After a morning buying last-minute provisions (sleeping bags, phrasebooks and so on) in London, Jamie and I left the safety of his house and headed for Standsted airport to fly to Riga, capital of Latvia. The flight went smoothly, and we were feeling pretty confident about things, being on familiar turf. On leaving the airport I gave Edgars (the man with the plan who organizes my shows out there) a ring to see what the score was. In theory we should have had a car and driver for the whole tour. There was no show that day, but we were due in Cesis the next day for the Fonofest. It was then that we found out that, no, we didn't have a driver after all. Public transport it was, unless we wanted to get a bus to Liepaja (about 1000 miles in the wrong direction) to get a car to drive back to Cesis there and then. That sounded shit to us, so we caught a bus straight to Cesis instead. Jamie promptly left his camera on the bus, thereby losing (among other things) our arrival photos. Thankfully I think I've managed to capture the true spirit of the occasion anyways (left). We met old friends in Cesis, not least our main man Andzs, had a scout round the festival site (including helping to build the sound-booth), had a few beers, and crashed out at Atis' place with Christian, pretty tired after the joruney.
We woke up feeling much refreshed, and much amused by the toilet paper brand. This was the day of Fonofest, a festival we played last year with Million Dead. Jamie decided to crack open the beer at breakfast, a decision which was to prove fateful (duh). We arrived on the site in the middle of the day to help set up, soundcheck, familiarize ourselves with the luxurious facilities and so on. For reasons which continue to escape me, I then decided it'd be a really great idea to play a bit of football. This was about as much physical exercise as I've done in decades. It also began some kind of terminal deterioration in my jeans that will culminate later in our story. After knicking a weird pair of sungalsses and playing a great set, with a great crowd (including someone waving a detatched mannequin's head), we started to, ahem, enjoy the festival atmosphere. After being plied with vodka by another old friend, Ivars, we were heading back into the festival site when Jamie spotted (a) a BMX course and (b) a shopping trolley. The results can be seen, left, and were instantly regretted. In fact it took most of the rest of the holiday for Jamie's arse to recover, and we'll be hearing more about it as our story progresses. After further debaunchery, and Jamie disappearing with Andzs' 16-year-old sister for an hour or two (?), we finally crashed out at about 2am.
Sadly, we had sort of not registered that we were due to get up a mere two hours later, and we were not best pleased when roused at 4am for the next leg of our journey. The next show was Tuntuma festival, in Lohja, Finland. This then entailed a car journey north to Talinn followed by a ferry to Helsinki and another short car journey to the festival. We were picked up and driven by the lovely Ilse and Austra, some friends of Edgars'. We felt pretty spectacularly awful at this point, particularly Jamie, who was realizing the full error of his shopping-trolley ways, and wasn't able to hold his guts down much either. Edgars was also in the car. After a 5 hour journey, interspersed with Jim running off to be sick (something that generally made him feel better, if only for a short while), we were dropped in Talinn. Here we had to wait for about 4 hours there, which did, incidentally, raise the question 'Why in the name of titty fucking Christ did we have to leave at 4am then?!' as well as giving Jamie time to contemplate the full extent of his injuries. Finally we got the ferry across the Gulf of Finland, which was actually really beautiful, and marked my first time at sea in the Baltic. Much restored by this and by a healthy breakfast, we made it into Helsinki, got picked up and driven to Lohja. Tuntuma is a small but great indie festival, on the edge of a lake. Everyone was very friendly, though not many people had a clue about me or what I do, MD having never made it to Scandinavia. Nevertheless we were well looked after, the show was great and it was awesome to sit on the beach in the sunshine during my first evening in Finland. We were pretty tired by the end of the day and had a quiet night, crashing out in a local band's rehearsal room, which had ace decor in the toilets.
The plan for the next day was to get a lift to Helsinki and then a train straight through to St Petersburg for the Russian leg of the tour. The first part went smoothly enough, but on getting to Helsinki we found out that the trains that day were booked up and we'd have to wait until the morning. This wasn't too much of a problem in the end, as Edgars managed to get us a place to crash in town with his friend Jarkko (right). Before we met him we decided he sounded like a Bond villain - 'I am jarkko! Tremble, puny Americans!' - but in the flesh he was, thankfully, not so much a deranged megalomaniac as a thoroughly nice chap. We passed the evening in a rock bar, drinking Finnish beer and getting to know the locals, before retiring to bed at Jarkko's flat. Incidentally, we encountered a bizarre shop window display nearby which seemed to be supposed to be an authentic display of English life. Weird. After another early start we went back to Helsinki station, tickets in hand, and boarded a train for St Petersburg. Finland had been really good fun, and felt quite safe, what with everyone speaking English, using the Euro and so on. Crossing the border into Russia felt much more daunting. The next phase of the adventure was due to begin...Part two is here!