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20/8 Our first gig in Latvia: After a long night with Russian karaoke and too many beers we arrived at the harbour of Riga. As we were passing through the custom staff was wondering about all the equipment that we were bringing into Latvia. But it all went smoothly as we had all the paperwork in order. When we got through the custom we met up with Martin Zviedris, the person that had arranged the tour and then packed our belongings into the tour-bus. Our first destination was the airport where we picked up our singer as he had been flying instead of taking the boat. After an approximately one hour drive we arrived in Jelgava where we were supposed to live during the tour week. After some time off and something to eat it was time for us to get back to Riga for our first gig at “Depo”. After loading off our equipment at the Depo club it was time for a radio interview with the radio channel “Naba” which turned out great. After the radio-interview (and quick stop at McDonalds), we were about to see how unfortunate the situation is to play in Latvia sometimes. As we only had brought our guitar amplifiers (guitar-tops) and no speaker cabinets which we had been promised. Without speaker cabinets, our equipment where almost useless (It doesn’t sound too good to put your guitars directly into the P-A mixer). But in the end we managed to get the backline to work at an almost acceptable level so that we could do our sound-check.  The only thing that we had to wait for was the time to get on stage (we are used to get on stage between 21:00 PM and 23:00 PM), so we sat down and had a couple of beers and waited, it wasn’t until 01:00 AM we entered the stage. After a couple of to many beers and some fatal mistakes of the sound technician/engineer we began to play. The sound on stage was really poor and our lead guitar disappeared from the monitoring and made it almost impossible for us to play, but we made it through the set. Afterwards we were a bit disappointed with our performance as we didn’t live up to our own expectations, but we had four more gigs to prove ourselves. Continue to the third day |