Last night’s show was at a small restaurant in central Amsterdam. We caught a Park & Ride into the centre from our accommodation and lugged our stuff across the city to the nights venue. The venue was cute. It was a student run, not for profit restaurant / bar that strongly encouraged the arts and great food. The bar owner was a guy in his early twenties who was slouched at the bar reading erotica and sipping on a glass of french red wine and the bar had a variety of the strongest ales that could be found in the Netherlands on tap; you get the idea.
Me and Chris had 5 drinks tokens each and a meal on top of our fee and enjoyed THE BEST meal I’ve had in a long time. Free food always tastes better, but seriously I would have paid €25+ for that meal. It was phenomenal. We had a steak with salad and dumpling style potatoes; I’m not much of a foodie so I can’t really explain it but just take my word on how good it was.
We got our stuff set up for our set and sadly, quickly realised that the in house PA system wasn’t up to much and we couldn’t bring ours (no hands left to take it on a bus). The gig was a tough one. It’s difficult; you can throw money at getting the best gear on the market that unleashes your potential but at the end of the day; if you put it into a crappy system, you’re going to sound shit.
There’s not much you can really do in this situation apart from embrace it, try and look like you’re having fun and just do your best. Unfortunately we both slipped into auto-pilot a bit too much and didn’t play too well. It was still ok, I turned a few heads; it’s always better to play than not to play, but we weren’t as well received / didn’t perform as well / weren’t as appreciated as we would have been usually.
I’ve never really had a BAD gig, not REALLY bad. I get asked quite a lot when friends ask me questions about life as a musician. Yes you’ve got to be thick skinned, I am very thick skinned with it, but equally if someone said dead to my face; “I hate your music.” – it would hurt a lot; it’s my thing, I spend all my time on it, It’s my passion. Anyway, gigs fluctuate but I’ve never been boo’d or had criticism after a performance or been heckled in a way that I couldn’t handle, i’ve not had any nightmares. I’ve witnessed loads but never had anything aimed at me (yet) – actually no that’s a lie there was a kid (3-5 years old) at a festival who walked in front of the stage and started giving me the Julia Caesar thumbs down once but fuck him; I came off stage to thunderous applause and his parents didn’t love him anyways.
A few friends from last nights show came along to last nights show including Stephanie; our Colombian film-maker friend, and Brady, an American photographer / musician who was a great laugh. We played ok, but we all knew we could be better so they just politely smiled and went along with it! After the show we left our equipment in the bar’s back room for 30 mins or so and headed out into the centre of Amsterdam for a quick look round.
People get really excited when they see that you’re touring, they think “oh my god, you’re seeing so many amazing places you must have the best time!” – Touring is great. But we’re not travelling. In our time in Amsterdam I would say we had 3 hours to ourselves in the whole two days where we actually had time to go and explore. You’re always tied up and it’s hard to catch anything. So yeah. It was great to see Amsterdam even if briefly. We wandered down the main canal and saw a bit of the Red Light District, took some photos and headed back to grab our stuff before the last tram.
We got back to our accommodation at 1am and stayed up til 2 looking through photos from the gig, scheduling in social media posts for the next day and adding up hat collection money. We crashed out sharing a king size double bed and slept through until 10am the next day. The next morning we had another Bel-vita breakfast and hit the road to Hamburg with me driving. I finally felt like I was starting to get the hang of driving on the right and put in a solid stint of 3 hours down the motorway. We stopped for lunch at a service station and got stung on refuelling prices. Chris took over driving and I did some social media stuff for the tour and we hit THE WORST traffic jam ever. We eventually rolled into Hamburg after a 6 and a half hour drive. That brings us up to date.
Yesterday was one of those gigs, I’ve had hundreds and I’ll have hundreds more. It’s not a problem; hey if you said to the vast majority of people – “Would you stand on stage and get ignored for 45 minutes if it meant you could go to Amsterdam and do what you love, get free food, free drinks, free accommodation and get paid?” You’d probably say yes… right?
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Joel's Side Of The Story 
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