Viva Catalunya
Sorry for the delay! Spain has been very busy.
So I wake up in Paris at 5:30 in the morning, hop on the metro (which surprisingly is running and vibrant with commuters, crazy), take an hour bus trip to Beauvais airport and fly to Girona, near Barcelona in Spain. And I play THAT NIGHT!
The bar is called Corsari. It is something to be seen for sure. It´s hollowed out of a lil´cave in the crevas of Sant Feliu´s Mediterranian Bay. As I open my Guitar, minutes before I play I find the guitar is in rougher shape then I am. The bottom is splitting and cracked from the plane and I have to use masking tape to hold it together… which mostly worked, save the peice falling off mid set and people cheering. That my friends is more rock and roll than smashing it. The show had only about 20 ppl but they fed me all night and payed me very well and I met some fantastic people so using the place as a warm up for the rest of Spain was a perfect.
I was in Barcelona the following night for my second show.
This show was actually hooked up by a good friend of mine that just happened to be friends with a bar owner. That´s it. Simple. He was a British guy, running a brit-bar in Barca. The show was mostly friends of friends but there ended up being about 40.
There was a misunderstanding about equipment and I had only one tiny amp and one mic and nothing to plug my guitar into! and it was 10 at night! After about and hour of weighing our options we ended up finding the aid of one of the bars´regulars: a middle aged , ponytailed , iron maiden fan who was happy to help. He actually had a decent Fender amp, surprisingly, and it was perfect. It was one of my most engaging shows to date. Everyone was attentive. Everyone loved it. and Everyone appreciated my Catalan translation to the end of sea song… Que Sera, sera! Cau la pluja, cau! I felt a bit ´Bono´ as I had the audience singing along with me! HA. hilarious, really.
As I said, Spain was busy. The third day there was showless but I had my first ever radio interview in a town just outside Barcelona. The drive there was incredible! Montserrat is a massive mountain that we drove around that looked like something out of the Lord of the Rings! It´s peaks are like jagged fingers pointing to the sky and it´s surrounded by a ton of smaller mountains and hills that had like a one-house-per-hill thing going on. Looked very bizaar. Just google Montserrat. please.
The interview was a bit surreal. Here I was, in Spain, sitting at a radio desk, haven´t slept in days, my broken guitar, a laptop podcasting my face live on the internet and my questions and answers are being translated to me by my Catalan friend, Helena, who is in the corner of the room smiling the whole time, making sure I´m not being misquoted. HA. awesome. Thankfully some good friends taped the podcast so I have it perfectly documented to always remember the experience.
My Girona show was a bit of a bust. It was more of a restaurant and my music isn´t really a sit down and eat kind of thing. I had a difficult time singing over the 100 or so eaters. I decided to join them and ate on the house and was paid handsomely despite cutting my set in half and only playing 35 minutes or so. Sergio Lopez from Pan´s Labrynth was there eating about ten minutes after my set which sadly was the highlight.
So, to sum up my last few days: Paris show, Sant Feliu, Barcelona, Radio interview, Girona… straight! It wasn´t until my fifth day in Spain that I regrouped and got to enjoy the city I´ve been trying to get back to for eight years.
Now, last night was my second Barcelona show and the best show I´ve ever played, hands down. Not even a sore throat could stop this one. It was at a trendy hipster bar called Heliogabal in an area of the city called Gracia, a maze of tiny crossing streets all off-white in colour and only the signs above the stores indicated any difference from one place to the next. I brought about 10 or so people and I played to about 65 or 70, with a cover of 5€… I know this blog is supposed to be informative and helpful for bands but I HAVE NO IDEA where these people came from! Tom Hagan, the opener, brought maybe five or six people but that leaves 50 walk-ins… I was told the bar gets a lot of regulars that just come by to hear music, something I think Torontonians could learn from. The sound was really good and filled the small bar up nicely… I played a rare ten song set and didn´t rely on one cover, as I had been doing on this tour up til that point. It was beautiful. I had most peoples´for every single song and the sea song catalan sing along was even more amped up then the first Barcelona show. I egged on the trendy bar by joking about how everyone is too cool to sing along, I get it, but trust me it´ll be really nice… and it was. As I began singing the yelpy lead vocal I ushered the crowd to get louder and louder with the backups and by the end I almost had everyone in the chorus! I did an encore of my most well recieved songs, King king me which did it´s job tenfold. Minutes later I was selling cd´s FINALLY and even autographing 3 or 4 of them. Amazing.
And now, I have to follow that with my second show in London… REDEMPTION!
wish me luck.
DG
