It's been bloody warm, hasn't it?
Well now it's cooled down a bit, at least in the good old land of Beer & Chocolate, aka Belgium, I thought now seems a good time to take a look back at the summer. A nice variety of gigs this summer, a few solo shows, a cover gig, a wedding and two festivals! I suppose the big thing of the summer has been those festival gigs seeing as it was my first summer on the bass guitar!!!
Joining Safran as the bass player has been such an incredible experience - first of all I loved the music of the band before I joined, but now being IN the band and getting to play the music I loved is amazing. Particularly because the bass parts of the incredible Simon Le Ma are some of the tastiest and smoothest lines you could ask for. I guess I shall go into further detail in my next youtube video, but I did not have a huge amount of bass experience before I joined the band, so having these bass parts have been such a great foundation for me to know and understand what a bass should be doing in the content of a band and in a song.
So to a) join a band that I loved to b) kind of learn a new instrument to then c) play one of the biggest gigs I have ever played, and I think the biggest gig the band has played is just the final point in realising how lucky I have been, what an amazing summer I have had and how grateful I am. We played the Luisterplein during the Gentsen Feesten, on the last saturday at 20u15 - so basically an incredible slot! We played great, the sound was great and the audience reception was great! There was around 1000 people there and all were bopping their heads and dancing to the music. The luisterplein is know for having lots of benches set out so people can sit and listen to the music - which apparently is the rules! Well, it seems that a lot of people down the front broke these rules because there was a sizeable crowd that got up and started dancing infront of the stage! Rock and Roll baby!!!
There's a tendency in musical culture, and I guess in everyday culture, that things needs to build and to get better and better, bigger and bigger, more and more. More streams, bigger crowd, bigger stage, etc, etc. This is something I know I have fallen fowl of in the past and to honest it's just caused me shit loads of stress and unhappiness. It's also not allowed me to enjoy things in the moment because there was always half an eye on what comes next. Well over the last year and a bit, maybe more, I have been actively trying to change that and as a result, have enjoyed not only music and gigs more, but life! So I don't know what the last part of the year will have in store musically, or whether next summer will be anywhere close to what this summer has been but ultimately that's irrelevant because this summer DID happen and it was bloody marvellous!