Summer Days 2017: July

Allrighty, since it’s summer everything is a bit chaotic with going to festivals every weekend and what have you in between. I’ll try to scrabble a few lines about what went on in July. Here we go:

1.7. & 2.7.2017 Lankafest & Tuska

We started our festival season at Lankafest, Puolanka on the first of July. Since our tours this spring: The 5 weeks in Latin America and the 7 weeks in Europe + Finland shows…the total was around 70 gigs or something. We decided quite early on that upon returning home from Latin America (June 6th or something) we’ll take the rest of the month of to rest a bit. Of course I went on Holidays with my family so there wasn’t too much off-time…anyways. At Lankafest we played quite late and it felt a bit shaky after a few weeks off. A couple of songs into the set everything started to work somehow and we finished the show with a smile. Afterwards we drove to Helsinki overnight since otherwise we wouldn’t have made it on time for our late afternoon show. 

In Helsinki we had some time to rest at the hotle before heading to the festival. Some interviews, a signing session and a fun show later we found ourselves in a restaurant having a great dinner before it was time to call it a night. The next afternoon some of us checked out the Ville Juurikkala photo exibition before flying home.

7.7.2017 Kalajoki

This was an interesting club show in the middle of the summer, nevertheless…I drove down with my gf for the evening and back the next day. One weird thing was that when we started the venue seemed half empty…apparently we started too early or something since the place was quite full when the show ended…and people chanting for more for several minutes after we’d done the vodka thing and all…that’s quite unusual in Finland. Thanks a lot !!

14.7.-30.7.2017 Karjurock, Pioneerirock, Ilosaarirock, Rome & John Smith Festival

The next trip was a rather long one. It started with Karjurock somewhere in the woods near Uusikaupunki,  on Friday the 14.7. from there we went to Turku for a few hours of sleep and then it was time to drive to Kouvola for Pioneerirock on Saturday. On this night we got to sleep a bit again before an early start towards Joensuu on Sunday. All the shows went on with nothing major happening and after the Joensuu show, I stayed behind with my gf to hang out and then have some rest before next weeks travel. 

On Monday we drove to Helsinki and flew to Rome to shoot 3 music videos with Secret Rule…who has another album coming out in November. I did the keyboards last spring when I wasn’t on tour. As far as the videos go, I’d rather not give anything away but I think they’ll turn out really great, we had some really cool locations and a lot of funny moments….and luckily there was some time to do some tourist stuff as well. Nevertheless after spending the week in Rome we flew back to Helsinki on Friday from where we went to Elias house to hang out and spend the night.

On Saturday the 22.7. we went to the John Smith festival and played a late night set after Children of Bodom. Nice festival and nice location…the next day was spent driving all the way home up north. What a week ;-)

29.7.2017 RockCock, Kuopio

The last festival this month was in our FOH guys hometown of Kuopio. I did make it a family trip, we drove down to my friends mansion the night before and then enjoyed the festival together. This was a rather quick, in and out - type of affair as most festivals seems to be these days. When we started the show our power was cut about halfway though our first song….which was something new, that hasn’t really happend in ages. Somehow we managed to get our shit together and back on track but for a while things were quite confusing.

As you can see apart from the week of making music videos in Rome we only played in Finland this month. In August we only have one more show in Finland and the rest are scattered around Europe. More about that later….

..and btw my solo album is out if you missed it:

Klingenberg Syndrome: Whiskey Tango Foxtrot

https://www.hellpatrolrecords.com/

cheers,

Hank