When Dreams Come True Twice

Allrightie, here follows the gig report from the weekend - the best experience I ever had in my life!

Originally submitted at The Forum

Brace yourselves, lengthy post ahead!

Let me just start out by saying, if I wasn't in love with the guys before these two gigs... I would so be by now. This was doubtlessly the best and most worthwhile experience I've had in my life. A whole weekend with POTF live!

I'm gonna take it from the beginning so that I don't miss out on anything.

Friday, May 9th
This is the day!

We gathered up on Friday at my house before hopping on a bus down to Gothenburg. Since we wanted to be down in good time before the gig we were in Gothenburg like, half past six, leaving hours of nervousness and anticipation to fill... We made sure we had a bite to eat and eventually wandered off towards Sticky in the lovely west coast weather

Outside the gig, the first thing we laid eyes on was the EA games tour bus! The second thing that happened was that I got a call from Ebeeto - who as it turned out stood five feet away and was only mocking me! Along with StenFan and his girlfriend, plus Ebeeto and one of his mates, the four of us who'd gone down were basically the only ones there. But as the evening went on, a more people gathered up, and as we hit the late hour for the venue, there was if not an impressive amount of people there, but at least there was a crowd ingenious enough to appreciate some good music.

I spoke to two girls in the ladies' room who'd come from even further away than us to catch the gig, so there were more hardcore fans at this gig than it would be Saturday in Uddevalla (but I'm getting to that eventually ). On the whole I had a lovely time chatting with the forumers both beforehand and after the gig! Thanks guys

Then finally the guys hit the stage and we hit front row, where we stayed all gig long The opening song was Save Me, but after that I can't remember in what order the songs came, so I'm just gonna make a random list and anyone else who was there can help me fix it up!

- Save Me
- Revolution Roulette
- Psychosis
- Passion Colors Everything
- Diamonds For Tears
- Lift
- Locking Up The Sun
- More
- Stay
- Carnival of Rust
- Illusion And Dream
- Late Goodbye
- Sorry Go Round
- The Ultimate Fling

As for their performance... phew... it blew me away. Everything I've heard about the band and how good they are live, proved to be more than true. I can hardly believe how swept away you got by the music! I understand everyone who starts listening to them after such a performance, as this. I've been wanting to see the guys live for two years, and it was a dream come true, to say the least. I'm so, so, so happy that we went!

A whole while of headbanging and sore throats later, we were all sad to see them go. Ebeeto's mate laid hands on the drumsticks and StenFan's girlfriend got away with the somewhat less desirable sweaty towel

The sweetest moment of this night was when we caught sight of Jaska and Jani mingling with the crowd after the gig, and went over to chat It was like five minutes of me praising them and answering questions about Uddevalla and GG They were very nice and chatty and I managed to steal both a pic of the three of us and some additional hugs

Right after this, we were supposed to be rushing off to catch our bus, and so we went outside, where we ran into Ollie and the other guys and again had a little chat. We told them that we were coming to the Uddevalla gig and that we'd enjoyed ourselves a lot that night, and so on When Ollie said something about it being so nice and warm outside, my usual chatty self couldn't be stopped... and I burst out with this comment:
"And here we are, talking about the weather..." That caused a few laughs, haha!

Then we caught the bus only just in time, and staggered into bed at around 3 AM (yes! no jokes involved!), but me and my best friend stayed up chatting about the gig until around 6 AM, when we finally dozed off in a state of dizzy happiness.

Saturday, May 10th
This is also the day!

Waking up a few hours later, my best friend went to her house to freshen up and I sat down to look through the gig pics (again). After I was done with that, my plan was to sit down and type up a gig report, but suddenly heard from StenFan who was coming in earlier than planned, and so I had to jump the shower. A few giggling hours passed as we had something to eat, something to drink, painted our fingernails (including the guys), prepped ourselves with the RR album and discussed the evening's plans.

Then StenFan insisted he needed a toothbrush, and the detour it took us shopping one, made us run into Captain and Ollie sightseeing outside this town's most popular pizza (hangover food) place! Either they recognized us from the day before, or I was a little bit obvious in all my POTF gear but anyway they waved at us and we went over to chat a little bit It was like, what did they think about Uddevalla, and can you believe it, StenFan's never been here before either, and how have you been since last time It was actually really good that we ran into them by accident, cause they told us when they'd start playing and we'd been wondering about that, so it was a little inside info, haha

Then we moved on to a friend's house where we tried to convince some of the people that tonight's gig was going to be the big thing, and even managed to get them to listen to Lift, but the majority of them were depressingly uninterested, and so we hit the place for the venue at around 10.

It was lucky that we had spots on the guestlist, since there were zero people in line. I was a bit disappointed there wasn't more people around, considering all the promotion this particular gig had gotten all around town, but we all figured the people would join in on us later. (And actually for a while there were pretty many people hanging around the gig, but somehow in an unexplainable way half of them mysteriously disappeared after about half the songs ) But to be perfectly honest, as the guys came on stage, it took me about five seconds to forget about the small crowd and just get sucked into the music, the energy, the laughter, the whole experience.

Strangely we all agreed later that this gig was even better than the one on Friday, although none of us could understand how it was possible! Marko was all over the fence of the stage, I hope he got its number before leaving, haha No seriously, he was such a ray of energy that it was amazing, all the band gave it a 150 percent and you could really tell. It's funny, cause you can really feel how much fun they're having when they're on stage, it's like they're just playing around, and still it's so incredibly professional. How do they do it? It looks so easy and we all know it's not I don't get it! I'm so impressed

The playlist for this gig was basically the same as the Friday gig, although this time they played my personal favourite from RR, Miss Impossible! That made me so happy

Overall the mood for this gig was so intimate, so... personal, in a way, compared to the first gig. The one in Gothenburg was terrific cause with all those people, you could really feel the pressure of the people there along with the pressure of the music. But this gig was also terrific, out of other reasons. I loved Marko's funny small talk (saying "All you fifty million people from Uddevalla" to the tiniest crowd and so on ) and Captain's little melodies that came after a joke, like a drumroll or something

We also got the chance to meet Tiia who was doing her best to sell some POTF gear! StenFan managed to flirt himself to a CoR T-shirt and we got a bunch of stickers each, very goodlooking ones! I bought one of the POTF pins and later got three more all for free, which I couldn't help joking about later, since I already was wearing three identical pins stuck on my dress One of them I gave away to a mate of mine who's been getting into POTF lately thanks to my humble self and I felt like I wanted to encourage him to keep listening.

Psst, I stuck one of the stickers up downtown today, planning to sneak up some more where you least expect...

Thanks so much Tiia! It was so great to get to meet you all and thanks for everything we got and for coming here and for, for everything!

I could say a thousand more things about this wondrous experience but I'm not going to bore you anymore! Just know that I had a really, really, really great time and now I know for sure this is my all time favourite band with the nicest people you could imagine.

Thanks POTF for coming down here and making my dream come true, twice!

PS. I took a few really nice pics! I'm gonna put them up as soon as they are looked through and chosen!