The trip to Vienna

Me and my buddy from the Beseech Fanclub, Morgan, went down to Vienna, Austria to help Beseech at their concert at the “666” party, and of course to get a beer or two. “The 666 party” is Austria’s biggest underground party for dark and gothic metal and brings about 2000-2500 crazy metalheads. But let’s start from the begining.

Friday the 19:th of april

Morgan and his mom (who drove us to the airport) picked me up at around 11 am and I was barely awake. We arrived at Landvetter airport about half an hour later. After the usual check-in routine, we headed straight for the bar to get the first beer of the day. With that I started to get back to life and it was time to leave for the plane and the first stop of this little trip: Paris, France.

I have to apologize to the French people, but the guy who designed the Charles de Gaulles airport must have drunk quite some wine before he started to work. When we found our gate we saw the line outside it and could hardly believe our eyes, the line was so long you couldn’t see the end of it. Just how smart is it to build one single entrance to seven different gates. I think you can imagine what it looks like when 7 airplanes worth of people tries to get in through this one entrance at once. Well, in any way we managed to get in and with about an hours delay we got airborne again and were on our way to Vienna. The trip went without any complications except the fact that they didn’t serve us any drinks, so we were pretty thirsty when we landed in Vienna. We cought a cab outside the airport and gave the driver a note with the adress for our hotel. This didn’t help much though, the stupid driver didn’t know the way, he had to stop four times to ask for directions. But finally there it was; The “Gasthof Gerhart”.

Beseech, who had driven down in a minivan (which took them about 24 hours) had allready checked themselves and us in and gone to get something to eat. So we had to sit around waiting for a while. When they came back we just dumped our luggage in the room and decided to go to the place where the gig was supposed to be. We knocked on the landladys door to ask for some help to get a cab. The door opened and out came and old lady looking exactly like Norman Bates mom in Alfred Hitchcock’s classic “Psycho”. I sure wasn’t going to take any showers at this hotel, I was sure she was going to kill me. After some difficulties with different languages we finally got our cabs and the beer was getting closer by the minute.

At the “Meggido” as the place was called, we finally got those long awaited beers and it didn’t take long before the second one came in. After some more beers and a lot of laughter Daniel decided to find out where the stage was. He was told that there were no stage at this place, the place were the concert was supposed to take place was about 20 minutes by car away from there. Well, we knew what we had to look forward to the next day...searching. We hung around for yet another while, Jonas made some new friends playing a soccer game with three locals. Sound engineer Öhlund, Erik, Lotta and Mikael went back to the hotel a little earlier than the rest of us, but with the concert the next day in mind we left right after them. While we were waiting for the cab to arrive a policecar pulled up, the officers sat there looking at us for a while, then called upon us and told us that we couldn’t just stand there, we had to move. After some explanation about waiting for the cab, they left and the cab arrived.

Of course we had to get something to eat on the way back so we made the cabdriver stop at a Mc Donalds, and left him waiting outside while we went in and ordered. Suddenly when I’m ordering Klas burst out with that voice sounding like his ready to start crying any minute, that only Klas has “ I don’t want no Fish Mac”, Jonas always nearby to save Klas stepped in and took the Fish Mac and tried to get a bag to bring it along. This caused problems, the staff didn’t understand what he meant. But Jonas is a man with a vivid imagination, formed his hands and mouth and pretended to fill the bag with air and then sounded like he smashed it, this however difficult to understand made the staff realize what he wanted. We all managed to get our food and went back to the hotel to eat and get a final beer for the day before it was time to get to bed.

Saturday the 20:th of april.

We all got up pretty early not to miss breakfast and planned the day ahead. Myself, Morgan, Jonas and Öhlund decided to try to find the place where the gig was supposed to take place, and headed out in the cold Vienna morning. We didn’t have to search for it for long but we had to go in to check it out to be sure.

Imagine a muddy forrest road leading up to a big hole in a mountain and you’ll get a pretty good idea about what this looks like. There were isles going off in different directions which where about 15 metres wide and 10 metres high. We were met by a single guy who was sarting to get the place in order, he showed us around a bit and to the stage. When we’re walking through these tunnels an almost mystical and scary feeling surrounds us and our “guide” tells us that this used to be an old brewery. After Öhlunds inspection of the mixing table and Morgan taking some photos we headed back to the hotel to tell the others. Everyone got ancsious to go down there at once but decided to take it easy for a while first.

While we were away the guys had tried to convince Klas to shave his head completely, at first he was not at all into this, but gradualy started to soften. When we got back he didn’t have any choice any longer, we were just too many. Said and done, Mikeal cut off whatever hair Klas had left and then Daniel went to work with the razor. Everything went smoothly and in all this “Psycho”-lady came out and asked about the payment, Robban took the responsibility and started to gesture and explaining in english and the lady answered in german, obviously they came to some sort of agreement because the lady took the bill and went away. It was starting to get time to leave, and Klas was finished. Nowadays better known as Uncle Fester.

The minivan got packed up and ready and we left for the “Vienna Dungeons”. Everyone was quite happy with the place except that it was very cold and damp, even I complained a bit, me who likes it best when it’s about zero degrees. Now we only had to wait for Max from Napalm Records, he was supposed to arrive around two o’clock, but he didn’t show up so we decided to go and eat something instead. We went to a restaurant which the Dj of the night, Marcus Ehlin from Siebenburgen, recommended to us and had ourselfs a good meal with some beer to that.

Back in the dungeon, still no Max so the only thing to do now was to start the soundcheck. That’s not an easy thing to do inside a tunnel covered with bricks, with frozen fingers and well plain cold bandmembers. Well, we got through it anyway and started killing time waiting for Max to arrive. Finally he showed and everyone got their backstage passes, meanwhile I had gotten a real chock. Jonas came up to me and said- “Look there’s Rob Halford”. I turned a could hardly believe it, there he was. After coming back to my senses and realising that it wasn’t Mr Halford, it was time to head back to the hotel to get some rest and try to get warm again.

When we got back to the dungeon later that night everything had chanched, between 2000 and 2500 people had arrived and it was like walking into a festival area. We hadn’t gotten that many beers during the day, so the first thing I did was to get in line at one of the temporary bars built up for the night, after about 20 minutes I finally got to the bartender, but was meat with the following statement- Sorry, you can’t pay with money here, you need a ticket. This he threw right in my face when all I wanted to do was to buy some beer, what a lousy fucking system. After pushing myself all the way back to the entrance, buying my tickets and pushing back again, standing in line for another 20 minutes I finally got my beer. But did I have time to finish it? No! Halfway through the beer it was time for Beseech to go on stage and me to get the videocamera running.
The gig was a succes even though the band had trouble hearing each other on stage which led to some minor error, but that was nothing to worry about. The european got audience doesn’t move that much so it was hard to tell wether they liked it or not, but there were a few brave at the front, all under the command of “Halford” that was doing what they could to act as normal headbanging, screaming audience. I guess the ABBA cover Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! Tore down the most applause, but the other songs came thru good to. The playlist for the night was as follows: A last farewell, Illusionate, Manmade dreams, Blinded, A season in green, Fiction city, Endless waters, Souls highway, Between the lines, Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! And finally Shadowscape.
Directly after the gig we carried all the equipment backstage, where we found out that me and Morgan would have to leave our hotelroom in favour of Beseech’s promotor Roland, some sort of double booking or something. Not much to do about that we thought and started to carry all the equipment to the car instead, where we ended up discussing what to do next. Time was after 3 o’clock pm so there wasn’t much time to start partying now anyway. Finally I got a bit pissed and told the band to go in and mingle a bit with the fans which they had to do anyway, if we had left for the hotel and dumped the gear there and then went back, most people would have left. So everyone went back in besides Lotta and Micke who was talking to “Halford” for a while before the went in too.

It turned out that it was lucky that I had raised my voice a bit, because inside the dungeon Robban spoke to Max, the head of the record label and he knew nothinh about any double booking. Roland had pulled a stupid stunt on us, just to have somewhere to stay during the night, he lives in Innsbruck, 500 kilometres from Vienna. There’s not words enough for what I’d like to call this sorry excuse for a human being. All of this had taken so much time so when the band was gathered again and back at the hotel time was after 4 o’clock. No one really felt like partying then. So we all went to bed.

Sunday the 21:st of april.

We went up really early not to miss breakfast, although we weren’t that many. It was only me, Morgan, Öhlund and Robban that managed to get up. After breakfast we went back to bed to try to get some more sleep.

Around 11 o’clock someone starts to pound at our door, Morgan opens the door and in come “Psycho” lady, shouting in german, we don’t understand a single word. Finally Öhlund steps in and with a little help from one of the record label guys we found out that we was supposed to have checked out at 10 o’clock and that she was pissed because we had made the floor into a complete mess. It was all the mud from the evening before that we had dragged around the hotel, but this has to be one of very few hotels around the world that has check out time at 10 o’clock. Well after a stressy morning we were outside the hotel in a beautiful morning packing the van.

Roland who evidently managed to find somewhere to sleep came out with his eyes glued to the ground, not looking up a single time while waiting for his cab. I wanted to tell him a few chosen words but managed to keep my mouth shut and let him stand there in shame. We said goodbye to Max and headed off to a nearby restaurant. After an exquisite meal we said our goodbyes to the band and got a cab to take us to the airport for our trip back to Sweden. The transfer in Paris was a lot smoother this time, but unfortunately we ended up in a plane full of chattering women. Well, back home, mum met us and drove us home, to where we got at around 11 pm.

Summarize
As you can see there were no bigger scandals, but I guess that’s normal when travelling with a goth band. But hopefully Bessech got themselves some new fans during this trip and those of you that haven’t seen them live yet should look forward to the upcoming european tour.

Oh right, I almost forgot, Mr “Rob Halford”, turned out to be Serge, one of Beseech’s biggest fans, we hope to meet you on the tour.

-Ulf “Uffe” Classon