Mix N Blend :: The Tour Diary

Wednesday 4th of August

What a crazy day. We get up at 6 in the morning and spend the whole day running around sorting last minute documents and paperwork and making sure that everything is in order for the French immigration authorities (Since where we are going is effectively a part of France). By 8 o’ clock at night we’ve managed to get onto backing up the live sets to cd, storing serials in case our laptop gets trashed, and packing all the other instruments we’re taking along. A heart-stopping moment when the mac refuses to boot for 10 minutes, but otherwise by two in the morning we’re packed up and finally ready. Four hours of sleep and away we go.

Thursday 5^th August.

It’s an early rise to get on our Flight to JHB. There’s lots to carry for us as we only put our clothes, the sax, guitar and trombone through, all the tech comes as hand-luggage due to not being able to trust airlines and airports these days. Sad but true.

We arrive at JHB international only to find EJ von Lyrik’s (Our Vocalist) bag had been left in Cape Town. She put two bags down on the belt that were part of a set, and the counter girl only tagged the one, thinking they were one piece of luggage.

Now here we are leaving for Reunion in about 2 hours and with no way to get her bag to us in time. EJ managed to get a promise of some compensation out of British airways while the rest of us are busy holding the customs forms queue up pulling out soundcards, kaoss pads, horns, macbooks and 20 other assorted sound devices. The people behind us aren’t impressed.

Then, after an hour wait in the checkin queue as a result of 3 different airlines booking their flights though 2 counters, we make it through passport control with a couple of minutes to spare, get through the gate, onto the plane and on our way to Reunion!

We leave at 2pm, fly for 4.5hours and land at 8:20pm local time.  A bus is waiting outside for us to drive us to our hotel in le Petit Tampon on the other side of the island, about 20min drive from St Pierre where the Festival is being held. Apparently  “Petit Tampon” means plug in French but that didn’t stop everyone cracking up at the name. Having nothing better to do for the better part of an hour, the back half of the bus decides to tuck into the litre bottle of Jamesons picked up in Johannesburg duty free. Some rather interesting photo’s result. We can’t really see anything outside at the moment as we’ve landed at night, and are all just pretty tired from missioning since 6 o clock in the morning.

Upon arrival at our hotel we check into our rooms and are greeted by some rather hefty goodie bags that consisted of 2 litre bottles of  the local rum CHERETTE and all such things needed to consume it. Since Lee and Ross are teetotal, this means an extra 2 bottles get unloaded on the room next door containing Kevin and Jon. This will have some rather interesting results on Saturday night. Everyone’s pretty big on their rum in Reunion, with the locals concocting their own brews ranging from pineapple infusions to banana syrip and vanilla pod mixes to chocolate (the one that blows one’s face off!). The trick is to take a bottle of white rum and then stuff it with whatever you want to flavour it with. Some of the bottles we get to sample over our brief descent into alcoholism have been fermenting for about 4 years. This from an initial base of about 50% alcohol level.

Friday 6^th August.

We Wake up to a fantastic continental breakfast, which we quickly plow through. The bus then arrives to take us down for our soundcheck at 11am.

This festival runs a little differently to South African events. The gates open Round 5pm and close every morning at 6am. There’s no camping and all the soundchecks are done during the day so that when people arrive, everything is set-up and ready to go.

What is also different is the way the performances are run. There are 5 stages, with performances running on 2 of them con-currently while the rest are closed. Performances then shift to the other stages. This way everyone gets to catch the majority of shows and it keeps the people flowing around the entire festival, which is fantastic.

Sound check is really easy with a great tech crew helping us out, even through the French-english communication barrier. Ross McDonald, our Trombone player / Guitarist, had his guitar suddenly pack up all together, which is not something you really want when 4000kms away from home. A quick solder job from the sound engineer sorts everything out pretty quickly, and within about another 20 minutes everything is ready to go. Setting up has never been this easy before. Plugin was easy, lots of staging and the monitoring is first class.

After sound check, we get treated to lunch by the beach just outside our backstage tent, just off the beach which had probably the best view we’ve ever seen from a backstage area. We’re sitting underneath some palms, watching perfect crystal green waves reel off one hundred meters out to sea, and in the background, Speech Debelle from Big Dada are running through their set. They’re on just before us this evening, and it’s sounding amazing.

After the check  some of us go back to the hotel, while EJ, Ross and Lee go downtown to do some shopping. EJ’s been rocking the same clothes for the last two days so she’s pretty relieved to get some new items to wear. Ross McDonald spends his shopping time finding some of the most obscene t-shirts he can from this beachware store called Pardon! to wear out to our gig.   Back at the hotel everyone goes down for a bit before we have to get down to our show

• 6pm Friday

We arrive at the festival to catch the tail end of Blick Bassy who’re really fantastic, playing some incredible folk/world music. We get to our backstage tent, put all our gear down, open up our fridge and  tuck into some DODO beer (local beer that comes in a glass bottles that resembles an old school glass medicine bottle, Island medicine I suppose). Kevin, Jon and EJ have a live TV performance  and interview to get through at about 9 before we even get on stage. Beer tends to help with things like that.

Round 9pm the three of us head off down to the studio which they have set up on a stage in the grounds. This is being broadcast all over the island and on French satellite TV.

Upon arrival at the studio set/stage we find our translator who tells us that she’s not going to be able to come on set during the interview due to there not being enough chairs in the studio. The plan she’d come up with was for us to go through all the questions with the presenter, translate them pre interview, and then get the presenter to ask us the same questions live, safe in the knowledge that we’ll spit out the same answers, which she (the presenter) can then  ’translate’ into French.

At the beginning of the interview however, the presenter goes into question remix mode and all our questions get changed, which made for a very interesting interview. Having spotted EJ giving Kevin a pre-live tv performance hug, she assumes the two of them are an item, leaving him to use hand gestures  to try and explain otherwise. Not helping is the fact that he can hear the two Ross’ (who have two of the most distinctive laughs in the world) laughing from the audience. We find out afterwards that they’ve been standing there scoring the two of us on our answers, with the translator standing next to them laughing herself silly.

Final score:

Jon 5 points

Kevin: -100 points

After that it’s time to grab a meal in the festival restaurant and then get ready for our show.

It can be rather strange seeing absolutely no-one on the dancefloor 5min before you come on and then suddenly with 1 minute to go, everyone just rolls in! So we set off with our first performance, which was really well accepted by the crowd; they pretty much went nuts! Half way through our set, it starts to rain ( this is during the driest month in reunion and after the locals were telling us has never rained in August in the last million years or something).

Luckily the quick-thinking stage crew have 2 gazebos over us in no time and we’re back on our way. A couple of technical glitches due to tech getting rained on messes with the tail end of our set, but the  show goes down brilliantly and the crowd are amped, having stayed through the rain the whole way through.

Post show we hit the rum hard and headed back to the hotel where we continued to drink rum rum and more rum…

Saturday 7^th August

Most of the band misses breakfast and slowly emerge from their rooms just in time for the buss to take us back down for our sound check.

We’re on a smaller stage  today called Vince’s corner, run by this guy called …. Vince. It’s a smaller stage, but has no less powerful sound than the others. Soundcheck goes quickly and we manage to find a way to deal with the gear problems from the night before.

We head back to the hotel to cleanup and then head out to take a little walk around the village that we’re in. Reunion is a place of colourful people and friendly smiles. And some very weird fish they sell that looks like slimy worms, which sent Inka our VJ running!

Then it’s back to the festival for our show. The gig goes off again with a crazy crowd and no rain. Things really seemed to gel for this one, which was cool as we’ve been rehearsing this keys, guitar, 3 piece horn section band setup for a month now. Nice to see that work finally come together.

During our dinner at the artist restaurant, which is overlooking the ocean we stumble across this Australian band called True Live, an acoustic setup mashing classical music, fun beats n breaks, hip-hop, ska and swing flavours all rolled into one. We all just stop an watch these guys in awe for about five minutes.

They’re staying at the same hotel  as us and, when we get back from our show we meet up with the bassist, Tom at about 3 am. Inka Jon and Kev then annihilate a litre bottle of Charette between then and 7am, which is the bus pick-up time for half our band members to head back to SA. I don’t think Tom was quite expecting to be mobbed like that to be honest, but we end up swapping some music, find out that he went to university with the guys from The Cat Empire and generally just end up chatting til the sun comes up. Lee, Ross and EJ make their bus and the rest of us, having kept half the hotel up, finally head for bed.

Sunday 8th August

Although the remaining group of us are supposed to DJ on the Sunday Night at the festival afterparty, the entire thing has to be cancelled due to Rain…again! and we we’re let off for the night. Our 2 Drivers, Clemence and Nico grabbed us and hauled us off to a local restaurant to try out some of the local food. There we ate Ragoul (cooked salami type sausage with mash and bean sauace) and Octopus and Prawns (Ross Finck has spent most of his trip paranoid he was going to die from shelfish poisoning ha ha, it’s not funny, but it is when he’s freaking out)

All in all the trip was an incredible experience, and we met some people who will remain our good friends forever .. Thanks to everyone from Sakifo who made it such a great stay, you lot rock!

We are still trying to get through the rum that we brought back. Our livers will never quite be the same again.

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