After my nice holiday, I only had a few days to get ready for the Honour Before Glory tour supporting Sometree in Germany. The joke was I had to burn CDs to sell, do my washing and even finish a couple of new songs. This was a bit of exaggeration, but I was hoping to play Lions and a cover that I hadn't played previously.
The first gig was Friday night in Berlin, and to make things easier I flew in the night before - as with everything on this tour flying over on my own with just a guitar was a strange and new experience! Everything went fine though, even though I was especially worried about the safety of my guitar!
In Berlin, I stayed with Sebastian, the guitarist of Sometree, and we spent more of Thursday night and Friday catching up on all the goings on since they came over to support Forward Russia in early 2007.
While Sometree went off to do a radio session in the afternoon, I wandered to some familiar parts of Berlin, in search of Wurst & Kraut, before catching up with them at Lido later on.
There was the usual big city anticipation for the gig, with Sometree playing their home town, the capital city, at the big club with an early start for the early finish.
In true whiskas fashion, I felt suitably awkward onstage - I'm especially paranoid about my lack of German - I just feel rude. Still the gig went well, though it was probably the hardest for me to start with as it was so early and to such a big city crowd. I didn't brave Lions, but Mazzy Star's Fade Into You slipped in just perfectly
Sometree were awesome, playing the perfect Berlin set - so so good to hear the new songs, and worked extra well with help from old friend Sean on extra keys and guitar. No crazyness after the gig, as we had an 8am start the next day, with Munich our goal (a looooong drive), after Sometree stopped to at Restgeräusch studio to record an internet session.
During the session, I was total spare part and gourged myself entirely on chocolate and crisps while trying to keep up with the UK football scores. Like most Saturday in England really!
There is vague hope of using he time on this tour to write some more songs and work on how I'm going to record others. Maybe this will prove easier when there aren't football matches to get distracted by!!
It's been a beautiful day in Munich today, and we've mosty just chilled out in the sun while waiting to soundcheck. I did manage to watch Man Utd v Liverpool, so all is not lost. The gig tonight should be good, and then a short-ish drive to Stuttgart tomorrow, and hopefully the tour really gets going
