Wednesday, August 22, 2007 

Adam’s Blog - Loch Lomond Festival 


Bonnie Scotland! It has to be said that playing in Scotland is one of 
the things that we always look forward to very, very much! There are a 
few reasons for this. The main ones being that the gigs always have a 
great vibe about them, and the people are so welcoming and supportive!

In addition to this however, to physically get to Scotland, there is a 
10 hour journey on the tour bus, which, despite how it may sound... is a 
lot of fun!

In the build up to this gig, unusually, we hadn't seen much of each 
other, so there was plenty of catching up to be done. There are normally 
rehearsals involved before gigs like this one, and three of us (Tom, 
Brendon, and me - Adam) actually live together, but various matters 
prevented that from being the case this time around. The long journey 
ahead was perfect to reacquaint ourselves with each other.

10 hours is a long time to be confined to a relatively small space, and 
when you consider that our 'catching up' took roughly 10 minutes, we had 
to think of some entertainment, and fast!

A brief glance towards the back of the tour bus revealed a startlingly 
large supply of poor movies - excellent!! And a brief glance towards the 
fridge revealed quite a lot of beer.....even better! We quickly lined up 
what we thought to be the worst possible movie - Troll 2. We were not 
disappointed. 

This is an absolutely tragic attempt at film making. It has an unknown 
cast, who - in my opinion, would fail an audition for Hollyoaks, 
probably the worst costumes ever filmed, and a script that could only be 
compared to cement for it's flair and complexity. It is however, one of 
the finest movies I have ever seen for these reasons. You have to 
appreciate the bad, to understand the good, and it's worth seeking out, 
as it is unintentionally hilarious.

So, after a few beers and some terrible movies, we finally retire. When 
we awake we find ourselves by the beautiful loch and are almost 
overwhelmed by how fresh the air is... believe me, when you live in 
London, you really notice things like this.

When we've all finally risen from our slumber, we attempt to find the 
festival site, and our first meal. The site wasn't particularly well 
signposted from the bus park, so we had an interesting trek around some 
wooded areas in an almost Blair Witch fashion... Like Blair Witch but 
without the death, the 'snot' and the man urinating in the corner at the 
end :-)

We finally find the entrance to the backstage area, our group all still 
living, and intact - and settle in to our temporary dressing room. Our 
actual dressing room was currently being inhabited by another performer 
whose name I can't remember, so for the sake of this blog, lets refer to 
him as Margaret. 

Whilst we waited for Margaret to empty his presence from our dressing 
room, we went to the catering tent, complete with our little paper meal 
tickets... these things are so funny, the main thing that you'll see 
people huddling together and dealing backstage at festivals is meal 
tickets!

We tucked in to an absolute feast of steak pie, whilst the veggies 
amongst us opted for the vegetable lasagne. There was an expansive table 
in the centre of the room, piled high with copious amounts of food to 
accompany our meals....... it looked fit for a sultan, not a group of 
stinking, hung over musicians.

After Margaret left, we were free to really bed-in to our dressing room, 
and relax, devoting all useful energy to our digestive systems. I 
decided it may be fun to try having a shower in one of the delux cabins 
that were provided on-site. It wasn't fun at all. There were two 
separate cubicles within one main cabin. One was fine, the other was not. 

Somehow, someone, at some point had decided to 'curl one out' in the 
other shower cubicle. Lovely, cheers for that mate. The smell was unholy. 
I then had a dilemma on my hands. I smelled like SH** but if I wanted to 
rectify this, then I had to put up with the overwhelming stench of 
SH** in the shower cubicle.

I won't tell you how it all panned out, I'll leave you guessing as to 
what happened!

After we had done a little bit of press in the afternoon, it was time to 
get ready for the stage. The crowd had been increasing in size as the 
day had gone on, so we were confident that there were at least a few 
people there to greet us. We had the chance to play a longer set than 
that of Guilfest, so we could add in a few more tracks. The whole 
performance seemed to just flash by. This was a shame, as we know that 
it may be our last gig for a little while... but hey, the crowd seemed 
to really enjoy it, we enjoyed it, and that's all that matters.

Now our obligations were over we were free to roam this quirky festival 
and listen to some other bands. We got a burger which I'd like to 
mention. We went to a place called 'SUPREME GOURMET BURGER'. That is the 
falsest of advertisements that I have ever seen. We chose this 
particular jaunt solely because of that title. DO NOT succumb to this 
sort of naivete yourselves. 

There was nothing supreme, or gourmet about what we ate, and I'd 
wouldn't go as far as saying that the 'food' that I was given was 
actually a burger. I don't care if this is slanderous... the food was 
more than terrible. I wouldn't even feed this to the dog of a terrorist. 
They should have entitled their burger van 'SUPREME GOURMET COLD SHOE 
MULCH'.

Earlier in the day, we had met up with our lighting guy Jamie, who 
accompanied us on our last tour and kindly did our lights today free of 
charge... If you had any kind of a seizure during 'Spirals' then he's 
the man to thank. Jamie is also the man responsible for Feeders 
lighting, so he invited us to watch their set from the front of house 
stage. It was a fantastic gig, much better live than on record in my 
opinion, and also the perfect accompaniment to the bottle of 
Jaegermeister that we managed to sneak in with us. Needless to say, come 
the end of the set, we were all smiling...

After their gig had finished, we made our way buswards, thankfully not 
on foot in the dark and the rain, but in the open-aired back of an 'old 
school' Land Rover... that's the way to travel! Back on the tour bus, 
therefore time for more bad movies. Now it was the turn of the highly 
acclaimed 'Sabretooth' - a similarly deplorable waste of time, that 
often raised a misplaced laugh, but was comparable to watching paint 
that had already dried. All was not lost however, as more beer, great 
music and lots of laughs marked the end of a great day.

We'd like to say a big thank you to everyone who came to see us, anyone 
involved with the festival - from the bookers to the caterers, and 
every conceivable person in between.

Watch this space y'all,

over and out, 

thirteen senses x

 

www.lewisslade.com/thirteensenses