Band: Pariso (facebook.com/parisoband)
Where: Komotini, Greece.
ED: It feels fitting having Mazz write the first entry to this blog. He was also the first writer for BMDJ. Anyway, I'll shut up now and let you read on...
Hello my name is Mazz, you may know me from the band Pariso, but luckily from my recollection Pariso never had any really bad promoters. So this story I'm going to tell you is from the Beartrap/Witchcult 60 day Euro tour. If I'm completely honest, I could write a whole book about this tour and the crazy shows they played, but this one I'm about to tell you sticks in my mind as one of the worst shows they played.
So during the tour we did a 3 date trip around Greece and played a show in a town called Komotini. Most of the other people we talked to in Greece asked us 'why?' because apparently no one ever plays shows there, so we were skeptical at first.
The show was at a university, the bands were going to be playing in an abandoned lecture hall and it was [a] massive [room]. The promoters were a group of anarchist punks and we asked if the school knew about the shows? They told us that they doesn't normally let them happen, but the school had stopped locking the doors to the lecture hall because they knew people would break into the room and get fucked up anyway.
So we arrive at the venue and the promoter looks like the Undertaker, he's about 6ft something, he was the scariest dude ever! He was really hard to talk to and didn't seem to give a shit that we were there to play.
He brings us into his office and it soon became really awkward for some reason. All these other anarchist members are giving us weird looks, and for the next hour we are sat pretty much in silence with a bunch of anarchist punks whilst they watch riots on youtube.
We then meet this anarchist punk who talks about how he kicked a dog once. I almost forgot, around the campus, there are stray dogs everywhere, some of them were quite terrifying. I remember Jake (Beartrap guitarist) went out for a cigarette, and I'll always remember him leaving the office, closing the door to go outside THEN hearing what sounded like a hundred dogs barking and him running back into the room.
The show didn't start till about midnight, so we had alot of time to kill. The first band on were a post rock band that played for about an hour, and then after that a space rock band played for what seemed like an eternity. At this point we'd been there for about 5 hours! We were so exhausted and so tired we just wanted to the night to end. At this point Alastair (Witchcult guitarist) had been chased around the campus by stray dogs also.
It was such a weird vibe, because it was a lecture hall. People were sat down on the chairs, and by the time Witchcult and Beartrap played Mike (Beartrap vocalist) says "who comes to a punk rock show to sit on a chair?" and invited them to come down with them [to the stage] and hang out. Not one person moved from their chairs. It was the most awkward show I'd ever been too.
It seemed (like most of the shows on the tour) that this was just a piss up in an abandoned room and no one gave a shit about the bands playing.
After Witchcult and Beartrap played, the punk rock band playing after wanted to borrow some of Alastairs drum kit. We told them we couldn't lend stuff as we needed that gear for the rest of the tour, and if it broke it would mean we had no gear (We didn't have any money to repair anything). Because they were drunk and also the language barrier, the band (and even members of the audience) got angry with Alastair, insisting he lend his equipment to them. This nearly turned into a big argument. Alastair was so angry he just left and stopped talking to the dude.
The last band played to about four people and they might have been the worst band I've ever seen live. By this point it was 3-4am and the show had just finished.
I remember that night particularly being a hard show. You think to yourself sometimes 'why am I doing this? No one cares, so why am I hear?' But we wouldn't be doing it if it wasn't fun, it was a funny story and we all now look back at it and laugh. If people I knew found out that this was fun for me, they would probably think I'm insane.
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