Wednesday, June 28, 2006

Smoke and the water

As some of you may know, this blog is being hosted by Guerilla. Having organised a lot of concerts and festivals, we're no strangers to Spinal Tap ourselves. So from now on, we'll put up a post of our own every week. This one is about the very first gig we ever organised.

The venue was a squat in Antwerp (apty named 'Los Squattos') so we had to improvise a lot. Of course, there wasn't any electricity so we rented a generator. As it was raining, we couldn't simply put it outside but instead had to haul the contraption up to the first floor. There, we put it next to a window but it soon turned out that this didn't provide enough ventilation ; the toxic fumes went straight into the venue itself. So we boarded up the entire first floor with plywood. No more fumes, hurray! But then we realised -notably when the venue was suddenly plunged in darkness- that those things need a refill from time to time. Crap.

After cursing our own thoroughness -we used a lot of nails- we finally managed to make it to the generator, took the nearest jerrycan and filled the tank. The machine immediately started to splutter ferociously, emitting huge clouds of smoke. A passer-by might have thought the Sioux were on the war-path again. Then it went dead. It turned out that the jerrycan contained water, whereas generators tend to prefer gasoline. Crap.

There was only one thing we could do: drag it out of the window, turn it upside down and let the water flow out. Easier said than done, because those things are bloody heavy. But in the end we managed to do it and -after a lot of pleading and cursing- the generator came alive again. The rest of the evening went without incident but we all had aching muscles for days to come.

2 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

WHAHAHAHAHA I remember it was me twisting the generator upside down! kewl story to be reminded of :)

5:09 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Uhm, een slangeske en zuigen is meestal de manier om zoiets op te lossen dacht ik. Natuurlijk, als je geen slangeske hebt ... :-)

De truuk is zuigen, en stoppen net voor het eruitkomt ;-) In het geval van water kan dat nog meevallen.

3:14 PM  

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