With the exception of your average local funk & pop cover band that doesn’t have the decency to at least make an effort to write their own material and plays the same boring disco classics in the same bar every week (you know who you are and if this refers to you, you have no business reading further anyway), I’m sure there aren’t that many self respecting bands around that come up with the idea of playing eight shows in the same town within a period of less than two months. The reason for that is simple: it’s, at the very least, highly doubtful that you will attract a satisfying amount of people on all these shows when you are overloading your fans with so much performances, and at most, quite ridiculous and it sounds like something only a total goofball would come up with and subsequently actually do. It sounds like something Gone Bald would do. Needless to say, Gone Bald did just that. Extreme optimism was one part of the plan, getting offers for all these gigs one after another and not being willing to turn any of these offers down did the rest and just before we knew it, our agenda was packed with this huge bunch of gigs all in the same town. We started the tour with a show in Occii together with Chinese Stars. Although I had spent the whole day trying to get a useful drumkit together from several places and barely succeeding in getting some very much fucked up equipment, we managed to start out really well, but after a while, trying not to move anything but the arms in order to prevent the stool from collapsing and me falling down, while simultaneously keeping a pace and trying to catch cymbals falling from the stands turned out to be just a little too hard to do. I’m sure we played some recognisable tunes, but no doubt it could have been a lot better.



In any case, it was a good rehearsal to prepare ourselves for the big party a couple of days later, the 10-year anniversary. A lot of things have already been written about this evening by others, none of which are far away from the truth, so I guess I can be brief on this. Crowd; a lot; music: great; drinking; a lot; organisation; stress. Definitely a concept worth repeating whenever there’s something worth celebrating and someone else is prepared to chase musicians around to start right on time. After some days off, we got back on stage at the Winston Kingdom. Nothing has been written about this evening yet, and I’ll leave it to that after briefly mentioning that future shows of Gone Bald at Winston Kingdom are highly unlikely to take place. This wasn’t a fact worth bothering ourselves with, because right after this, we got right back on the road for the 3-2 tour, an intermezzo in The Windmills, Wooden Shoes, Coffeeshops, Red Light District, Canal of Shit And Here Goes The Neighbourhood Tour 2004, which brought us outside Amsterdam for the weekend to play shows in Arnhem with Vehicle and my hometown Leiden with Makazoruki, where we had to cope with all the turmoil caused by Holland losing a soccer game to Tsjechia during the European Championship. I personally don’t give a shit about soccer, I say to rule out the slightest possibility that anyone might have had this impression for a moment. It might have been the lost game though, that caused a lot of people to stay away from the gig and cry themselves to sleep or maybe they weren’t interested in the first place. We didn’t really care and played well anyway.


A couple of days later we were back in Amsterdam, where we were planned to finish a benefit festival for Radio Patapoe at Pakhuis Afrika. We already played here sometime last year (see the first part of Bubbacultcha and for all the lazy people, all you really need to know is that it is a squat, which basically means: picture a trashy place, filled with a couple of dopehead hippies and some German shepherd dogs, with their dreadlocks grown right into each other (probably to keep track of which dog belongs to which hippie or the other way around) add to this an extremely low level of fysical and mental activity, an occasional remark to no one in particular about some hardcore lyrics dealing with the supposed stupidity of capitalism, the meat industry, the state or just society in general, and I think you’ll have a rough idea of what I’m talking about. If you don’t, you are probably playing the keyboard or doing background vocals in some local funk & pop cover band that plays the same boring disco classics the same bar every week and, as stated earlier, you have no business in reading all this). We seemed to have been scheduled to sometime around midnight. Due to organisational complications (a routine procedure on squat festivals like this, which means you can always add a few hours to the announced time of playing, while the actual reasons for all the delay will remain a mystery for the bigger part and for the rest, you just don’t really want to think about it anyway) we started playing around 3 AM, trying to entertain the remaining few of the festival crowd and their German shepherd dogs and not entirely failing to do so. Details on how some old hippie on stage took the microphone to announce us as The Craving Cunts are not available at the moment (maybe I just don’t want to think about it).

A couple of days after that, Amsterdam again, doing a show with Lushus in Volta. Getting away with the possible dangers of playing the same town on a weekly basis seemed to be easier than expected and people were still showing up to see us play. We were in a tour routine already, which means that in playing the songs, not much could go wrong anyway and indeed, all went well.


About a week later, Amsterdam again, a show in Fraropa, together with Morbide Eenheid, which, for the ones that know it, means I had two shows in a row to play in one night. It means the same thing to people that don’t know it of course, but fuck all these details. Doing a double shift turned out to be no problem. A great evening, a cool venue and a good crowd. The very next day, a daytrip to Toronto, followed by yet another show in Amsterdam at the Krawattenklup. The place was packed, there were a lot of bands and the sets, including ours for a change, were short and to the point. After almost two weeks of rest, the final show of the tour in The End, together with Avec Aisance. A lot of people still showed up for this gig, which proves that some bands can get away playing this many shows in the same city in two months time. Keep your eyes peeled for the Gone Bald Vomp tour, which will feature Gone Bald doing shows in this famous small Austrian village on a daily basis for about two weeks or so.