Dirty Cello

From the journal of Dirty Cello…"Our brief interaction with Eurovision." Since the Eurovision contest just wrapped up, I thought I’d mention our Eurovision story.

If you don’t know what Eurovision is, it is a competition where a bunch of European bands have a battle of the bands with lots of different rounds. It's pretty silly and over the top.

A while back there was a Will Ferrell comedy movie about a fictional band from the small town of Húsavík, Iceland. Part of the movie was filmed there. Since the movie came out, this very small town decided to open the Eurovision Museum to bring in tourists and fans of the movie.

On one of our tours to Iceland, we got booked to play at the Eurovision Museum, which sounds way more exciting than it turned out to be.

First of all the museum is only about 2 rooms big. We were playing in the larger room, where we were promised a sound system. We were even sent a picture of a stage with microphones and speakers and everything we needed.

When we started to set up, it turned out that many of the sound system items in the pictures were actually props - just fake pieces of gear to create the look of a stage. There definitely wasn’t enough equipment to put on a concert.

We had to scramble around taking some of the real gear and some of our emergency gear we bring on trips to try and make everything work. We almost failed at this because the mixing board, which is the heart of the sound system, lacked the special cable that powered it. Fortunately a local guitar player happened to wander in and he ran home and brought us his mixer to borrow.

The show went off pretty well and we had a decent turn-out. Check out our video on YouTube called, “Dirty Cello in Iceland - a crazy tour” to see some scenes from that concert. There’s even a scene at around 4:00 in the video where you can see Jason trying to tape together a mic stand for this show.