High Rise Tour - Newcastle - 17/5/17
The second day of tour was Newcastle - a city I had always been through but never been able to stop and visit! That’s another major benefit of going on tour, being able to visit all sorts of new cities and towns all over the UK. About 99% of the dates on this tour were in places I had never visited before.
Driving from Leicester wasn’t too bad. We kept ourselves entertained with some old school games like naughts and crosses, hang man and the name game. The venue for that night was Trillian’s rock bar, I heard from people from Newcastle that Trillian’s was a great bar to visit and that their cocktails are really good so I was definitely looking forward to this venue! As soon as we got to the venue and the bands started loading in I found a spot next to the stage behind the merch desk where I could set up my own little work station. The venue was clearly a rock bar with lots of vintage vinyl decor and old posters plastered everywhere which gave it a nice homely vibe. Since they had no backstage area so this was the best spot there was and the venue even gave me an extension lead so I could plug in and work away. So while all the bands were doing their thing soundchecking and restringing guitars I started editing photos from the night before.
After that Ricky and I went out to explore the town centre and see what there was for food. We went into the shopping centre to find out that everything aside from restaurants were closed. Ricky bought chips and I said I’d go back round to get a burrito but alas, that had closed too by the time we got there! With no luck we headed back to the venue and we gathered Tom and Dan who had finished restringing their guitars by then. Attempt two at finding food was underway and we decided to settle on a Nandos we found in the other side of the shopping centre. Finally - food!
We sat inside the venue to eat our food so we could watch the other bands play. That’s when I noticed how awful the lighting was - tons of red light. Before High Rise’s set I made sure to have a chat with the sound guy to request minimal red lighting. After the boys had finished their food they then realized they were up next and they had just absolutely stuffed themselves! Fortunately no one threw up during their set and they managed to keep jumps to a minimum.
After that it was loading out time again. Luckily there was somewhere we could park the van that day near the venue overnight and it was a short walk to our city centre hotel. Some of the band wanted to get food before we headed back and guess what was the only place open… McDonalds! Although the Newcastle McDonalds was rather oddly mapped out as it had a massive walkway before you even get to the till. As Dan put it “you could claim air miles on that”. Then after Jovic ordered one of everything we walked back to the hotel. Tom and I joined Ricky and Dan in their room for some late night drinking. We probably went to bed around 3am nearly every night on this tour! Well… at least Tom and I did!
