Day 9: Lyon
Welcome
Yesterday we traveled Southwest into the Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes region for our show in the city of Lyon.
Our day began with a visit to the restaurant of our hotel in Paris where we took a few minutes to partake in the complimentary breakfast. I enjoyed a selection of cured meats, cheeses, and baguette.
Brand new wind turbines under construction.
It was another windy day on the French highways and Jonathan did a commendable job getting us to Lyon safely and on time. Located 400km Southwest of Paris, Lyon is France’s third largest city with a population of 500,000. The area around the venue was rife with public conveniences such as trams, trees, cycle lanes, and a laundromat which we utilised heavily as we were on day zero of our clothes cycle.
Liz checking for dryness.
High levels of concentration are visible at soundcheck.
Enjoying some European hospitality before the gig.
The show was at Periscope, a venue that is focused on presenting innovative music - usually jazz and other improvised music, but that didn’t hold us back from playing our set of un-improvised songs and riffs. The highlight of the night was watching Cherym get completely engulfed in smoke at the beginning of their set. Despite being nearly disappeared by the over-enthusiastic lighting engineer they played a ripping gig and completely won over the Lyon crowd. It seemed that the room was on it’s way to being fairly inebriated by the time we played and it worked to our advantage helping us to come across as skillful and coherent despite the slightly rough gig we played.
The stage at Periscope looking quite volcanic.
Cherym, partially obscured.
One thing that caught us by surprise during the show was the unified yells of “ouaei ouaei ouaie” from the crowd that began immediately after the first song. After the set we managed to track down the culprits behind this phenomenon and I asked them to perform the chant for posterity.