Hmm, I just realized that I am a bit slow with my updates again, so let me finally tell you about the rest of the Latin American /Australian tour. After finishing the Brazilian shows under perfect conditions and with awesome gigs we started moving into unknown territory and played in a lot of countries in which we have never played before. Unfortunately we ran into some serious technical problems, everything from broken mixing consoles to wrong electricity voltage or no electricity at all, but thanks to our crew we could still play every show and some of them turned out absolutely remarkable despite of the technical chaos. Take the show in Caracas for example, by the time we arrived at the venue to do soundcheck the whole place was completely flooded because of very heavy rain. The big problem was that also all the power generators were in the water, all the electricity was drowned completely, there was no chance of using anything of our equipment that demanded the converted power. So in the end we used equipment that we borrowed, stripped down everything (going down from 48 channels of monitor sound to 8 is fun :-) ) and played a set that was completely adapted to the circumstances: we couldn't use any clean sounds for the guitars or any keyboards, so we kicked out all those songs demanding this and played a pretty old school set, still the show was a lot of fun. My personal highlight of that evening was the Bards Song, the only "clean guitars" song that we didn't sacrifice, we played it with crunchy electric guitars, it sounded pretty differend but everybody still liked it.
After the Latin American part of the tour we went to Australia and played some great shows in Sydney and Melbourne. Unfortunately we had to cut the set in Sydney short because the owner of the venue only informed us about a strict curfew exactly one minute before that curfew, when we asked earlier on that day if there would be a curfew it was still "no curfew tonight"...Well, it was still an awesome show and we can always add the missing song next time ;-)
So a big thank you goes out to everybody involved, our fans, our crew and all the new and old friends we met during those weeks.
Another big thanks goes out to my friends in Sinbreed, whith whom I played a couple of gigs during the last weeks. Shortly before we started the South American tour Frederik asked me if I would like to play some shows with them cause they only had one guitarist in the band and of course I accepted the invitation. I didn't have much time to learn the songs, actually my only chance was using a couple of days off on the road, but in the end that was time enough and I loved the new experience, after all it was my first time playing with different musicians since the middle of the 80's. In case you missed those shows, don't worry, we are planning to do more next year ;-)
