World Exclusive: Ghouls' Belgium Tour Diary - Part Two

Maz from Ghouls continues his Tour Diary exclusively for The Punk Archive...

Day Three

The hangovers were much worse this morning....

Emerging about lunchtime into the harsh sun, us Ghouls and Riskee parted ways temporarily, with them off to Brussels to retrieve the errant guitar and meet their pal Will (who'd decided to join us for the rest of the tour), and us to head onto Mol for today's gig. I should probably take this chance to say a massive thanks to our Ben and Dave of RatR for doing virtually all of the driving this trip, top work boys!

Arriving in Mol with plenty of time to spare, we were at a bit of a loss of what to do with the day. But our usual luck saved us. While sat in the random car park we happened to pull up in on arrival, Muss piped up with "….is that a swimming pool?" It turned out to be an awesome massive outdoor pool with slides and diving boards and stuff, which was EXACTLY what we needed to sort our hangovers! Despite us having one set of swimming shorts between us we threw ourselves in in a motley collection of pants and improvised shorts (pretty much everyone else in the pool got out at this point). The video diary will do this way more justice than I can though, go watch it! Riskee eventually turned up and hit the pool instantly.

Hooking up with Jason from El Topo, our first meeting in the flesh, we headed down to the venue. Tonight's gig was a festival called Chili Con Rock, in aid of youth related projects in their twin town in Nicaragua, so a super worthy cause, and this also meant there was an unlimited amount of incredibly nice chilli, much to Bray's delight! We were also shown the most massive amount of rider beers we've ever seen, and the fridge kept getting refilled magically as the night went on, it was AMAZING.

The show was by far Ghouls' best of the tour, an amazing stage, awesome crowd, brilliant sound setup...basically everything was pretty perfect! We even played a couple of new songs for the first time ever live... Riskee were busting out an acoustic set this gig, and while stood watching them, several of the crowd came up to me and mentioned how much they were reminded of The King Blues. High praise indeed, but a totally fair comparison in my opinion!

After this things get pretty hazy, but some things definitely stood out, such as finding out the buildings surrounding the square we played in used to be a Boy's Prison for seriously bad youths, and that the interior was pretty much untouched.... Obviously some of us HAD to take a look at this, and let's just say it was supremely creepy! I also remember meeting several people who'd come to the fest just to see us, which was pretty epic! We had a place to sleep that night, but it was a short drive away, and all of use were waaaaaaaaaaaaay too drunk to drive. It was a nice evening however, so we just dossed down in, under, and on top of cars. The two of us on top of Roy had a bit of a rude awakening when the others decided to do doughnuts with us asleep on top however.....


Day Four

Wow we thought yesterday's hangovers were bad......

Gently woken by the morning drizzle and the sounds of Benny being violently ill, we crawled out of our sleeping bags while looking like the walking dead, and tried to piece together what happened last night. I woke up on the floor with several bruises, having definitely started the night on top of Roy, so draw your own conclusions there. We finally got things together to say our goodbyes to Jason and his awesome team, heading out to the final gig, a Jeugdhuis in Ghent.

The less said about the first two thirds of this day the better, but most of it was spent parked up, sleeping the previous evenings excesses off. Still, we eventually made it to Jeugdhuis Job, and the welcoming arms of Vera, Lies, and Math. These girls and guys helped us put ourselves back together with some amazing veggie pasta, cheese, and tasty Belgian beers, thank you guys SO much!


We discovered that the awesome Ten Foot Pole had a gig across town the same night, so we were a little worried about the turn out at this show, but it turns out we had absolutely nothing to be concerned about. This gig was one of the best shows I've ever seen Riskee and The Ridicule play. The packed room absolutely erupted for their unique brand of punk, with sweaty people literally flying everywhere. Personally I was dreading trying to top them for our set!

We put everything into our set, and the crowd went equally as wild for us. Stage divers, and our very first ever wall of death meant this show was punk as fuck. The Belgian people know how to party HARD. We have a UK tour coming up in October and you UK readers are gonna have to up your game to top the Belgians!

We had to set off for our ferry at about 3am, so we enjoyed a few beers with the more hardcore members of the crowd after the show (most of them to be honest!). We got to Calais with a couple of hours to spare, so after we checked in we parked the car in the ferry queue and all drifted off.....

….I was rudely awoken what felt like instantly later by an angry ferry official shout that out ferry was boarding and that we had to get on NOW. Shaking Benny awake, we groggily drove onto to boarding ramp. At this point, Russ piped up from the back '….where's Muss?!'. It turned out he'd jumped out of the car to sleep, and we'd marooned him back ashore, asleep, with no passport, wallet, and his phone was out of battery.

Oops.

We sat on board feeling pretty awkward, and wondering if we were gonna have to find a new bass player, when Muss just casually strolls up! It turns out he'd spotted Riskee about to drive Roy aboard and he'd dived in at the last second. We're lucky bastards sometimes.....

It was time to say our goodbyes to Riskee and go our separate ways. It's hard to properly articulate how awesome these boys are, they're the finest of touring buddies, true mates, and an awesome band on top. They force us to really up our game when having to follow them on stage, and we wish we could tour with them every time! It was a real honour they decided to join us on our first ever tour on the continent, and I can't thank them enough for all their support.

I also want to say once again how amazing, friendly and welcoming everyone we met in Belgium was. Thanks to everyone who fed us, gave us free beer, let us crash, and came to a show! The punk scene over there is the most amazing community, and although I love gigging and meeting people here in the UK, we could all definitely learn some things from our brothers and sisters across the channel. Us Ghouls and Riskee and the Ridicule are already talking about heading back to Belgium in early 2015, so watch this space.....

Ghouls will be touring around the UK in October
https://www.facebook.com/events/1442094662734882/?fref=ts

Ghouls' upcoming EP can be pre-ordered here:
http://ghoulspreorder.bigcartel.com/

More information about Riskee and the Ridicule's début album here:
https://www.facebook.com/events/258119400979026/?fref=ts