Over the last weekend myself and my band of merry men took a trip to Finland to play the H20 festival in Turku Finland. We flew into Stockholm, Sweden and took the overnight ferry to Turku.

The journey took 12 hours as we weaved our way through 6000 small islands, many of which had beautiful wooden houses hidden in the many trees that cover these islands. Being summer time the sun hardly sets below the horizon and it was quite strange to be in twilight at midnight. The ferry was probably the biggest boat I have ever travelled on with 10 decks, some of which were just cabins and others had bars, restaurants, and duty free shops.

After being up for over 12 hours I decided to get some sleep and retired to my cabin while Ollie, Darren and Jack decided to stay up for a little longer. I however had a very fitful sleep due to us being directly above the cabaret bar, and was subjected to over 2 hours of the house band rattling through various versions of current songs! Thankfully only one Farrell song and that was the Daft Punk! 

We arrived at Turku at 7am and were met by our driver along with a Swedish artist who would be playing on Saturday (Anders). We drove into Turku and checked into the hotel, like many cities the centre was based around a square, with a local market selling local produce. I really liked Turku and the local people were so warm and friendly. We met up with Mikko and Kata from the festival who were also so lovely, we were then treated to breakfast by Ana who was helping out at the festival. I was also pleasantly surprised to find so many places that were vegan and vegetarian friendly and the hotel even had gluten free for breakfast! 

We spent a few hours wandering around and then we needed to get some rest before our show  that evening as we were on at 12am. We then headed over to the festival which was in an old shipping yard, it was huge with so many different stages/venues.

We were playing in a beautiful old wooden warehouse space,  and we were excited by the prospect of playing later that evening. We arrived when a band called Olimpia Splendid were playing, we loved them! They are our favourite new band!

So please go and check them out, you wont be disappointed!

We also got to catch a bit of Mad Professors set on the main stage and managed to have a chat with him back stage after his show, he did however think we were Hawkwind!  as they were playing the same evening too! In fact Ollie was asked on a number of occasions during the evening if he was part of Hawkwind, must have something to do with the beard me thinks!

Finally the time came to take the stage! as with many festivals it can be quite chaotic as one band leaves the stage and the next needs to get set up and line checked in a short space of time! By the time we had managed to get sorted which was a little stressful, but we got there and were ready to go! The set went well, but like many artists you always feel it could of gone better,   a couple of the tracks just didn’t work for me personally on the night, this is always going to happen and nothing is ever perfect or to your expectations..but what I took away from this show was I had an amazing experience and felt extremely blessed to have worked with 3 amazing musicians, Oliver Cherer, Jack Hayter and Darren Morris! It just made the whole thing so much more enjoyable with them The organisers of the festival were amazing and so were the audience, even if we did loose some of them during the show!

Ollie lost his wallet earlier in the evening and someone had handed it in and he was later reunited with it! Thank you H20 festival for being so lovely and looking after us, we hope to come back soon! 

I am keen to do some more shows in the coming months and will keep you all posted!