Tour notes – pt. 1: Grae J Wall, Dez Paradise, Clark Nova
Heippa!
After a smashingly good tour with Trashville-Low-Stars Grae J. Wall and Dez Paradise I have arrived back home.
Besides the fact that Grae and Dez are absolutely nice blokes and we had an excellent time: We scheduled to meet at Schönefeld Airport last Monday as all three of us were scheduled to arrive there around the same time. Big Time (sic!) – not only that none of us had had more than 2.5 hours sleep the night before, we all were flying in from different countries. This feels like Rock & Roll already and would not have needed another 20 km in a taxi to make our dizziness complete – backwards and through dense Monday morning traffic.
The next steps were: Getting down to my place to have breakfast and then get the new Joey Ramone CD that was supposed to be released that day. Well, it wasn’t but that didn’t keep us from chasing it all over town until we had somehow gotten rid of the afternoon without having a rest. We played at White Trash that night – but not before assuring we were the band that had been booked. The dialogue with the event/night manager went like this:
“Is that the name of your band on the billboard outside?” – Yes. “And you didn’t play here yesterday?” – No. “Well, then you must be the band of tonight.”On Tuesday we went to Zap’s Studio 13 in Potsdam to record 2 or 3 songs of Grae’s for his new album and to add some banjo with my old guitarjo. I believe this is going to become an excellent album and I hope it gets finished soon! From the first second on Zap made the impression of a nice chap and sound engineer / producer. During the session I should learn that he literally masters sound engineering while leaving the flow of the session go its own way – just to switch over to producer within half a second when a professional external advice is needed in arrangement.
The next day we drove to Fürth to see our friend Martti where we should stay for the next two days while having gigs in the area. Martti is also known as “Secret Penguin Man” or short: Mäkkelä. The two gigs to follow couldn’t possibly be more different: Kunstverein as a name may sound calm and as if it could become complicated getting a beer that’s not warm. In fact it is a punk venue like I maybe haven’t seen one in years: Located in a squatted production building, VoKü-Catering, a raddled pa that nevertheless is remarkably loud and almost electrocuted Grae, and sanitary fittings in a really bad shape.
As always, here comes the inofficial part of the tour documentation, more pictures can be found on the Trashville pages and also on Clark’s Facebook page.
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Cheers
Clark
A few important things tht Clark forgot to mention dear readers…
* We arrived in Berlin wearing double shirts, cardigans and jackets to discover that Germany had become an equatorialy hot country in our absence!
* The beanburgers at White Trash are decidedly good! – as was local roving photographer Frank! Also dear Mr Product came down and the management insisted on giving us about 156 free drink tokens – we felt it would be rude not to utilise them.
* There is a bevvy of French spies operating from the back room of Clark’s apartment – they start work early in the morning (evicting Clark who had set up camp in there whilst the english took over the bedroom). Les espirons appear only at lunchtimes to mingle cleverly with the local community whilst gleaning important information for their shadowy communications.
* On arriving in Furth we debunked immedoiately to the rear of Babylon for long cold beers and here were handed the magic ticket – very much like Willy Wonka but with beer instead of chocolate – 20% off at the Playmobilland shop!! – good times ahead.
* One of the charming things about Kunstverein is that they keep the bar choices simple – beer or strange fruity cola stuff – water is not an option, a good decision I think. This drink obviously improves your skills at table-football as the locals beat Clark and I fairly substantially and there can be no other explanation for that!
Oh and the cute Bavarian swingers dressed as police officers that tried to pick us up on the motorway!