JEBO
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9/22/2007 9:39:17 AM
---- Updated 9/22/2007 9:53:16 AM
JEBO Tour Blog Day 2
Day 2 - Monday July 16th – Ghent
JEBO Daily Blog for Kevin @ Bristol Rock www.bristolrock.co.uk
by Charlie Presburg (www.pollstar.com)
I won't go on about the weather although as a Brit, it is my god-given right to but let's just say it ain't what it was and rain looks likely. We meet over a hotel breakfast and hook up with our illustrious German agent Peter Iserloh, the man mostly responsible for our string of German gigs this week and he's on good form as ever. After some wandering around the town in the drizzle, we all meet for lunch by the canal. This very picturesque place is almost entirely made up of churches, canals and castles with stages, market stalls and temporary eateries set up all over the place, an amazing feat in itself and a picture postcard of a European town. But enough of the tourism, this is rock and roll, baby! After a hefty lunch we stroll back to the hotel and take some down time in the run up to the gig. In the early evening, the boys unload the van whilst I'm off on some wild goose-chase to look for a phonecard, another feat in itself, shame I never found one public phonebox the entire time, oh well, thank gawd for the mobile phone! So the van's unloaded in the evening heat (yes, the sun donned its hat once again) before the impending down-pour. The sound-check goes well and the boys run through two songs. When I think about it, this is an amazing event, you have to imagine a small English town being totally taken over by music of all genres for a ten day period with tens of thousands of people walking about and live music on multiple stages until 4am. The sound on our stage is excellent and the production staff are fantastic.
Sound-check done we adjourn to the dry tranquility of a backstage trailer where I get to try out the video camera we've brought with us, we're going to attempt to capture various snippets from the week on celluloid, well, when I say celluloid, I mean, we're keeping a video journal of some of the shows.
The boys take the stage bang on time, 8pm and yes it's wet, very wet but this band are awesome wherever they play and in whatever conditions they play. They deliver a storming hour long set to a great audience reaction. Their work here is done so we adjourn for several beers under nearby canvass, the rain is tipping it down and we're hungry. An hour or so later we're dragged off by Christoph from the festival to a nearby dining room that resembles something like a soup kitchen for soup and mussels (I've never got the whole seafood thing so I didn't indulge, soup was nice though, very nice). Food and wine abounds here, there's a lot of giggling like fools and we decide that we're going to hit the Pink Flamingo (second best bar in Gent we're told, so, what's the best bar then, never mind). James and Peter retire to the hotel whilst the rest of us (Rob 'Ballen' Allen, Jeff, Spider, Lawrie, Nick and myself) find the Pink Flamingo, where we're subject to a great deal of 80's electro-music such as The Buggles and Nick Kershaw, great bar, not sure about the the music policy but that's just me, my ears did prick up when T-Rex and Black Sabbath were played. Needless to say, many beers were consumed, we laughed an awful lot, put the world to rights and headed back to the hotel around 3.30am to sleep. A footnote here to say that we were awoken at 5am by Jeff looking for the keys to the van, only to find ten minutes later that they were in his bag, ta Jeff!
It's been a long day, time to sleep, tomorrow we're off to Germany for the remainder of the week, our target audience and definitely something to look forward to, have some of that!
Long live the Schnitzel, more in a day or so.......
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