A JOURNEY TO THE UNITED KINGDOM
Entry Eight

Next day we have free so Troy can leisurely go out for a run. He is getting to know the area and actually meets up with another runner braving the city traffic. He really covers the ground so he is excited to tell me of the cool shops that he sees that would probably only take us an half hour to walk to. He does perk my interest when he mentions Starbucks. I have a goal of getting a mug from each city and that isn’t happening. Mat and Shannon and I do get out for a bit and check out a museum that has a showing of Storm Thorgerson’s artwork. He is the photographer behind many of our favorite album covers such as Pink Floyd: Wish you were here, Momentary, and Division Bell to name a few. These are supposedly just photographs not altered in a computer. I can’t begin to figure it out. He says that this is how his work is meant to be viewed: up on a wall and not on a tiny album cover. I can’t believe our fortune in getting to see something like this. The gallery doesn’t charge a dime to get in and we are able to get full color catalogs that have little thumbnail prints of some of his work. We find out that he did other groups like Led Zeppelin, Muse, Cranberries and Audioslave.
Tonight’s the night of our gig that switched venues about three times. It finally lands at Flapper & Firkin, which is only blocks away. We walk down just to make sure and get some details about doors and sound check. You should see the emails that Mat sends out. He has been out on the road for months at a time as tour manager for groups and basically has it down. He’ll have a list of about ten questions that need to be answered and he’ll get a reply with the answer to the first one… or the last one… with everything else in the middle like it’s not there. Basically nothing is confirmed about when we play. I think there may be four or five bands that are playing also. We stress that it is in our best interest to play somewhere in the middle of the local bands so that we can play for the fans that they will be bringing because no one knows us except the cool guy who escorted us through the city center. But they insist that we play last. The music club is actually down in the basement and is called the Dungeon. It is so dark we can barely see to bring our stuff in. The ceiling above the stage is really low and Troy has hit his head twice because everything is painted black. Mat finally has to rig up something reflective on the “spot” that he keeps nailing. All of the bands say thanks we’ve been whacking our head on that too. We find out that we are definitely the headliners tonight and guess what? The headliners provide the drum set as the back line. I am not happy. Mat is setting his drums up for some abuse. I’ve seen this before. First of all he has an electronic kick that they are definitely not using. Someone goes and rents a kick drum at a local store for the night. Next, we can’t afford the wear and tear of his drumheads. We didn’t bring a ton of replacement parts. At least the other drummers are using their own cymbals, those things are hundreds of dollars and they crack when they are whacked too hard. I have a terrible feeling that we are only going to get to play a few songs. Whenever you have that many bands, you have to really keep the sets tight and the set changes snappy or you run out of time. This just happened to us recently when we drove all the way to Chicago to play 20 minutes to about 10 people because it was actually after the event was suppose to be over at 1am. I was wrong I predicted that we would only get to play a few songs, but I think we play four songs. After our set the other bands apologize for taking so long and one member even says that he could have listened to us for the whole night. That one comment makes the trip for us. I forgive him for taking forever getting off stage. We sell some cds and made some new friends. One of our friends, Debbie makes it out to our show. We couldn’t believe she walked there all on her own- she’s so cool. We rush out of there because of the early curfew with the bar staff actually waiting for us at the door. There is no need to clean up with a place that dark- if only you couldn’t smell the Dungeon. I ended up leaving a couple organizing things down there because you can’t see black on black. Oh well. We joke with Debbie that she is going to be the only one to experience the Follow extremes: from playing the Dungeon the night before- to playing the church gig at 8am the next morning.