Honour Before Glory in Germany - Day 3

These blogs are running into each other a little bit - so I hope, as well as being at least mildly interesting, they also make sense! The timings are slightly off. I originally wrote this on the drive from Munich to Stuttgart, but now write it the day after Stuttgart (does that make sense?!). I will write of last night's adventures later today!

As reported, the day in Munich was nice and relaxed. We stayed at an apartment in part of the venue (the first time I've slept on bunkbeds for a few years!). The whole venue itself was split into 3 or 4 different sections, and operated in numerous different guises, including hosting some youth / social work, and a radio station. All in all a very cool place!

The gig was a bit more comfortable for me, and I managed to play Lions acoustically for the first time which was good, though I still feel slightly uncomfortable being onstage on my own! I think it will work better when the band exists as a 'bigger' entity (personnel wise). But I think I try and make excuses for this too much anyway!

Sometree rocked it again, while I descended into Augustiner Hell. Watching Sometree you again feel it's odd they never reached a bigger audience in the UK. Is a large part of it because they're German? Or does that geographical problem mean an inherit problem in terms of touring and being 'out' of England

In the course of the day, while talking about pubs, football and lyric writing in English, I introduced the guys to cockney rhyming slang - a whole new world for non-English speakers. The well oiled end to the evening, culminated in loading Danny Dyer clips on to You Tube...

Today I've been reading about Kristin Hersh's Strange Angel project - find out more here. I always enjoy her music and the recent 50 Foot Wave stuff was great, so it's interesting to read about another approach to making music (and seemingly unheralded)

And to Stuttgart... (except in real life I'm about to leave Stuttgart, but will write of last night later...)

Honour Before Glory in Germany - Day 1/2

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