ON TOUR: European Monstour 2005
At the end of 2004, the band and the management asked me if I wanted to officially join the crew for the upcoming European Monstour 2005 -tour to sell merchandise and work as a roadie. For a wide-eyed twentysomething super fan, the anwser was super easy. To spend more than three weeks, 15 gigs in 8 countries all across Europe working for and hanging out with my favorite band? Yep, hard to say no to.
This was Lordi’s first real headlining tour. Although the tour wasn’t all that glamorous; some of the venues and crowds were small, the tour bus was cramped at times and the schedule was tight, these are still some of my dearest memories and experiences ever and I wouldn’t change them for the world. The photos on the other hand, are not. I had only a cheap pocket camera with me on this tour just to take some travel pictures for my home album and such. Here’s some of them nevertheless. They’re mostly just general photos from the venues, my own working spaces and the audiences with some behind-the-scenes type of stuff. The shows in Barcelona and Gothenburg had merchandise vendors of their own, so I have more live photos from those gigs. The only place I don’t have any photos from is April 17th, Rockstar, San Sebastian, Spain.
For me, the tour was a dream come true at the time, but there was already something brewing within the band. After the tour and four summer festival shows, Enary was let go from the band and Kalma made a decision to quit after the next album had been recorded. But all of this wasn’t made public until New Year’s Eve 2005 when the official website and MonsterDiscoHell revealed the new line-up for what was about to become the biggest and busiest era in Lordi’s history. Mostly because of the little things called The Arockalypse and Eurovision Song Contest 2006…
(133 PHOTOS)
