In
2005 I was sitting on a porch of a rough wooden cabin with my band mates Des
and Ray from Sliotar. We were on the festival grounds of Keltska Noc festival
in the Czech Republic, where we were going to be playing the following night.
It was a day off for us on our tour of the Czech and on a day off, boys play. We
were trying to come up with a way of cooking an egg using only tin foil and
sunlight. It was a roasting hot summers day in Central Europe, no wind in
sight. We were the lucky ones back in those days. Our promoter had flown us
over from Dublin, picked us up from the airport and he did all the driving
around for us. All we had to do was be up in time and play our shows.
But
during that afternoon something happened. An old camper van / tour bus of
another band from the Czech pulled into the festival grounds. The bus had seen
better days, but it still was driving strong (in fact last summer, eight years
later they were still driving the bus). I turned around to Des and said we
should get one of them and hit the road with Sliotar. Des laughed, but
something did get filed in one of the filing cabinets in his head that day.
Only
few weeks to a year from that day, we were sitting on the deck of a ferry on
our way to France. In the car deck of the ferry there was our pride and joy. A
1986 608D Mercedes-Benz School bus, which Des had converted into our tour bus,
with bunk beds, fully operational kitchen and bathroom with shower. This was
every teenage kid’s dream… The only problem was, we were not teenage kids
anymore. Little did we know what the next six and a half weeks would take us
through.
The
planning of this tour and the following 14 tours would make me and Des quite
the experts on booking and organizing a tour. Our tour bus got downsized after
the fuel prices soared in 2008. We’ve had numerous breakdowns, tours where we
lost money, tours where shows got canceled (I can only remember one) all sorts
of illnesses, we had lots of great beer, some bad beer, got frozen in Denmark,
heat stroke in Italy, and attacked by swarm of very organized mosquitoes in
Austria (they only come out between 10-11pm). Our personal relationships have
been tested to a breaking point on several occasions.
Now
we are about to bark on another tour with Sliotar. The 2014 Summer Tour takes
us to Italy, Czech Republic and Austria. This would be what we call a
manageable tour these days, only two and a half weeks.
I
wrote a blog post on touring few weeks back and you can read it HERE, consider this
as the second installment. I am not trying to discourage you. Touring can be a
lot of fun, but before you set out, you do need to know what you’re getting
yourself into :-) In the next post of this series, I will go into more detail
how I went about booking that very first tour.
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