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.
PART 2: Chro
MONDAY 5.11.2018
The morning started off with a 3 minute shower and a breakfast at McDonald's. Because of the snail speed internet, I had to wait up till 1:00am for the material of the previous blog text to be uploaded and I slightly overslept in the morning. Paul picked me and Thorsten up from the hotel at 9:30am and after breakfast we drove to the rehearsal studio to rehearse tonight's set through one last time with our guest star, Barbara Clelland. She will come on stage to sing the last song, Angels & Demons. Rehearsals went really well. No complaints and the band seems to have a good positive vibe and lots of energy. An estimate of 1500-2000 people should be present at the first show. The other guys are now loading the van and I am writing this blog and doing other social media crap, haha. Soon we will drive to SWG3 and start the load-in and soundcheck.
Great venue! An old industrial hall, that has a capacity of about 2500 people. The backstage is also cozy and clean with a nice shower. Quite different than the smaller clubs I am accustomed to play at. Beverages and snacks are plentyfull. We have to still wait for the soundcheck because Mr. Schenker first does his check and then has a Meet & Greet event where he plays one song with each singer for the people present. Then it is our turn to do our sound and our stage time is at 6:30pm. Some butterflies in my stomach at this point.
The soundcheck had small technical difficulties and we didn't have much time to get the optimal settings, but three minutes before the doors opened for the public we got everything sounding great! Now we have one venues presets saved so the next soundchecks should be easier. The show was brilliant and we had loads of fun on stage! Usually the stress of playing the first shows take a little bit of balls out of the performance, but this time I felt good from the start and it was a joy to perform. The house was full and the people seemed to enjoy themselves. So everything was great and it is good to continue the tour with a great first experience under our belts!
After the show I watched a couple of songs of Michael Schenker's set and it seemed to be going great. The older rocks stars really knew how to capture the audience! You could tell, that they had a lot of milage behind them in performing. The singers were also excellent even though they are getting older. Graham Bonnet is at a respetable 73 year age and was singing better than guys half his age. I had a lot of adrenaline flowing in my body so I needed to go backstage to calm down after a few songs. I have loads of time to check out the Schenker Group playing on the next gigs. In the night we drove to our hotel at Livingston (about 45min from Glasgow) and in the morning the journey continues towards Birmingham!
TUESDAY 6.11.2018
In the morning the alarm went off at 6:50am and I woke up totally confused. Only 5 and a half hours of sleep and we headed off for breakfast to a petrol station. Today we have a log drive of 5 hours ahead of us from Livingston to Birmingham so we had to set off early. Nice view though even though we were driving through some fog. Hars but beautiful rolling meadows and hills with lots of sheep hearding in them.
The journey took about 6 hours with breaks. Our singer Nikola is the worst with schedules so the 5 minute toilet breaks stretched out to 20 minute breaks. We were anyway in good time at the venue, which looks smaller than the Glasgow one, but actually fits more people. The concert hall looks like an old theater with balconies for people to also sit in and the capacity is about 2000 people. Schenker is currently doing his Meet & Greet and then we will rush on stage to do our souncheck. I have a good vibe since yesterday went so well. I think we will rock the house today also!
Haha the soundcheck was a disaster! We ran out of time and everybodys monitor channels were connected wrong. Right at the last moment we got everything fixed, but the balance of the instruments in my in-ears were totally lost. Well... sometimes you get to play with pristine sounds like yesterday and on other days you have to make due with what you have. I have my own little mixer fixed with velcro to my keyboard and I connect my keyboards directly to it from the phones output. This way I always hear myself at least even if the front of house would be having problems. The drums almost always are audible acousticly, so I manage to stay in time even with a bad in-ear mix. Next it is time to go on stage and hope everything goes well!
The show was great, but my monitor mix has terrible. I did give my very best though and I think it sounded good to the people listening. A lot of smiling faces in the audience and quite a nice crowd. There was also a lot of people up in the balcony section of the hall so it is hard to say were there more or less people present than in Glasgow. Now a couple of beers and a shower. It is nice in venues of this capacity that they have proper backstages and shower facilities. The ex-singer of Black Sabbath, Tony Martin, was in the crowd and I went to say hi to him after the show. At least he said it sounded brilliant!
Related links:
www.instagram.com/chrismofficial