This Euro tour started with a simple booking: an invitation to play the "End of the Road" festival in the county of Dorset, UK, not too far from Stonehenge. As is often the case with touring, you start with an "anchor date", then book everything else around it.
This anchor date is everything it was supposed to be and more. We get about 90 min SW of London, and the GPS begins to take us through smaller and smaller roads until it feels like we are practically on a bike path through a farmer's field (it turns out that we were). In the distance through the fields we would get glimpses of a massive blue tent, which we assumed was part of the festival, and indeed it even was the tent we would play under. Incredibly, those little farmer trails would have to accompany big tour buses as well, housing the likes of Modest Mouse, Wilco and several other big name headliners.
Like I mentioned, we were to play under the big blue tent that afternoon, a show which would ultimately be headlined that evening by fellow Canadians, New Pornographers. So here we were at our 'anchor date'. We hit the stage at around 5PM, and within a few songs the tent was pushing it's capacity, somewhere between 2500 - 3000 people (I wasn't exactly counting heads). The feeling coming back was tremendous. It kind of puts you on form when a large audience is conveying it's collective approval of your music.
As it turned out, the vibe here was quite sensational, and the event coordinators managed to commandeer the exquisite gardens into an interactive art/nature display as well, seemingly designed to enhance the expanding minds of some patrons. In the picture of us in that forest, Casey is donning a borrowed mohawk/viking helmet from one such patron. Fully enhancing! If you read any of my tweets (www.twitter.com/Doots_Mayhem) on the Pickathon Festival this past August in Portland OR, you will see that the End of the Road Festival is very much like that one, in it's use of nature and it's carefully selected artists.
So there. We have done our first big UK festival. For 2011 we hope for more. Green Man, Glastonbury, Reading, Isle of Man, Edinburgh ... look out, here we come !
After this fest we will play Paris FR and Middleburg NL (see below), then fly home only to immediately drive to Eastern Canada for some more festival and club dates. After one week off we will then head to Australia for the final leg of all touring for the Mountain Meadows album.
It will be high time after this to stay home for a few months, recoup and rekindle our home and family lives, and focus on another record, hopefully to be released sometime in the first half of 2011.
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