Sara Hammerzmith

Alrite. So they finally let us sin the arena, and the first thing me and Thomas did was to look up the presslady to pick up my photopass. After that we just scanned our tickets and ran into the arena, right over to Fairy of Darkness and LivingDeadDollie! It was so nice to meet them and to finally get to talk to them you know? And the cutest thing, they gave us small candybars that said Merry Christmas in different languages. We weren’t really doing too much but only recaping of what had happened and soon Burning Black started to play.

The show was great – I have always been a bit doubtful towards supportbands – and certainly around bands with a bit heavier sound.  But I did really enjoy this band, and I guess it was also kinda epic that the singer was fooling around a lot with a banana all the time! Or well, I guess it wasn’t the same banana all along but.. you know!

After the show when they were thanking the crowd Thomas demanded them to get me a banana so Stefano Moro (the guitarist of BB) went and got me one.. “Miss banana gotta have a banana”. Seriously, I have never wanted to kill Thomas as bad as I wanted right there! Hahaha. (No, I wouldn’t I love them all!)

However, the epicness of this entire thing doesn’t really end there. After a short while the second supportband went on, The Dogma, only for us to realize, the guitarist there had a unicorn on his shirt. Are you kidding me? Unicorns AND bananas? What the HELL is this? However – The Dogma was all fine. I am not too fond of their music, but they didn’t do anything bad or such. Amazing.

The Dogma left the stage and it was time for us to become REAL excited. In any minute… or eh… 30 minutes, Lordi was about to enter the stage. We were basically just staying… RIGHT, haha, Thomas had also got one of the The Dogma members scarf! We tied a little fly on him, you know, to get it out of place! The time passed by as we just talked and planned – we were gonna try out our six ways to ruin a Lordi gig, and in the middle of the planning, the sound of SCG V started. That pretty little keyboard accompanied with violins to end up with a woman giving birth. The band started to enter the stage during this – obviously – Otus, Awa, Amen, OX.

It did kinda hurt a bit to see Otus enter stage, but after a while of catching my breathe I got over it. Right on time, and much more rawer than Kita ever did, they hit it off with “Babez For Breakfast”. As you might have understand you people who follow my blog, I have been involved a lot in the spoiler thread on MB so I kinda new what was coming. They followed up Babez with “Dynamite Tonite”. I understand a lot of people love it, and I’m okay with that… BUT WHY, DEAR LORDI, is this in? I was happy that it was out on Deadache Tour, but apparently.. it was just taking a break. Damnit.

Earlier today, Mr Lordi had been saying that they couldn’t play the whole set. I was so relieved you know when I saw the setlist on Monsterboard – My ALL TIME favourite song, “My Heaven Is Your Hell” was finally in. FINALLY in the set. But somehow, I get the feeling I am the only one (as I have seen, of course!) that actually enjoys it, so when Mr Lordi said that they had to cut down the set I was like please no, please… and then when Mr Lordi started to rant about the “second single” (and apparently it’s the first and not the second?) I felt… relieved. But still worried – he could as well be talking about “Blood Red Sandman” or maybe it could even just be a delightful Fuck Off to all us “My Heaven” lovers. But when he FINALLY said the words “My Heaven Is Your Hell”, I could breathe again. And Laugh. And Smile. And cry a little. For FOUR YEARS.
FOUR YEARS my friends. Finally. And it was just as perfect live as I had imagined it.

“Bite It Like A Bulldog” was the next song – if you haven’t got it yet, it’s kinda OX’s song. According to the setlist, my fave song off Babez For Breakfast was supposed to appear… but no. They had cutten it off, instead Awa started to play her beautiful little lullaby for us and once again we saw the dead couple dancing only to be killed by the what, Killer Queen? No? Yes? Yes.

What is rumored to be the second single of Babez was the next song, “Rock Police” and this was also the first point for us to try out our you know, ruin lordi gig thing. I want to clear out from the start – No, we are not hating Lordi. No, it’s not ACTUALLY ruining the gig at all, it’s just the three of us (Martine, me and Thomas) who fools around a bit.

Sadly, the electric chair was not here in Paris. Kinda sad, I had really been looking forward to see it. But it was ok. It was a bit sad it didn’t have any story – the wanker just appeared, Mr Lordi knocked him out and that was it. Nevertheless – The song was amazingly executed still and I couldn’t complain about that.

Not sure if you remember – but the other day I was complaining about how they stick with “It Snows In Hell” instead of doing the new ballads (on Deadache they sure did Evilyn too, but you know) and on the setlist it had been saying they would do “ISIH” but… Do you understand how amazing it felt then to hear the intro to “Call Off The Wedding”? COTW might be the best ballad Lordi has ever done, and to hear it live FINALLY, was great. It was great. It’s time for them to stick to it, if you ask me.

The scene that every Lordi fan knows about came up, the “Whos your daddy” scene. For todays specific event Awa had actually gotten some kind of candybars that were named “Daddy” that she showed off. Real nice. But whats up with her chibivoice?

The band stepped off the stage to give Otus his 15 minutes of fame. Ok – he didn’t really last EXACTLY 15 minutes, but you get it. He has a real intense drumsolo, I can’t say anything else than that he is really talented. REALLY.

An oldie, “Last Kiss Goodbye” has in some way, found its way back into the set, and since it’s one of my faves I can’t complain. I feel kinda spoiled you know – All my faves (‘cept from Nonstop Nite then).

Ok. Now came, the song, that I so dreadfully fear. “Grannyz Gone Crazy”. It’s a fine song,  I love it… but I FEAR the granny. And I am not lying when  I am saying this – when I saw her entering the stage, I basically sat down on the floor. There were NO WAY in HELL I was EVER Gonna be beaten by her. EVER. So I sat gently down. Thomas kinda laughed at it. Yeah, he can go ahead! After all, he is just a GROWN MEN DRESSING UP LIKE GIRLS!!!!!…. Almost! Hahaha!

Another always-be-in-the-setlist-song hit off – “Blood Red Sandman” before Mr Lordi stopped for a while to talk. And what did he say…
“Well. I kinda made a promise earlier today to play a certain song, and now we are gonna do it. So here it is HATE AT FIRST SIGHT!” and pointed at Thomas.

And seriously, I was myself RELIEVED we didn’t get “Evilove” (I am not a too big fan of it) and it was amusing to see how happy Thomas got from it. Amazing.

Amen-Ra got his papermoment-15seconds-of-fame moment, sadly enough shortened down his guitarsolo to ONLY “Amens Lament To Ra” and the intro of Dr Sin, so yes, “Dr Sin Is In” was the next song obviously, and that was a little sad, but I guess we will live. The song was a pleasure to hear again – it is real lovely.

SCG3 hit it off as an intro to “Bringing Back The Balls To Rock” who was followed by yet another tribute song – “This is Heavy Metal”. I got a little pissed about how long Mr Lordi stood there talking about a bunch of bands we at the moment couldn’t care less about you know, I mean, FUCK, they cut out Nonstop Nite, but he can stand there and talk all this bullshit? Well.. I HEARD THE TONS OF BULLSHIT HE TALKS!  But it was well nice to see the TIHM dude for real!

The fantastic three was followed up after that – you know them – “Devil Is A Loser”, “Hard Rock Hallelujah” and “Man On Fire”.. No, just kidding. “Would You Love A Monsterman”. I kinda love the fact that they switched places of HRH and WYLAM. Great.

After this, the show was over. Over all, despite all the down toning things, it was a real great show musically. I enjoyed every moment and can quite easily say this was the best Lordi gig in my life. To make it the PERFECT they should of course cut out Dynamit and add Deadache and for gods sake get rid of “Biomechanic Man” (that they, THANK GOD, weren’t playing in Paris!)  and keep Nonstop Nite.. BUT… It is fine anyway! Lovley. 

The gig gets easily 8/10. Should have been a full set, but it’s not the bands fault.
Best: Do you need to ask? MY HEAVEN OF COURSE!
“Worst”: The talking about the bands. 

Alrite. After the gig we just took a moment to catch our breathes and then ran to the backstage entrance and miraculosly got in. LDD and FOD ran ahead of us, and Thomas had som struggles with the guard so I was kinda left in the middle. I asked a couple of girls of the crew where they went and pointed down in the directions. I didn’t run or anything, just walked for myself, singing a little (I figured I’d also wait for Thomas and Martine) when OX appears.
Pretty much like:
Me: *walking* *singing*
OX:  BUH!
Me:  AHHHHAHAHHAHAHHHHH!
Lordi 2 – Sara 0.

The rest of the band came and Mr Lordi asked us to walk as far as we could and found a door we could go out. Both we and the band thought it would best to be outside (Space wise) but Mark (the temporary tourmanager) didn’t agree… So the band had to squeese into a little stairway, and that was fucked up. Cause if Otus didn’t cover the fan, he was behind Amen, and if Awa didn’t cover the fan, she was behind OX, and OX… did barely even make the pics. But it turned out fine, and Martine, FOR SOME REASON, asked Amen about our madness on MB. And apparently he knew about it, HAHA! Who would have known. After that we started to take pics, and just as we were taking the last… an invasion of fans appeared.

I don’t know where the heck they came from, but a whole ocean! Kinda.. And Mark said we had to leave – and believe us, how much we ever wanna spend time with Lordi, we would never let other fans waiting. BUT, if the hallway was so small barley Mr Lordi could fit, how the fuck where we supposed to get OUT if its CROWDED with fans!? After a while they got it and moved our of our way, and then it was fine. We got out, and said good bye to Thomas and then went to the merch.

After two years I could finally pick up my beloved Deadache shirt, and gladly, it was still on sale! I also got myself a lanyard, and Martine got Otus shirt,  Kita shirt and lanyard (as far as I remember). We waited for LDD to come out (she got stuck in there…) and then we went outside.. to the cold… TO THE SNOW! While we were inside it had started to snow a bit..

We went to the tourbusses and were soon accompanied with  Burning Black and got to know them a little bit. FOD had her picture taken with two of them and we got lightners and CDs of them. They had to leave, and soon the Lordi members started to roll in too. We said good bye to each and everyone of them and then we left Trabendo and went to McDonalds to have some food and drink (Martine, Me, FOD and LDD) and that might have been one of the peaks of the entire night. I had a blast. It was so hard to say goodbye to them afterwards.

We went up to our hotel again and basically just laid there and said “What the fuck just happened..” we put in our backstage pics in the computer to look at them and we were just.. ahh.

The next day we went up ridiculously early to have breakfast and head for the airports, sadly, we didn’t travel from the same, so it was good bye for Me and Martine at the metro station.

Another epic trip was ended. And not in any single way, do I ever regret of doing it. Actually, I can’t wait to do it again. To meet everyone again. Thanks everyone. Thanks.

// Sara
(And yes, all my pics have my copyright on them, you know the drill.)

Alrite, I gathered myself now to start write about Paris. I will spilt this epic trip on three different entries – Saturday, Sunday and the gig! So here goes, SATURDAY.

This might have been the most epic trip ever really. First we can begin with the fact that I actually had to leave Sweden at what, 3am. It was real cozy though – it was dark outside and the bus was silent and not too full either. Hoever we did leave the station a bit late, and that kinda freaked me out, since I had a tight timeschedule to make it to the flight. But thanks to the new road or whatever it is, we advanced and arrived in Oslo 15 minutes earlier than planned. By now I’m quite familiar with Oslo (or at least the central parts) and since we went to the flytrain to pick up Thomas, it was a piece of cake to find it. And I got with the first one! So I was well in time for the flight, no more stress! Once checked in at the airport I bumped into the lovely Martine and we headed for security and the taxfree. Did you know there are no softdrinks in the taxfree? We were looking for a coke but all we could ever find was alcohol. Nice.

I must say, for two girls from Scandinavia that speaks no french, we handled it pretty good down there. No mishaps or anything – we got to the hotel safely. I guess it’s all thanks to Jordan Mooney and his researches and map he fixed for us. Thank you, dear. And also thanks to Martines dad who made sure we found the hotel. I though gotta say – that might have been the weirdest hotel EVER. It was said when we booked it that it was supposed to be a quite nice hotel… But what the you know… My room was almost smaller than the ones in Hotel Micro and my bathroom didn’t have a lock. And we just… relaxed for a while. Just laid down, or, I did, me and Martine had our own rooms so I can’t tell what she did, but oh well, haha. After an hour or so we asked Thomas to come, and the procedure to get him to our hotel was the first hilarious thing ever. He got out at the subway, just as we, but for some reason he had problems to find our hotel. We literally hang out of the windows looking for him and screaming after him, and we saw him once in a while, but for some reason he went totally different ways and ended up at a hospital… way off. He did however find the hotel later on, and we were just about to get down and get him as he came up instead. Apparently the guy in the reception had presumed he was up to visit us, so he had sent him up to our floor.

And we just… froze up there. It was one nice reunion. We listened to some The Mumblers songs, talked ALOT about the next day, and just recaped of the recent happenings. After a while Thomas started to build a tower of cellphones and after a long long while he succeeded. At this point though, we were really starving so we went out on a pizza hunt… I think we walked across half the centre of Paris before we realized we had a pizzahut right across the street. After having some fine pizza and pepsi (in the name of Mr Lordi!) we went back to the hotel to make even more cheesy Lordi videos, refining our choreographies and all. After a while Thomas left and it was just me and Martine again. Updating a little on facebook, and then we were done, and went to bed.

Stay tuned! I will soon update with more.

// Sara

Its been a fucking week since Paris. I can’t fucking believe it. And I haven’t written a shit either. Now I do.

I’ll give you an entire review soon, but right now I just cant..

But I felt I had to say that it turned out like I though. When Otus entered the stage I did cry for a while. It was like… It was so weird. WHERE THE FUCK is my pet the destroyer, you know? It sucked big time. But I got over it kinda fast too. Kita is an arse, just to deal with it.

We also learned that fences should never be put in front of Jasmine and Ginny when Amen arrives to the venue.

NEVER.
And Mr Lordi thinks I’m Pippi Longstockings.

So long!
// Sara