Kairos Band

Technically, the day starts at 12am right? So may as well start there! Our gig from Friday night finished around 12:30 am! After signing CD’s and posters and clearing down our gear, we set off home. After getting back at around 3am, we stayed up till 4:30am having some good old manly chats about… manly stuff I guess!

Around 11:30am we decided to get up and get out and enjoy some good Portuguese sun by the pool. This was interesting as Harvey is able to sit still for about 3 seconds! This was a great way to start the day. Someone got a little sunburnt on his legs…..which we enjoyed laughing at for the rest of the tour! Lol.

In the afternoon we set off to set up for the evening gig. This was in a hired out cinema. Great first impressions. The team were brilliant and treated us like royalty. The gear was top notch too. Gallant had some fun with the digital desk and had the building shaking within no time! A great vibe all round. Set up went without a hitch as did the gig. The crowd really got into it which is always great. I didn’t see to much of that though as the smoke machine was on pretty much all the time and it was a little thick to say the least! We loved it though. All in all a quality night.

Another great day in the land of the port and cheese!…. Thanks for having us.

Matt Buck

Woke up about 9am to beautiful sunshine at our Portuguese villa. Breakfast ready for us on the table, was absolutely perfect! After feeding time we were laying out in the sun for a bit when our non English speaking chef/hostess came out and asked if we were ‘angry!?’ Very confused we did our best to reply that weren’t angry but extremely happy! It then clicked when she led us through to the dining room again that she meant hungry! And so proceeded the jokes throughout the weekend telling her all the time that we very ‘angry!!’ Harvey our guitarist was the ‘angriest’ I’d ever seen him!! By the time we had lunch we’d already eaten twice, slowly I was falling in love with the Portuguese culture….

We were playing at Figueira da Foz which was about 2 hours drive away on the Portuguese coast, by the time we left our translator Carla was with us which made life a lot easier! Thanks Carla you were a huge help! We passed the time by listening to tunes/playing cards, got so bored we decided to re-write the rules of blackjack to play up to 51 instead of 21! Was going well until Aaron needed a calculator to add his cards up! Spent an hour on the beach trying to fry our bodies, before heading to tonight’s venue.

We weren’t really sure what to expect and were hoping the rider we gave would of been followed closely, and it was! Great stage/sound/lighting rig and a really helpful crew who spoke some english!! Was an outdoor gig which is always my preference for doing sound as there are no acoustic issues and I have more chance of reaching the whole City with my sound levels! We took some time setting up and making sure the guys in-ear monitors were setup how they like it. Now my favourite part of setup…the soundcheck! Nice loud system, plenty of bottom end and clarity! Thank you very much.

We went to our hosts apartment and managed to have a shower, eat some food and relax before the gig, we were the headline act so weren’t on till about 11-11.30ish, my kinda culture! Watched the end of the Croatia v Turkey game which I was very happy about as I had missed most of the games while we were away!

And onto the gig! We turn up to the beautiful setting for the concert of palm trees, harbour with sailing boats and a warm sea breeze, we were living the dream! A good crowd as well! From the moment the guys kicked into the first song the crowd were going crazy! Ooooh we love the Portuguese! I’ve sound engineered these guys for a long time and I can honestly say that this is the best and tightest they have sounded to date! The new songs went down fantastically which was good, they are a bit edgier and rockier than the older stuff and the crowd loved them. The more mellow tunes were received really well too with ‘Little Song’ providing a nice break from the in your face rock style and the anthemic ‘Solution’ must’ve made the hair on the back of peoples neck stand up! Finishing with the title track from the new EP, ‘Piercing the Darkness’ I think this could be a classic track! Thank you Figueira da Foz you were amazing.

Got to bed at 4.30am for some much needed rest before another day in the life of a rock band!

Special thanks from me to the sound crews at all the gigs, they were amazing people.

Gallant – (man who moves faders to create loud noise)

Hi, we’ve arrived after a very long day. We started at 10 at the Norwich with a quick run through and quick check of all the gear making sure that the weight was dispersed between all the cases otherwise we’d need our good friend the foot to help out, who thankfully we never needed.

So the journey there was pretty smooth apart from a slight detour to pick up a flight case that should have been delivered the day before, but alas Aaron missed it, so there we were picking it up at the last min from Thetford.

Anyhow we got to the airport and checked in on time, ate a quick meal, tipped the restaurant 100% by accident in a hurry and ran to our flight.

So we arrived and we were ready for anything, and the temperature was beautiful. It was already dark so we didn’t see much on the way to the villa, apart from what seemed like the longest bridge in the world. We pulled into a beautiful little villa, went through the gates to a beautiful courtyard with a pool. The only thing was we only had enough beds for 4 of us and there so Tim being the most gracious and humble slept on a mattress that looked like it belonged to his youngest daughter…I hope there’s a picture somewhere.

This was a great start to our tour, but it just got better and better as we started to make new friends, you best read the other journals for that.

Cheers Mark

As with all gigs to places we’d not been to before, I was wondering what Liverpool would be like. It’s a huge city making our home town of Norwich seem really small, we came of the motorway into a leafy suburb, and soon found ourselves on the grounds of Liverpool Hope University. I admit I was surprised how smart the grounds and builds were, and since we were staying overnight in the halls, that was a pleasant surprise. My halls at Uni weren’t so plush…A quick visit to the stage where the sound crew were moving in the gear, at first I could only see a few tiny monitors, and got that worrying feeling of not having much gear to work with – I shouldn’t have worried, after a while there was a big stack either side of the stage. I now thought the opposite, we could blow the roof off the student union hall with this rig…After a great BBQ, back to the dorms to watch Portugal v someone or other and then waiting to go on stage. Two previous bands had warmed up the punters, and they were all in good form wanting just to have some fun, some of the dancing just made me smile (a rare deed…) We belted out our melodies, went to a more calm patch and finished with our new EP title Piercing the Darkness. There was an encore wanted, but we were played out after just over an hour…and we had our merch to sell. Great PA system and support from the hire firm helped make a great evening. Next day, we departed for a tour of the Liverpool harbour area which like I said was vast, and then headed home for Norwich…leaving me thinking that Liverpool definitely was a place to visit in the future.

Tim Hamilton

Tonight I was really nervous before going on stage to play, which is slightly unusual as i don’t usually feel nervous, maybe just a little extra adrenalin than normal, but not tummy sickening nervous pains! Maybe it was because we were playing to 400 women at a fashion conference and they were all seated, not really expecting to get rocked out. We opened with Something New, which is a nice opener to ease them in, and then we cracked into a brand new song, Piercing the Darkness. This track is loud, fast, and full of energy and slaps you round the face when you hear it. At this stage I got rid of the guitar and strolled down the cat walk to get the ladies standing up and out of their seats.

They seemed to really enjoy it, apart from the odd one or two older generation covering their ears, which is always seems to tickle me. At the end, we had a lot of people come up to us and say how much they enjoyed it. One lady in particular stood out to what she said to me, she said, the kind of music you play I really cannot stand, but when you guys started to play, i found myself really enjoying it and there was something different about your sound and I really really love your songs. So that was really cool to hear a lady in her 40’s go out of her way to tell us that. So, thank you very much. Thank you WOW for having us, it was an honour.

Aaron