Carters Euro Blog

The Labours of Hercules

Today’s our day off!  Hooray!  The tour is feeling good.  We’re 4 shows in and going strong, full stride now!  You know about Brighton of course.  We played Manchester (hardest place to play yet, too much natural reverb).  We played Bristol (GREAT, nothing but real fans!) and just finished Evolution in Newcastle.  Sound was CRAZY!  It was so windy our front-of-the-house-man, Matt Thornley said it sounded like everything was coming through a falanger.
I’m starting to get a feel for being on the road.  Specifically living on a tour bus and all the routine involved.  When you’re playing literally on the other side of the country every day, you rarely have time to go out and hang or see a city.  People love our music, but we’re not rock stars per say.  It’s a very regimen deal.  As a result the rock star level debauchery has been negligible to say the least J  People are really starting to get comfortable with the ins and outs of being on stage and our confidence as a group is building.  It’s interesting because we all come from so many dynamic backgrounds musically and otherwise, yet we can come together to make music.  We have been likened to Real World meets Road Rules only “a billion times more talented“.
In Nottingham today.  We get a day off *whew*  The plan is to go see Sherwood forest and Nottingham Castle (if possible) AND Indiana Jones 4!  It’s going to be an action packed day, or maybe, we’ll do nothing at all.  Anyway.  Forging ahead, and unless something amazing happens next week, I’m not going to give you any more details about the shows, I feel they are getting redundant.  I really want to do a profile of our tech crew.  They ROCK!  Mick, Jake and Matt.  Great guys.  Total characters.

Hercules and the Tour de Bus

HALA is ON THE ROAD! Headed (or now in) Manchester! Back in the day Manchester had a more poppin club scene than London, or so I’ve been told. So the record stores here are of a higher quality. We’re gonna be playin the biggest venue yet. 2000 PEOPLE! I’m nervous. It’s gonna be surreal.

We have played our two shows in Brighton; the private industry party for all the big wigs at digital, and the first full out fan show at Parlour. We rocked the house! We’re still smoothing out set time and stuff, but we’re pretty much a band. Our label has confidence and the crowd response is good.

Oh! We got our tour bus today! ROCK! In trying to keep with Herculean fashion the color scheme is fuschia and black (good effort by the Suits). Although consensus has it that the fuschia should be pink, gloss not matte and there should be sparkles in it.  Still, the bus ROCKS!

It has two lounges, one on top of the other, each one with a multi-regional dvd player. Both have CD players, surround sound and the bottom has an X-Box 360! Unfortunately there is no wi-fi on the bus, so sorry SltdChclt420 and Keone22 no u8er l33t pwn@ge while roadin it.  I also had to wait til the bus stopped in Manchester at the hotel before I could post this (I started writing it 10 hrs ago about 4 hrs before we left for Manchester).

The sleeping quarters are nice and cozy.  They give a decent amount of privacy too.  My only problem is there’s no natural light except a little 6x6 window you can look outside with.  Sensory deprivation was getting to me.  Especially since I don’t have anything to tell the time with.

OK fam, friends and fans… Gotta shower.

Love

Carter

p.s. pictures pending… No really they are! 

Brighton And Love Affair

Greetings fam, friends and fans.  It’s been a busy few days and I have just been able to sit down and document what’s been going on so far.  For starters, our tour kicks off in Brighton UK.  It’s on Her Majestys’ shore almost directly south of London.  Beautiful beaches, very pebbly.  It’s a small hilly town.  Not too big. The people here are polite.  This is probably the most cordial place we will be playing in all of the UK.  I get a sense this is a touristy spot for Brits.  There’s lots of promotional material everywhere for music and events in the approaching summer.  There’s also an exceptional amount of nice clubs here.
The hotel is called “My Hotel”.  It’s a boutique hotel.  It’s real nice.  I imagine someone spent good change for us to stay here because everything is of superior quality to what I would get in a normal hotel.  Everything from the body wash up to the bedding.  Also, everything is very artsy.  I wish I had Pam here to describe the exact sort of art.  I don’t, so artsy will do for now until I get some pictures up. The food is fairly british.  There is a noticable higher quality of restaurants here than in London.  Perhaps bad food is just a London thing?
The venue is OK.  Neither here nor there really.  It has about a 500 person capacity.  And it’s under the arches that support the sidewalk next to the beach.  We rehearsed there all day Wednesday *sigh*.  The sound isn’t too bad.  The house soundsystem  is very clear, and loud but doesn’t project onto the stage at all so we have our own monitor engineer.  The first gig is tonight.  We’re pretty much ready.  We just have one problem: the time between the songs.  Since Andy (the leader) has to program live samples between songs and some songs require about 30 seconds of prep time.  The band has been coming up with ideas to fill this down time such as playing a little jam, or some sort of setup for the song.  We have yet so see what actually happens.  OK.  Off to more rehearsal.

Love

Carter