OMG OMG OMG, you HAVE to watch this!!

Lord of the Rings Parody on YouTube.com

I suspect that many folk will have already seen it, but it’s truly well done. HA!

A blogger in Spain just posted these videos on his blog, and has kindly given me his permission to embed them here. You can see me on the far left, battling desperately to keep my bow on the string in the high winds, which is why I’m not as animated as I might be! The track is the housey version of Beyond, on Mixolydian.

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Or so they say. On a completely un-band-related note, I was trawling the blogs today, and discovered another insidious form of blogger marketing, www.blogsvertise.com. Kinda like product placement, but for blogs – payments are being offered to bloggers to mention products in their blog entries. The rules say, you don’t have to endorse the product. You don’t even have to say anything nice about it. You can even complain about it, so long as you include three links to the product’s webpage.

They give you weekly assigments, and then you can weave the product somehow into your blog. To be honest, it actually sounds like fun. To what extent can I sell a product without selling out? The entire reason I have a blog which I host myself is so that I can forego those annoying banner ads which appear on free webspace. Will this see me turn this here organic blog into a corporate hell of sponsorship, sneaky plugs and multiple links in a single post to just one product? What effect will this have on the amount of spam I have to filter out every day in my comments?

Welcome, dear reader, to my first foray into commercial internet marketing, as opposed to viral marketing. Wish me well!

Now back to our regular programming. I swear, the blog entry for Shrewsbury is coming. Plus some other musings on the tour which I’ve left out thus far!

Arrr, me-hearties, this be one festival where oy’d be glad to foind meself at again, arrr!

Picture a hippy festival of 5000 folk. Now, picture all those folk, dressed up in the most garish pirate and fairy costumes you’ve ever seen. Imagine it, 5000 people dressed up to the nines with swords, swashbuckling coats and bandanas, or wispy fairy wings, flowy dresses, glitter and scarves. Now, imagine a good proportion of those folk mixing together fake swords, fairy wings, eyepatches and fairy wands all in the SAME costume, and you’ve got a good idea of what Solfest was like.

It was, must have been, felt like, the LARGEST pirates and fairies party in the world! I thought that Beautiful Days was good – well, Solfest was even BETTER! (Meaning no disrespect to Beautiful Days, we had a marvellous time there – but one word: mud!)
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AKA hippy-fest 2006. Lots of folk going around in hippy clothes, more dreadlocks than you could poke a stick at, and vegetarian health food stalls everywhere, as well as the mandatory greasy snack carts. Lots of hippy clothing stalls, along with … A FAIRY STALL!! Yep, go there for all your fairy needs. I bought myself a pair of fairy wings for the Pirates and Fairies party at Solfest next week, SOO excited!!

The vibe at this festival was just awesome! There were young folk and old, families, and the whole festival was strewn with entertainers bringing the place to life.

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Jumping back in time a little, our on the ground correspondant Simon Rowley interviews the Mark Saul Band following their near brush with catching a plane in Stansted during the recent tightened security measures. This was during the trip from Edinburgh to Spain, where we were delayed in Edinburgh by 3 1/2 hours, only to miss our flight in Stansted by 3 1/2 minutes.

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The gig in Spain was… interesting. The gig was on a stage which had been set up in a lovely little cove in Tapia, just off the beach. We rocked up there for the soundcheck to be greeted by a spectacle which was almost slapstick, if if weren’t just a little bit scary. The wind off the ocean was blowing a gale, and the poor tech crew was trying to install a couple of rear-projected video screens on either side of the stage. These things are essentially big cloth sails. Not the easiest things to grapple with in the wind. One screen had been mounted already, but the screen on the ocean side looked to be causing problems for the tech crew. Imagine trying to mount a sheet four times larger than a king sized bed, supported by a metal frame, onto a large pole, in almost gale force winds.

I thought to myself, surely they’re not going to do it. Surely they’re going to make the call that it’s not safe, and go with just the one screen. But no. It seems the Spanish are a stubborn lot, cause an hour later they were still grappling with the screen, securing it with electrical ties, obviously hoping that it wouldn’t blow the stage off the (delicately balanced) stilts that it was standing on.

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We´ve arrived safely in Spain, after a gruelling 23 hours of travelling to finally get here – we got up at 3am, didn´t arrive till 2am the next morning). I won´t bore you with the nasty details of our flight, but suffice it to say that the combination of an almost 4 hour delay in leaving Edinburgh (though I saw Sigourney Weaver in the airport lounge, so I feel a little better about the whole thing), luggage handlers who dragged their heels getting our gear up to arrivals, and one nasty beeyatch on the check-in desk in Stansted, we managed to miss the closure of the check-in desk by 3 (that´s THREE) minutes. I don´t think I´ll be able to get the image out of my head of three of us sprinting through Stansted airport, trollies piled high with guitars and gear, and me on the phone to Mark yelling “we´re coming, we´re coming, don´t let them close, we´re 2 minutes away!”

Regardless, the nasty woman at EasyJet (should have got her name, she was TOTALLY unreasonable) refused to delay the flight by even just 3 minutes to get our gear through. And it was EasyJet´s FAULT that our flight was delayed in Edinburgh.

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I called the airline today to find out about baggage restrictions for our flight to Spain tomorrow. Several phone calls later, and they were still adamant that I would NOT be allowed to take my violin on board as hand luggage. I even said to them, if I take it out of the violin case, it just scrapes in under the permitted size officially allowed on flights in and around the UK. But no, “under no circumstances” would they allow me to take my fiddle into the blissful warmth of the cabin.

They don’t seem to understand that my violin in its case, can actually take a fair bit of beating. I get told that I should have arranged a flight case for it, but I just want to wail at them and tell them that the jostling isn’t a problem.

The problem is the cold.

Cold kills a violin, didn’t anyone ever tell you that, you stupid twerp? (I’m talking to the dick at the other end of the phone, not to you, dear reader) Cold, dry air will split a violin’s seams, or crack the wood. Taking an instrument from a summers day in Melbourne, to a winters day in Banff Canada, for example (fellow MYOers will remember it well, I’m sure) can potentially cause damage enough to make your mother weep. So imagine what will happen to it by putting it into a luggage hold which is at 40 degrees below zero…

What got me most incredulously upset was the tone of voice of the lady at the other end of the phone at the airport, “no ma’am, as I said before, you will not be able to take your violin with you on board. You’re not even allowed to bring cosmetics on board” – as if it was the most horrible thing she could think of! She said it like that would convince me that Oooh, things must be serious! No cosmetics, oh woe betide us all! Al-Quaeda has succeeded in it’s plot of terror, for we cannot bring our blush with us!

I wanted to reach down the telephone and bitch-slap her, and yell “who the hell freakin’ cares about stupid cosmetics?! So you go without refreshing your lipstick for a couple of hours! Your lippy will survive just fine in the hold. I have to play a GIG! And my instrument is more than just a tool, it’s my BABY! It’s an extension of ME! And you want to put it in -40 degree weather for how long? Would you make me put a child down there?”

*sigh*

Anyway. We’re off to Spain tomorrow to play what I hope will be a good gig in Asturias. I hope that it’s bloody worth all this f*&king *expletive deleted* debacle.

Just got back from a devine weekend of gigs and relaxing (kind of) in Stornoway. I love that place, I love the harbour, I love the people, I love the new arts centre, I love the fact that they have a wonderful festival (we didn’t play it this year, but we did last year, and what a marvellous event), I even love the name of the place, Stornoway.

The are two ways of getting to Stornoway, on the Island of Lewis, in the Outer Hebridean Islands in Northern Scotland. You can be boring and take the plane, or you can take the more romantic (if slightly more rusty) route, and board the ferry from one of a few places. Our chosen point of departure was Ullapool, yet another sickeningly pretty Scottish harbour town which boast music festivals, fresh fish, and Highlanders who can be as quirky as they are friendly.

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