Holy crap! What a whirlwind the last few weeks have been, shit, nearly a month! It goes like that on tour. You wake up wondering what time it is, what day it is and what country you’re in…every day.

Nothing could really prepare us for Alencon, France.

We played a small arena called La Luciole and the opener for the night was, wait for it…an air guitar competition! I was reminded of that bit in Spinal Tap when they get to the fun park and see their name on the billboard under the Puppet Show, “If I told them once I told them a thousand times, Spinal Tap first, Puppet Show second!”

It turned out to be a great night and it was made even better by someone doing their air guitar performance to our song, Too Much. Bloody hilarious.

We had a couple of days off before the biggest shows of Tracer’s lives. First up was Liepzig with the almighty Black Label Society. We rocked up at the 1,000 capacity venue to be greeted with a wall of Marshall stacks, Black Label Society branded stage and a crew of some of the most intimidating bikie types you could think of. The crew was a little dubious about us to say the least. A bunch of young, surfy looking guys from Australia trying to keep up with these seasoned professionals. It started to turn around when we were sitting backstage with the other support band Kobra and The Lotus (a Canadian metal band with a super hot, blonde bombshell with a killer voice) and in walks Zakk Wylde himself. As you might imagine he is quite an imposing figure but after a few minutes of chatting it became quickly apparent that he was a gentle giant and an incredibly cluey guy when it comes to the music industry. We played a killer set to the packed audience and the German crowd went mental for us and we could see the BLS crew start to pay a little attention at what was going on with Tracer.

What blew us completely away was Black label’s set. With their weathered BLS jackets, Zakk Wylde in an Indian head dress all looking like larger than life, Nordic warriors from the set of a biker version of Lord Of The Rings, these guys tore it up on stage. An incredible live show complete with a 15 minute guitar solo, cementing Zakk Wylde’s throne as king of metal guitar.

The next day we travelled to Osnabruck to play another show with Black Label Society and it was great to see the slight turnaround in attitude towards our band from the BLS crew. It seemed we had won a little bit of respect from the night before.

The show was great too! The venue, called Hyde Park, looked like something out of Terminator that had graffiti all over it and looked kind of run down…but really cool. More on the Black Label shows in a minute, because the day after we were off to Spain!

We had never been to Spain before and, to be honest, we had been wanting to go for the last four years! There was a high level of anticipation and excitement from us all for this leg of the tour. As we were driving into Spain we noticed how the landscape changed into something very familiar to us. The dirt started to take on an ochre tone. The mountains started to flatten out and become rolling hills. It was like driving around the Yorke Peninsula of South Australia. Our home! The only real difference being the colour of the towns we saw from a distance or travelled through. I think Spain had a big terracotta sale and the house builders bought up big. All the houses are basically the same colour!

We arrived at our first show at Taberna Belfast in Santa Maria Del Paramo and immediately wondered why it looked like a ghost town. Ah, siesta! It is a very strange thing for us Aussies to arrive somewhere in the middle of the day and not be able to buy any food or go into any bars because the whole town is sleeping.

That wasn’t the only thing to take us by surprise either. These guys eat dinner at 10:00pm! We were starving at 3:00pm! And nothing was open! We were wondering if it would be possible to eat out on arms! Thankfully our host and owner of the bar Eva, put on another fantastic Spainish custom…a plate of delicious tapas and a cold cerveza! Eva was an incredible host and fed us delicious meals for the two days we spent in Santa Maria Del Paramo, we can’t thank her enough! This night was the last night of Dre being 27, a scary age for any musician so we made sure we partied hard and warded off any evil spirits with the power of Jack Daniels.

The venues throughout our Spainish run were all quite small, but they were packed with music loving folk. The next show in Burgos was actually a small room under a stadium!

Low roofs don’t go very well for us, especially when we do our party tricks at the end of the set. Both Leigh and I cracked our guitars on the ceiling when we put them behind our head! The show was pretty cool though.

The best part of Burgos was the awesome showers in our hotel room. Now this may sound weird but showering on tour is close to the best thing in the world. Obviously people can see that we sweat on stage but just how much sweat happens is incredible. I have seen Dre literally throw his shirt to the bathroom wall and have it stick. There are salt rings around all of our jeans from where sweat has settled over night. It’s fucking gross huh? So a shower is not just a shower. It’s a cleansing of the soul! And Burgos had a shower that was like a waterfall dumping on your head. Then there were two other taps. Curiosity got the better of me so I turn all of them on full. Jets of water streamed out of the wall like tiny massaging fingers. And the pressure would have been enough to wash an elephant! This was incredible! The funniest thing about it all was when I stepped out the shower I saw a very ironic “Save Water” sticker on the shower screen.

Zaragoza was the next show up at a place called La Ley Seca. This roughly translates to something about the Prohibition in Chicago in the early 20’s and explains the Al Capone imagery and the Tommy-gun on the wall.

The bar was plastered with comic books, band posters, album covers and other cool paraphernalia and the owner was a cool guy. He sent us to one of the greatest tapas restaurants we had ever been too and full bellies always leads to a great show!

Next up was another unconquered country for Tracer, Portugal. After trying to navigae the labyrinth of cobbled roads, one way streets and road works in downtown Porto we eventually found Hard Club. And what a venue! State of the art P.A. system and a great stage. This was another Black Label Society support show and holy shit was it a good one!

This was BLS’s first show in Portugal and it was sold out. When we took the stage the crowd was so amped it was electric! The crowd was with us from the first note to the last and it was one of our best shows of the tour. BLS ripped it up yet again.

Madrid was our next stop at a venue called Ego live. It was another small show but a really cool crowd that was into what we were doing.

The next day we caught up with our friend Joh and did a really cool interview/acoustic session while enjoying the Sangria famous to Spain. I have to say that Madrid’s nightlife is crazy and filled with amazing looking women. There were a lot of conversations that trailed off into mumbling as one of us saw one girl more beautiful than the other. Spainish guys are lucky fellas!

The next two Black Label Society shows in Tilburg and Saarbrucken were great. We got to hang out with Zakk and the rest of the boys backstage for a while. I even got a personal tour of Zakk’s huge array of custom guitars.

We had really built up a re pore with the crew and I talked to Zakk’s guitar tech, Moby for a long time about endorsements and helping Tracer out in the future…Sure was a turnaround from the first show! Dre got along great with their drummer Chad and had a massive drum geek chat that no one else really understood. By the end of the tour with these guys, they had all helped us out so much and we had learnt a great deal about how a bigger touring band operates on all levels.

It truly was an honour to share the stage with these guys and pick the brains of the crew, we are truly thankful!

But that wasn’t the last we would see of the Black Label fellas. We were off to open the mainstage for the biggest metal festival in Europe: Graspop Metal Meeting! Crowds of up to 45,000 people! A stage the size of a bloody jumbo jet and the three of us blasting the hell out of the enormous P.A. Yep, this is where we belong! The big stage, the big crowd and the big sound of Tracer made us all realise why we do this job.

The feeling that you get from something of this magnitude is hard to put into words. It is why we work so hard, drive so many miles, have no money, have sacrificed for so long. Standing on front of that stage with the crowd taking the same ride as us is something that I will never tire of and always strive for. Fuck it was good!

The great thing about being first on stage was we had the rest of the day to check out other bands. Side stage at Kyuss Lives was incredibly cool. The bottom end from the bass shook our gut and our brains throughout their set. Slash with Myles Kennedy was just as awesome. Those that know me know that I’m not a Guns ‘N Roses fan but I love Slash’s playing and with Myle’s Kennedy’s incredible voice, this was a fantastic show. I have to say that the highlight for me was watching Ozzy Osbourne play War Pigs with Slash and Zakk Wylde on guitar. Fuckin fuck yeah!!!!

We had a day off next up but our friends from The Royal Republic invited us to their show at SouthSide festival in Germany. We were still riding the adrenaline wave of the day before when we surprised the boys as they were actually on stage. They played the killer set we have come to expect from these guys and we were lucky enough to score backstage passes and hang out with them again. There’s a special connection bands have when they tour together and although we told the same stories and some new ones, it was just cool to hang out with these great guys we are privelaged to call our friends.

The day was capped off by watching The Cure. My Dad is a super fan of these guys and I didn’t realise it but I had become a fan also and the events of the last few days become a little overwhelming when they played my favourite song Lullaby. Holy shit! We are actually living out our dreams!

Until next time and as always, cheers and beers