And it was! The band arrived, Eve, Jorn and John arrived (Glenn was scheduled
for tomorrow after his show in Sicily), more friends arrived so it was time for
us to go and get the set-up and rehearsals started.
Fabrik is a great venue in the heart of
Hamburg. It used to be a machine factory before becoming a live music venue in
1971 and, judging from the photos and posters, just about everybody has played
there.
And it helped a lot that the house staff were
so professional and so helpful, enabling us to quickly navigate the technical
minefields of the first time in a venue.
We needed today for music rehearsals but we
needed it just as much for technical stuff because we were planning to record
and film the show for a double DVD to be released in the late autumn.
For sure this was a really ambitious project
but I am still not afraid to take risks and the record company was 100% behind
it so we had a lot of people working hard to get it ready.
Live Fire was to be the core band for the
show and they had spent last week rehearsing the new songs so today we were
focused on the musical basics and it went really well.
To pull this off we needed everyone’s
complete commitment and we were able to fall back on our combined experience to
deal with the problems that were bound to come up.
It’s really a testament to everyone’s
professionalism and I was thankful to have such an incredible team of musicians,
technicians, drivers…… they were all great!
By about 9:45 pm we pretty much stopped
making progress and we knew that was the time to stop so we did!
Willy, our drummer said he felt like he just
played three or four gigs in a row and he was probably right!!
We sat down to a really nice buffet and kind
of unwound from the day, discussing details that we would focus on tomorrow.
There was a
special feeling in the air…….
