4/20/02 – Is that the day to be in Amsterdam or what? Great show at the Paradiso, not the greatest sounding room, but a great crew and sound system. Must be nice to live in Amsterdam and work at such a cool venue..

Back to the UK, and after a gig at a Disco in Brighton (which went great none the less), we find our selves in Liverpool. Good to see some friends from Adlib Audio bring in a mighty fine Nexo rig. The Series 4 looks a bit small without it’s meter bridge, but works out great.

We return to the Rodon club in Athens. Though if you saw it written in Greek you might think it was the Podon club. Once again George is there to greet me at front of house. Always good to see familiar faces.

After a battle with the monitors at soundcheck, we settle in, and I thought this show kicked the last show that we played here’s… butt. And a great opportunity for me to get some camera angles from the balcony.

An old and battered Soundcraft Venue, EV MT-4 rig with no where near enough subs, and the audience members that cram onto the staircase.

In the middle of the town of Coimbra, we play this large sort of festival thing. A fantastic PA provided by SoundLights and Crew or Portugal. My first time behind the new JBL line array, and I must say, JBL have finally made a box that sounds decent.

A big thanks to Miguel and all the crew here for a great job.

The month of April found Mercury Rev returning to Europe for a months run of shows supporting the release of their new album “The Dark is Rising”. After a couple of days rehearsal we started the tour in France with a show at L’Ubu in Rennes ( a very small club to get things going) and then a show at La Nef in Angloume.

La Nef is a nice room, good PA and an Amek Recall, though they don’t have a computer to run the recall. The two small racks on the right is what I was carrying with me. The top rack is the bands, and the bottom one was rented from Canegreen.

Next we move on to Italy, and four shows with an Italian band called After Hours. Here we see them at soundcheck, the third show in Milan at a hall in the Centro Sociale, a sort of “squat” like Christiania in Copenhagen. A big reverberant hell hole of a room. They stole there power (which only cut out twice during sound check), they stole any phone lines they had. A 6000 capacity hall run be the locals.

After our sound check, including an all star jam of your favorite zep hits the band comes out front to hear just how wonderful it sounds…

Live in Rome..

We were using in-ears for Jonathan, and he finally wore them for a show (besides just trying them for sound-check) in Rome. All went well, and though there are still a bunch of things to work out with the mix, it seemed that things would eventually work out, that is until Oliver, our new monitor engineer, left the in-ears behind in Rome. So much for that idea. Otherwise Oliver has been doing a fantastic job and the band has seemed much happier on stage.

Our four shows with Afterhours went really well. We had separate front of house set ups. I got a great set up from Imola Audio Scene – the one in front – midas XL-200 and more outboard then you could shake a stick at. The desk behind was a trusty Soundcraft Vienna II for Afterhours.

Big thanks to Dedia and Thomas for all their help. After Hours put on a great show with Flavio mixing house and Mamo on lights. The crowds were loud and into the show.

After a sad farewell to our new Italian friends we go on to play one more show on our own in Turino at a club called Hiroshima mon Amour. Here I find myself in a scaffolding perch high above the crowd and behind a Yamaha M3000. Note to self… Don’t buy a M3000…..

A good show none the less. A fond farewell to the fabulous Italian food and back to France we go.

We then made our way to Paris for a pre taped TV show. We crammed into this very small bar with a massive amount of TV and sound equipment, and then somehow they crammed a small audience in to watch the event. Me, I spent most of the time in this nice air conditioned truck down the street….

One last show in France, this time at a very cool purpose built venue in Clermont called La Cooperative De Mai. Here we see a nice fuzzy photo of their front of house including my personal favorite, the Midas Heritage 2000.