Christian "Chrism" Pulkkinen, Eden's Curse keyboard player reports from the band's tour in the UK, where they are supporting Michael Schenker. These stories are shared with INFERNO, where you can read them in Finnish. Chro
SATURDAY 3.11.2018
Right! It's a go! A week of
English breakfasts, depressingly wet weather and pale but extremely friendly fans. I strongly suspect, that I won't be coming back the same man I left (at least not as thin), but it is OK! You live
life for the experiences right? The strongest emotion at the moment is excitement what all the following week will bring with it. I haven't had any stress for a while though. I have rehearsed
everything up to standards back home. Always you think though about all the situations that could commence when there are lots of variable factors in play.
For example in 2017 I flew to Germany to play at the Rock Of Ages festival. The flight to Amsterdam went OK, but the next flight not so well. The pilot bumped into something on the way out to the runway and damaged the wing somewhat. After about 45min of waiting an inspector arrived and checked out the damage. Soon an announcement was heard that this plane isn't going anywhere and we were shuttled back to the terminal to wait. Well it was OK I thought, we still had loads of time until showtime! After two hours of waiting we got a new plane and the journey to Germany started. I was still positive. Loads of time right? When I got to Germany the shuttle was late and also the German schools had started their summer holidays, so we drove about 30km/h a 40km journey and I missed most of the soundchek. I put the ancient memory card in the 20 year old borrowed keyboard and was almost instantly on stage playing infront of the festival crowd. Everything was actually OK, except Sell Your Soul was missing a piano sound altogether. So there I was feeling stupid pressing the keys with nothing coming out the PA system.
The experience was stressful and taught me to try and be ready that anything can happen on these concert trips. Considering electronics, I am now prepared for everything. I have brought with me an extra smartphone, a laptop computer, several chargers, two portable batteries you can charge your phone on, memory cards with my gig presets on them, a sound card for my laptop, and a couple of small video cameras to take footage from the shows. If I have any spare time I will try and edit you guys a song or two from a show with multicam video.
Kinda tired
now because 11h of travelling behind me. You need to travel to Glasgow through Amsterdam and I happen to live in Turku, so the bus trip to Helsinki-Vantaa airport makes the trip couple of hours
longer. The flights went fabulously though and I met a couple of fun Italian guys on the first flight to Amsterdam. The boys were a little off with their English, so I couldn't quite understand what
they did for a living. The other guy was a metalcore drummer and the other guy a porn star who sold insurance information to the mafia. I probably misunderstood but fucking cool if I didn't, haha! I
also noticed that at Schipol airport the beer costs 5,50€ and in Helsinki 10€. Haha, even the bartender at Amsterdam told me I was fucking ripped off in Helsinki.
At the moment I am sitting at the Travel Lodge airport hotel having a beer and thinking about all the subjects that I should cover in this tour blog. But to be honest, I've never been much of a poet so please feel free to write in the social media posts if there are any subjects about the music business or as being a musician you would want me to cover. Tomorrow is a 12 hour rehearsal day with Eden's Curse so now I will go to bed and tomorrow continue writing.
SUNDAY 4.11.2018
A bad nights sleep behind me and I feel the weight of the couple of
beers and wine in my body, I had during the trip from Finland, but not too much thank god! 12H of band rehearsals ahead of me. Our sound engineer Louise, who has mixed Motörhead on various
tours, will also be at the rehearsal studios to check out the sound and monitor mixing. She had small technical dificulties since her van with all the gear in was stolen at the end of last week.
Many thousands of pounds worth of gear was lost. We managed to get a loaner mixing console, the Allen & Heath QU-32, so everything should be OK. We have rehearsal space rented out from a company
called Berkeley 2, which is actually the largest rehearsing studio in Great Britain. Many big stars like Beyonce, Emeli Sande, Wet Wet Wet, Neil Young, Robert Plant, Lionel Richie and Slash have
rehearsed here before their UK tours. It is convinient to start an UK tour here since it is in the north of Great Britain and you can drive down for the next shows towards the South. This complex
has many rehearsing rooms and in the next small and confusing video presentation you can see ours.
We have been now at the rehearsing studio for 11 hours. The playing is going brilliantly, but these kinds of days where you play from noon to midnight are brutal. A few hours went setting up the sound. 4/5 members in our band has in-ear monitoring so everybody was set-up with a pleasent mix and it was saved into the digital mixer.
Tomorrow the schedule continues with an hour or so of rehearsing in the morning at 10am and then we head for the SWG3 venue here in Glasgow. Our on stage time is 6:30pm on the Michael Schenker dates which is pretty normal everywhere except in Finland. In my opinion it is nicer for both the musicians and the audience that the concert is a place to start off your evening instead of ending it. In the next blog text I will be already giving you guys some feedback about how the first two shows went! Cheers!
Related links:
www.instagram.com/chrismofficial