We Fins luv your soft rock stylings ya?
Posted by qmonkey on October 30, 2007
OK, it’s come to this, im going to have a roll out an other ‘when I were a rock star’ tale. Reason being that two of t’other legends have got blogs and are likely to mine this story soon if I don’t get in there first. Truth be told we were small fry, we managed to cultivate a reasonable close-to-home fan-base who would buy enough of our CDs to pay for the next one, and a great slap-up Christmas dinner. But one thing our illustrious manger did well was to publicise us in European countries who frankly didn’t know any better.
There was a period of two years or so when approx one long weekend a month we were jetting off to Scandinavia, Holland or Germany to rock the socks of the unsuspecting locals. Best part of it was without doubt, the fact that it was a free weekend away with yer mates. Most times we’d stay in hotels but some times we’d be sleeping on the floor in some random house of a promoter who looked like Ringo Starr. In retrospect those were the most craic - ‘getting in amongst em’ as our manager liked to say.
The venues would vary greatly, sometimes it would be a festival in a holiday camp near Eindhoven, next it was a youth meeting in downtown Düsseldorf, next it would be a wee pub is the snowy hills around Essen, or a beach hut along the Hague sea front or a summer festival by a late in mid Sweden. We never really knew what to expect until we got there.
One February weekend we were booked to play at an unpronounceable festival in Turku, 
Finland. We usually flew to Amsterdam then on to our location, this was a particularly cold weekend and when the plane landed in Helsinki it was minus 16 degrees. As we walked from the plane to the terminal the wings were being de-iced for take off (I wouldn’t have fancied the return journey). We got to the luggage carousal and waited as usual for our instruments and our bags to come around, as we always did hoping they hadn’t got damaged in transit (as was common). Fifteen minutes later we noticed that the bags had stopped coming, and the horrible realisation set in that we we’d been de-bagged!
Vox came to the fore, and marched up to the KLM desk to let them know that we were world renowned recording artists and we needed our bags by 11am the next day for a sound check. This seemed to do the trick so we made our way to the hotel, finding it all quite an adventure.
At the hotel we had a bit of banter at the bar, meeting up with a crazed fan (crazed seems harsh, but he was a bit of a mentalist). He was Finnish and had travelled to gigs in other parts of Europe to see us, and he was really proud to have us on his home turf.
We were still wearing the clothes we’d travelled in - I have an awful feeling that I opted for casual slacks and a polo neck sweater. We’d no wash bags or night attire, other than the wee wash pack KLM had given us on the plane. So when the morning came we were dying to get at our bags so we could have a good shower and change before the gig.
But yes, you’ve guessed it, the bags hadn’t arrived. At this point we started to get a bit concerned. The cavalcade arrived at the hotel to bring us to the gig venue and seemed uninterested in our story and more interested on getting us there in time. ‘Don’t worry we’ll sort it out’ seemed to be their favourite phrase. So in we got, still wearing the clothes we put on the previous morning and smelling like angry Swedes (that joke slays them in Finland).
As with all these trips we still had no idea what to expect. In my mind I was thinking it would be a little town square festival, where we played on the back of a lorry while some people listened and others wandered around the stalls. When we pulled up at the biggest ice hockey arena I’d ever seen we were convinced we were just using the car park.
As we got through the doors we realised that it was a 20,000 seater arena and they were hopeful of filling most of it. We started to get that pit of the stomach feeling of oh oh, we’re soooo out of our depth. They obviously think we’re something we’re not. Think about the stage at Live Aid, but indoors, massive screen each side of the stage, excited teenagers everywhere
THEN it hit us, oh my word, we’re wearing the clothes we travelled in, oh crap, we’ve got no instruments. The hunt was on scavenging and begging random punters to see if we can borrow a few guitars - eventually it paid off and we got what we needed (though I ended up playing this Level 42 like 5-string poncy bass). We jumped on stage trying to look like it was the kinda audience we were used to - shouting things like Hello Finland!
When it was over we were euphoric, taking pictures of everything that moved, chatting non stop about the gig, but even as we were manning the merchandise booth, servicing a queue of enthusiastic Fins, it was tempered with the melancholic thought that we would probably never play to this many people again. We never did, but we’ll always have Turku.
November 1, 2007 at 12:15 am
It seems an appropriate juncture to perhaps confess that I have all your autographs and if I were still 14 I’d be somewhat star-struck and tongue-tied, even over the web!
If only ebay had existed back then I coulda made a killing off of some random Fin…