Our trips to Te Puke and Hamilton

Yo Yo Yo! It’s been a super-busy couple of weeks as we’ve been grinding eachother towards perfection (and insanity) for the upcoming events. Insight to our daily practice last week:

Well, some of the ”upcoming” has already gone as (like often) our updates are not up to date… We’ve been out and about, doing ”mini-gigs” in Open Mics and last Sunday (30May) we did a not-so-mini-gig in Hamilton at The Lucky Finns (nothing to do with our Finnish members).

Te Puke

The aforementioned Open Mics take place in Te Puke, about 1/2h away from Tauranga. We heard about them through a friend and when we first got there, we’re blown away by the awesome crowd that crawls into the pub every Thursday night. Te Puke is ”The Kiwifruit Capital Of The World” and gathers backpackers and pickers from all over the world on Thursdays at ”The Jellicoe St”, where the Open Mics take place! Cool people, some pretty amazing talent, cool event!

Lucky Finns

The Hamilton gig was another kind of a mish! We planned on leaving Tauranga at 1pm-ish. Well, in real life, we got packed and on our way at a bit before 3pm! Then there was that terrible car-crash on the way and we got delayed even more. Set-up was ok, but the sound-guy couldn’t make it early enough for a proper sound-check AND for some reason we couldn’t get any guitar or bass coming through the PA! Also our listening – monitoring – foldbacks wouldn’t want to work with the sound-guy / -desk. This all delayed our gig with another 1/2h. At 8:30pm we finally got the bass and guitar coming through to the room and we decided to start without the fold-backs. I mean, listening others is overrated anyway… The gig itself was a blast! A few new arrangements, a few new musicians, a few new stories to share between the songs and a few new faces in the audience, what could possibly go wrong?!? We had soooo much fun onstage, did a few on-the-go changes to the songs and just enjoyed the vibe and everything. Skipped the break we had planned just for the fun of it. People dancing and then again concentrating to the message! That’s the whole point, right?

After the gig we had some cool conversations with a few peeps, a nice and easy pack-down (as you do!) and then some of us headed down to Raglan to spend the night at Okko’s, while others raced back home..