Photos » France '09

The first weekend of October 2009 we hauled our sorry asses over to France to play three shows in a row in French basements and sit in a van like retards for a fair amount of hours.
We left at seven in the morning from Roosendaal and our first goal was to get to Paris. As usual we had our good friend Hans Wilders from Lugosi a.k.a. our rock in the burning behind the wheel so after some pointless wrong turn near Antwerp due a TomTom device behaving stupidstupid we arrived in Paris around lunchtime. The venue (Le Pixi) was located at the Avenue de la Republique and it turned out they had two of those in Paris. Handy. Needless to say we were at the wrong one first, so our tourist plans had a small delay. We parked the van and proceeded on foot.

We arrived in the city centre and immediately ran into Gaspard from Justice having lunch somewhere. After the obligatory bandpic at the Eiffel Tower we had a romantic stroll and some tender intimate moments at the Louvre. Supercultural entrepreneurs galore!
It was time to head back to Le Pixi to meet up with Onito the promoter and Aside From A Day. This is, let's say, the French version of Breach or Amen Ra which we were opening for today and tomorrow. So, after soundcheck and beers it was time to get sweaty. Note: all three shows were in extremely HOT French basements. We cranked out a pretty good set and I think the people seemed to like us but they didn't get the Snapcase cover very well. Scratch that song for the other two shows. After Aside From A Day's set we had some more drinks and followed our guide Yannick on a hell ride / hell walk straight through nightly Paris where we might have acted kinda stupid un petit peu.
We all have limited recollection of these moments and just got the photos and the scars left as proof. After a few hours we arrived at some apartment where we had microwave pizza, more beer and some local liquor that I'm not sure about. Bedtime for all except Walter because he spent the night dans le toilette due to diarea. The next morning we purchased a big ass zebra for only €4 (!) at some outside market. It was originally €5 but we bargained the hell out of it, too bad we didn't succeed in getting the free hat with it ("ensemble? oui?") since the French lady drove a damn hard bargain.
We said goodbye to Yannick and friends and set sail for Metz. Metz turned out to be a very nice city and it absolutely had the best looking basement of the weekend, at a place called Jeanne d'Arc. After getting some shit from the owner we said fuck it and left in search of dinner. We found a nice-looking but crap-tasting restaurant with the best toilet ever. Imagine a darkroom with heavy classical music and a toilet, oh yeah. Back at the venue a nice crowd had turned up and the first band, Bud Spencer, was running very late (most inefficient soundcheck ever?) but were about to begin. Instrumental Keelhaul-ish rock, good to do. Next up was us, we tried to make up for lost time by setting up and linechecking in no time and kicked off with Two-Headed Giant. Kids liked us! They all lost their minds doing bardives and circle pits and sodomizing our zebra. When our feedbacking-and-screaming-end-of-the-set was over people gave us a big hand and this group of boys came onstage and thanked us for the music and tried to kiss us. French people are weird.

Aside From A Day was up next and did their thang well. Headlining was a young local band called Ebenezer Howard which were cut off abruptly by the dickhead owner since it was time for all the bands to shut the fuck up get the fuck out I guess. Oh well: fuck you, pay us.
Speaking of paying us: this event was not happening yet; they were gonna pay all the bands at the sleepingplace. It turned out this was twenty kilometres away. We arrived in the middle of the night at some big house that smelled like cats and cigarettes with most of the other bands and half the audience. When we finally got some money out of the promoter we skipped the afterparty and went straight to bed. Martijn had to share his bed with the guy (whose name remains unknown) who lived there. He lived in this house with his mother and little brother. Mom partied all night with the kids and little bro woke us up yakking on in French. We all tried to shower there in a bathtub that had a clothesline hanging a few feet right above it. Around the tub were empty beer bottles and full ashtrays for a nice decorative effect. Some cat jumped out of the washing machine and the unknown dude came walking in while I was in the shower ("zie lock ies broken") so it's safe to say I'm glad we didn't end up with rabies or aids. Thanks for the place to crash though.

We got our shit together and went to see Hans. Hans had to sleep in the van since he was allergic to cats (lucky) and after a pitstop at the local bakery we started our six hour drive to the city of Tours in genuine Fear & Loathing stylo. Driving with 3D goggles on = SAFE.

We arrived in Tours in the afternoon. We've played here before in 2007 via the same people as this year, so it was good to meet up with Yohan, Celine and Audrey again.
The Black Hawk turned out to be a cool venue in the centre of Tours and it also had the hottest basement of the weekend. I mean we felt like miners while getting the gear downstairs. Sweat was pouring out of us during soundcheck so this promised to be quite a sexy show. People were there wearing Otis t-shirts from a few years back which was pretty cool. The band opening for us (Cheesy Lane) was the coolest band we've seen this whole weekend. It was like hearing Bleach-era Nirvana. Real cool. We started our set with mics going out on the first two songs but all went well after 10 minutes or so.
We provoked the local punks to mosh which worked out well, and floored Yohan and gave him our zebra as a gift. Really enjoyed that set even though I fucked up my face with a mic. Then, we all got drunk at the afterparty and we all went to sleep except for Onno. In the morning Hans took his first shower of the weekend and we picked up Onno at this French girl's place and headed home... All in all we had a great weekend and we will be returning to Tours on June 12th 2010. Thanks to Hans, Onito, Yannick, Yohan, Celine and Audrey for helping us out in France, and to Marloes for helping us get the rented van back to Lichtenvoorde on our return. Viva la France!