Dream or Nightmare European Tour? A day Behind the Scenes with OCEANS

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Traveling through Europe for four weeks, presenting your music to thousands of people and having the time of your life: That’s how many people imagine tour life these days. But is it really like that? Or isn’t it more like a disgusting version of a low-budget class trip in 7th grade, except that you’re constantly on the move, everything smells even more like Axe body spray and someone is constantly sick? We wanted to get to the bottom of these questions and luckily OCEANS were kind enough to give us this insight!

Many thanks to lightinmirror.de for the pictures and thanks to OCEANS and explicitly also to Rocky for the organization, the day and a generally wonderful time with you! 

The Modern Primitive European tour of the exceptional Greek band SEPTICFLESH had been running since the beginning of October, with OCEANS as support. The show at the Hellraiser was the second last one and therefore everything was routine and well-rehearsed, but four weeks of touring don’t go by without leaving traces of fatigue on the musicians. 

When we arrived at the Hellraiser around 16:00 that day, it was already noticeable. My original idea was that we could arrive at the venue at the same time as the band. But due to the fact that all the equipment had to be unloaded and everyone there had their routine, our presence would only have been disruptive. So we were there right on time for the sound check!

The sound check itself is relatively unspectacular. Everyone is caught between anticipating the upcoming show and working through the to-do’s before said show. The sound check is the only and also the last opportunity to correct certain small flaws in the sound and adapt it to the location. Does the sound fit? How does it feel on stage? Can you hear yourself well enough? Can you hear the others? 

Anyone who gets the idea that you can “pre-listen” to the whole set during soundcheck is very much mistaken! Soundcheck is the live version of the person who constantly taps through their playlist and never hears a song for more than 30 seconds!

After the soundcheck we went backstage again and, oh wonder, it was warm in the room for a change?!?!!? You rarely or never get that at Hellraiser! We also used the time to take some cool band pictures, as you could see at the beginning, but apart from Rocky we didn’t know anyone in the band and a bit of friendly sniffing around is a must! Besides Rocky on guitar, there was drummer Jakob, singer Timo and bassist Thomas. Apart from the genuine friendliness we experienced from the guys, I was particularly pleased that they were so open with us. It felt like there was nothing they didn’t give us an insight into and we are really grateful for that! It is absolutely not a matter of course that we are given this level of trust, especially as we really only got to know them there on site!

Speaking of trust: On the boys‘ initiative, we then took a look inside the tour bus. On a tour like this, a bus is home to far too many people in far too small a space. On sometimes long journeys across Europe, you spend a lot of time there with people you don’t (really) know and also somehow admire because they have achieved what you still want to achieve with your own music. In this respect, a tour bus is always a mini cosmos in which the musicians have to get along with each other. But as we were assured many times by everyone, everyone got on well together! (To be honest, I didn’t really want to believe that, but driver Andreas also said that it was the case and if anyone knows what harmony is, it’s someone who regularly drives artists all over the Europe).

However, such a microcosm is not without its risks. Even if there are no arguments, you still live in a very confined space with a relatively large number of people. Life in a tour bus is actually a bit like being in a kindergarten: someone always has to go to the toilet, someone is missing at the most inopportune moments and compared to the germs cultivated there, any laboratory for bioweapons looks really bad! Especially when it comes to germs, the Modern Primitive Tour really had it all! I’ll spare you the exact details here, but a quote from Andreas sums it up perfectly: “There was too little drinking and too much vomiting on this tour!”

Now that we’ve established that the guys from OCEANS (and everyone else on the tour) were in really bad health, let’s take it to the next level: Have you ever thought about how you actually sleep on a bus like this? If you said “in bed”, then that’s true, but it’s not entirely correct. There are sleeping areas in the upper part of the bus that can just about be described as bunks. Not all of them have a window, but that’s not so important because you can’t open the windows anyway. The choice of bunk is important, as we were told, but now imagine you’ve never been on this bus before. How are you supposed to know which “bunk” is the most tactically ideal? Exactly! Not at all! It can quickly happen that you get the bunk where the LED light feels like it’s hanging by a thread and where you can hear the snoring of the others particularly well.

When you reach the venue with little sleep, it’s time to arrive and unload your equipment. If you’re lucky, the venue even has a washing machine where you can wash your clothes. But that’s where the next problem arises: on tour with four bands plus crew, everyone logically wants a wash. So if you have to deal with unloading the equipment, as drummer Jakob reported, then you are quickly at the end of the washing queue. Then it may well be that there is no washing machine in the venues for the following one or two weeks. And now imagine that these washing machines are still eating your socks! Sometimes I can no longer find my own socks in my own washing machine. It’s hard to imagine how stupid I’d feel if I had to assume that one of my socks had gone missing in a washing machine in Milan, Toulouse, Bochum or Zagreb!

In addition to these challenges, you also have to put on as perfect a show as you can every night. If possible, the audience shouldn’t notice that you’ve only slept for 3 hours, that you’re wearing your underpants for the third time or that you’re just completely nauseous! The closer it got to showtime for OCEANS that evening in Leipzig, the more you could feel the restless anticipation that seemed to flow through everyone. The corridors of the Hellraiser, which are usually rather empty, then turned into a kind of busy corridor in which everyone was buzzing back and forth to do the final touches before stage time. Of course, we positioned ourselves in front of the stage and you can read about the gig in the concert review!

Once the compulsory part of the evening was done for OCEANS, there was finally time to relax a little. For some this meant watching the other bands of the evening, others retreated to the backstage. However, I couldn’t help but get the impression that showering (together) is a significant part of the after-show ritual… But saving water is always a good thing! 

Of course, OCEANS also took the time to get in touch with their fans, even though the Hellraiser was really crowded that evening.

But no concert evening is over until ungodly amounts of pizza find their way into the backstage area. Just forget all the reviews on Google! Touring musicians can tell you best where to get good pizza! But multi-tasking was also required here, because what was in the club has to come out again at some point… Drummer Jakob in particular had a lot to do here: The drums are taken apart with firm, experienced hand movements and packed into appropriate boxes. Later, when the drums are loaded in, Mambo No. 5 and other classics resound out into the Leipzig night. Jakob, if you’re reading this, please send me your playlist! It was awesome!

With everything you’ve read so far, the question arises as to why people do this to themselves! Why are you drawn into a bus with more than 20 people under almost inhumane conditions to tour across Europe? The answer certainly depends on each individual musician. What we have observed and felt with OCEANS, however, is a passion for their own music that makes certain personal sensitivities simply secondary. It’s an adventure, and in a world where many things are predictable, it’s simply enormously appealing. Of course you also see a lot of places that you might not have seen, but the drive to expose yourself to these situations comes, in my view, primarily from the liberation that the performance of your own music brings. You can’t just be a musician for a small percentage of the time. Either you are or you are not. But if you are, then the joy of performing on an international stage outweighs many negative aspects. 

We were and are enormously grateful that we were able to spend this day with the boys! I have rarely laughed and smiled as much as I did on this occasion. Even for us, the insights and thoughts they shared with us are something rare and special. But if you were to ask me now whether I would do a tour like this to myself in the long term, my answer would be a clear “For God’s sake, no!!!”. Above all, it’s important to me to show how much work and stress is behind the 40 minutes or so that OCEANS presented on stage every night of the tour. Despite illness, lack of sleep, dirty clothes, sometimes bad food and general exhaustion, OCEANS managed to put on a show that, at least in Leipzig, didn’t have to hide behind the bigger bands of the evening. You can only pay tribute to that!