Michael Versace with some short impressions about the Summer 2003 tour!. (source: www.versteegt.net)

Birmingham, uk - academy 2
Sold out. hung out with grizzly, the drummer from the reggae band Steel Pulse. said it was the best sounding show he had heard there (aw shucks!)

London, uk - Royal festival hall - lee "scratch" perry's meltdown festival
Sold out crowd of 3000! shared the bill with Sun Ra Arkestra and DJ Spooky,
who joined the band. kinda neat doing a sold out gig at a place with such a
history.

Day off

Wandered around london... our hotel was next to the thames river in Southwark (pronounced: suthuk). wandered around piccadilly circus, charring cross, trafalgar square. dave, the guitarist, suggested seeing a former spearhead soundguy at a club... turns out i knew the guy since he was the monitor guy for Motorhead. PLUS the band playing at the club that night was an orange county band who Casey, a guy i used to work with at House of Blues, was doing sound for. small world! hung out a little with him.. rode the London Eye, a huge ferris wheel next to the Thames....

King tut's, Glasgow, Scotland
Beautiful rolling hills... like to come back some time. all the people were
super nice and funny.

The village, Dublin, Ireland
Took the ferry across to Ireland at Liverpool. Hung out with my old friend
Steve from boston, who moved back to ireland a couple years ago. another cool city i want to come back to.

next day: travel to brighton, uk
took forever to get there. our nice dutch bus driver, Toon, had a bus that was just too slow. shame to spend our day off driving. when we finally got there, hung out with my brazilian friend from san francisco, anna, who now has a thick south english accent and vocabulary. stayed overnight at her and her husband's place. had a gig next day, which they came to. sold out gig at a cool little club called the concorde 2, right on the seashore.

Paris, france. Le Zenith, opening for Tricky
Drove overnight to paris.. stayed up long enough to see the bus drive into the huge train that took us through the england-france train tunnel. awesome. the gig was in a large arena for 10,000. the local crew seemed to appreciate me trying to speak french... phoned my friend from san francisco, vivian, who is living in france, but never got a chance to hang out.

Dijon, france Tribu festival
yesterday, the local crew were threatening a nationwide strike, and today it
happened. while we were loading in and doing sound check, the crew started to disappear. and by the time we returned to do the show, all the microphones were taken and sound equipment was shut off, with the workers picketing in front of the club. a real shame, since many people came from FAR away to see the show... would have been a cool festival, one band was from Brazil, and another from Mali.. we ended up doing a little acoustic show for 4 hours in the backyard, which was a lot of fun in the end.

St. Gallen open air festival, Switzerland
huge outdoor festival, great crowd. hung out with more friends from San Fran, Kaspar and Julia.

Munich, Germany - Muffathalle
First gig with a bad turnout (it was sunday). venue was neat, built on top of
an old mill. they had a great beer garden, serving steins of beer the size of
a pitcher!

Amsterdam, Holland - Paradiso
totally sold out show, with tons of people outside trying to get in.  the whole 3 1/2 hour show is on the net at http://www.fabchannel.com click on "michael franti 2003" on the right side of the page.

Nijmegen, Holland - Lux
neat club in a movie theater complex. sold out again!

Macon, France- day off

Torino (turin), italy
day off... stayed up while we drove through the alps, which was awesome. ran around turin, really old buildings, beautiful old churches, and the ice cream here rocks! did a festival the next day in an arena....