the great singapore trip

Been a while since my last post. Work has been quite hellish. It kinda sucks being the most junior lawyer in your firm as you just get the most 'rotten' and 'hopeless' of files dumped on you for you to deal with. And that does suck, big time!

Went to Singapore about 2 weeks ago to play the Baybeats Festival at the Esplanade with my band. Still get 'visions' of that wonderful trip from time to time. It was just so lovely, going to play in a different country, with your good friends. Our first trip together, and it was dreamy.

Our show was more than we could've asked for. We played on Sunday, 18/7/2004 at 8.00pm. I heard complaints from other bands about how the monitors suck, or could be better. As for me, the whole band in fact, we just LOVED the fact that we can now, for the first time ever in our quite long career as performers, totally hear ourselves on the monitors clearly. I could clearly hear my voice AND my guitar! Usually it's either one or the other, most often it would be the latter leaving me just gambling and hoping that I'd sing in tune. But not during Baybeats!! So from our point of view it was already excellent.

Then came the crowd reception during our performance, which surprised the hell out of me, and is most definitely a delight to everyone in the band. The crowd cheered, clapped, applauded, smiled, laughed, some sang along, there was even a guy right up front who danced all the way through our set. I then spent about an hour plus after the show just talking to people who came up to say hi or congratulate or buy CDs or ask for autographs!! Almost everyone who came up said that they loved the fact that we sounded so different and so fresh from everything else now. Which kinda of baffles me, but also made sense because no one seemed to WANT to play pop songs anymore right now, especially in Malaysia. So it was definitely a night to remember. We got paid $200 Sing. So $50 for each band member, which meant I had more money to buy DVDs & VCDs!! More about that later.

Stayed at a backpacker's hostel. Cheap too. And filled with beautiful, half naked, tourists walking around with not a care in the world!! It's at a great location to boot. Mamak downstairs, shopping mall & MRT station across the street, bus stop right in front, 7-eleven round the corner, in short it was pretty easy to get around. The soundcheck on Sunday practically robbed a whole day's worth of wandering around. But I did find some great DVD, CD & VCD places. Bought 5 DVDs, Shock Corridor, The Naked Kiss, Night and Fog in Japan, Giants & Toys, Band of Outsiders. Also bought 2 VCDs, Divine Intervention & The 400 Blows. Blew a big hole in my pocket, but definitely worth it. I only bought Last Days Of April's latest CD during Baybeats, but it's good. And finally got to buy Love's best of compilation at a 50% discount at Borders, which was a sweet deal.

Wish I'm there right now, wandering the streets. Will definitely go there again in the near future. Hope we'll get invited for another show there, which is a possibility, since I made quite a lot of new friends there. Anyway, till my next post, ta!