Ken Hensley

One Night in Finland.....

Friday

A short flight from Helsinki, north and a bit east, to Joensuu (only 60 km from the Russian border!) where we were met by Heikki and Jukka and took the temporary tour bus to the centre of town where we were introduced to the city lawyer and a lady representing the office of international affairs. I explained to her that I had already had too many of those and they had been very expensive and she smiled as if she actually understood my silly humour!

The gentleman from the council made a short but very nice “welcome” speech and then we sat down to a delicious lunch before going to the hotel which was close and then to the venue which was even closer. A little island in the middle of town and a really cool place for a festival. The gig had sold out a long time ago so we only had the weather to think about and it did start to rain by the end of sound check. But all was well, the press meeting was relaxed so we went to the hotel for dinner.

We were already feeling very welcome in this small Finnish town. The Grand Old Rockers of Joensuu (of which I am a highly qualified, honorary member) had really gone out of their way to prepare things for us and we were (and still are) very grateful to them all. There were six bands opening up the festival and their only qualification was that they had to be over 40 years old! Interesting….. but these bands did play a significant role in making my life very uncomfortable later.

Sound check had gone well. We finally managed to communicate with the “house” monitor guy by naming him Fred. None of us, not even the Norwegians, could pronounce his real name. Of course all of these bands did their sound checks after us…

At show time they had packed nearly 7 thousand people into this venue and the buzz was incredible. And all the prayers for “no rain” were answered too!! We kicked off the show as usual but I spent the next 95 minutes with a horrible monitor mix that had totally changed during the other bands sound checks!! It was hard to communicate with “Fred” under normal circumstances but, during the show it proved impossible so I was stuck without a real monitor mix for the whole show. But nobody else noticed and we rocked through the set with the noisy and enthusiastic crowd rocking along with us. We hadn’t played together since Latvia so we kept the set on familiar ground.

INTRO
OUT OF MY CONTROL
BROWN EYED BOY
JULY MORNING
CIRCLE OF HANDS
JUST THE BEGINNING
BLOOD ON THE HIGHWAY
THE WIZARD
RAIN
STEALIN’
EASY LIVING
THE LAST DANCE
LADY IN BLACK
**********************
GYPSY

After a short rest I went out to the meet & greet and along with signing a lot of new CDs etc., and thanks to Heikki’s personal generosity and the good folks who chipped in a Euro here and two Euros there, we were also able to raise some money for the Esperanza Street foundation. If you want to know more about the foundation, please visit us at www.esperanzastreet.org where you can find out what we are doing and even make a donation of your own if you want to. We have PayPal on the site now to make that easier.

The band had to leave at 4am the next morning and there was a really happy spirit in the air so the celebrations lasted longer than usual…. much longer actually!