Chelles (F) @ Les Cuizines

We get up early this morning, St Etienne is cloudy, the night was short and I ‘m feeling the lack of sleep. We quickly take our breakfast, say a warm goodbye to our hosts and take the motorway...
I slept more than half the way, waking up every now and then when we stopped at tolls and when we put some gasoline. That’s why the 500 kilometers between St Etienne and Chelles seemed rather short. I looked at my watch its 3:30 pm we ‘re only half an hour late. It looks like we’re more and more on time, gotta keep an eye on that and put it an end soon !!
The venue is really great, netheir too big nor too small, and very well-designed; the perfect venue to play some rock n’roll. It’s funny how, from a day to another, the places we get to play are different: yesterday’s pub was as big as today’s platform to put the drums on stage.
We take like 10 minutes to soundcheck, it sounds good, the sound ingeneers are cool and competent guys. Then we go backstage to meet our friends of GUERILLA POUBELLE (GxP) for whom we open tonight . It’s been a while since we met then and it's always a pleasure to see them.
We stay backstage playing video games, talking bicycle gears with Youpela and talking about sex with Fannie aka “dude, it’s just screwing!!” ( both are roadies for GxP)....It’s 7:00pm, we go to a Japanese all you can eat self-service restaurant. And in this summer camp athmosphere I didn’t notice anything and took a spicy salad, that is when my stomach decided he had enough...
Three hours and a half and 2 alca-selzer later, I missed NAFTA6TEM: the first band to play tonight, we’re next. The audience is full of energy and the athmosphere’s good, I can seequite some guys singing along. We’re a bit spineless, it’s like you win some you lose some, an average show to sum it up .... We leave the stage to GxP, they just rock, feedbacks, pants down and a very energetic show.

It’s already time to go back home. It won’t hurt for once to go home by night....

St Etienne ( F ) @ The Pub Fiction

Today is the kick-off of our last shows for the “Time To Drop The Gun “ tour. There’s like about 8 more shows to come before we take a break so that we can release the new record.
Metting at 13pm at the rehearsal room, we load the van and then we’re “on the road again!!” The van we rent has only got 6 seats so we downsized the staff to its minimum ( the 6 members of freygolo) to go to St Etienne. Except the endless traffic jam at Givors and the directions in St Etienne that did not fit the changes of direction of the traffic due to some roadworks, the journey is fine... We turn up only 1 hour late in the crime scene ...
For the second time there we meet Nassim, the sweet guy who put up the show for us , and our friends from WHITECARD and THE PANTHER PARTY. The pub is as big as my room and the floor’s tiled, speaking of the size it’s pretty cool the gig‘s gonna have a convivial aspect but speaking of the tiles it’s less cool because it’s gonna reverberate the sound all over the place... anyways we ‘ll care about that just before we play; no need to soundcheck, we’re getting hungry so it’s about time we taste the local food speciality: the donner kebab.
The stomach full of ketchup and mayonnaise, I watch THE PANTHER PARTY concert, a brilliant emo pop band, it’s the 3rd time we play with them and I can’t get enough of it .
Then it’s our turn to play, after a quick soundcheck wich lasts like...hum...30 seconds...
1-2-3-4 let’s go ! The pub is crowded the floor turned into a ice skating place due to the condensation and the crowd is gently pogoing. There’s a very good athmosphere here tonight, but the bouncer doesn’t seem to enjoy himself maybe because we play football/soccer with the pub’s kinda disco ball ( you know that old balls like from the 80s’ that you hang on the ceilling and the little mirrors on it reflect the lights from your coloured spots ), disco ball accidentally taken off the ceilling by Rémi ( the trombone player). We play 4 new songs in our set just to see if they can make it live, “Good for nothing” and “She tries to be someone” are really making it tonight contrary to the other 2 new songs ... We end up the show at 11:30, the barman offer me a fresh beer and is happy that we stopped just on time because the cops showed up, apparently we played so loud that we shook the walls of the neighbours’ above !!
We finaly ended up at Guillaume PANTHER’s house where we talked about an hour or two and drank a few beers and then we went to sleep pretty exhausted, 3 slept at Guillaume’s place and 3 others at Lolo’s PARTY house.
We got a long way to go tomorrow ...

"TTDTG", Japanese Issue

Today I received a few copies of our “Time To Drop the Gun” japanese issue!!! Nearly 3 months ago to the very day “TTDTG” ‘s been released over there, I was actually quite looking forward to taking a look at the thing. It’s true that this edition is quite similar to the French one, but after all it’s still cool to flush out the 2 or 3 changes.
The Japanese label added the song “Nothing To Do” as a bonus track – song which was originally on our split cd with D-Sailors ( a german band) , split cd today out of stock -, plus the homemade videos for “Loaded dice” and “Wasting My Time Again”....I don’t really know if adding those was their best idea ever, I haven’t watched those videos for like 2 or 3 years and maybe I shouldn’t have watched them again...
The most amazing change is probably the addition of a kind of mini-booklet which contains the lyrics of all the songs translated into Japanese. What suprised me the most was actually the fact that all the lyrics from each and every songs were translated, even those which weren't good enough to be on the original booklet ....