Features Tour Diary: Canterbury (Part Eight)

When we heard the really rather great Canterbury were heading out on the road with The Blackout, DIY wanted in on the action. The band will be sending us snaps and reports from the road. This is part seven, as penned by Luke Prebble (vocals/bass)…

Photography by Samuel Bradley

The prize for the largest number of Blackout fans already outside the venue when we arrived goes to Manchester. There were hundreds of them!

Manchester Academy is a huge room, with a huge stage. Those two ingredients mixed with the amount of tickets that had been sold for the show, is the makings of a great night.

It was an afternoon filled with various bits of press, sitting around in a hot dressing room, and the loudest sound check I’ve ever experienced. So loud in fact, the vibrations of the stage caused the microphones on Mike’s amp to move about five meters along the floor during one song. It seems like a slight design flaw if you ask me, to have stage built for loud music performance, which vibrates when the bass gets to a certain level. But it was awesome all the same.

The vast open room also proved the perfect arena for some indoor skateboarding/luge, a couple of our Sam’s favourite activities.

One thing that can be said for the show itself was how dark it was when the house lights went down for us to go on stage. It was pitch black. Scott nearly started hitting his drums with my bass, and I thought his drumsticks were my microphone! Lucky there were no such fatal errors made, but boy it was dark.

The crowd once again was a stunning view from the stage. A huge amount of excitable heads and arms warming themselves up for the nights events.

We were foolish enough to manage to lose a whole box of our flyers, which really sucks, but on the flip side, we did our best merch figures of the whole tour so far.

So one more show to go, London roundhouse, the biggest of the tour, the capital city show. Very excited, but not for the post tour blues which will inevitably hit after tomorrow.