We've been away about three weeks now which has seemed to have flown by. We flew in Schiphol on the 11th and met Matthijs van der Ven of www.onderinloed.com fame. We stayed in Matthijs flat in Utrecht where he very kindly gave his bed over to me and Iona for a couple of nights...in light of this, i reckon we'll have to upgrade our air mattress for when Matthijs visits Glasgow next month.
We played a very nice little gig in Livingroom 78 in Utrecht with Dan Tuffy of Big Low and had one too many Dutch beers after which resulted in us travlelling with a hangover to Amsterdam to play in Mulligans. We've been to Mulligans a few times now, and its always great to see everybody that works there and the other musicians that socialise and play in Mulligans. It was a very nice suprise to see Erik van Loo, and wife, Barry who travelled from Deventer in central Holland and whom we did not expect to see, and hadnt seen for a little while.
Whilst in Amsteram we filmed a session for Matthijs onderinvloed projuect with Ro Halfhide sound engineering. The two covers we played were an arrangement of Blackwaterside and Dolly Partons' Jolene. I also put a quick version of Merle Travis's Cannonball Rag down as its an all time classic guitar tune has really stood the test of time. Matthijs and Ro will work there magic with the film and audio and we'll post the results up when its ready in a few months
On Sunday the 15th, Matthijs had organised for us to appear on a show called XNoizz on radio 3FM in Holland. On this we had an hour to write a song using a title that we picked from a list emailed in by listeners. We just about got away with it except a line that should have read "this heart is tired from breaking" was sung "This tart is tired from breaking" by Iona. This endangered the song to falling apart as we tried not to burst out laughing, but as i say, i think we got away with it. We'll post the audio from this show in our music club section on the site in a couple of weeks, and maybe work on the song a little bit and record a more polished version too.
Matthijs will be over in Glasgow next month filming for his project onder invloed, which translates as under the influence. He'll film some bands covering a couple of their favourite songs. With Davie Lawson, we'll be showing Mathijs and his sound engineer, Ro Halfhide around for the week, which should be fun.
Were in Bremen, Germany just now and have been touring around Germany with Daisy Chapman for the last 2 weeks. As time is ticking to a close on my internet Cafe account, we'll post a bit about this later along with some photos, but so far we've had snow, parking tickets, a mad booze up called Carnival and Iona has had to have a tooth out an hour before a gig and still sung like she meant it. Happy days.
