You are currently browsing the monthly archive for July 2003.
A Jamie picture from the Warick.
Here we are, after a fair old drive. The sound check is where the real fun happens these days. Ask vin, over there, chewing his own face off. The soundman was gas, screaming strewth at the pa as it sputtered and coughed it’s way around. Isn’t that the one we nearly blew up last time. Ahem.
Great gig. Gugai is the man, puts us on, gives us a meal and the booze, lets us go mad playing for the Galway crowd. As ever the bootiful ladies are up the front, dancing away, and as ever we’re asking ourselves how any one cane dance to us at all, but hey, who cares. Donal O joins us on stage for the Superlady what with the Tycho’s having supported, which we won’t go into, and we have a scoop or two and dance the night away after too. We’d love to stay, but yet again, we’re driving home in the dead of night. Bus driver’s alright, lets us stay for a while and chill out. well worth it.
Paul about to take off his specs and yell "have at you!" at the stage manager, who was, to be fair, a cunt.
Yeah we’re back, higher up the bill and with less booze in the dressing room. Although the setting is Punchestown this year, I tend to think all horsy places must look exactly the same. This year we’re actually there on time, and the panic that preceded last years gig is but a memory. In fact they insisted all bands turn up 3 hours before hand, these days, not twenty minutes. You’d see their point, writ in the face of the crew, you would, were you not fuming and name checking murder at the actions of the stage manager. Have you got a plug board. What? I don’t look after plug boards. Why is the clock facing the wrong way? what? Can I tell you to fuck off? What? There we are, waiting stage left, arguing with some obdurate idiot idiot. We don’t let it affect our performance, after all, it’s not a pimento-less olive, now, is it?
So we play our set. Humoursly there’s actually a crowd at the start, you know, cos the gates are open. And by Christ if there isn’t, like, a million people AT LEAST by the end. We squeeze about an hour and a half worth of effort into 25 minutes. We’re fucked after, but by Jesus, it was worth it. Full tent… full noise, us knackered, booze somewhere. (you can’t drink that on stage. What? Fuck off). Then off with us, to play foosball with J. Fish in some awful staged photo-op for Hot Press and drink booze with whomever we please. But mostly alone.
Then off to the flaming lips in the rain, and sitting in the dressing room, having a can, whishing the manics would shut up. Rare days, rare days in deeed.
Precipiced on the edge of the world, Roundstone was all that and more. The sun abandoned refuge behind the clouds and we stood there, melting a bit, feeling iffy. As festivals go, this one is up there. From nuts to soup, everyone was real nice to us. Booze, food, sunshine, a nice big tent to play in and a gaf by the sea in which to dwell. We lamented lack of tourball, when at 2 in the morning, in the near pitch of the coastal night, we noticed the football pitch. Just as well, imagine the careers, lying splintered by the sidelines as cold morning and sobriety crept upon us. But hold on, sir, what about the gig?
Sir Richard of Stackpoole has a fancy gaf with a nice garden. He was top drawer to us and everyone else and we felt righteously done by. Think of Slane on an intimate scale, on a real scale. We probably pissed everyone off with our sound check, which was of course much like any of our sound checks, being unending, and added to this was the fact we did two cos Graham from Whelans turned up just as we were finished our first and offered to have us do another so he could do it. Rodrigo y Gabriella got their revenge though, making us wait with their many encores, which gave us a fright. What were we to do to top that? Well, we start with Deathfall Priest or something an move on from there. By then the crowd is too deaf to care, by the end they were too drunk to care. We went through Superlady, manically. We were also selling the cd, it’s world debut if you like. How privileged is that? JP drove us down there in the van and rewarded himself with a hangover of megalithic proportions. It’s a gig I’d heartily recommend to anyone. And yet again, as we stand on that stage and watch people enjoying themselves we ask ourselves “how did this happen?”……
