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November 14th 2005
An early start but a good night’s sleep and I am quite excited about
playing with this band for the first time. Each of them is
highly rated and they all say nice things about each other so it
will be interesting to see how it goes. They’ve had the music
for about 4 weeks so hopefully they’ve done their homework!!
After breakfast I took a walk
around Fredrikstad which is an old Norwegian port city and I like
it. It is quite small but today it was very windy and the wind was
cold so I visited a couple of shopping centres to warm up… don’t
want to be getting a cold before the shows even start!
Everyone was on time (a good
sign) and after we finished setting up we began by running through
the first couple of songs and I could see that they had done their
preparation. Some of the songs in this set went more smoothly than
others and I know I will adjust the final set list as we go along so
the idea is to just go through all the songs, regardless of mistakes
and then go back and fine-tune everything.
Ken, Eric and Morty have strong
voices so we will also spend some detail time on harmonies.
The guys here in the old city of
Fredrikstad have been really helpful to us. The area is an island
which is reachable by a road bridge or by ferry and it used to be
the headquarters of a regiment of the Norwegian army. Jimmy has his
base in one of their old mess buildings and he operates his company
from there. They supplied the PA and a lot of the accessories for us
and that has been a big help.
The Moon Festival is also
headquartered here and I want to thank Petter and Frederik for their
help.
At the end of the day we had
covered about 70% of the show and made good progress. We still have
a lot of work to do but these guys are not afraid to work hard so I
am optimistic that we will get there.
Jimmy made lunch, an excellent
spicy chicken soup, and we went back to the hotel after rehearsals
to relax, have some dinner and chat about the next couple of days.
It was a good day, I am tired but
it’s a good tired if you know what I mean!!
Next day...
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