Compilation video from Stettin, Poland

Thanks to our friends in Poland for putting together a compilation of a few songs from our show in Stettin: 'Echoes of Silence' and 'Ghost in My Head'.

High quality video from Judgement Day "Echoes of Silence"

We just found a great video from Bat Rock TV on YouTube which was filmed at Judgement Day. Hope you enjoy it!

Thank you Stefan and Thomas!

While it may look like it's all excitement, partying, bright lights and bald men from the outside, a tour in a van also means a lot of hard work and stress. And the people doing most of the hard work don't ever get to stand in the spotlight.

Thank you very much to our wonderful driver and merch salesman, Stefan. He is officially the funniest German in the world and he did so much more than just drive us 6,000km around Europe.

IKON would also not sound as good on tour if not for our professional sound engineer and translator of Stefan, Thomas. He not only made our shows sound great, but he also whipped up some pommes mit mayo in the kitchen while tweaking the levels in Budapest. Thank you for your patience and the laughs.

Last show of the tour in Roma

It was some journey to get to Rome in time. After leaving Austria at 1.00am straight after the Festival show, we had almost 1000km to go to get to our final show in Rome by the next afternoon. As luck would have it, a large truck overturned on the highway outside of the city, spilling the cars it was transporting on to the road too. This meant two hours stuck in the van a few hundred kilometres from the venue, and also that we were very late for our soundcheck.

Despite this bad start, the show in Rome was a perfect end to the tour, with excellent promotion ensuring a great crowd were in attendance and they were not shy to stand up the front of the stage and go crazy. We barely realised that we played 22 songs!

We visited the Colosseum after the show in the early hours of the morning, taking in the last moments of madness before the tour came to a close. Well, at least the part before the 24 hours on a plane rolled around.

Now we're back home in Melbourne and we thank everyone who came out to see us in Austria, Belgium, Germany, Hungary, Italy and Poland, whether it was for the first or fifth time. Thank you also to those who've followed the blog who were too far away to come to see us play, especially Miguel and Matthias.

We'll continue to post photos and videos from the tour here in the next few weeks, so keep checking back.

Setlist Roma 03.10.09

Memoirs of a Butterfly
Reality is Lost
I Never Wanted You
Condemnation
Subversion
Echoes of Silence
Dreaming
Blue Murder
11 O’clock Tick Tock
Afterlife
Fall Apart
Love, Hate and Sorrow
Without Shadows
All Depths of Despair

Encore One:
Torn Apart
Path of the Unknown
A Line on a Dark Day
Garden of the Lost
Rome

Encore Two:
Stalag 13
Black Roses
Ceremony
Psychic Vampire

Video of Condemnation and setlist from Judgement Day

Here's a rough video taken on a still camera to show the feeling of the Judgement Day Festival. We've recorded every show on the tour, and both the Leipzig and Berlin shows were filmed, so hopefully some good quality footage will be available for you to see soon.

Judgement Day 11 setlist
A Line on a Dark Day
Memoirs of a Butterfly
I Never Wanted You
Condemnation
Echoes of Silence
Driftwood
Garden of the Lost
Fall Apart
Without Shadows
All Depths of Despair
Rome
Sister Ray/A Forest

2.10.09 Judgement Day Festival, Dornbirn Austria

It had taken us some time to get to Budapest, although well worth it for the crowd's enthusiasm and gratitude to us for travelling there. Nevertheless, we were left some distance away from our next show at the Judgement Day Festival in Dornbirn, Austria. After a day driving in the tour van, we spent the night about half way to our eventual destination, in Linz, Austria. It was a wild night full of clothes washing after so many days on the road with no time off . The following day our "lovely" driver Stefan got us safely to Dornbirn the night before the show.

Spielboden was an impressive venue with good sound and lighting, which looked like it was used more for cultural events rather than the bunkers we'd become accustomed to on this tour. Disturbingly, we knew that we had to leave the festival straight after we played because we had to make it to Rome by the next afternoon. And so we had a relax while Grooving in Green (formerly Children on Stun) played and then performed for an hour. After so many shows under our belts, it felt like we had found our rhythm and that it was a good performance.

After the show, we had a quick chance to talk to many fans who'd come over from England and some locals too, but meanwhile the van was being packed for a quick escape to make the 1000km journey to Rome. As in Budapest, it was terrible to have to leave when the festival was still kicking on with a party.

Setlist and video to come...

Limited edition 2-CDs

Just a quick note to tell our favourite fans who are hoping to buy the limited edition 2-CDs of the new album, This Quiet Earth and On the Edge of Forever that we will have some left from the tour and will put them on our website for sale when we return home to Australia. Don't worry, we haven't forgotten you!

Best wishes,

IKON

29.09.09 After Music Club Budapest, Hungary

It was a long drive from our Polish adventure to our next show in Budapest, so we stopped en route in the capital of the Czech Republic, Prague. It was the first time we'd seen more of a country than the inside of a hotel room, a petrol station or an autobahn, and it was beautiful. We've even got photographic proof.

We arrived in Budapest unsure of how we'd be received in Hungary. What a surprise to find one of the most excited and enthusiastic crowds of the tour, all crowded in to yet another underground venue (we seem to be touring all the bunkers and caves of Europe this year). It has been amazing to play to audiences like the one in Budapest who are happy to have darkwave bands playing in their city at all.

We were entirely exhausted after the long drive and the gig, so we unfortunately had to leave the club night after the show and head for our hotel. Even more sadly, we farewelled our sound engineer, Thomas, in Budapest, as he had to head back to Belgium.

And so we set off in the van minus Thomas's talents and translation skills to our final two gigs in Dornbirn, Austria (at the Judgement Day Festival) and Rome, Italy.