Welcome to my Road Diary of the first European leg of our Prog Noir Tour.

Oct 11th: It’s great to be back touring with Stick Men. We flew into Brussels (arriving at separate times) and went by van to Lomme, France, for our first gig.

Stage slightly less crowded than with 3 drum kits on the Crimson tour.

Nice to see we’ve been mentioned in the local entertainment magazines.

And, as usual in the first shows of a tour, I had very little opportunity to take pictures… that’ll change as we get some shows under our belt. Here’s the Lomme audience.

Day two, October 12th, we drive to the Netherlands, not too far, to our next gig, in Tilburg.

Mornings with Stick Men often involve practicing in the hotel room… the music is tricky and it’s been a few months since we played it… also there are some songs from the Prog Noir album we’re not playing yet, so trying to get up to speed on them takes practice. We’ll add more as the tour goes along.

and there’s no paradox involved, it’s very nice.

A jazz theme with great photos on the walls, and a beer tap unlike any I’ve seen

And a local photographer with a very analog device. He’s here to grab some photos of us with his 4 x 5 camera. (On film, for those of you old enough to remember what that is!)

His name is Stef Mennens and it’s his photos around the club.

Here’s a sight you don’t often see. He’s going to duck behind that black cloth to do the focussing.

During the show, here’s Pat’s explaining the song “Horatio”. Really, he’s making up his own background story about it, since the piece itself has only one word in it… ‘Horatio’.

So, that’s our first two shows. We’ll be driving to Heerlen next, and I’ll make that a new diary entry - It’ll take me a few days to get back into the groove of updating the diary for a tour of one nighters – maybe switch to three show per diary.

Anyway, more soon.