Kicking Again

I'm in the lucky position where I have a job that gives me a relative amount of freedom to fuck off on tour whenever I want. I don't get paid when I'm away, but at least I'm not restrained, as most people are, to just five weeks of holiday a year. I guess I'm also lucky that Victims usually make enough money on tour to at least cover the bills whilst I'm away. Of course, to make sure of this luxuries on tour are few and far between, but it's all worth it.

The last tour was an absolute blast. What could be better than going out for three weeks around Europe with two other bands in tow that happen to be old friends? The shows were great for the most part, as was the hospitality given to us by the people sorting the shows. By the end of the three weeks I was feeling the strain though.. Three weeks weighs a lot heavier than it used to, especially when restricted to an average of five hours sleep a night, partly through my own faults, partly due to circumstances and the schedule we were on. Writing every day helps the long hours in the van whither away, as did the constant patter of the Tormented boys we were sharing it with, but after three weeks of driving, writing constantly, not sleeping properly, drinking too much and eating way to much shite from the endless service stations, I was knackered!

Hence, I haven't written for a while...

As blessed as I am to have a job that allows me the freedom to go away on tour, I know that as much as I've tried to see that things are covered in my absence, I've got a lot of catching up to do when I get home. This time around it was particularly bad since beside the usual stack of paperwork to be attended to, I came to home to find myself critically short staffed in both the bar and the kitchen. After a couple of days back at work I found myself longing once again for the road. Or the lack of responsibility that comes with being out on it...

As it is, Victims only have a handful of shows left this year. A couple of festivals, Hellfest in France and Tuska in Finland respectively, with a gig supporting Poison Idea and Bombus sandwiched in between. There was a stint on the west coast of the States planned for October but that has been put on hold for a while since our boy Andy is going to be a fathering a new child in August. The States can wait.

As well as Andy expanding the Victims family, Jon is also busy touring with his old band Nasum. They're out touring for most of the year, wrapping up some time in October. He's just come home from a three week leg in the States and it seems like it went great. Obviously Nasum's founding member Meizko was torn away from the earth far too early, as hundred of thousands of others were in the tsunami disaster of 2006, and due to those tragic circumstances Nasum never got to tour what was to be their final album, Helvete. They're doing that now.

I think when Jon comes home we'll start actively writing a new Victims record, and there is talk of some shows with Rotten Sound in Finland. I'm sure there will be other shows to follow as we near 2012, if indeed we all make it past December 21^st... Jon is convinced we won't.. I'm a tad more optimistic.

Obviously with no Victims stuff planned for ages, I've got some free time on my hands. Well fuck that! I've finally started a new band with my old mate, Bloody Kev, something we've spoken about doing since we finished Raging Speedhorn. The new band is called Diagnosis? Bastard!, and as well as me on guitar and Kev screaming, my good friends Viktor who plays drums in a shit load of great bands like Nitad and Pig Eyes, is playing drums and Lucas Lima, a fellow immigrant, although his emigration from Brazil is a little more ballsy than my pond hop, is playing bass. We're booked in to the studio to record a bunch of songs and there are plenty of plans for gigs and the like. Much more to come on that soon.

I'm also starting something up with another old friend, Lasse, and Turbo, the old Breach drummer. Whereas I'm writing most of the DB stuff, Lasse is taking care of writing with this project, which is always a work out and an interesting challenge. Most of the time before I can even learn how to play the stuff he comes up with, I have to first learn how to listen to the shit. Just figuring out the beat he has in his head is a head fuck! It's certainly good practice though. We've attempted a couple of things in the past but it hasn't worked out for one reason or another. The last time we were playing was around the period we were writing the last Speedhorn record. After playing with Lasse for a couple of months and learning this whole new way of playing guitar, the few usual shit Sabbath rip off songs we'd written for Speedhorn went out of the window and newly inspired, we wrote Before The Sea Was Built. So the huge majority of old school Speedhorn fans who hate that record can blame Mr. Holmberg...

As if two new bands weren't enough, there's even talk of one of my old bands, Battle of Santiago, getting back on with things and playing some shows. Our friends The Great Waste of Time are having a release show for their new record and have asked us to play. There is even talk of the ridiculously pretentious record we did with Stig Larsson, (not the dead guy who wrote those books, but the cantankerous old poet/play-write who hangs out at Erik's local pub, finally being released, with a show being planned for that too... You never know, we might even play some other shows..

So that's that for now. There will be a report from Hellfest and the other two Victims shows, as well as some photos and other bits and bobs from the last tour we played. There is a wonderful collection of photographs taken by Drette of Andy and Robban doing the whole giant/dwarf thing. I have to gather them together and put them up. Maybe you had to be there, I don't know, but at the time it was a great source of amusement for us during the long hours on the road...