Happy New Year!
Thursday, December 31st, 2009And so, another year has passed. In many ways it feels like nothing has changed and we’re exactly where we were 12 months ago. It’s only when I started thinking about what we’ve done this year, that I appreciated just how far we’ve come.
In February we embarked on our biggest UK tour to date and we played in Ireland for the first time. That tour was by far and away the best headline tour we’ve done. Every night we played to between 80-200+ people. It was great. We made a bunch of new friends and caught up with old ones. I can’t tell you how fortunate we were to have such fantastic local supports every night.
After February’s UK tour, it was back to Europe for two weeks in April (a lot warmer than when we last went in December) and once again everything went really well. Some shows were definitely better than others and I can’t say I’m eager to do another 11 hour non-stop drive through France, but it was worth it. Some nights we played to a handful of people, other nights we played to 300. It was pretty surreal but we were always met with kindness and some of the most gracious hosts we’ve ever been lucky enough to meet.
I think it’s pretty fair to say that one of this years highlights was getting to play 3 nights with ‘Love of Everything’ and ‘Joan of Arc’. Anyone who knows us will know just how excited we were to be playing with some of our favourite musicians of all time. All three gigs were incredible. I only wish we could’ve played more.
Then we found ourselves in summer. Truck Festival was insane. Having found out that we’d be on at the same time as label mates and the most uber zeitgeist band of the summer ‘Pulled Apart By Horses’, our expectations were somewhat low. So when the tent filled and people began queing outside to get in, it came as a bit of a shock. All in all we were told about 300 people were in there and I can’t describe how fun/weird it was when people started crowd surfing. My only regret is that I didn’t join you ;-P
A week or two later and we were on the outskirts of Derby in the muddiest field I have ever seen. Stuck behind Esser’s van (we think it was Esser) for half an hour, leaving us only 15 to walk all our gear 200 metres through rivers of mud. Oh yeah, and I was the only one with wellies. Nice!
When we finally got on stage and all set up, it was another great gig. It was a tent similar to the one at Truck and once again it was full to the brim. Whilst there was a distinct lack of crowd surfing (probably for the best), from the smiles on peoples faces it appeared asthough we brought a bit of sunshine to what was one of the dullest days of the summer.
October came round and we embarked on the last UK tour in support of ‘Animals’. This time we felt brave and took out some of our favourite bands as tour support. We were pretty concerned that everyone was bored of us by now and that most of the gigs would be terrible. We couldn’t have been more wrong. With only a few exceptions this tour was as good (if not better) than our tour in February.
So 2009 was a good year. Whilst we may not have made good on our intentions to get to the US, we still managed to improve as musicians and thanks to a bit of word of mouth, a bunch more people have heard of us. As I’m writing this I noticed on last.fm that we now have over a million scrobbles recorded. A MILLION! How ridiculous is that? I never thought that our music would get listened to so much and that’s only taking account of the tiny percentage of people who use last.fm.
So yeah, thank YOU for listening to us. Thank YOU, for reading our blogs/updates/tweets/whatevers. Thank YOU, for coming to our gigs. Thank YOU for buying records, t-shirts and tab books. Your support is invaluable to us and makes it all worth while.
See you in 2010.
TTFN TTNG
Plans for next year:
- Play some shows in the US
- Write and record a new album
- Crowd surf at one of our gigs at least once
