On the third of March Ryan, Daniel, Damo & I, being the South African rock band PARKLANE, crept up a tunneled stairway leading from South African tarmac to the belly of an iron pterodactyl headed for Canada. Since it was a Lufthansa flight everything was in German, not to mention the eight hour layover in Frankfurt. The flight took 28 hours in total & was a time-warp in itself. As we flew over Toronto in that last hour a sense of accomplishment mingled with a nervous excitement of some sort softly in my stomach. From above this city looked massive, but also dry & flat with little mounds of white stuff packed neatly into the corners of every car-park & road.. I believe that stuff is called snow. We were met at the airport by our prospective new manager, Lindsay, in a stretch hummer limousine & spent our first night in this new city in a deluxe hotel called The Grand. We were too cold to test out the jacuzzi on the roof..
After that first night we went to stay in Lindsay's friend Phil's basement to set our game plan in motion. We played a benefit festival in that first week at a venue called Rock & Roll Heaven which went really well. There was a massive lineup with bands playing from Friday through to Sunday. We rocked it so fantastically on that Friday that the event organizers asked us to end the festival off on the Sunday which was an honor, not to mention a good sign being our first show in Canada!
The next week the Canadian Music Week festival started, which is the reason we came to the country. We were the only South African band to be officially invited to play, we were invited as one of the 35 feature bands, showcasing with the Bunkrock Entertainment bands on Friday the 13th March at a nightclub in Queen Street called The Reverb. So our first week went by with us trying to get used to living with this guy Lindsay as our manager. He didn't have much experience in the field of band management but showed great enthusiasm towards the band so we chose to give him a chance to prove himself, unfortunately he didn't really come through with the shows & it seemed like he had no money, and we didn't come to Canada to support anyone so we had to end that relationship. This transpired in the middle of the Canadian Music Week festival which was a tad stressful as we had so much pressure on us at the time, now we had to deal with this too.
The week leading up to our showcase on Friday the 13th we spent at the Fairmont Hotel (the festival headquarters), networking ourselves inside-out, meeting all sorts of music industry heads, media & bands, and attending various seminars that were an amazing source of information on the music industry. It was fantastic, I loved every minute of it. We met so many people, even had a moment with Gene Simmons - the guitarist from KISS!! There was this one seminar we went to where we created a stir, it was a massive auditorium filled with hundreds of young people, mostly other bands that were playing at the festival.. with a panel of record label executives up front giving information on the ins & outs of the music industry.. anyway, we got in there just after it started found some chairs at the back & parked ourselves for the talk. We sucked in all the info as best we could but the whole time we were sitting there wondering how we could get our cd's into the hands of these record label people.. At the end of the seminar there came a time when the speaker announced that there was time for one question, out of the blue Damo (switching to present tense for effect) stands up. Now u must know this hall was PACKED and Damo, our soft-spoken drummer often battles getting his words out.. Ryan, Daniel & I are gobsmacked wondering how this is going to go.. Everyone turns around & stares at this short mohawked South African, he grins & starts mumbling his question from about 200m away but no-one can hear him so they tell him to go upfront & speak, so up he waddles through the crowd to the stage where these industry heads are luring down at him wondering what on earth he's going to ask. So he spits it out, "What happens, right, if you're a hardworking band from the other side of the world, done the gigs, done the tours, got the fans, got the songs".. he looks each one of them in the eye, then holds up a cd & says "Who do I give this to" then grins. A classic moment. By the time everyone had filtered out, each of those record label representatives had a PARKLANE CD in heir hands.
Eventually Friday came around and we played our showcase with the Bunkrock bands, we were to play at midnight, the last band of the evening. We absolutely ROCKED that show. We had 5 cameras rolling around us the entire duration of the show filming a live DVD.. by the end of the 2nd song we had all the people up front by the stage, by the end of the set everyone was jumping around singing our songs back at us clapping & grinning at us, it was amazing! Thanks to our efforts and all the heelpful people we met, there's now a lot of talking going on about Parklane in Toronto.... Things are seemingly positive in terms of achieving the goals we have set ourselves.
A few days after the show we left Lindsay's basement & moved to this friend's place closer to the city-centre (Dan's young friend, a lovely girl called Leigh), her parents made us some nice big meals & let us stay there for 2 days while we made some other plans.. During the festival we happened to meet this team of 2 guys and a girl who study music industry & production at Fanshaw University in a town 2hrs from Toronto called London & we met with them to check them out & see if they could be our management team... After a short while we all realized meeting them was a godsend as these people, Perry, Jef & Camille ended up being perfectly suited to the job. So we decided to go stay with them in London for a bit & record an album at their studios which is now where we're at. We have our own basement in this little house, the guys cook for us, organise gigs & are recording our album, we have so far laid down all the drums for our 11 songs, yesterday we laid down the bass, guitars & vocals for our first single which will be the song Hold On. It sounds amazing, Perry, Jeff & Camille are excellent in the studio. We may have the massive honor of having Kevin Doyle (of Allanah Myles, Black Velvet fame) work his magic on the mixing of all of the tracks.
So far we have a few paying gigs lined up for the next while, we're going to finish recording this album first so we have a complete product to sell when the ball starts rolling. Our accommodation is sorted for the moment & we have a fridge full of food as well as a bunch of record labels watching every move we make. People here LOVE our music, there's no bands making the kind of rock we're making, and they love the fact that we're from South Africa following our dreams. It's been the hugest roller-coaster ride of my life so far, the happiest ups & the most depressed downs I've ever been exposed to... Am so grateful that I'm here doing this with the band. I love it :)
