Day 2: Utrecht
Welcome
Yesterday we began our tour with a show in Utrecht, in the Netherlands.
Although hotel’s elevator displayed clear signage with a traffic light system in an attempt to regulate the flow of patrons attending the complimentary breakfast buffet, I defied their system and attended during the red light, the busiest hour. I served a large plate up with tomato, cucumber, boiled eggs, cheese, pumpernickel, and a croissant. On the side I had a small bowl of fresh fruit with honey and yoghurt.
A few hours later we assembled downstairs for lobby call where we were reunited with Jon and Liz, and also the stealthy man who sat next to us on the bench unnoticed. It was Jon who spotted our van approaching, the gunmetal grey panel work contributing to a rather striking look, similar to that which you might attribute to a Mercedes coupe or an Aston Martin Vanquid. In fact it was a MAN TGE 3.180, a German-built combi van with a 4-cylinder, 2.0 liter, bi-turbo Euro 6 diesel engine, generating 130 kW and 410 Nm of torque at the front wheels. You might find all of these technical details nauseating, and if you do I think you’ll enjoy the fact that it has a very bouncy front seat, and our driver/tour manager Berend goes up and down a number of times whenever he drives over a bump. This vehicle feels like a real workhorse and we are excited to take a break from driving Sprinters and put this MAN through its paces.
If you had noticed a conspicuous omission in my first blog post, that I was missing a segment that has been going back a few tours at least, well done. I did in fact see and photograph the Mainfreight sign on Auckland’s George Bolt Memorial Drive and it was a fine adage that they had on display, a saying that now came into play as we opened the cargo compartment of our van for the first time and tried to load our suitcases around the incredible amount of equipment and merch that was already jammed in there.
Tristan uses the strength of the wolf to get Liz’s heavy, broken suitcase into a nook above the cymbal case.
Berend took us out of Amsterdam smoothly and confidentially and soon we were on Rijksweg 2 heading south towards Utrecht. Although 130kW doesn’t sound like a lot of power to drive a fully laden van, this metric actually translates to 174 mechanical horsepowers - plenty enough to get us the 38 kilometres to our hotel on the outskirts of Utrecht. Our drives are all incredibly short in the Netherlands so we had time to check into our hotel and have a couple of hours rest before heading to the venue for load in.
At 3.30pm we arrived outside Ekko, a small club located right next to the River Vecht. We unloaded across the cobbled footpath, dodged speeding cyclists who were confident and unafraid of the heavy equipment cases we were wheeling. Everything went down a narrow corridor into the venue where we began to unpack, eager to find out if our instruments and electronics had survived the trip from Gainesville. I opened my bass case and counted: two basses, both still intact. Jon’s guitar still possessed its golden sheen. Liz’s acoustic guitar was somewhat troubled by changes in humidity but was otherwise in good shape. Tristan’s cymbals had remained rust-free and were looking shiny and ready to play.
The stage at this venue was an unconventional shape. Start by imagining an isosceles trapezium with the two parallel sides running parallel to the front of the stage. The shorter of these two sides is the rear wall of the stage and Tristan was sitting in front of this wall, in between the two angled sides of the polygon. In front of his drum kit, you now need to imagine an invisible line that connects the two angled sides, enclosing Tristan inside the trapezium, his safe zone in which no one else is allowed to setup their music equipment. Now that you have this picture firmly emblazoned in your mind try to imagine a narrow rectangle, perhaps a ratio of sides of about 5:1., and one of the long sides of rectangle is nestled firmly against the front edge of Tristan’s polygon. The rectangle is about twice the width of Tristan’s area, so we have plenty of room to spread out laterally, but a good amount of it sits underneath the PA speakers, and each end is obstructed from view and enshrouded in darkness.
If you feel like you have understood this description of the stage, I would love to see what shape is living in your head. Sketch out what you think the stage looks like and send it through to breakfastandtravelupdates@breakfastandtravelupdates.com, or my Instagram page @breakfastandtravelupdates.
The benefits of the trapezium/rectangular stage were not many, although I think the reason for this awkward shape was the two storage rooms installed right behind the stage. Unfortunately for us this meant that Bird, our giant inflatable fish had to take a night off as there was no single place on the stage to accommodate its formidable girth, and the sold-out show meant that we couldn’t place it in the audience.
There was enough to worry about at soundcheck in any case as we hadn’t touched our instruments in three weeks and all of the sounds that came out of them seemed new and unfamiliar. We had just enough time to get things to a functional level and then we vacated the stage so our old friend Lande Hekt could get up and have a go.
I took a walk in the small break we had before playing. Utrecht was thrumming on this Friday evening and the banks of the Vecht were lined with busy bars and restaurants, with plenty of patrons out enjoyed the magic that comes from dining in dangerous proximity to water. Apart from a small gaggle of Geese there weren’t many watercrafts out on this serene and handsome canal, but I did see a couple of heavily crewed dinghies that seemed to be the preferred vessel for a those wanting a low budget cruise option.
Five minutes before 9pm we began our set. It was unsettled to begin with as the three weeks of dust accumulated on our fingers and hands was thick and difficult to work off. But we got things working after the first few songs and it felt great to be playing together again. 250 people were jammed into this small room and it was a hot and exciting 80 minutes that we all enjoyed before retiring into the back room.
I write now a paragraph for those fans out there of band touring logistics. Not the glorious stuff like freighting guitars across the globe, or finding a nice spot in your case that perfectly fits your microphone, I’m talking about bread and butter logistics - the process of packing down a stage in thirty minutes so your venue can begin their club night. We waited thirty seconds backstage before coming out and rushing to retrieve our cases from the storage room. There were patrons still in the venue trying to chat and get autographs, so we weren’t allowed to put the work lights on, and we were stuck with the stage lights which changed colour and brightness regularly just in case lifting heavy road cases down off the stage felt like too simple of a task. Everything needed to be stacked on one side of the room so there was space for patrons to stand in front of the DJ who had begun playing already. When everything was off stage Berend rushed to get the van and parked out front of the venue while we began to wheel all of the cases out, pushing through the crowd of people who were lined up at the merch table. Once all this gear was loaded the van had to be re-parked across the other side of the river so the area out front of the club could remain clear for arriving patrons. We headed back to the merch table to finish selling and signing and eventually we were able to pack this area up and get it ready to load. Berend went out to fetch the van for the final time and we ferried everything outside, summoning the strength of the wolf to get all our merch boxes up and into the cargo bay.
Finally we finished our work for the evening and made the short drive back to the hotel for a hard-earned rest.