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26.10.2008: It's no fun being an illegal alien

It's no fun being an illegal alien

Hello everyone!

More than a week has passed since we arrived from our last (=sixth) trip to North America this year. Personally, I've been suffering from a horrible jet lag this time, so please excuse the delay in my diary entry... Anyway, we're done with the Queen shows for now; hopefully there'll be more of them next year.

But now, let's go three weeks back in time. After the mind-blowing album release concerts at the Finlandia Hall in Helsinki, we had a few days to rest before flying to Oulu in northern Finland to do another Queen show with the local symphony orchestra. This was the first time that we were doing this programme with any other orchestra than the Lahti Symphony, but we had no worries since we had with us the one and only conductor for this show, Jaakko Kuusisto, plus our own rock steady rhythm section. Besides, we had been singing ABBA with the Oulu Symphony before, so we could be sure that they would do their challenging job very well.

Courageously, the orchestra had chosen a pretty unusual venue; Club Teatria is a former slaughterhouse that has been renovated to the biggest rock club in the country. We were eagerly awaiting the sold-out gig since we've had some very nice experiences of performing in rock clubs before. Out of the 2500 people in the crowd, maybe 2000 were listening very intensely, but unfortunately the noise from the bar in the back of the hall made it very difficult to hear each other and the orchestra, despite the in-ear monitoring. Maybe I boosted my monitoring a bit too much, since during the fourth song my right earphone said pop and wouldn't function anymore. Well, somehow I managed with one earphone... To some people in the audience the venue was clearly an unpleasant surprise, but from a performer's point of view the unconstrained party feeling of the crowd certainly compensated for the weaknesses in the acoustics.

From Oulu we came home for one night and continued the Queen tour with Jaakko right away to Edmonton, Canada. After one day of rest at the destination we had a pretty busy concert day; 8 o'clock in the morning an appearance in a TV morning show, then one single three-hour rehearsal with the orchestra, and the concert in the evening. Despite the tight schedule the concert went really well and the people seemed to like it. To me this was one of the gigs that I can't really recall much of afterwards, due to the time difference and shortage of sleep, but I suppose in was all right...

The next day we were off to Minneapolis, USA, but we didn't get very far; at the Edmonton airport the American immigration officers found a defect of form in our visas, so they couldn't let us into the country. We sat in a small room for five hours, waiting for something to happen; fortunately they were very nice to us and even let us go and have something to eat. Finally we had to sign a "withdrawal of application for admission", and under the signature line it said: Signature of alien. There we were, feeling like some space monsters and ready to jump into the first plane back to Europe since we were clearly unwanted persons here.

Well, after a night in an airport hotel our manager who was already in Minneapolis managed to sort out the visa issue, and so we arrived in the USA one day later than intended. We missed the rehearsals with the orchestra, but then again, we didn't need to rehearse. The concerts were very good, once again, especially considering the circumstances, and the Minnesota Orchestra is still one of the best orchestras in the continent.

Now we'll be at home most of time until the Christmas tour, except this next weekend when we'll give three concerts in three different European countries: St. Pölten, Austria - Copenhagen, Denmark - Helsinki, Finland. The Helsinki concert is a very interesting one; we'll be opening for Take 6 which would of course be a great honour for any vocal group in the world.

Have a beautiful autumn!

-hannu-