dinsdag 25 mei 2010

The Fat Lady Sang


Wow, here I am at home, looking back at an amazing tour with awesome music and incredible people. The last show in Manchester was just great! The guys were playing like it was the last gig of their life...

The Merch boot was very busy and I think I sold almost every shirt I had. The orange ones were sold out very quickly, the black album cover shirts as well, and the shirts with the faces in all sizes except S.

In retrospect my extra order was perfect. I am so glad to have sold almost everything. Selling out is nice, as long as it is the last gig of the tour ;) And apart from that I also found the time to make some onstage footage of Mike teaching the audience the Family Guy theme, the Boba Fett moment and the Stranger in Your Soul mayhem! Hopefully it will be featured on the upcoming dvd!

After the show it felt so unreal: the tour was over! No more getting out of bed at 11.00u / 12.00u, watching movies until 5.00u in the morning, after-gig-food, closing every day with 3,5 hours of great progrock, etc. etc. So many inside jokes we used can not be used again ;) well, not soon...

After the gig we were all summoned on stage by Mike, I happened to be filming anyway so I filmed everyone of the crew (except Sebastian who manned the merch stand on his own! Preventing all leftovers to be stolen haha, a true hero!) getting on stage receiving cheers and applause from the great Manchester audience...

Daniel took care of filming me as well (that's why he has the camera on the picture above) and I also took some shots later of the two front rows. Awesome ending of an awesome show! He later gave me his new album and signed it for me. It is a great album by the way! Very different than what I expected, I think Daniel is a contemporary, proggy Jeff Buckley. Anyway check that album out: Pain of Salvation: Road Salt One.

After the show we all got into the bus (very crowded) and drove to the hotel where most of the guys left the bus. There we said goodbye, hugged and wished each other well... kind of like a family. Actually it is really special to be working with 15 guys, AND living with them, without EVER having a discussion or fight... just to show that these are very nice guys!

After the hotel only Jens, Marillion's light guy, Pete, Collin, Max and me were left. So we drove to Marillion's studio where we dropped off Pete, I slept for two hours, then drove to London to drop off Jens, I stayed awake with him, then we drove to the ferry in Dover, I slept until we were at the ferry, then we drove to Ede and I slept until we were 30 minutes away. So that was quite a night, 3 shifts of a couple of hours sleep...

but today is tuesday, I'm at work, back to Hoshino where I do sales and marketing for TAMA, Ibanez and some other music brands. I came to work to find out that one of our endorsers (Paul Grey, bass player for Slipknot) died this weekend which is very sad)

But yeah, the tour was great, and I was very surprised to find out that people all over europe were reading this blog. Just great, thanks for letting me know and thanks for all the compliments!

Or as they say: the show isn't over till the fat lady sings!

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