Tag: live

Close your eyes, point your fingers on a world map and you’ll probably hit an Irish Pub. Some countries conquer with weapons, others do it with drinking establishments 😉

When the Irish Pub called Mulligan’s in Deutsch-Wagram (a town close to where we lived in Austria) got refurbished we were asked by the new owner to be the band for the opening party. As usual back then, we had Philipp Wolf on the drums and Michael “Moz” Mozeth on the bass with us.

Everyone had a wonderful evening, with lots of dancing, singing and laughing. We remember to have made many new friends that day, most notably the guys from “Craesh” who we played a joint live concert at “Aera” with later. (It was the one that some of our earliest fans from various places in Europe attended live, and of which we uploaded 5 videos on YouTube.)

They also helped us out with the diving equipment when we filmed the “Nothing Is In Vain” video. So all in all you can say the Irish shamrock brought us luck.

Stay groovy!

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You might remember the photos from our third ever time on stage with our new live band at the Replugged in May 2012. We posted these pictures a few months ago and while catching up with all other photo albums from 2012 we found another set of images from that same venue – only 4 months later on September 6th. Different show, same location, same band.

The sound engineer was much more trigger happy with the smoke machine this time around so the photos turned out a lot different. 🙂

We still remember the difference that these 4 months of live playing made on our confidence when being on stage. We were starting to get the hang of this!

Stay groovy,
Mona & Lisa

© Photos by Thomas “Fuxi” Fuchs 

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We were invited to play the “Sommerszene Gänserndorf” on the 28th of July 2012. It was one of the bigger stages we had played up to that point, so naturally we were looking forward to that day for many weeks.

And it was great – despite the change of weather in the middle of the set 😉

It started off as a warm, sunny Summer evening and turned dark and thundery in the middle of the set, with a short rain shower to finish it all off. If you look closely you can see how the atmosphere slowly turns gloomy and our hair gets more and more messy as the wind picks up throughout the evening! 😉

The audience huddled together under umbrellas like real troopers, and thankfully the PA and guitar amps were covered from the rain so we could keep playing. It all made for an intimate, connected performance that will stay with us forever.

We were still only in our first year of live performing and soaking it all up like a sponge! It really was a perfect evening, despite the imperfections 🙂

After we were done at around 11pm we packed up and headed to yet another stage, but more on that on Friday …

See you then!
Mona & Lisa

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We’ve played our fair share of quirky stages in unique venues over the years and this one definitely falls into that category.

The Höfefest (translates to Yard Fest) was a newly put on festival in a town near where we grew up in Austria. Private house owners as well as official town buildings opened the doors to their gardens and backyards for a weekend. Bigger and smaller stages with all types of live music, magician and theatre shows, food and drink stands were scattered all throughout town.

So, on the 9th of September 2012 we played a 2 set concert in someone else’s garden – and it was charming! A warm summer evening, a relaxed atmosphere and a cheerful crowd in a beautiful setting.

Stay groovy,
Mona & Lisa

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Today we’re sharing some photos of our gig at the “Beach Party” in Zwerndorf (a village in Austria) back in September 2012.

There was certainly a party … but where was the beach?

As it is likely to be the case in Austria, things turned out a lot colder and wetter than desired. The nice outdoor stage they built for the festival had to have it’s inauguration another time as they moved the mini festival inside the “3er Wirtshaus” that weekend.

The venue is a curious, fascinating little place. This little tucked-away venue between two fishing lakes had become somewhat of an “insider tip” for music lovers in the area. It is very much hidden in the middle of nowhere  near the Slovakian-Austrian border, yet hosts some of the biggest names in (especially) Jazz on a regular basis. We’ve seen legends like Brian Auger or Joe Zawinul there over the years.

There are never more than a handful of dishes on the menu, all cooked and served by the owner “Pepi” himself.

A great little place that we enjoyed playing at together with Michael Mozeth on bass and Fabian Natter on drums.

Of course, the “3er Wirtshaus” is currently closed down like most other venues and restaurants. We will try our best to support our own local businesses again as soon as the times allow it and can only hope that they will pull through and survive this “stress test”. It would be a shame to see unique, authentic places like that disappear forever.

Stay groovy, stay safe, stay curious,
Mona & Lisa

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2012 was the year when we put our first live band together. After a good amount of rehearsals and preparation, we decided to step into the live circuit. Once we had gained some experience playing every venue, festival and pub in the area for the first half of the year, we decided to put on our first fully self-organised show in July.

Which meant that we (The Wagner family) rented a big barn/hall in a neighboring village, set up our own sound and light system there, worked with the local fire department to get tables and benches put in, designed our own posters, put up hundreds of them up all over the area sometimes in the middle of the night, spent hours throwing flyers in what must have been thousands of mailboxes (with a little help from a few friends), organised catering, tickets sales, … Let’s just say that we really put a lot of effort into trying to make this show as successful as possible.

Now, when starting off playing live, it’s not uncommon to do many things yourself. We very often brought our own sound and lighting rigs to venues, organised our own ticket sales or took care of promoting gigs on our own.

But that particular show was on a whole other level and set a new milestone for us in terms on how much we can organize and achieve with just a very small dedicated team.

More than 300 people showed up that evening … to a village whose entire population is only about twice that size. The barn was packed to the brim 🙂

Papa Rudi was doing the sound, lighting and was coordinating our filming team, while Michaela was selling tickets and merch with the help of some friends and taking care of pretty much everything else.

In this rural community you don’t get a Rock’n’Roll concert in a random barn every day, and we hope to have created a fun memory for a lot of folks from our area. We will certainly never forget this night 🙂

It pains us to this day, but in an unfortunate chain of events we lost all video footage from that show (and a few others from that time period) during a fatal server crash. Which means we were sadly never able to release any videos from it.

But these photos survived!

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Who would have thought that this particular gig we played on October 20th, 2012 would produce our most viewed video to this day – our cover of Drive My Car, currently at 3.3 million YouTube views!

It was the opening song of our third and final set we had played that night. In total we had been on stage for nearly 4 hours and our setlist was 42 songs long! Thinking back, this must have been the longest single gig we ever played.

Uploading “Drive My Car” was a pretty spontaneous decision. One week we needed a new video for YouTube and on a whim decided to pick that song out of the entire setlist. We are glad we did because we know that many of you stumbled across our music because of it!

That particular show was memorable for many reasons, not only for the length of it. It was the only time we had ever performed at this particular venue, and here in the Club we’ll share with you why.

The “Saloon” is a restaurant/music venue in one of the big shopping/entertainment malls in the part of Vienna that we grew up in – the “Donauzentrum”.

Everyone we knew has had at least a few meals there and it was well liked for its food and convenient location. We knew they had regular live bands there, so when we were in the midst of heavy live performing, we thought it was a great venue to add to our live calendar.

The show went fab. The atmosphere was lovely and the crowd was in great spirits, attentive and delighted. When we came off stage that night, all happy and bouncy, we were quite surprised though to meet a slightly disgruntled bar manager. How come?

Literally the first thing he said was that, musically, we were one of the best bands he had ever perform at his place. Well, thank you!

But then he had to add that he was used to people standing on their tables on Saturday nights, chugging beers whiles singing their heart out to (Austrian) country and party songs. He had expected that instead of melodic 60s pop, folk and rock’n’roll songs. It’s still beyond us why he booked us in the first place but it’s something we joke about to this day. In a way he was the Austrian version of Bruno Koschmider, the guy that had told the Beatles to “Make Show” when they were playing in Hamburg in their youth, to cater to a drunk crowd who would leave the most money at the bar. 

Kind of ironic that the same night our biggest YouTube hit got created.

And since this is already becoming a longer post we also want to address something that has come up in the comments of our “Drive My Car” video on YouTube every now and then:

Yes, there is a confederate flag on the wall behind us, and no, we didn’t know what it represented back when we played that venue. The first time someone pointed it out in the comments we actually didn’t have a clue what they were talking about. After googling and reading up on the complex history and symbolism connected to the flag, we are now very aware of the controversy and connotation surrounding it. It’s a part of American history many Europeans didn’t necessarily know much about. We doubt that even the restaurant’s owner himself knew about the flag’s history (although we don’t know that for sure) but that it’s been a rather clueless attempt put some “Wild West” looking things up on that wall.

We just wanted to clarify that our playing there was by no means a political statement, so next time you come across an angry comment about the flag, please feel free to share this ♥

Have a groovy day!

Mona & Lisa

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The Shamrock is a pub in one of the neighbouring villages to the place we grew up in. Before we filmed the music video for our song “One More Time” there we had played a show on November 9th, 2012, which was when these photos were taken.

Many years ago, we even chose our performance of Friday On My Mind from that night to put it up on YouTube. As you can see in the photos the lighting was a bit crazy, so now you know why me made the YouTube video black and white. 😉

If you want to see photos of our video shoot for “One More Time” at the Shamrock pub please click here.

Stay groovy,
Mona & Lisa

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