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...