Paul Bielatowicz

After breakfast in our hotel’s restaurant, I indulged in the luxury of free WI-FI internet in the lobby, before we set off for the airport at 1pm. Traveling with us in our van was Miller Anderson (the guitarist from BBQ, who played before us last night) and his wife. We chatted for the duration of [...]

Up at 4.15am… taxi at 5am… airport 20 minutes later. After some confusion of how to get to the departure gate we boarded our first plane of the day, which took us to Vienna airport. Another security check… another gate… another covert mission to get the guitars onto the plane as hand luggage! We were [...]

We met in the lobby of our hotel at 9am and set off for a day of travel. The Spanish promoter who had been looking after us took us to the airport and we boarded a flight to Madrid. Once in Madrid, we returned to the same mile-long terminal where we’d been 2 days previous [...]

I woke up, had breakfast, spoke to my wife on the phone, had a shower and then met Simone in the lobby for walk along the sea front. Whilst walking we saw several signs worthy of photographic documentation; Bazar Vanessa (Vanessa is my wife’s name – perhaps she’ll use the photo for her first album?), [...]

After a good night’s sleep, I awoke to face a day of travel.
Our party met in the hotel lobby at 12 (we had to vacate our rooms at 11.30, so we ‘unofficially’ lingered in the lobby until Stefano came to pick us up at the agreed time). From there we made our way to the [...]

Feeling completely rested and restored from the onslaught of the first 5 gigs, we headed to Rome to play our next gig. The journey took a couple of hours plus half an hour for the obligatory stop at an ‘Autogrill’. When we arrived, we found that we were playing in Rome’s tennis stadium (the equivalent [...]

I awoke at 8 am with all the lights in my room on; I’d got back to my room the night before and collapsed on my bed (a combination of exhaustion and Limoncello (but definitely more of the latter if I’m honest))! I went down for breakfast in the hotel’s restaurant on the beach (a [...]

My alarm woke me at 7.30, after only 3 hours sleep – this time it was self-inflicted! I wasn’t too worried about not getting much sleep, as, for the first time on the tour, we didn’t have a gig today, or tomorrow for that matter. We met in the lobby of our hotel at 8.30 [...]

We landed in our next city, Ufa, at around 5am and were met by a new group of Russian hosts. On getting into one of their cars we were handed a menu for our evening meal, which we dutifully filled in. The menu consisted of several courses, the options for the first course were either [...]

At last, our first half decent night’s sleep of the tour; my alarm woke me at 8, after 6 and a half hours sleep. I sacrificed breakfast in order to take full advantage of the sleeping opportunity and met the rest of our party in the hotel lobby at 9. We set off for Moscow [...]

After one and a half of hours sleep, my alarm went off at 3am signaling the start of a new day (the lines between each day seem to be getting smaller and smaller on this tour!). I went down into the lobby and outside the hotel were people leaving a club; it was still very [...]

After a few hours sleep, my alarm went off at 5am, heralding the start of a day of grueling travel; we planned to take 3 trains to Munich airport, where we’d take a plane to Oslo, Norway, for our next gig. On arriving in the lobby I learned that the decision had been made to [...]

It had been precisely 6 months, 2 weeks and 2 days since the Carl Palmer Band’s last gig, and none of us had played together since. To say that Carl is not one for over rehearsing would be something of an understatement… in my four and a half years in the band, we’ve rehearsed a [...]