Monday August 29 2005, Hof Ter Lo Antwerp (Belgium)
Five Days Off + Me First And The Gimme Gimmes

Today we went all the way to Belgium to see the fifth European show ever of the world's greatest coverband, Me First And The Gimme Gimmes...It was the first show of their one week tour through Europe. After waiting for an hour (we arrived too early) it was Five Days Off from Belgium opening. The place was packed with 700 people, they didn't play that bad but it was really hot inside so I took a walk outside. When I passed the tourbus Fat Mike was standing there talking to people about how nice the weather was or something, pretty cool... Found out that there was absolutely nothing to do around the venue so I went back in to see Five Days Off's last songs.

Half an hour later Me First And The Gimme Gimmes entered the stage, consisting of singer Spike Slawson (Swinging Utters), Joey Cape (singer Lagwagon) and Chris Shiflett (Foo Fighters) on guitar, Dave from Lagwagon on drums and of course bassplayer and scenestar Fat Mike to open with Stairway to Heaven. The crowd was good today, really enthousiastic on I Believe I can Fly, End Of The Road and Wild World, the sound wasn't too bad, the heat inside was killing and Fat Mike damn funny. Every gap between songs was filled with typical Fat Mike jokes about drinks, straight edge, gays and of course jews. 'This is a cover song', 'Jew-Piler' and 'Who believes in God? - You people... you are wrong' might have been the best ones. The jokes were better even than the music I think. Some covers were really cool but I didn't know most of them so I enjoyed the jokes the most. You should order the recording at Noowaag.com to find out that I'm right.

Coolest thing came in the end, after 65 minutes of covers and an encore they left and told the crowd to go get a hamburger at the stand outside. Seven minutes later when 80% of the crowd had left, they came back half-naked to do 2 more songs. Soon everybody came back rushing inside, really funny. Musically it wasn't all that great, but with people like them on stage it's always a big success, no matter how or what they play. It's a real bummer that they cancelled the Dutch shows cause this band in the W2 in Den Bosch would be just legendary. Anyway, maybe next spring.