Second entry: Day 5 to 11

European tour 2007

Day 5 - München, Germany

Feierwerk in München was the second venue on the tour that I had been to before, then playing in the Hansa 39 room, this time in the Orange room (or whatever it was called). During the evening I met a few friends from the past, among others Mike Hanus from Fleshcrawl with whom I did my first tour ever back in 1994. 13 years ago... Time flies!

The show was OK, we are sort of suffering from "first band disease" which means that the people who are coming to these shows are basically there to rock out to Misery Index and Dew-Scented. But never mind - it's fun to play anyway.

Day 6 - Schweinfurt, Germany

Next stop: Schweinfurt and the hardcore festival "Never say die!", which is something our booker Avocado is setting up. They have a few touring packages out in Europe right now and a few times these packages cross paths. Of the four "Never say die!" festivals this was the only one we attended. Other bands on the bill: Converge, Rise and Fall, Animosity, Job for a Cowboy, Bring me the Horizon and a few others. In other words, not much death metal apart from the three in our touring package. Again, the crowd was a little bit held back, but the venue was quite cool and of course I got to see Converge again.

The night ended with a loud thunderstorm, which was rumoured to come during the festival, but fortunately it came while we were in our hotel beds.

Day 7 - Erstfeld, Switzerland

Going into Switzerland is always a drag for a band due to the customs, and of course they caused a lot of trouble for our touring party. We were sort of in a hurry to make it to the show and also to leave it, so being stuck at the border for quite a while wasn't really something that we prefered. It took a long time until the customs said what they wanted (which ended up with a 1300 Euro deposit for the merchandise) and then we finally entered the country.

All the trouble seemed to go away at once as Switzerland is very beautiful and the ride from the border to Erstfeld was really cool. And when we arrived to the massive Transilvania club surrounded by huge mountains everything felt really good. We shared stage with Dagoba, Aborted and Hatesphere and our touring party asked a great favour from Aborted and Hatesphere as we had to leave as early as possible to do a very long over night drive to Hellfest. Luckily both bands accepted to play after us.

Unfortunately the show in Erstfeld was one of the worst for Coldworker. The huge venue had almost no visitors when we played and we had to cut three songs out of our setlist due to the delayed schedule.

When Misery Index had finished up the set we quickly packed everything into the vans and went out on a hellish drive for 12 hours to Hellfest...

Day 8 - Hellfest, France

After we'd finished that very long drive we were met with rain - and mud! Hellfest was one big puddle of mud and that was as you understand not ideal at all. To make things worse, Dew-Scented who was supposed to open up on the main stage was forced to cancel their show as the stage wasn't finished (?) and a generator caught fire which caused a lot of commotion. A few other bands were also forced to cancel their shows (among other Lamb of God) and at the same time the other two stages's schedules got all delayed and in fact, once we were on stage last at the Discovery stage everything was delayed almost 1,5 hours, so we played against Machine Head, which was a drag since I'm really into their new album.

Oskar and I tried to catch a few songs by Mastodon but the sound was so bad it was impossible to stand there in the mud trying to enjoy the show. Earlier on the day I met Brann (with whom I toured USA in 1999 and met in 2001) so that was cool, catching up and all that stuff. It's hard to understand that a guy you shared a van with eight years ago is in one of the biggest (and growing) metal bands of today.

During this tour the Misery Index guys, mostly Adam (drummer), have come up with different versions of our band name, but they all got beat by Hellfest who named us "Clockworker" on the door to our backstage trailer. Someone is mixing up Sweden and Switzerland again...

Our show was good - we were psyched about playing at Hellfest eventhough everything was more or less crappy during the day so we gave a little extra. After the show som of the guys went to see Slayer and Cannibal Corpse but Joel and I was too tired with all the mud to go there so we waited at the vans and eventually got to a hotel and a well deserved shower.

Day 9 - Hellfest, France (day off)

The second day at Hellfest was more relaxed for us. There were some discussions at the hotel if we should head toward the next stop (Manchester, England) and find a hotel near the ferry, but most of the touring party wanted to spend the day off at Hellfest. So we went back.

First thing that happened for me was that I bumped into Adrian Erlandsson who's currently is playing with Brujeria. Haven't seen Adrian in years so that was fun. Second person I met was Jeff Walker who's also playing with Brujeria. I was trying to find Shane Embury but it wasn't until Brujeria was about to enter stage that I finally met him and also shook hands with the singers. It was quite a blast watching Brujeria on stage, and the crowd response was really cool.

During the day we also said hello to some of the Vader guys (our sound engineer used to work with them) which satisfied Anders B and Daniel who are huge Vader fans. Then as night fell we headed backstage and bumped into the rest of Napalm Death which always is a nice thing. The last three summers I've met them in Sweden, Italy and now France. Napalm Death then pulled of a short but very sweet show. I've seen them about 60 times now and this show was one of the better ones - the whole feeling of it all was really great.

And then we left Hellfest for another looooong drive...

Day 10 - Manchester, UK

After a long hellish drive to Manchester (home of the amazing Karl Pilkington) we stepped out into the rain and an infernal car alarm that created tinnitus among to touring party. Not a good way to start the English dates.

Unfortunately, a Sunday in Manchester wasn't really the best of days for metal. The number of people that attended the show was not impressive, but we are of course thankful to those who came to the show. There were two or three headbangers in the front of all bands.

My personal highlight was that I got to rehearse a Nasum song with Misery Index...

We spent the night in two appartments and if I ever need to illustrate the word "rathole" I'll take you to where we slept...

Day 11 - London, UK

London and Underworld in Camdon. Quite a nice place in a very exciting town. Again, we had a bit of bad luck as Cynic played somewhere across the street, but again it was quite good anyway.

As a special treat, I played "Digging in" with Misery Index. First time I've played that one since the recording of "Inhale/Exhale" (unless I played it live sometime...).

Only three days left now. We're getting pretty tired now...