A tale of disappointment, frustration and lessons learned the hard way.
GET HYPE!
Devin Townsend is touring in Europe, and he’ll be playing Oslo!
– Naíve Ranyhyn, 2019
I immediately purchased a couple of tickets for Devins ‘Empath’ tour, with all the tail-wagging excitement of a labrador thinking he’s headed for walkies in the park.
Prepping
The concert was to be held on the 24th of November, a Sunday night, in Oslo. So to ensure I had enough time to get to the venue and enjoy my gig. How best to do that, one wonders?
Where I work, I’m lucky enough to enjoy a flexible schedule, which means in cases like this, I can usually arrange to have a day off, and work the hours back some other way. As long as I give sufficient notice, it’s hardly ever a problem, which I’m thankful for. So I gave ample notice to my boss that I would like to take Monday 25th of November off work, and that was OKed without any fuss. Excellent! Now for transport.
Rental?
I have this old diesel car, a 2001 VW Passat, that has seen a fair amount of mileage. For the past year I’ve noticed some issues with acceleration and have been unable to pinpoint and fix it completely. We found a hole in an EGR valve, which was replaced by a mechanic friend of mine, and we flushed the engine and turbo system as well, but still it struggles to even reach the speed limit in some cases. So I decided I didn’t want to take my car to Oslo, where diesel cars are banned at least some of the time.
Instead of using my car, My roommate and I decided to rent one. We found a rental agency, and found a suitable car. We decided the cost was acceptable, even factoring in the higher level insurance we wanted to get to cover any and all possible damages that might occur, just to be safe.
Shortly before the concert was set to happen, my roommates cousin offers to lend us his car. Being at least somewhat frugal and seeing no sense in giving good money to a rental agency when we can get it for next to nothing, we agree, and decide not to book the car instead. We thought we were clever. Alas, the innocence of youth..
Murphy’s Law
The evening before the concert, the guy whose kind offer of borrowing his car suddenly remembered that he’d forgotten to put the centric rings on when he changed to winter tires.
So. Not that car, then. It was too late to get a hold of a rental too. What do we do? Let’s check buses then!
No buses going quite so late. Maybe a train would work? Let’s look up train schedules.
Oh god, vy?
With the concert starting at 19:00 we saw an opportunity to arrive in Oslo at 18:30, and leave again with the last train out. That gave us several hours for the concert, which should be done by then. Gigs usually last around two hours so we thought we were good. Even including the sound check and encores.
To avoid having to wait for 4 hours and 45 minutes at Nelaug train station – conveniently located in the middle of absolutely fucking nowhere – before getting on the connecting train home, we decided to arrange transport to and from Nelaug by car.
Being a seasoned concert-goer you noticed our mistake right away. We didn’t account for the warm-up act.
Being a seasoned train commuter however, you noticed yet another mistake we made: Thinking that 30 minutes extra would provide sufficient temporal slack for us. But no, Vy had other plans.
Delays
While waiting for the train at Nelaug station, we were informed that the train would be running about 20 minutes late, because they’d decided to pick up more cargo than they had originally planned. This took extra time in and of itself, but there’s an additional delay from the added weight not accounted for. This caused us to arrive in Oslo an hour after schedule.
“Official spokesperson assures public it’ll never happen again.”
Haken
We may have arrived an hour late, but it turns out this was just in time for the warm-up act. The one we hadn’t factored into the concert duration when we booked our return tickets. Yeah.. We got an hour of whatever the fuck this is first.
To be fair, it’s our own damn fault. I know there’s always a warm-up act, and the Empath tour poster on the Devin Townsend website even mentions Haken being part of the tour.
So, with the warmup act and the main act sound check concluded, it was time for some of what we came for.
Ain’t never gonna win.
We had to leave after the track ‘Never Gonna Win’ in order to have enough time for the train ride home.
My favorite tracks of this tour being Deadhead, Why?, Kingdom and Spirits will Collide – I was pretty disappointed I didn’t get to hear any of them. But that was nothing compared to the disappointment of hearing the intro to Deadhead just as I was heading out.
Every fiber of my being told me to dig my nails into the wall, refusing to leave until the song was over. Sadly, my voice of reason won out, and I begrudgingly left the concert hall, heading for the train home. God damn, those were some of the hardest steps I ever took..
Lessons learned
Next time, I’ll book a hotel for the night, and I’ll be taking an early bus.