On Croatia Croatia is warm. Very very warm. We’re in Dubrovnik, the most touristed place in all of Europe. Estimates are 36 tourists per each local resident and we feel it when we first arrive in the Old Town. There’s a literal swarm of people walking every direction, icecreams held high above the crowd. There’s icecreams everywhere – every second shop is an icecream shop, which makes sense in a week where the temperature is 35 when we arrive and bottoms out at 30 degrees overnight. The city is glorious – giant stone walls, ramparts, skinny laneways with tiny tables laid out. Our host suggests we dine at the Stara Loza restaurant, but that we’ll need to book in advance. We stumble in by accident and manage to get a table for two on the street, finding out in the process that this is a Michelin-starred restaurant and the food is on the expensive side. Splash out, its not a honeymoon is the call of the night and I order the beef ribs which melt away as I eat them. We spend 150 Euro on one meal and promise that we’ll have breakfast in for the rest of the week to compensate. Continue reading “On Croatia”
On Moving Parts I dream of emails. I dream of emails with signed contracts, with confirmed itineraries, with tentative set-times, with the tag line ‘yep, lock it in’. For the last eight months I’ve been working on one of the biggest juggling acts of my career – lining up a fifteen show, seven person Gusto tour of the UK. I’ll do a bigger post in the near future, once the full tour dates have been announced, once the real big thing I’ve been working on can be put out in to the world, but for now I talk about moving parts. Organising a tour of this scale is a series of ever-increasing hurdles. First there’s the band availability – figuring out exactly when seven people are available to tour, how to juggle everyone’s calendars to minimise time off work, how much imposition I can put on the band’s day to day life. Then, into that ever-shrinking window where everyone says they’re free, I sketch out a rough itinerary – where do we want to go? where can we afford to go? what actually makes sense for a seven piece band from Melbourne to do on their debut Europe tour? Continue reading “On Moving Parts”