This weekend was pretty busy.

We got the van this weekend. I wish I had some photos of it, but I don’t. I mean, I don’t even have a camera and I don’t like borrowing Emas camera because I will inevitably lose it. Needless to say, the van is awesome. Its silver and everything. There’s tons of space for everything we bring to shows (which always seems twice as much stuff as we’ll need) and space for PJ to nap all the way to everywhere. We.are.finally.a.real.band.

Before we picked up the van we played a house show with Break The Habit, Russo, Cynics and Wooderson. It was in the basement of Elliot’s house in Brighton and loading our shit down the stairs was the standard nightmare I should be used to by now, but never seem to. The room was tiny and the show was packed and awesome. Sam Russo blasted out a bunch of songs, some of which I didn’t know and were amazing, literally amazing. Sam Russo is the best song-writer of our generation, right? Giles/Cynics, was excellent – he just gets better every time. I’d never seen Wooderson before but they were really awesome and for some reason I have managed to miss listening to them properly so I am totally going to check out their myspace. Break The Habit play with tons of energy and get pretty rowdy when they play, it’s always fun to watch them and all their stuff is for free download right now, so definitely get all that and then go watch them play and buy their records. We had only a few minutes to set up and get going because PJ was slowly dying of man-flu and was getting the train back to London with Joe so we only played a few songs but it was probably the most fun show we have played since Flacos in Florida at Fest. In fact, the show was very much like that show – really rowdy and sloppy and fun.

Anyway, the next day we played in Reading.

My friend Jim doesn’t drink beer. He’s never even tried it. He doesn’t drink cider and I’ve never seen him drink wine. That pretty much leaves spirits, of which I have seen him drink a lot. At bars he usually gets a huge glass of vodka with a tiny bit of lemonade in it and he’ll go through a bunch of these while getting buck-wild and sweaty. Anyway, our band was the lemonade in Jims massive glass of fast, hardcore punk. I mean vodka. I guess that was a long way of saying “we were the odd band out at the Reading gig last night” but it didn’t seem to matter at all, it was fun show to play and all I really want to talk about is how awesome Moral Dilemma were. They are another band I have managed to miss seeing live and last night they just seemed a step above the majority of bands playing that style of music. They just know how to dial in their equipment to sound good, they don’t seem to make mistakes and they play fast and hard. The PA system sort of blew early in the night and so the vocals all sounded, well, shit, like a 50s radio that was hardly tuned in properly. Anyway, despite the bad vocals, Moral Dilemma were awesome and everyone kicked off.

I’m tired today and my voice hurts. 2 back to back shows without monitors and my voice feels a little pissed off with me. Would bringing my own monitor to gigs be really un-punk? Forget it, I’m going straight for in-ear monitors and my own soundguy.

Laters
Dan