Mike Mills of R.E.M. joins the Modern Skirts - JoJo Glidewell, John Swint, Jay Gulley and Phillip Brantley - on stage at Westerpark in Amsterdam on July 2. (Photo by Justin Gwin)

The Modern Skirts recently returned from a European sojourn where they performed at three festivals, including an opening slot for R.E.M. Keyboardist JoJo Glidewell kept a diary of the trip and shared it with us, and check out a photo gallery from the trip:

Wednesday, June 25

Arriving in London, the opening of our European tour, and greeted by the nasty little surprise of our instruments once again being lost in transit somewhere. To make this kind of tour happen, a band typically has to rent a lot of equipment, as sending amps and drums on the plane is expensive, and actually, probably not allowed at all. We did bring our guitars and my piano, though, and thus that whole mess. We didn’t have a show the first few days, so it wasn’t a problem, but when you pay a cool hundred to get something onto a plane, you kind of would like it to arrive with you. That’s just not how it is, I guess. We did get them the next day, so no problem, really.

Our driver was a Scottish fellow named Keith who we would quickly become very fond of. Before we arrived, Keith rented most of our equipment for the trip from a backline company, and was there with all of our gear to whisk us off to the hotel when we arrived at Heathrow.

Saturday, June 28

After a few days off exploring London, we drove deep into the British countryside to Glastonbury for our first huge show. We were hurried and hungry, and by the time we got there I was feeling completely overwhelmed. The festival was enormous, 175,000 people packed into a valley with people and tents as far as you could see in every direction. It was to the point of being too much to be pleasant. It was impossible to get out of the crowd and it was muddy and kind of smelled like urine everywhere.

We were the smallest fish in the music world’s biggest fishbowl. The show was fine, though. Got in front of a hundred or so people and played well. Nothing that special, to be honest, but bigger things were yet to come.

Keep on reading…