isabella

Roaming around Melbourne’s St Kilda … full moon, summer night, lunapark, old seaside theater, Harley-Davidson gangs. Australia, January 2012.

Taking off to St-Denis-Sydney-Melbourne. Arrival in 28 hours.

December 2011. The tour goes on. After a train ride through shiny waters and floating mountains again, we reach Perpignan and its train station, celebrated by Dali as the Center of the Universe (the axis around which the Iberian Peninsula revolved 132 million years ago…) Then the odd silhouettes of the Théâtre de l’Archipel loom over us… a gigantic red sphere. A pinkish concrete...

Moriarty on tour, Southern France, december 2011: after a month in the cold plains of Germany and the fogs of eastern Europe we’re all blinded by the pinkish sunlights and pristine surreal reflections on the coastal waters. Lakes like mirrors, mountains on the horizon floating in mid-air, hovering above a cushion of fog, possibly man-made. We reach Istres at the edge of the industrial zones...

Théâtre de Lorient – CDDB, 16.12.11. Memories from the Missing Room took shape for the third time. The whole thing was quite a rush, no time for a real rehearsal. But the energy was there between all the members of the team… the technicians, Morgan on the sound, Kelig on the lights, Christophe on the revolving stage, Marc the director, his assistant Tünde, the actors Geoffrey Carey...

Here we are! the stage is set we’re back into the old motel room, number 08. The staff drove the whole thing a few hundred miles, then built it back up: walls doors windows bed lamps and revolving stage. Philipe Dupuy has his machines, inks and pens ready. Director Marc Lainé is rehearsing with the actors, Priscilla, Geoffrey and Philip. We watch the huge room of the CDDB that should be...

Waiting for the storm. Saint-Malo dec.16th. Omnibus. Late in the night Emeric drove Arthur and Charles at the edge of the raging ocean… waves crahing against the Pointe de la Varde.

Last week, final acoustic show in Paris: Musée de la Police. Most people thought it was a hoax. But actually the place was quite interesting… full of stories, atmospheres, crime scene photographs, outlandish characters. Quite a challenge. Then we realized the museum was on the third floor of a central police station. Of course they never had a music band come in and do a concert in there...

On the road to Lorient through stormy weather.

La Cigale, Paris, December 6th 2011. Three years after! Lail Arad opens the gig in front of fifteen hundred people packed in the room, she ends it with Everybody’s moving to Berlin; and indeed outside it’s freezing cold. We start with Isabella, Cottonflower, trying to get used to the big stage again after a week of small acoustic shows. Then in the middle of the harmonica solo in...

Third acoustic show in Paris : Cabaret des Trois Baudets, Pigalle. An afternoon concert with a hundred kids cheering and laughing and crying and yelling and jumping on the chairs. Odile a.k.a. Isabella is there to tell the stories and blow bubbles and balloons and dream her nightmares on stage…

Second acoustic show in Paris : Galerie Hus, nestled at the foot of the Montmartre hill. Outside the Xmas lights are glowing, inside it’s Otto Wols’s etchings, scratched and cut into the surface of the metal plates. Are they scribbles? cities? nerves? sounds? Tristan the gallery owner tells us the story; Wols was a musician, always playing the violin for hours before he got in the...

First round of the secret acoustic shows in Paris: Musée de la Chasse. Hunting museum. Bears, buffaloes, dogs bearing weird names, owls on the ceiling, alligators suspended in the underground parking. And guns and rifles. Stories of life and death. The empty museum at night, animal ghosts lurking after all. An albino boar starts talking in the voice of Jacques Lacan, moving its eyes and jaws...

Last show of the german tour: Karlsruhe, Tollhaus. A cheering & dancing crowd; some of them drove all the way from France -the border isn’t too far away.

Reaching the Rhein river now; Köln Cologne Colonia. The Kulturkirche a one-of-a-kind reformist temple run by the one-and-only Pfarrer Vater Thomas: one day he’s celebrating the cult, the next day it’s a rock concert – and we don’t mean christian rock! – And it does work. The acoustics are amazing under the brick vaults, so is the Stimmung and everybody’s ears...

A train ride from Switzerland, through the haze again. In the news they say the Caimano is gone. And so in Frankfurt the low November sun shines on the towers of steel and gives an eerie american feel to the city. The Brotfabrik is on a street named Bachmannstraße… it’s a sign so we decide to play « Long Is The Night » and dedicate it to the author of the lyrics, Ingeborg...

Another foggy road between München and Lausanne. A woman stands hitch-hiking at the entrance of the autobahn dressed in a black XVIIth century uniform; she takes a ride in our yellow vehicle. And starts telling her strange story – and it’s like Hermann Hesse’s Narziß & Goldmund… She’s a carpenter travelling from Hamburg, on her Wandergesellen ritual journey:...

Leaving Prague… a long drive to München through Bayern all covered with blankets of white fog. The Feierwerk is an old fire station converted into a rock venue. Skaters are swarming around the place in the cold icy sunlight. Good old Ivi is there to cook heart-warming and throat-scorching soul food. An east-german skeleton found by Arthur in Dresden looms over our homemade record shop. Dad...

Moriarty in Prague, Czech Republic. After a long drive from Dortmund through bohemian hills and tiny czech villages we reach the suburbs of Praha. We say farewell to our companion Emit who has to head back to old England. Some of us get lost in Smichov looking for coldwar era czech instruments… until we find an old Jolana electric bass, in a strange little shop that hasn’t changed...

The german tour goes on towards the eastern border: with the indomitable Emit Bloch on our side, we reach Dresden for a night at the Schauburg Cinema. The building looks somewhat rundown but the Sergio Leone projection room is warm, surrounded by the painted faces of Clint & co… the good the bad and the ugly watch the show. The dressing rooms are nestled behind the screen, amongst the...