Jamming and interviewing at Westminster Uni and then all aboard the rock-n-roll dream bus to Brighton!
Here’s how the Soundpad album was to work with in the UK. The British Council hooked up with the music label FMM (which is based in the University of Westminster) to digitally release the album in the UK. Now the Uni took this chance of working with four bands no one had heard about and put them in the hands of the students of a whole bunch of departments (film and video, TV, journalism) and we were their guinea pigs next two days and conducted a wide array of experiments on us. Yes, the needle scars may heal but, the pain, the screams…
[Photo] Friends at Westminster Uni
On a serious note, we had a great time. There were interviews, jams, and a full-fledged video shoot that was shot with multiple cameras in a state of the art studio. We also made some great friends – many of whom would come for the show in London later. They have a lovely campus, and we saw quite a lot of it in those two days. Their crew even had us loll about on the grass and jam – this is that ensued.
On the second day at the Uni someone came in and told me, “Hey, the buses are here” – now we’d heard that we’d be taking buses (caravans they told us) two bands to a bus and we’d be headed out on tour in them. Living, sleeping, waking, all in one bus. So I was expecting something a little bigger than a Volvo, but nothing could prepare me for what I was about to see.
[Photo] The Bus from Rock n Roll Dream Land
Twin decks. lounge in the lower deck, with a TV, DVD player, PS2, fridge stacked with the good stuff, microwave, kettle, larder and loo. Upper deck with sleeping quarters, bunks with LCD screens, lounge at the back with another set of TV+Frig+PS2 in case you were feeling too lazy. The crux: before us the bus was used by Leonard Cohen!
That was also when we met Mark and Pete, our Tour Manager and Backline Tech respectively. There is much to be said about them, as we will in the coming posts. They put us through the grind in the tour that was to come up. And we loved every minute.
The bus ride from London to Brighton was spent mostly guffawing at how Mark would pronounce Kannada swear words. We hit Brighton, parked on the sea-side, hooked up power from a venue we were playing at and got wasted.
Text: Jishnu Dasgupta
Images: Pavan Kumar
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