Antillectual

In 2014, our friend Ronaldo Frey worked at Destiny Tourbooking. When he asked us to support Ten Foot Pole on a summer tour, we were honored and pleased. Ten Foot Pole was one of the bands we grew up on.
By Willem

For me, it started with their song “ADD” on the Epitaph Punk-O-Rama III sampler, which I thought was one of the best on it. Pieter (our first bass player) gave me a tape with Unleashed, the album that featured ADD, on one side and Propagandhi’s How To Clean Everything on the other side. I played the tape until it broke. I discovered their earlier album REV and loved it as much, even though there’s a different singer on it (Scott Radinsky, who later formed Pulley). When Insider came out, it was one of my favorite albums of the year 1999.

Dennis Jagard, the singer of Ten Foot Pole, is a renowned sound tech. He toured the world with some of the biggest artists, like Prince, “Weird Al” Yankovic, and Jimmy Eat World. We had played with Jimmy Eat World at Tivoli-Vredenburg in Utrecht six days before our tour with Ten Foot Pole started. We knew Dennis would be at that show to do sound for Jimmy Eat World, so we introduced ourselves and let him know we were the band he’d be spending the next month on the road with.

The first show of the tour happened at Cassiopeia in Berlin. A legendary place that is now under threat of closure because of the gentrification of the RAW Gelände, the area in Friedrichshain where it’s located, a true shame. We had played Berlin quite a few times by then and had some friends come out to the show, but there was one visitor we didn’t expect who managed to get Riekus a little extra nervous. At some point, we walked backstage, and all of a sudden there was Jim Adkins, the singer of Jimmy Eat World! He had extended his stay in Europe after their tour for a vacation. He now came to the show in Berlin to see what his sound tech was up to when he’s not on the road with them. Small world!

Stuttgart

The tour was a blast. We got to know Dennis and the rest of the band, and had an amazing three weeks with them, enjoying old and new Ten Foot Pole songs every night!

Celebrating the end of tour with Ten Foot Pole