Diary Archives
08.23.2006
Final Diary Entry
Our final leg of the year long Life in Slow Motion tour started with our bass player Robbie's Dad being hospitalized for what the doctors said would be his final time.
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06.15.2006
European Festivals/South Africa
We got back together to rehearse and perform a radio show at the Church at the end of May, but our bass player and his wife had their first child, Finn Malone, on the 21st and Robbie needed to stay home.
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05.08.2006
Byron Bay/New Zealand
Our first show in Australia was the Byron Bay Blues and Roots Festival - a really cool hippie festival held over five days in this amazing part of the country.
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03.11.2006
USA Tour
We started March 1st at the Fox Theatre in Atlanta. We've played here before and remembered it fondly. Like the Fox in Detroit, this is an amazing looking and sounding venue.
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02.07.2006
European Tour
2006 began for the band with a couple days rehearsal in the Church where we learned a few new songs and ran over the others. Everyone was in top form and looking forward to our European tour.
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12.13.2005
UK Tour
Manchester Evening News Arena...we got in to Manchester on the Saturday of George Best's funeral. Robbie threw his bag in his room and got a taxi to Man United game...
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12.05.2005
Start of the UK Tour
Dave's larangytis brought our American tour to a screeching halt back in October and the healing process was slow.
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10.16.2005
Toronto, Washington D.C. and New York City
We started our latest tour in Toronto, two months to the day after our last show in Toronto.
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09.26.2005
UK Tour
So this has to be the shortest tour I've ever been on. It lasted six days! Can you really call it a tour if it's less than a week? Maybe it should be called a leg.
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09.16.2005
Promo, TV Tapings and the Record's Release
We have been taping a lot of television shows since getting back from America last month.
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08.30.2005
Promo Tour Wrap Up
From Boulder Colorado we flew in to Seattle for a day off which also happened to be Clune's Birthday. Dave had something special planned, we were told to meet at the pier at two in the afternoon.
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08.16.2005
Boulder Colorado
Boulder Colorado is the site of the long running, annual "Triple A" Radio Convention. This was the original show that this tour was built around.
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08.05.2005
The Tour Begins
So I am in the back lounge of our bus, driving from Boston to Philladelphia overnight. Our show at the Avalon tonight went really well, for everyone except Dave.
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07.13.2005
Rehearsals in North London
My name is David Nolte and I'm the guitar player in David Gray's band. Dave has asked me to update his website weekly in the form of a tour journal which will start today.
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Diary Entry
European Tour
Tuesday, February 07, 2006
2006 began for the band with a couple days rehearsal in the Church where we learned a few new songs and ran over the others. Everyone was in top form and looking forward to our European tour. The day we set off for tour started with Dave getting the news that his good friend Brian Clancy had been found dead. There was talk of a burial the following day so Dave drove up to Manchester on the day of our first show in Paris only to find out the burial would be the following day. He then flew in to Paris and arrived just in time to play the show. Needless to say it was very emotional. We didn't even see Dave until we got on stage and then he kept eye contact to a minimum. He made it through the whole thing and was even able to play a couple songs for Brian at the end.
The next day was a show in Tilborg, Netherlands. Tilborg was a great show for us, really great audience, like the Filmore Way East. The crowd was at least 80% male there and when they sang along to Please Forgive Me, it was all an octave lower than I was used to.
Cologne, Germany was next and it was also a really good show. This one was recorded for radio broadcast, they picked a good night to do it, everything sounded good and the crowd was really up for it. We did a nine minute version of Lately that Dave declared "the 18 inch version...beyond vinyl!". Clune was really ill for this gig but you wouldn't know it from the recording, he played and sang great then got off stage and threw up violently in the backstage bathroom. Then he cleaned up the splatter, that's the kind of gentleman Clune is. His illness lasted a few days, he wasn't able to eat or drink properly and it was really causing him concern because he never gets sick.
Our next stop was Zurich, Switzerland at the same venue we'd played three years ago. I remembered it all very well, this was one of my favorite gigs. To show their approval at the end of your set, the audience makes this funny, whirring sound while holding out their arms and wiggling their fingers at you. Every single person does it and it is freaky...it's like they're casting some weird spell on you or something. It goes on for a good while then they raise their arms and 'wooop' to end it. So it happened twice this night, after the set and then after Babylon. The second time around, at Dave's instigation, we started doing it back at them. This seemed to go on forever...way longer then before....we sat there waiting for the 'wooop' so we could play another song and it just wouldn't come. It all sort of fell apart with the crowd laughing at us because, it turns out, we were supposed to do the 'wooop' and we were waiting for them to 'wooop' It's apparently some kind of football thing.
After that came Munich, Germany. Another really good show for us. Nice sounding venue. Then it was back to Switzerland.where we played a casino in the basement of a Hilton Hotel in Geneva. As a venue, this was high on the weirdness factor but the show itself went great. The crowd was a really mixed bag of people, with a wider than normal age range, but they seemed to really enjoy it.
After Geneva we split up with Robbie, Dave and Tim flying back to London to play at a premiere party for the movie "Walk the Line" and the rest of us driving on to Milan, Italy. Our drives on this trip have all been after the show, overnight drivesso you don't see much in the dark and this particular night we were driving through the Swiss alps roads that had been closed the night before with a fresh meter and a half of snow. I sat up watching what I could and it was pretty scary. I would like to thank our driver for being the pro that he is and getting us there safely.
There have been a few of these tour diary things where I've said 'next week I'll write about...' and then I never do, so I won't promise anything here. There should be more soon.
