NORWEGIAN WOOD
The mêlée outside the hotel as we departed for the venue.
The Norwegian Wood festival is held at the Frognerbadet (“the Frogner Baths”) in Oslo every year. We played here 5 years ago and it was chilly. Today we were prepared, like yesterday, I wore my Galvin Green Golf thermals and when I told Mark that my hands remained warm last night in Bergen, he was a convert. Pete did the honours and found some Under Armour togs and they worked a treat. Warm and toasty, Mark played a lovely, fluid show with warm hands. The show was fantastic and the crowd was too.
Pre-show routine was unremarkable except for the fact that the surroundings were delightful. There was a meet and greet and Mark and I were presented with some platinum disks for the ‘Tracker’ album. The backstage area is well thought out and the dressing rooms were nice enough to make us want to stay after-show for a few drinks and food, well the super expensive hotel bar certainly isn’t worth going back to. We ended up staying for well over two hours and then continued well into the morning light in my room with DJ Fletch on the SpotiJ thing.
With the onset of websites such as Trip Advisor and Yelp, a more realistic picture via customer reviews can emerge about hotels. As to their accuracy, well that’s always questionable but at least we get to see the range of experiences. I always felt badly about degrading a hotel in any way but now that’s changed as after all, we are paying for a service and in any walk of life, if you don’t do your job properly, you shouldn’t be doing your job.
Our scathing reports about the hotel yesterday had some minor positive effect today, Tim Hook, our tour manager must have ‘had a word’. The surly breakfast waiter was much more pleasant, possibly a coincidence, and the breakfast order, driven by yesterday’s experience was at least edible. I thought to myself, “what can’t they fuck up?”. Answer…boiled eggs. Wrong! They were cold. Ah well, at least they tasted great. (apologies for the language but sometimes only one word will do)
Since we now have a day off in Oslo, I decided to get out the heavy artillery and set up the NHT speakers, maybe do some serious listening, maybe some recording. I’m now using a fabulous little Presonus USB Audio interface called the Audiobox iTwo. Dead cool.
