An Amazing Park, a Broken Amp and a Crazy Night

So after some of the usual us taking ages to leave (I don't really know why it happens, but I really wanna fix it, I mean it takes us hours to leave every day!), Dara and I went to join the others in Parc Du Thabor. What an amazing place. I mean really, it's beautiful - I tried to take a few pics but couldn't really do it justice...but sure here goes anyway:

We couldn't find the others (huuuge park), so we sat down for a while and planned our street show some more. Alex spotted us and came over to show us where they were sitting. In retrospect it was a bad idea to move as we got nothing done from then on, but it was fun! We did some juggling:

I practised a few new songs for the night and Finbar painted a few faces, nearly enough to cover our camping for the night. We spent tonnes on groceries yesterday though, nearly 50 euro. Had to be done in a way - stuff like washing up liquid, salt, wine, wine, wine....we figured it'd be okay; we were ready to pump it on the street that evening.

It all went wrong just when we set up to busk. The guitar wasn't making any noise. Man it was bad, I didn't know what to do. Then I tried to play just acoustic with the cajon, absolutely bashing the guitar and singing out, but inevitably broke a string pretty quickly. Finbar cycled home to get a string and new lead for me, so we sat around and hoped for the best. It didn't come though - the new lead did nothing to help. We thought the amp might have been damaged on the way in on the bike. That really hurt. 300e amp, it's not like we can just buy a new one, that'd be cheating. We said we'd go on though, and did about 30 minutes bashing out the guitar and singing loud, just played the fast poppy songs. A small crowd still formed, which was great, and seemed to really like it. We made about 10-15 which was okay. Some of them stayed around for the night and hung out with us too, great fun! 

The night got pretty crazy, we just stayed in the same spot and got into a million jamming sessions between us and Alex/Emily/Michal's group, I'll try put a snippet up here if it works...there were punks, rappers, breakdancers, and tonnes of drunk French people all joining in. It was definitely a night to remember. Afterwards we cycled home, Dara wore the GoPro headcam and we took some shots for the first video (gonna try and make a video per city). It's not very good for night-time stuff though, so we'll see if it turns out.

Today I took the amp out and messed around. The line-in works with my mp3 player so looks like it's just the guitar's problem, which is fucking awesome. Even if it is a broken pickup that's much easier to fix/replace than an amp, and it's most likely just a dead pre-amp battery. So David's very happy today. It being Sunday I can't buy a new battery til tomorrow so gonna have to live off savings today/tonight, but feck it - my fingertips hurt when I type even at the moment so best take a break from the guitar for a day anyway. We're gonna try and hit up a like and have some fun. Salut!