As we are surprisingly not getting any younger we elected to fly to Geneva and hire a car rather than face a 12 hour drive on a holiday weekend through France. This all went pretty smoothly and we arrived at the very wet open air festival site around Friday teatime. After settling in our digs and a nice meal in one of the few restaurants that were open, we thought we'd go back to the festival site to take in some music; one problem, however, it was raining cats and dogs and had been for the past hour. Would there be any music on? Would anyone be there watching? To our amazement a crowd of two to three hundred people, some with umbrellas, some without were braving the elements and getting soaked to the skin watching one of the very fine Czech bands.
As we were not scheduled to play until the Saturday evening, four of us took the opportunity to drive down to Annecy, a medieval town situated on the edge of the largest lake in Europe. Rick had to stay at the festival site as he had previously committed to do a couple of instrumental workshops. Annecy was a fascinating town and well worth a visit if you are in the region.
Our show on the Saturday evening went down very well and the festival organisers reckoned the crowd was up to three thousand strong! We sold out of CD's within minutes of finishing our set and certainly could have sold more but because we were flying we only taken 10 or so with us.
For the Sunday morning gospel set, we adopted a single microphone set up, which we now prefer for most situations. This is now made much easier by Ron's new slim line Eminence double bass; we always previously had a bit of a problem when Ron sang lead on a number with the bass getting in the way. Now it's just Ron that gets in the way!
For a first staging of this festival at La Roche, we have to say that the organisation, from our bands perspective was pretty faultless and Christopher Howard-Williams and his team should be congratulated on a job very well done. Hopefully the various sponsors and the town of La Roche were delighted with the weekend and will wish to stage it again next year.
Many thanks to Lilly Pavlak from Switzerland and François Robert of La Roche for sending us the stage shots to use on our web site.
EWOB Picture Gallery: click on any picture to enlarge.
