Welcome back! Here’s the second part of the Taylor Road Spring Tour review!
The second half of the tour started with 2 places I absolutely love playing at. On Friday 27th we headed up to Rhede to play at BLUES. It’s only an hour from Düsseldorf and we drove up in beautiful afternoon sunshine. This place is a proper rock/blues club. Big stage, great sound. It also has one of the most quirky backstage areas on the circuits – a trailer in the carpark which has been converted to a comfy band chill out zone with sofas and heater, low lighting! The trailer is decorated with old posters and there’s one of the old Kris Pohlmann Band line up promoting my debut album from 2009, New Resolution. Nice. The gig was one of the best ones on the tour and I fed off the audience’s energy. I don’t end up going out into the crowd mid-solo as much as I used to, but I did here, jamming in the crowd and sitting down off the stage during ‘Reconsider Baby’ during the ‘quiet bit’. After a gig like that it’s hard to sleep, you’ve got too much adrenalin. I spent ages surfing the net on my tablet and ultimately fell asleep in the early hours of the morning.
The next day after a big breakfast we drove up to Quickborn. The guys at Kamphuis have been really good to me over the years. They’re not only an official band sponsor but the team comes along to our gigs anytime we’re up in the Hamburg area. The local band ‘Punchy n’ Judy’ opened for us. Good band – good blues harp player. Check them out. This gig was our second SELL OUT show of the tour. It was HOT. Packed and I lost about a stone in weight that night. I also remember jamming with the harp player from Van Wolfen, Ralf Kolmer. That was fun, especially playing ‘Too Tired’. After the gig we ended up staying in the pub until late in the night and then we couldn’t get back to the hotel as all the routes were blocked and no diversions were signposted… so like any bad-ass band would do, we drove down one way roads at 3am in the morning! What a weekend!
The next weekend we headed East to Berlin. The show on the 6th March in Kiste was a real highlight for me. Berlin, the capital. My first gig in this magnificent city and what a lovely club. Before the gig we did an extensive interview for RockTimes. Read it here. For our first time in the Kiste we had a good turn out and what a great reception we got! Lots of whistles and applause before we even hit the first notes of ‘Ain’t Crying For Yesterday’. One of the most challenging songs of the night is ‘Look The Other Way’. I specifically wrote the solo for the song and it took me a few weeks to write it. You lucky Berliners were witness to me nailing the solo and well, what would you know, Mike Kempf from Rocktimes filmed it! Enjoy it here. The next day we headed south towards Cottbus and arrived in the small town of Forst. The club, Manitu, as the name suggests in a Native American India styled club. This is a big place with a huge stage. I’ve never played here before and definitely want to come here again! We stayed in a small guest house about 10 minutes drive away in the middle of nowhere and only 2KMs from the Polish border! As for the gig, I thought we were excellent and Roman’s drum solo was brilliant. I don’t normally go for drum solos, but man can my drummer pound those skins! Awesome. What wasn’t so awesome was driving home 7 hours through the night and early morning… that drive was brutal. Luckily after this gig we had a week off and boy was that much needed. Balancing a normal Monday-Friday job with a touring band at the weekends is hard work.
I’d had just changed day jobs and combining this challenging start with gigs every weekend could have been pretty hard. The break was
well timed and well needed, but after one weekend off I felt it was already time to be gigging again! Finally, on the 21st March we headed over to Mönchengladbach to Pogs. I say “we” actually Dennis lives there, so this was a home gig for him. The new owners seemed like nice people. Since my last gig there they have built a little stage and got a better PA. At 9pm we hit the stage and rocked through our set. It was a strange crowd, not many knew us, despite the fact the fact that one band member lives in the city and that we’d played there before. As a result the atmosphere was somewhat subdued. Never mind, not every gig can be like Remscheid or Quickborn.
After Mönchengladbach we had 2 gigs left, starting with Leverkusen, Topos on the 11th April. This club is legendary on the blues circuit and for me it has a very special place in my heart. On the 9th May 2006 I had my first ever live performance fronting a band. I will never forget how nervous I was and how it felt to play and sing in front of people! On that fateful night, playing Freddie King’s ‘Going Down’ I knew I wanted to do this! Topos is an intimate location with a crowd that listens to everything you play. It’s a seated club with a small stage. We changed the set slightly to suit the more blues-oriented crowd, but we still smashed through the new Taylor Road rock songs! This night was extra special as some of the audience had created their own t-shirts and sang along to a lot of the new songs! Also, my Status Quo friend Michael was there too. I first met him when we both attended the Quo album launch for Quid Pro Quo in Köln’s Hard Rock Cafe back in 2011. I’ve still got the Quo ‘Piledriver’ album, signed by Francis Rossi & Rick Parfitt framed on the wall of my study at home! Anyway, I digress… Being amongst familiar faces and
having an enthusiastic crowd makes for an easy gig! Having said that I was suffering with the first signs of a cold, but once I got 2 or 3 songs into the set everything went well. I really enjoyed the gig! This was a good one. And then there was only one more concert left…
The Kulturrampe in Krefeld is one of my favourite locations. Close to home. A real rock venue. Dark, good stage and sound and we can play loud! This was going to be the album launch venue but after I postponed the launch it wasn’t possible to launch the album here, instead we made this the ‘home-coming’ gig and what a night it was. We had friends and family from all over Germany & the Netherlands come out to see us. For me personally seeing my wife at the gig and ex-work colleagues meant so much! Julian Jasny of ‘Minor Cabinet’ opened with a fantastic 30 minute acoustic set highlighting what a talented singer/songwriter he is! At 21:45 we hit the stage and the applause was electric! The gig flew by. I loved every second of it, but it was hard work. I still had my cold and breathing and singing was hard work, but it didn’t deter me! At 00:30 we played the last notes of ‘Reconsider Baby’ and left the stage. I stayed around a long time talking to as many people as I could, signed t-shirts, posters and CDs before crashing back stage! 3 months hard work, but immensely fun work, if you can call it work came to an end.
This was a fantastic tour. As I wrote in the first part of this review it boiled down to 3 aspects. Firstly, new, exciting songs that really found their place in the set, secondly, great musicianship from a young line up and great characters in Dennis & Roman which made the time away from home fun and entertaining and finally great crowds and hosts at the gigs! Now only just over a week after the tour ended and I already miss the gigging! I’d like to thank everyone involved in the tour for making this tour so memorable, particularly the club owners for allowing me to do what I love so much. Most of all THANK YOU – the fans – for coming out and supporting us!
I now need to turn my focus to ‘Black Penny Records’ and the release of Minor Cabinet’s debut album. This is a very exciting step and something I wanted to do for some time now. I did the ‘dry run’ with my release of ‘Taylor Road’ and it has been my fastest selling album yet. Now I know I can help this talented band get started. The album sounds amazing, so look out for the release this autumn.
Apart from the record label I’m working on a few other things. My long-term producer Thomas Hannes and I have started discussing a very different music project (a business project), so we’ll see how that progresses and I now have time to write material for the next album. My next tour will start in October and already looks very exciting with a number of venues that I haven’t played in before and will be a big step up for me! I’ll announce the tour details in the summer!
That’s all for now. See you soon, stay healthy, love from Kris.