I ♥ Liège

Saturday James went to Oma & Opa in Aartselaar. Since he's hoarse for the moment, my mum and dad would have a quiet time.. for once :-)

Then Cate & I drove down to Russeignies, where David & Sandra live, to drive to Liège together with our new drummer, Hans.
After a good 2 hour drive we arrived at the centre of Liège city, and were welcomed by the very very warmhearted host of the youth hostel, Sébastien. The first gig of the evening was already playing (a tribute to Noir Désir, a for us unknown French band, but seen as the whole crowd was singing along like mad, we realised our musical knowledge does have it's limitations), which forced us to unload our gear and transport it right across the front of the stage, towards the backstage area... (Something Cate really was looking foreward to :-p).

During the whole evening we were treated like heroes. It's really incredible how the people in the south of our country are so much more hearty and warm, compared to those in the north... We were on cloud nine.

The second band, a Red Hot Chili Peppers tribute called Coffee Shop, started playing around 21h15; I made some pictures of them here.
Being a local band, they had the biggest audience of the evening (about 500 people), and played a bit longer than foreseen, but that's ok.
During their gig I did a LIVE interview on Walloon radio N°1: BelRTL
You can listen to it here. Be warned: It's all in French... :-)

Finally, at around 23h30 it was time for us to play our gig. The 200 people that had stayed, cheered like they were still with 500, and we had a sound on stage like a CD was playing: a fantastic job of the sound engineers! We played more than an hour, and our rendition of Voodoo Chile turned out to be more than 15 minutes long! The sound engineer also recorded the last 40 minutes of the gig on a portable recorder, and he'll send me the mp3's when he's transferred them to his pc. (I'll then post a link here as well, so you can have a listen :-)
UPDATE: They posted a small movie on YouTube (the start of our concert) here!

A fantastic day, in a marvellous setting, with beautiful people... If only every Crosstown concert could be like this. :-)