Katatonia's Jonas Renkse: Exclusive Tour Diary. Part 4

Read previous three parts of the diary here:

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Hammerfest – March 12th

Metal Hammer's own festival Hammerfest is located in a weird (to me) environment. Some kind of vacation camp in the midst of beautiful hills and next to the ocean. As I have never seen this kind of camp before, the first thing that comes to mind is the ferries that go between Finland and Sweden. If you would take out the interior of those ferries and place them on land… that would describe it. Apartment complexes with cabins/apartments everywhere and each one filled with shitfaced people. Perfect place for a metal festival really. Me and Anders are led to the press area and do a couple of interviews each, then we just hang around waiting to go on stage. As it's a festival with limited playing time, we play around with a couple of set lists for this one. We try to make it as easy as possible and only select songs so we have touse one guitar tuning only. We play around 50 minutes and I think we went down pretty well! Perhaps our music was soothing to the hungover and nice "pre-party" music to those who were just about getting drunk and getting ready for more brutal stuff like Napalm Death. We have to wait for our support band Swallow The Sun who also play the fest and have got a playing time at 01.20...

Cardiff – March 13th

From the north of Wales to the south... We have played the Barfly in Cardiff before, some 10 years back when we did a UK tour supporting the "Last Fair Deal…" album. The place is really tiny but it's sold out which feels great, of course. The gig feels fantastic, audience is very supportive. After the show we have been promised to be taken to a bar called FUEL. The man in charge drives us there and we have a great party. Good music, nice people and a lot of drinks. We get served some pizza and more drinks. Daniel is dancing. Good times. Afterwards we take a walk to the bus and see a lot of barefoot people on the streets. Time to hit the sack… tomorrow's gonna be rough.

Wolverhampton – March 14th

Kind of hungover we stumble into the venue known as Little Civic. It's a nice place. Everybody in the band is tired so we keep off the beer and just chill until sound check. Sound proves to be good on stage thanks to our FOH Ronnie. We have no real expectations for this one, but once again the UK proves to be really good crowd-wise. The gig feels great, people are supportive as hell. This is the last UK gig on this tour and even though we want to get down to the more southern areas of Europe I have to say that I'm really blown away by the UK audience! Their support really has meant a lot to us on this tour. Thanks again to everybody who came out!

- Jonas Renkse, Katatonia, 2010

Comments

[EpiExplorer]

Ha, this diary is fun. :B