Tim's Flight Home End of Tour Blog (50 show wrap) (Patreon)

The day has finally arrived. November 20. At 6:30pm the adventure ends. Well…not really. Maybe a better way to describe it is that this chapter has ended. Actually that doesn’t seem to work either… It’s more that the adventure is just taking a few weeks break. Time at home to book and plan all of 2019’s adventures. Not that that really stops whilst we are away. I actually just finished booking our next Australian tour a few days ago (**shhh, don’t tell anyone yet *may 2019 and holy shit the line-up is insane. The biggest package we have ever done anywhere in the world as a headliner**)) 

Either way, I’m looking forward to getting home. In the last 11 weeks we’ve only been home for 10 days and it hasn’t been since 2015 that we had two tours back to back so close over a 2-3 month period. That time is was our first ever tours to Europe, back to back festival tours, getting our chance to shine on the big stages alongside many of the worlds best bands and seeing how we stacked up.

I remember being so excited after those festivals because more than anything playing on those big festivals made me feel like we belonged. Sure there were still some bands each day that made me go “Wow, we have a lot we can improve” but at the same time plenty that made me feel like we matched or bettered what they did and that we deserved our place amongst them. I think that was the first time I really knew we belonged at that level, that we really were good enough to play alongside the worlds best and not seem out of place. Having said that, a lot has changed in the 3 1/2 years since, and I do feel like we’ve gotten quite a bit better as a live band as well. I try to always be learning where possible. Studying the art of how to run of how to manage a set of NeO music for different crowd types (headline/support/festival); how different countries crowds interact with us and what you can expect out of them. The opportunities we have to move around the stage. When I need to stay focused on my playing or singing and when I can just focus on the performance element. A balance I find very natural now after so many shows on this record.

But I digress. 

50 shows. That is how many shows we have played in the last 11 weeks. That’s a lot. Definitely the most we have ever played in such a short timeframe. 

The Mexico tour I already wrote about in detail here on Patreon and I had written quite a bit about the USA tour but damn it is hard to keep consistent with such things when you get sick on the road and you have to go into survival mode. I’ll do my best to keep writing as often as I can though.

The North American tour was a great success. Mexico was so successful we may even be getting the chance to come back again soon in 2019(!). 

Touring with Wintersun ended up being a great combination musically and personally for us as well. The band was great to watch live each night, we got treated really well by the band and crew and the crowds were on average double what we pull for our own headline tours and so I feel like we made a lot of new fans (which is the primary purpose of a support tour above all else). It went well for us financially, we actually made slightly money than our headline our 12 months earlier in North America (payments and merch was similar but the tour was longer and it normally takes us 20+ shows to break even coming from Australia so we made more money mostly due to simply having more shows after that break even point in the tour.). 

The European tour was very successful as well in many ways, not as much financially where we had the opposite scenario… a short tour of only 16 shows meaning there weren’t enough shows to get to our break even point and so we did lose money on that tour. But add both tours together and we made a small profit, made a lot of new fans, got to play for a lot of existing fans and overall the band moved forward in a lot of ways which is the main thing. It was in particular great to get to play headline shows in Romania and Israel places we had missed so far on the URN album cycle. I definitely feel a strong obligation to try and play everywhere we can that we have fans on each album.

We are trying really hard to finally get to South America. The success of the Mexico tour gave our booking agent hope that he might be able to get a promoter on board to book us a headline tour  in February for after 70k (aka the Boat). Unfortunately it looks like that isn’t going to happen as he couldn’t find a promoter that felt we were big enough to make it financially viable for them to put together a tour. Internal flights within South America are quite expensive and so it’s not a cheap place to tour so you need to be quite big to make it work without someone (band or promoter…or both) losing a lot of money. At present we’ve been told to wait until next album…however we are still looking for other ways to get to play there such a festivals etc. so fingers crossed we can get there sometime soon.

But back to the tours just passed. 

There were quite a few moments that stuck out for me  across this couple of months for different reasons. I’ve got half an hour until we land to finish this so will try and get through as much as possible! 

1. Mexico City- see previous blog about the amazingness of this tour!

2. Luggage Issues- Delta losing my gear bag on the way from Mexico to USA was a total pain in the arse. I played the first show of the USA tour in shorts and my persefone t-shirt (breaking a “no band t-shirt” rule we have for on stage attire). I then spent much of my day off in NYC replacing my gear and buying new clothes at 1am in Manhattan (seeing apparently clothes places at still open at that hour in Midtown!). Almost on queue my in ear headphones broke a couple shows later and my spares were in the lost bag resulting in me having to borrow Dan’s spares for the rest of the tour. My bag finally turned up a few days before we were leaving to Europe and after originally indicating they could send it to Sweden for our first show, then then told me the night before we left that actually it would be there in time for the 2nd show… which didn’t work at all as then I would have to bring the new spare set of gear and would have too much gear to bring back at the end of the tour. So I had the lost bag sent home to my house in Australia and it finally turned up at my house a good 6 weeks after it was first loss and I’ll be reunited with my stuff in an hour or so from now. 

3. Wintersun- it was really such a pleasure touring with them. I got on with the guys really well and very much admired Jari’s supreme dedication to his performance. Every night he was solely focused on preparing for the show and he was never out partying, always resting his voice and making the shows his top priority. I had heard some negative comments about him in regards to him being thinking he was too good for other people, but I didn’t think that at all. I just saw someone that was very dedicated to making sure he put on the best show possible every night and that was the only thing that mattered to him. Sometimes supports mistake someone wanting time to themselves to relax, or time to be quiet and not talk (if you’re a singer and need to rest your voice) as being arrogant and above hanging out, but it’s something I can definitely relate to. I have had supports comment to me that it wasn’t the second half of a tour that they really got to know me much at all, this was even on tours when I was the tour manager, as I am often working, performing and resting…off in my corner with my headphones on. My way of avoiding conversation and saving my voice for the show each night.

4. Baseball- Having spent 3 years living in San Francisco back when I was a kid in the 90’s, playing baseball and attending games for the Giants and also the A’s on occasion was part of chlldhood. Despite our several trips to the USA since 2016 this was actually the first time I was able to attend any games and it was quite special to re-connect with those childhood experiences. I have watched many a game over the years on TV, but it was amazing to get to attend part of a couple games (in Los Angeles and also Seattle) in person this time around. 

5. Re-connecting with friends- one of the great things about us touring regularly to these parts of the worlds is being able to rekindle relationships that used to be strong in my life but that drifted due to me being away for so long. It was 17 years since I visited my friends in San Francisco in 1999 to our first tour in 2016. I have a couple friends that I had kept in touch with who after now having seen them at all for 17 years and just loosely keeping in touch via email/Facebook etc. I now have been able to catch up with them 4 times in the last 3 years. And to be honest, that is more than I have caught up with some of my Aussie friends due to me being away so much.

6. Damnation Festival- this day was quite special partly as I had so many friends there this day and it felt amazing to be able to hang out with friends in bands like Caligula’s Horse, The Ocean, Monuments etc. none of whom are from Leeds but all just there for the day to play our music and share in the occasion.

7. Ihsahn- We’ve all been fans of his for so long it was definitely quite special to get the chance to share the stage with him and his band. I remember first discovering Emperor when I was 21… Xen showed me some tracks from ‘Anthems..” and I was hooked. The bands image and lyrics and involvement in the notorious Norwegian black metal scene had me thinking they were a pretty intense almost scary band, so it was funny that Ihsahn himself turned out to be one of the nicest guys I’ve ever met in any walk of life. Absolutely zero ego, with total respect for NeO and what we were adding to the shows each night. Very happy to sit down and have a chat. If you ask any of the NeO guys they’ll all say the same thing as it was something we talked about amongst ourselves “Wow, how nice is Ihsahn!”. The saying goes that you shouldn’t meet those you idolise as they may live to disappoint your high regard of them. With Ihsahn that wasn’t the case at all. If anything I became a bigger fan of his after having the chance to get to know him more personally. His band were all lovely as well, his crew (which we shared for the shows) were great and looked after us really well. It was just a really positive vibe the whole time which was great.

8. The Ne Obluminai- It’s only 10 minutes until landing and there is a lot more to write on this topic so I’ll add a part 2 soon but just quickly… the love and support we get from fans and especially those here on Patreon continues to blow me away. There were several moments where I could really see how important a moment it was for someone for us to be sharing our music with them and to be able to share special moments with people like that is something that continues to blow me away and remind me over and over why getting to do this is such a special thing to be able to do.

So what I have I missed…. talking about experimentations with new crew, juggling working on the road, endless flight luggage issues, Romania/Xen, Israel plus tons of amazing experiences with Ne Obluminati! I’ll try to get to them all in part 2 once I’ve gotten over my jet lag in a few days time.

Until then…

Thank you for all the amazing support for all those that came out to any of the last 50 shows, or any shows at all in 2018! We really are very fortunate to have the support of so many wonderful people.

Just landed back home!!

Tim

P.S. no time to proof read so apologies in advance for any typos/errors :p