Thirty-six hours in transit: right after the concert in Quebec, hopped on an airplane to Paris, then drove a bus through diluvian rainshowers to reach a festival in western France and play again, drenched in mud and jet-lagged. Tom wanted more, so he took the wheel again and drove back to Paris through the night.
Moriarty on tour: Québec-Paris-Laval, July 6,7,8th, 2012.
4:30am : sunrise over Quebec city, amidst plumes of smoke giant spiders hover in their webs above the sleepy acadians. Later we hop on a bus with all our messy gear to reach rue Saint-Joseph for our concert au Cercle. White-haired bony-cheeked drifters watch from their bench as youths line up along the sidewalk to enter the club. The venue is filled up and warm, some watch the show from the...
Leaving Sherbrooke. A hotel with endless corridors and a swimming pool with fake rocks and floating seniors. A hockey coach named Ivan came to the show and now bids us farewell. On the low-cast highways of Estrie, bikers on Harleys with racoon or fox-fur tails flying in the wind, titanic iron bridges from a bygone era, wide estuaries. We reach the hotel lobby swarming with musicians, managers...
A day off in Mile End, roaming through square cornered streets lined with small yards and quiet porches and indie culture hangouts, until torrential rainshowers wash out the city. Les chats les hipsters quelques vieillards à barbe blanche fuient aussi. Our good friend Christine bravely set up a concert in the Dépanneur café on Bernard O. Street, with Montreal band Sweet Aloysius. Inside the heat...
Leaving Montreal, a bus drive through the wide Canadian landscape, endless industries and iron bridges, low skies, hills and mountains and rain and lonesome gas-stations… We reach Sherbrooke and the wonderful théâtre Granada, looking magical kind of like the Club Silencio from Mulholland Drive. People are sitting around tables in darkness, their faces dimly lit by candles like some sorts of...
Sunday, July 1st. Canada Day (not over-celebrated in Quebec though). España supporters flood the Boulevard Saint-Laurent and explode in outbursts of raging joy, all yellow and red after the victory of eleven men on a lawn. Tonight we’ve been invited to play two gigs on one of the festival’s main stages on the Place des Arts, surrounded by the art museum, the national theatre, and a...
Second gig at the Metropolis Savoy club; sold-out room, warm, cheerful and amazing audience. We started acoustic again with an acadian song from the Lomax archives… « j’ai pris mon char ici belle pour m’en emmener au texas belle… »
Moriarty on tour, Montreal Jazz Festival, Quebec, Canada, 30.06.2012
Hopped on a flight, 8 hours across the Atlantic, no sleep, aircrew with acadian accents, stories about winnipeg, manitoba, guy maddin, klondike, yukon gold rush, cree indians, les voyageurs, les 500 femmes du roi, how Canada was made / 3pm landed Montreal Trudeau airport, blinding sunlight, bands queueing for cabs to the jazz festival / 4pm jet-lagged into the Metropolis, old-timey ballroom...
The oracles said it would rain, but the storm and the hailstones went away and we played the gig in frontal sunlight, blinded and warm. Around us the eerie modernist park was for once filled with thousands of people. Inside the greenhouses the dressing rooms felt like sweatlodges. We climbed inside a tiny truck at the back and from that dark cabin the sound was sent across the airwaves of France...
A gig in a chapel, a cloister once paced by peaceful monks, now invaded by publishers, writers, architects, party-crashers and the indomitable RKK / Rémi Kolpa-Kopoul on the turntables. Moriarty on tour, Couvent des Recollets, Paris, June 2012.