7am came around far too quickly. We dragged ourselves out of bed and set about packing up and taking down our tents. It was not a great experience as it was the hottest day so far. The temperature had risen every day and peaked on the day we had to do the most physical work outside. It was very sweaty.

We walked to the bus stop with all our stuff and in a certain amount of pain due to some sunburn. The bus was packed full of people and a good deal of them were from Exit. Between the number of bodies and the heat, we were looking forward to getting on the air conditioned coach to Belgrade… assuming the air conditioning worked on the coach. It was a longer wait than usual for that coach and we couldn't wait to get on as the heat was just getting stupid. When it arrived, there was a mad dash for the door. Ally and I were the last to get our bags on the coach and therefore the last to get on. A bad move because there were no seats left on the coach. We were under the impression that you had to buy your ticket in advance to get on the coach so we always did that but apparently you could just walk on, sit down and buy your ticket in your seat. So Ally and I took a seat on the floor of the coach. That sucked but I got to lie down in the aisle and fall asleep for a bit, which was a bonus as I was so knackered.

Before we headed off to the airport, Boban took us to see one last studio that he works at/with and told us the process of studio hopping in his recording process. Sounded a bit complex but all seemed to make sense. We might be back out there later this year or next to record some tunes, which will be awesome.

We made one last stop and picked up Morris and Damien then headed to Belgrade airport to make our way back home. We said our final goodbyes and thank yous to Marco and Boban and then got on the plane.

At our stop over in Milan Morris bought us all pizza because he said we just had to have some! No one argued with that point as it was great pizza. Here Morris gave us some more tips and pointers to help us on our way.

We arrived back in Heathrow around 9:30pm and had a group of lovely ladies welcome us home. We said goodbye to Morris and Damien and felt good knowing that their final judgement of the experience was that "it was a hoot". Damn straight.

I woke early once again, this time with the distinct feeling that the previous night's beers were playing merry hell with my bowels. The festival toilets were gross as hell and so I thought I'd take the bus to the bus station (where they had nice toilets). I'd pay 20p for a comfortable crap! Turns out this was going to be a whole band outing and a new bonding experience for all of us!

Afterwards, we set out to find breakfast and went back to a McDonalds we had seen on the bus route. We were gutted to learn that Serbia's McDonalds don't do the breakfasts but we weren't going to complain as the food was still welcomed with open arms. More wrath of beer followed however. We sat in that McDonalds for about an hour or more.

We had a lot of the day to do nothing but, although that sounds dull, it was nice to have time to chill since the previous days were so full. So we spent most of the day either catching some sun or sleeping in the shade or reading or getting sunburnt – general relaxation before another busy night.

We got to up to the festival late afternoon with the intention of meeting Aetar and promoting the hell out of our sets but cross wires meant that they were down with the campers whilst we were in an empty fortress listening to a rubbish band sound check on the main stage. I would have thought that being good enough to play on the main stage at such a huge event meant that you were able to tune your guitar and sing in tune. I guess I was wrong.

It was around 6 when we met up with Morris, Marco, Boban and Aetar by the Fusion Stage (after lugging all our stuff from a car park a sizeable walk away). Almost straight away we were taken to a tent to do another radio interview. It was a small affair but more publicity for us nonetheless. Myself, West and Ally took the helm for this one. The gutting thing was that since our cds were no longer with us, we couldn't play one of our songs on the radio to promote us more. Shame. We chilled in an artist café bit until the punters started arriving then we dragged our stuff over to the Future Shock stage. Boban was adamant that we never left our stuff anywhere and wanted us to take it all around with us all night. Ouch. Thankfully there was a place to leave our stuff at the stage but we left Ally and Igor in charge of looking after it for a while.

The rest of us wandered off to an area behind the main stage where there was the official publicity area for the festival with areas for interviews and photographs. There was also a bit for MTV. Morris blagged us in and we took some photos in front of the Exit sponsors billboard (see pics). Some lady from MTV joined us in a couple but I have no idea who she was. It was gutting that Ally wasn't with us but he was cool with it and he didn't really miss much.

There were a couple of back and forth journey's that followed, more great food and a couple of garbled phone calls about something else of ours getting nicked. Once again it happened to West. We had managed to buy another couple of sets of drumsticks from Aetar and one of those sets plus West's wallet had gone missing. Luckily he managed to find his wallet in one of the tunnels. They had nicked his money and oddly enough, his driving license but everything else was still there. So we still had one pair of drumsticks for the gig but on the downside we only had one pair of drumsticks for the gig. West breaks at least 2 sticks every practice so this wasn't looking great!

Another mad dash back to the main stage to see the first rock band on there that year. Van Gogh – a Serbian band and well worth checking out. As soon as they had finished I was back at the publicity area to do a TV interview. We had the impression that it was about to go live on MTV Europe so I was bricking it a little. I was taken to a set round the back from where we had the photos earlier to do this interview and it was a well impressive looking set (see photos). Katarina got interviewed 1st then I took to the seat and got interviewed by Su about Serbia, the Exit Festival and Strangeday. It only lasted a couple of minutes but it was cool to be on TV for something that I'm passionate about. We later learnt that the interview was going on the official Exit website but could be used elsewhere. We'll let you know as soon as we know.

It then dawned on us that we had a load of flyers advertising our gig but they were all still within our possession. So that was our next task and we split up to do that. I experienced first hand the "English trying to make foreigners understand them by speaking slowly and loudly" thing. A bunch of drunk girls asked me where one of the stages was in that very way. Very funny! As soon as we were done we hightailed back to Future Shock to see Aetar rock it up again. Their cover of Paint It Black was wicked in amongst a great set of their own songs too.

Then we took to the stage to do what we came to Serbia to do, and it was sweet! We made sure that our changeover was swift and we got to the rock straight away. It was a great job all round. The only real set back was that we played Trademark Failure 2nd and as I was about to rip into my solo at the end of the song, my guitar went dead. I thought it was a jack lead problem so I shook them both around a lot only to find out that it was my plug converter that wasn't in the socket properly. Unfortunately I found this out too late to recover from it and we just had to end the song. It was a shame but I wasn't going to let it stop me and we got straight back to it. We started off with a smallish crowd but as the set went on, we managed to pull people down off the rafters to come and listen to us properly so by the end we had about 150-200 people. Quite an achievement for something of that scale. At the end of our set we got so much praise from the monitor engineers and other members of the crowd who came backstage to specifically thank and congratulate us. It was amazing to experience. Big thanks to Boban who did our live sound for us and made it sound sweet out front. It was an all round celebration and we listened to the next band on stage whilst we chilled stage side, big grins all round, beers in hands and new good friends surrounding us.

Our celebrations and parties continued further round the festival at the Lush stage. We went to the back stage part that led to the side of the stage to meet some people and to have a dance! The Lush stage had old Jamaican men playing old reggae music well into the morning and this is where we stayed partying on into the small hours. Morris was even having a boogie by himself and was well away. It was here that we said our final goodbyes to Aetar. It was a bit sad but we knew that we had made some solid friendships with them and they will prevail. We're looking forward to seeing and playing with them again one day. We may even be able to get them over here for a gig. Watch this space.

By the time we had finished dancing and loaded our gear back in the car, it was around 4am. Toby and Ally walked ahead but me and West were hungry as so we got our last gorgeous chicken kebab thing before the long walk home. It was a gorgeous walk too as it was getting on to 5am and the sun was coming up. I took some sunrise shots and some extra final photos before getting some shut eye. I considered staying up but thought that 2 hours sleep is better than no sleep. It was going to be another early start for a long day of travelling home.

Not having to be out of bed before 11am allowed us to catch up on some much needed sleep. We woke in comfortable beds rather than on rocks. Always a bonus. We were still feeling the high from the night before and it was good. It was short lived however because on packing up our stuff, we realised that the bag that contained West's 5 sets of new drumsticks and all the copies of Please Intervene we took with us had gone missing. We looked all over where we were staying, we checked the cars and we had someone checking the club but to no avail. It sucked in a big way but we couldn't let it ruin the rest of the trip. We still had 2 and a half days in Serbia and we were going to make the most of it. What better time to start than right then.

We got picked up and we picked up Morris and Damien and then spent the day chilling by a lake in Belgrade. The weather was gorgeous, the water was warm and there was beer and meat a plenty. Around the lake were bars and restaurants and we had a massive lunch at one of these. We had a couple of beers whilst talking about life and music in general and waiting in anticipation of the food. We had no idea what Boban had ordered for us but we knew it was going to be good. First came the bread, then the salad then came the mother of all meat platters! Unfortunately you can't see them on the photos but the platters were about 18 inches long and only about 2/3 inches were devoted to some chips. The rest was all meat – sausages, kebabs, steak type things, chicken wings – and we stuffed ourselves royally. It was fantabulous.

We chatted to Morris about the previous night's performance with a lot of good feedback and some extra tips on how to improve our show even more. The man certainly knows his stuff. We chilled for a bit longer then we took our asses down to the lake for a swim. A few crazies decided to swim across the lake and a few of us stayed back and caught the sun and played some water Frisbee. Igor (Aetar's bassist) came down to join us too and we got to know him more. And here is where we spent most of the afternoon. Nice.

We got the bus back to Novi Sad and Exit again with no complications or boredom. Except the journey was dull as. But to liven it up, the bus driver decided to miss one exit, stop, reverse back down the motorway and then take the exit. And we thought England had bad drivers!

We got back to Exit (on the correct bus) in hope that no more of our stuff had gone missing in the 30 odd hours that we'd been away. Annoyingly, someone had gone through West's tent but oddly, they hadn't taken anything. It was weird but we were thankful that everything was still there. Onwards.

We got to the festival and sadly Lauren Hill had already played. A bit of a shame cos we were all looking forward to seeing her. However Basement Jaxx were on right after and we caught most of their set. At the main stage there were a couple of huge screens showing the acts up close so they weren't matchsticks in the distance. The best thing with this was that you could text in and have your text appear across the bottom of the screen. We sent one in but never saw it appear. However some Family Guy fan sent in a text saying "Testicles. That is all". A stroke of genius.

The rest of the night consisted of more great food and plenty of beer going round. It was the first night that we could have a good look round the festival and so we did just that. We had a peek at many stages on the journey including the Future Shock stage, which we were going to play the next day. We also had a bit of a dance down at one of the reggae stages and had a great laugh. The night ended at a chill out area which had a low wall with a very big drop the other side of it. Not the smartest feature for intoxicated people! Thankfully no one fell over it. We trundled home early in the morning with the impression that despite the cds and drumsticks going missing, it was another fantastic day in Serbia and there were still 2 to go.

Toby got about 2 hours sleep before he had to get up at 5amish to go back to Belgrade to appear on Serbian breakfast TV. It was a cool experience if a little weird! He mentioned that we sound a bit Foo Fighters and a bit Incubus. However the DVD they had playing had live footage from our album launch and Insight as the soundtrack. Not very Foo Fighters or Incubus. Never mind. We were all glad Toby got up to do this and felt for him totally as he had so little sleep. However he did get to miss out on the biggest shock to the system, which was the morning sun. Tents get hot in the sun but tents get frickin baking in the Serbian sun at 8am! There was no need for an alarm clock because the sun always managed to get us out of bed on time.

We had to be in Belgrade by 1 so we left Exit at 10am. Having been ripped off by the taxi the previous night, we decided we'd get one a bit further out of the way but then decided (after some tips from the locals) to get a public bus to the bus station instead. In comparison, the bus journey costs 29 dinars per person which is about 20p, a far cry from the 1000 we had to pay for 3 of us the night before. Under the impression we were all sorted and ready to go, our bus turned up and we hopped on in spite of the driver not being able to understand us. We didn't know how important that would turn out to be as we got the bus to the end of line in the wrong direction. He was a bit surprised to see us get back on in the same place we got off. This time he managed to understand where we wanted to go. So we were about half hour behind but for 20p we didn't much care! And we still managed to get to Belgrade by 1 (after some more glorious Serbian food).

We got picked up in Belgrade and went back to Boban's studio to pick up our instruments but that took about an hour as Boban wanted to play Back Off in his studio (big rig and very, very nice). He put on his producer hat and gave us his tips on the song and structure. All helpful and taken on board. You might be hearing the changes at a gig soon.

We left the studio as Morris and Boban had organised a practice for us so we could get ready for the gig in Danguba that night. We drove to the outskirts of Belgrade and then off the road up a dirt track for a couple of miles before we got to this practice room. I was initially thinking that it was up in the hills because of noise etc. but it turns out that it was the house owned by one of Aetar's members and it is their practice room and studio. It was cool to see them again and to hang out a little more. Before we got to practice, we sampled some Serbian watermelon (see pics), which just happens to be the sweetest, juiciest watermelon we could have ever hoped to taste! We chilled with a beer and our enormous fruit before practicing a couple of songs and then shipping out to Belgrade centre again.

We arrived at Danguba, dumped our instruments and once again moved on somewhere else really quickly. Boban took us to another smaller studio that he works at sometimes and where some friends of his work. We had good look around and then went back to the club with one of the guys from the studio who engineered our gig that night.

Back at Danguba we met Broken Strings (the opening band) and got to chatting with them. Had a good chat to Dzonson (the lead guitarist) and learnt about the Metallica and Muse tribute bands he had played for in the past. When we began to sound check (around half 5) I played the intro to Metallica's Seek and Destroy and the place erupted. There were only a handful of people there when that happened but I knew from then on that it was gonna be a good night!

In England we've been used to gigs starting somewhere around 7 or 8 with the headlining band going on stage around 9 or 10. In Serbia it's altogether different, or at least it was this night. Broken Strings didn't go on until half 10 which was a bit of a shock to the system. We were all knackered and fading slowly. We managed to pass the time before the venue opened by chatting to the other bands and learning Serbian humour but it still didn't help our tiredness. Broken Strings went on and rocked the place up nicely. Aetar came on after them and made sure that energy was kept up. When we took to the stage, we were all still tired but from somewhere came this huge burst of energy. We all had it and we all felt it and we gave it everything we had. There have been gigs where we have played well but that night we were on top of our game. Not only that, but the crowd here were far better than any crowd we've played to in England. They were so responsive and they didn't let up for a minute. They were with us from the word go and weren't satisfied til we played more than we had ever planned to. We've been together for almost 7 years and it has taken this long to realise and experience how a gig should be.

We managed to sell a couple of cds that night and gain a number of new fans and to top it off, we got to stay in a hostel. No festival noise, no festival toilets and no baking hot sun to wake us up first thing. Just what we needed to cap off an amazing day.

It was a 5am start to gather and then get to the airport. We managed to check in and get through customs without any of us saying or doing anything that would get us shot or arrested. So far so good. We had a gloriously tasty breakfast on the other side before we boarded. This was about 9am.

When we landed in Serbia we were met by Boban and Marco, who both drove us around for the whole 5 days. Westy was ecstatic to learn that smoking was not only still legal in public places but also a packet of cigarettes only cost around £1. He was rich! From the airport we were taken to dump our guitars in Boban's studio and then on to see Morris. We chilled and had a beer whilst Toby was whisked off to do a radio interview.

At 8pm we caught a bus from Belgrade to Novi Sad, which is where the festival was held. Boban, Marco, Morris and Damien (the cameraman) met us at the bus station. We got a taxi from the bus station to the festival and got charged 1000 dinars (which is just under £10). These taxi drivers, like many in Serbia, don't turn on the meter and so they charge you whatever the hell they feel like.

It was about 10:30pm by the time we got to Exit and began the whole checking in process. Morris kindly took care of this whilst we were introduced to Aetar. We had previously got in contact with them about Exit. They were on the bill just before us and had also organised a warm up gig for us in Belgrade on Friday, 2 days before we played Exit. They were cool and helped us out a bundle.

We finally got sorted and then had to find a place to camp in the dark and put up our tents in the dark! After being moved we got set up to the sound of The Prodigy playing the main stage. You could see where it was over the river from us and you could definitely hear it clearly! We then took the half hour walk to Exit to try and see a few acts. The streets between the camping and the festival were lined with people selling drinks, food, sunglasses, t-shirts and loads of other stuff. The festival itself was like a whole new world when we got there. So many people from all over Europe gathered in this Serbian fortress for a 4 day festival and we could clearly see there was a lot of booze and pills going round already.

The Prodigy were still playing when we got there and after getting our alcohol tokens, we waded into the main stage crowd to get a glimpse of them. It was just at this point the crowd erupted and went nuts. Thousands of people all around us with their hands in the air, dancing and chanting "smack my bitch up". It was so crazy and a bit overwhelming that day as we were all tired and hungry. We hadn't eaten since breakfast at Heathrow airport so it was time for food! And food consisted of the best chicken kebab thing ever and a huge slice of pizza. Ally, Lydia and I waited around for over an hour whilst the other 3 were in the queue for beer. We thought we had lost them somewhere. But no, they were still waiting for beer. We later learnt that there were a number of beer tents on site and they could have got their drinks in a matter of seconds elsewhere. You live and learn I guess.

After the beer fiasco, we decided it was time to head back and we all finally got to bed around 3am. The festival was still going strong and was still just as loud. There wasn't a lot of sleep ahead of us.

It happens every so often and, by its nature, there are never enough people who know about the situation to mourn. I'm talking, of course about up-and-coming bands breaking up before their time - before the number of people who should know about them actually do. If you haven't already heard, Life Sentence have announced the end of their time together.

Usually the eulogy is full of overstatement and hyperbole, touching a spot in the hearts of those who knew and loved the band and leaving a slightly blank stare on the faces of those that didn't. In this case I don't think it's an overstatement to say that Life Sentence affected people significantly, both musically and personally, and that their absence in the local music scene will leave a big hole.

We first met Dan when we were planning the third smackbosh and the rest of Life Sentence at the actual gig. I'm so glad we did. We've had some great times playing together and we were looking forward to more times playing together. All of the members of Life Sentence are so easy to get on with instantly and to hang out with.

The break up can, I guess, be chalked up to 'one of those things'. When you're in a band it's not always easy to keep on one path together. You can find all sorts of things pulling you in all directions. Sometimes it's external, sometimes internal, but it's never an easy choice and pointing fingers and trying to assign blame is, especially in this case, extremely futile.

Life Sentence played their final gig on Friday 30th March and there were many friends there to celebrate the all too short life span of a fantastic band. Thankfully they have been able to leave us a legacy in the form of the CDs and the memories.

I'm left thinking what other musical greats we might have heard, given that it's possible for bands like Life Sentence to break up before becoming well known.

Dan, Scott, Jack, Liam (and Ben) our hats are off to you, gentlemen.

Goodnight.

Toby and Strangeday

http://www.myspace.com/lifesentence