts are awesome. You're pretty much guaranteed a decent meal and a place to stay. On top of that, it's very much like hosting a party - there's always plenty of alcohol. So basically what happens is you end up being the "guests of honor" of a sort, and the setting is so intimate that the audience HAS to listen and can't rally yak away like they sometimes do in a bar. Needless to say, by the end of the night in Antwerp, all the alcohol had been drunk, all the food had been eaten, and a very inebriated me was driven to a place to sleep by one of the fortunately not inebriated hosts. Had a great time, of course, made even better by the fact that two people we had met and then gone out with in Hamburg (they played before us) were at the show as well, stopping by on the way back to Germany from England. Always nice to make friends on the road.
The following day we drove to Lille. Now, we had been in Lille just over three weeks prior, briefly, to spend the night with the couple who was to host this house concert, but hadn't really seen the city proper. After getting in and eating a VERY late lunch (the band gets cranky when hungry, but meh, we survive), our hosts directed us to a big open-air parking lot where we were to leave the van for the duration of our stay, and then drove us to our accommodations, two apartments generously lent to us for the night. It was then that we finally saw Lille proper, and it was gorgeous. Much like in Gent (in fact, originally the city was Flemish), the old city managed to remain intact during WWII, and so we drove through a maze of winding cobblestone streets, surrounded by beautiful old buildings.
After hanging out for a few hours, eating food and drinking wine that our hosts had left us, we were driven back to the house where the concert was. The room was completely packed, with even two small children in the audience. Unlike the two other house concerts we played (and the one small bar with no sound system that felt like a house concert), this time we had a small sound board, some speakers, microphones for the vocals and acoustic guitar, and a very nice keyboard (the one we lugged around all tour was a piece of crap, to be honest). Playing a house concert is a lot of fun but, due to the lack of amplification, can be quite difficult, simply because strings and flute are naturally much louder than an acoustic guitar, and so it's very difficult to hear the strumming patterns; also, Emanuel doesn't have the loudest voice around, and so often in such situations it can be somewhat difficult for the crowd to hear him, and so we have to play much more quietly than we would like to. That night in Lille, however, none of that was a problem, and we played literally every second of material we brought with us, as well as a few things written on the road. The audience was amazing as well, cheering wildly after every song, which spurred us on to play a hell of a good set. I mean, of course we always give it our best every night, but crowd energy just has so much to do with it. No matter how well-trained one is, it's simply impossible to not have the crowd be a factor.
After the house concert, we stayed around for a while chatting with the audience (and of course drinking wine and Belgian beer), and soon it turned into a somewhat out-of-control dance party (I saw at least a couple people hit the floor, between the antics of the dancers and the inebriation factor). And a great time was had by all. At around 4 AM, our hosts escorted us back to the apartments (much different route walking than driving), and that was that.
The following day we had a day off, and our hosts generously offered us the apartments for another night. We then had the opportunity to walk around Lille during the day time, which we did for a few hours. The city was just beginning to set up its Christmas decorations, and, due to it being a Sunday, most of the businesses were closed, in spite of Lille being a city of 220,000 people (with a metro area of about 1,000,000). Of course we had to stop in at a local church, the Eglise Saint-Maurice, a beautiful building in the Gothic style, full of statues, sculptures and paintings. We then went to the Rue de Gand, a street known for its restaurants, for dinner, and of course had an excellent meal (how can one not, when in France?).
The next day, we said goodbye to our hosts, grabbed our instruments from their home, crossed the channel, and then drove to London for a show at a place owned by the quintessential hipster publication Vice Magazine. It was a free show, and for whatever reason just didn't work out for us. Lots of things went wrong, the crowd wasn't that into it (clearly not there to see us) and frankly, we were glad when it was done. Free shows can be tricky like that - when a show is free, no one feels any obligation to listen, and you are guaranteed to have people just there to drink, who don't care one whit WHO is playing. We played four free shows at venues on this tour, and only one was an unqualified success.
We then went to a flat that our booking agent had landed for us last-minute, as the venue wasn't paying for accommodations (not uncommon for London, or any major city for that matter). The host was a really nice, friendly guy, but why on earth he agreed to host a 6-person band is well beyond the scope of my reckoning. I ended up spending the night curled up between two comfy chairs I pushed together (my back was not pleased with me), and two of us spent the night in the van. None of us slept more than a few hours (except the two lucky enough to get a couch and a mattress, and we didn't begrudge them that). We got up the next morning, had a good English breakfast, and drove off to Hull feeling optimistic, as one is only allowed one worst show of the tour.
The last time we were in Hull, we had a great experience. The club where we played both times is called the New Adelphi, and it is somewhat unique in that the owner, a man named Paul Jackson (and a man whom we all admire greatly), insists that only smaller, mostly unknown bands are allowed to play there. In its 26 year existence, the club has given a stage to such stars as Radiohead, Oasis, and Franz Ferdinand (good company, no?). He also happens to really like our music; the club manager told us our CD had been in pretty much constant rotation there ever since our first performance. Hull is also the site of the best Indian food I've ever eaten, and it was waiting for us on our return. We had a great show, and the club had a good bit more people than it did the first time we played there. The New Adelphi is a club I'd be happy to play on every tour.
After the show, we did our usual sit-around-and-chat-and-sell-merch thing, after which we hung out with the club staff for a while, all of whom are amazingly nice people, and then said our goodbyes. This last night of the tour was to be our most difficult, but we had known that from the very first day. The issue was that our flight left from Heathrow at 12:50 the following day. However, we also had to drop our equipment off with the person we had rented it from at a town about an hour outside of Hull. We also had no interest in dealing with rush hour traffic around London. Thus the course of action had to be thus: we would leave Hull, drop off the gear, then drive to a gas station not too far from the airport to wait until about 8:30 AM. We would then get to Heathrow around 9, drop off the van with the rental company, and have plenty of time to get through check-in, security, and have breakfast before the flight.
This plan mostly worked as planned. The only hitch was the when we got to the vicinity of the airport, we simply could not seem to find a service station, and on top of is all we were running out of gas. After a stressful 30 minutes of getting lost and wondering where in hell we were going to find fuel, we finally managed to get off the highway, locate a gas station, and even find some signs for a back way to Heathrow (at that point the highway was bumper-to-bumper). I managed maybe an hour of sleep, and hadn't showered or changed my clothes since leaving Lille. But hey, that's rock and roll, isn't it?
The flight was fine, of course. I don't mind overseas flights, since these days you can watch a plethora of stupid movies on a tiny screen to pass the time. I had no interest in sleep, since I figured my best bet to beat the jet lag was to tough it out until the evening, where eventually exhaustion would take over and I'd awake at a reasonable hour (success, on that score).
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