Winter Tour 2020

Monday, February 17th.

Woke up on Day 33 in Wuppertal, opened the window and breathed in the fresh German air and realized the European tour was over. But, we are already thinking about our next shows in Canada, two playing with Anekdoten in Quebec City and one show (so far) for Olivia and me in Montreal. Details on the way.

Before all that we have two months in Penzance, working on various projects in the studio as mentioned in yesterday’s blog. We ventured out into Wuppertal today, we got an email back from Christian telling us that the owner of Pop Art, the record store, didn’t get back to him, so it stayed closed for Monday. BUT, the hovertrain has been running for 119 years and we thought it’s about time we rode on it. So we climbed the station steps and waited 1 minute and there it was in glorious powder blue, slightly swinging from side to side. What I hadn’t expected was how spectacular this feat of engineering actually was. Giant green steel girders and War Of The Worlds’ struts holding up the rail that the train hangs from like space fruit in a science fiction novel. 

We rode the train all the way to the last station (Vohwinkel) one way and all the way to the opposite end (Oberbarmen) before we ended up back in the middle where we started. On the way back we met four nice characters, who were doing the same thing. Three of them were Finnish, one was Brazilian and they were all students of Capoeira, an amazing blend of dance and martial art (they were studying under their Brazilian friend’s father). Olivia had just bought some Portuguese language books and we spoke Swedish with one of the Finnish guys. In the other direction, we’d spoken to some German residents, who were amused at our touristic enthusiasm. We found out some interesting facts:

1. Once, the train fell off.

2. Once a baby elephant was brought on board and it freaked out, smashed through the window and fell into the river below - and survived.

3. Apparently, it doesn’t matter how spectacular something is, if you see it every day, you get used to it (even the pyramids I suppose).

Read more about it here.

So we set off back to Olivia’s parents’ house, Gerd’s Citroen and the monster Opel SUV had taken us 3,383 miles (5,445 kilometres), all driven by Olivia (Siv’s Fiesta had taken us to the local shops in between). We got back in time for me to have a sesh with Ahad in Istanbul, then dinner, and then I watched Chelsea - Man United (0-2).

Olivia has to get up in the morning at 6.30 AM to finally go to Düsseldorf to pick up her new Swedish passport, Gerd is going to work at the German Aerospace Centre, where he is attempting to melt moon rock, using directed sunlight so it can be moulded into bricks to build on the moon, and Siv is flying to Boston with Lufthansa (she is a flight attendant), whilst I luxuriate in bed and try and do something constructive when I get up to a house patrolled by Feliné the cat. When Olivia gets back we’ll catch up on Picard, and plot. We leave for London next week. As far as the blog, well, let’s see, but I can tell you now that IF I do any more blogging, it will now be on my website - martywillson-piper.com.

I’d like to thank everybody who came along to see us, all the support from family, friends and fans (FFF). It sounds like a political party. Thanks to all the wonderful people we met, that ran the venues and were so kind and helpful. I urge everyone to stay cool, stay tolerant, stay progressive, love each other, keep an open mind and keep on trying to like Gentle Giant albums. Love from us and see you soon somewhere.

PS - Olivia is AMAZING!

Sunday, February 16th.

If you were going to finish a tour, where else would you want to do it if not in Wuppertal? Of course if you’re not from around here you’ve never heard of it, but there are some interesting things you should know about this place. First of all it’s famous for the Schwebebahn (hovertrain), a suspension monorail, dating from 1901. But there are three significant famous people from here (in completely different fields), Dance - Pina Bausch, Metal - Udo from Accept and Politics - Friedrich Engels, quite a trio. If you are not into Marxist theory, groundbreaking dance or German Metal you’re none the wiser, but maybe you’re into trains.

It was a really late night last night, so late in fact that I forgot to mention Philipp the American man from North Carolina who I was talking to randomly outside The Tube in Düsseldorf. His mum’s sister was Dana. She won the Eurovision Song Contest in 1970 with All Kinds Of Everything, I remember it well. So, late night, I fell asleep in a second, but had to wake up for a sesh with Tony in Sydney. I was so tired in fact that I got the times wrong and got up an hour earlier than I had to. After the sesh I went back to bed. I got up at 2PM and had an hour to get ready. We managed to leave just after 3 for the drive to Wuppertal, a little longer than an hour. We were supposed to be there at 5 but we thought we’d get there a little earlier and set up if we could as the doors were at 6. In contrast to the first few days of the tour, the Autobahn seemed to be full of Porsches, all different ones, Carreras, Cayennes and Panameras. A white 911 passed us at supersonic speed, perhaps it’s a Sunday thing, powering down the Autobahn super fast in your high performance rocket is way safer when there’s less traffic and no nasty trucks.

(Today’s photos by Philipp Adam)

Olivia brought two CDs to listen to, Holst’s The Planets and Steven Wilson’s Hand.Cannot.Erase., but we talked instead, I find it so hard talking when there’s music on, I can’t help but listen, the music takes priority. It seems that others don’t feel that way and find it hard to concentrate on the music and hear it as background only and everything is more interesting in their world than what’s being played or sung. We’ve been really lucky on this tour with attentive audiences and if you were there and are reading this I’d like to say thank you. It’s been a month of shows, not every night, but we started on the 16th January and we finished on the 16th February, playing 16 gigs. One cancellation due to the weather and one gig that wasn’t a gig. The whole tour was an exploration into the concept of touring Europe, playing intimate shows. Would it work? Would people come? Are there venues to do this? We found out that it mostly does work and we also found out that more people in the audiences don’t know us than do and they still like it! Ha ha. Result! Maybe in Hamburg this wasn’t true, most people knew us there. Perhaps Bielefeld, too, and Berlin, but in lots of other places we were mainly playing to new people.

What happens to the blog when the tour ends? Tonight was the last show, but tomorrow is the last day as it’s a travel day back to the beginning. But Tuesday the tour is really over. I was thinking that I should transfer the blog to my own site, martywillson-piper.com, and continue to write. Will I have anything to say when I’m stationery? There’s still a lot going on, getting to London and then Penzance next week. Looks like we’ll be away somewhere on the coming weekend and then two months in Penzance in the studio, working on projects - Noctorum, Atlantaeum Flood and Space Summit. Nicklas from Anekdoten is coming down to Penzance, we have to rehearse for the upcoming Canadian gigs in May, Jerome Froese is coming for a visit, both in town with their partners Sophie and Anja. I’ll have lots of sessions as I’m more available now to do them off the road. Then there’s the In Deep Music Archive, which is always a fascinating project in itself. I’m always trying to find time to share musical thoughts via the In Deep website. Not travelling doesn’t mean I won’t be exploring.

So what about tonight’s gig? Sunday night in windy, rainy Wuppertal, storm on the way, short notice and not Hip Hop, we were always going to have a small audience. But it was a great show, with fans, family (Siv and Gerd came) and new people in a really interesting place called Kontakthof, that looked like it might have been a cabaret venue in 1930s Berlin. Ilona and Stefan, who ran the venue and the sound system were super cool, they were musicians themselves and having some experience and expertise is so necessary. Two friends of Olivia’s came to the show tonight, too, Daria and Philipp, and Philipp is a photographer and the pictures you see here were not only taken by him, but sent to us tonight when he got home, what a guy! Thanks, Philipp!

Christian in the audience informed me that the local record store Pop Art is closed on Mondays, but he’s going to try and convince the owner to let me in for a browse! Fingers crossed for a final tour dig. Will let you know if it happens tomorrow for the last official tour post, see you then.

Saturday, February 15th.

Late night, not enough sleep, we woke up in Düsseldorf in the flat above the venue sleeping in separate bunks - handy, but weird. They were so nice at the venue, they filled the fridge with snacks, bought 3 different types of bread, so we were sorted for breakfast. Tommy, the promoter, has a record shop 20 minutes walk away so we got out of there as soon as we could and walked through the centre of town past the park and its various geese, ducks, swans, pigeons and gulls until I realized that it was too hot for a coat. What is going on? It’s February in Germany, I should be freezing!

We arrived at the store and I dug in finding some interesting records, Message from Germany, Smak from Yugoslavia, John Cipollina, Quicksilver Messenger Service guitar player, a Tim Hardin live album, Jackson Heights, a Nina Hagen compilation, This Is Pentangle, Edwin Starr and a hard to find Victor Jara album plus some others. I listened to Bohemian Vendetta in the store, but couldn’t decide if it was great or terrible with its over the top version of Satisfaction, so I left it behind.

I’ll probably regret it and never see it again. We had to get back to the flat to pack up and leave and Olivia had to get the car out of the carpark and drive it as near as possible to the venue and the flat above. The streets were full of people as it was Saturday afternoon, so I had to walk the gear through Borussia Mönchengladbach and Fortuna Düsseldorf football supporters that were drinking in the bars that filled the street. 

We managed to leave with little fuss. A carnival band dressed as Incas passed by, playing a song that was some hit song that I couldn’t place but I knew. Carnival season is upon us and in the West of Germany people go nuts for a few days, celebrating with a street festival that includes parades and drinking festivities with people often dressed as whatever costume they found in the fancy dress shop that day. The tradition goes back a couple of hundred years, but it’s actually just a booze up for men dressed as bears.

We took a wrong turn in the traffic and ended up having to drive out of the other side of town, yes we got lost. We were already a bit late and finding ourselves on the wrong side of the river and heading in the wrong direction was stressful. The gig we were driving to was our one and only house concert on this tour and it was being held at the house of the conductor of Olivia’s youth orchestra, Rolf, and his wife Anne. We somehow managed to make it on time, it was only an hour and a bit away and an uneventful Autobahn led us pretty much straight to their front door. We arrived at their lovely house and put our instruments in the front room. No PA, no amplification, totally unplugged and to an invited audience of classical musicians young and old. It was a real challenge, first of all you get used to singing into a microphone and secondly you are in someone’s house…in Germany! Thirdly, these are people that read music and play Beethoven’s symphonies - they are serious, they don’t come across someone like me every day and Olivia has to play violin in front of these people that really know their stuff - other violinists! Aggh, the horror! Whatcha gonna do? Rolf and Anne invited us to play, because they’d seen us at a little cafe in a local town and liked us and I suppose they must have known that we wouldn’t die on the spot tonight. But this was so different to where we’d just been, it was just soooooooooo intimate. 

Well we played, we philosophized and I told humourous stories about the songs, the places we have been, and they sat, listened, clapped, and ate small tidbits (prepared by Anne) off lovely plates. I have to say they were so open-minded towards us and listened intently, some with puzzled looks on their faces as their different English skills showed. Young and old they were amused, entertained and we realized that it’s all about adapting. Last night we were in a Rock ‘n’ Roll bar and streaming to the world, tonight we were in a posh front room of a sophisticated pair in their seventies, performing for their friends and colleagues at a private party. Olivia’s violin teacher was there, Tatjana from Russia/Kyrgyzstan, plus mum Siv and a couple of the girls Olivia had played with in the orchestra (Katha and Felicia and their husbands Timo and Fabian). Everyone here was smart, these two guys were an engineer and a physics teacher. After we played I talked mainly to them and we solved Israel/Palestine, cancer, the expanding universe and renewable energy. The things you can achieve with a positive attitude.

After everyone had left we sat and talked to Rolf and Anne for a while, such positive, friendly and clever people, real gems. It seems like everyone liked what we did and it was 1AM when we left, we got there at 6PM so we must have been doing something right to let us hang around the hummus sandwiches for 7 hours. Now we are so tired, not enough sleep last night and tomorrow is the last gig of the tour. The next time we walk on stage will be in May in Canada and it will be as different an experience from this one as you could ever imagine. Bring it on.

Driving into Düsseldorf was easy, we drove down Mintropstrasse where Kling Klang, Kraftwerk’s studio, was and found our way right into the centre, where all the Düsseldorf nightlife action is and I can tell you that at 3.12AM there’s no sign of it abating. The club (The Tube) was a real Rock ’n’ Roll venue. We have been playing more sit down type listening places on this tour (except Freiburg), so this was an interesting change. It’s always a challenge to get the sound right, new venue, new sound guy, new PA, we have to explain what we want tonally, balance-wise. You can mix this cake in many different ways and not everybody hears it the same way (I love the sound of cake). We worked a lot on the sound with David, the sound guy. He told me after the show that he has no facebook, email or mobile phone, nothing, I asked him if he’d grown up in an obscure Amazon tribe (not really). All the staff were really cool, in fact David bravely crawled under the stage to recover my tuner that I’d accidentally kicked underneath. They have a lady who looks after the bathrooms often in Germany, tonight it was Petra. 1 Euro fee, what a way to make a living. She was a reader, she had a big thick novel called Der Teufel von New York by Timothy Wilde. It seems to be called The Gods Of Gotham in English. It’s one of those historical crime novels, set in 1845. Is it a cliché that more women read gruesome crime novels than men? Read this.

The gig was being livestreamed tonight so I hope everyone was getting a good sound out there. After the show AAE Andy called me and told me it was sounding good in his house. Yay! If you missed the show, you can watch it here. It didn’t freak us out too much, but there is something about playing live to the world that’s slightly intimidating. It seemed to go well, feedback has been good, thank you everybody for listening. Those new strings really make a difference, I must change them more often. Olivia was amazing tonight, she always is. One thing, how you perform these songs is so dependent on the sound, you respond to what comes back at you sonically. There are some venues that shouldn’t have music because music sounds so bad in them, everybody loses.

We are staying in the flat above the venue tonight and finally the noise outside has stopped, I guess 4AM is the curfew. So time to sleep. Tommy the promoter has a record store in Düsseldorf so we will go visit him before we leave tomorrow. Our next gig is a house concert in Königswinter, no PA, you have to be ready for anything doing this as the circumstances change so radically. We will go from the dark labyrinthine underground concrete bunker to the plush surroundings of a lovely home. The set will probably change, too, some songs need the right building.

Thursday, February 13th.

Last day before the last three European shows. Tomorrow’s Düsseldorf show is going to be livestreamed. It’s pretty much the set we have been playing in recent times, but the Europeans haven’t heard it before, so it seems appropriate. With plans to play in all different parts of the world in the second half of the year and beyond, new albums being released and new projects being recorded, we hope to add some new songs and new old songs as we return to venues. There are no rules to the setlist really, but familiarity isn’t the only reason to enjoy your favourite band. I know you know this, unless you don’t. It’s always so difficult when you’ve made so many records. You have to remember that the old songs were once the new songs and if the audience is only interested in your old material, then you are basically a tribute band to yourself. Also for us we are playing songs from lots of different bands that I’ve been involved with, so some songs are more familiar than others, depending on which country we are in. We have a lot of material to choose from and some of the songs we play or interpret might have been from albums that didn’t sell thousands of copies, so the version that the audience hear that night is their first experience of the song.

I love how audiences that don’t know you judge songs without the bias of their success. For example, if we occasionally play Milky Way here in Germany, most of the audience doesn’t know it, so it’s really lovely to be able to play Hopes And Fears with equal appreciation. So our thing as a duo is playing older songs reinterpreted with Olivia’s violin, giving a whole different take on the original version. We should probably record these unique versions as well as working on new material in the future, it will happen, some time.

I finally got ‘round to restringing my guitar tonight. It doesn’t take that long when you’ve done it as many times as I have, but I have a dodgy tuning peg so whenever I restring it, I need a screwdriver to push the cog back into the bent peg so it actually succeeds in winding the string - I must fix that. This guitar looks like it has been left out in a field for a few years. You wouldn’t believe it, but I actually bought it new. It’s had a hard life for a delicate and sensitive acoustic instrument, travelling, being on the road and being banged around in the studio for 35 years. It has had a new bridge carved especially to deal with the intonation, a new hole in the body to get to the pick up as the old hole stopped working. It had a floating pick-up gaffed to the body when the inner pick-up access was broken and some issues with the whole bridge piece lifting from the body. Part of the wood where I strum is getting thin and at some point, I will wear it all the way through. The pick-up tone and volume have lost their little tabs, so I try not to touch them. It’s a mess, I wouldn’t change it for the world.

We took the guitar outside into the cold today before I restrung it and took some photos before it got dark. We weren’t out there long, but Olivia was freezing to death so we ran back inside. We try to come up with an interesting original picture for each blog day, but I don’t think we’ve had one of the guitar yet, which seems necessary. We need someone else to take a pic of the two of us, it’s always a picture of me taken by Olivia, I’d rather take pictures of her and post those. Artwork, pictures, image, for the music to get across it needs a context, a style, an aesthetic that people can relate to. The audience often looks like the group, although one fascinating evening I was shocked to find that the audience was not what I expected. It was The Cure at Madison Square Garden and nobody was dressed in black! They were just a wacky Pop band to the Americans, in New York anyway. I guess the Friday I’m In Love side of the band had more effect in America than the Faith and Pornography side, the Disintegration side or the 10.15 Saturday Night side. The Head On The Door, Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me must have been the American appeal. I don’t know, maybe everything was successful there (three sold-out nights), but the pastel-coloured clothing of the audience and not a Goth in sight surprised me, maybe it’s just the East Coast, it’s the only place I’ve seen them.

Did I listen to any music today? Did I watch snooker? Of course, I did both. I also had a bit of a sesh with Jed in Minneapolis, working through the Space Summit songs. He introduced me to Hinds, Spanish Indie girls, song Riding Solo. But I watched some YouTube vids, The Everly Brothers and their amazing harmonies, Gram and Emmylou and as it happens today I’m wearing my First Aid Kit t-shirt, I love bands with great harmonies whether it be in metal like Alice In Chains or Americana with The Civil Wars or Crosby, Stills and Nash, but Gary Moore’s guitar playing is mad, I listened to Blues And Beyond tonight. Music has me jumping across all styles all the time. I can’t eat the same meal every day, actually, when it comes to food, I could.

Last but not least, Angela Merkel is reading my European tour blog. This after yesterday’s post.

The figures suggest that 120,000 people a year die from smoking-related diseases in Germany alone, the figure is 8 million worldwide and it’s all for profit. It makes you realize that traditionally morality is only ever the conservative excuse for restriction unless morality is trumped by profit. The world is so sad, the world is so beautiful.

Wednesday, February 12th.

Oh the expectations, the relief of the day off, but it’s all a big lie because you are not really off, you’re just not playing that particular night. First of all, you have to get to where you are going from where you are, so it’s actually a travel day. So by the time you get to wherever it was and have unpacked the day has already gone. If you have two days off in a row then you are desperate to do the washing and if you are off in a strange town you have to figure out where you can do it (if you are in Sweden launderettes are hard to find so you often can’t do what you need the most). All this depends of course on how many people you employ. For example, Duran Duran would have an on the road wardrobe department. Bands of any size don’t restring their own guitars, although I saw Carl Palmer a couple of years ago and he set up his own drum kit on the stage, some musicians like to be hands-on. For those lucky fellows with a crew they still have to get to all the emails they missed and what about postcards for the folks and getting to the post office for the stamps, then there’s your wife’s present. Haha! It helps if like me your wife is in the band. I’m pretty handy at negotiating myself around in a few languages, but Germany, France and Spain can be tricky and as soon as you hit Eastern Europe English might not be helpful. Imagine if you have no language skills at all. So the myth of the day off is shattered by the reality of catching up and struggling to achieve awkward needs.

Today arrived and went so quickly that I can barely remember what happened. Late breakfast, Snooker, lunch, snooker, dinner, discussion with Gerd about magnetism, the wind and electricity, snooker, sesh with Eric, dinner, snooker and now it’s 12.30 AM, I guess I overdid it on the snooker! Olivia has been using her days off to do tons of admin and emails, it never stops if you are doing the paperwork, never! We drove to the shops in the Citroen for some essentials and also because it’s nice to get out of the house for an hour. By the time we left it was dark, cold and miserable. As we left the house and got onto the road, all the commuters were coming home from work. Those streams of cars, the headlights dazzling you, the impatient driver behind you beeping you as you try to get out of the side road onto the main road, wanting you to risk YOUR life because he’s in a hurry. The stress of driving in the rush hour traffic every day must be terrible, but I suppose going on stage every night would stress a lot of people out, too, to each their own.

Germany is mad for cigarettes. They still have horrible billboards with grinning healthy perfect people gleefully engaged in some outdoor activity. There’s still cigarette machines everywhere, even in a small village like this one and when you go to the supermarket there’s machines at the cash registers where you pick your brand and buy your coffin nails. Although the packets have these terrible pictures of diseased lungs and children on respirators and all these awful images, these machines just tell you the brand, taking your mind off all the nasty stuff for a minute, just long enough to distract you into buying. In the world of drug addiction and deaths caused, cigarettes are the great hypocrisy of the establishment.

I had a look at eBay today and found this.

The turquoise lettering version of the first Led Zeppelin album could set you back £7,000. The funniest thing about it though was the free postage. I managed to fit in listening to Jim Sullivan tonight. A rather enigmatic character, recently reissued on the classy Light In The Attic record label out of Seattle. He made two albums, U.F.O. in 1969 and self-titled in 1972, before disappearing in Santa Rosa, New Mexico. In his abandoned VW Beetle they found two boxes of the said records, his ID and his Guild 12 string. He was never heard of again.

There’s so many mysterious musicians out there who didn’t disappear but just faded away. What happened to Bob Ray or Bruce Mackay? Truly obscure singer-songwriters, that are barely remembered in musical history. I’m still waiting for that billionaire to donate the building to the In Deep Music Archive, so we can preserve all these mysterious characters for posterity. I guess, a special alarmed room with 24-hour armed guards for the Led Zep album.

I didn’t get to string my guitars today, I’ll do it tomorrow, on the last ‘day off’ before Düsseldorf and the last three shows of our European tour. Today was more of a day for simply smelling the flowers. So Sunday night or Monday is the last designated blog day. Is it really true?

Tuesday, February 11th.

“I awoke in a room, that I’d never seen, with velvet drapes and ancient beams”. Not exactly true, but I awoke in a lovely room in an old German 19th-century house with high ceilings and ornate plaster decorations. Wiesbaden is what Germany might have looked more like if there’d been no war. So tragic, these beautiful buildings destroyed all over Europe, because of some nutter’s crazy ideas (sound familiar?). The idea was that I would get up before Olivia and go put more money in the meter, let her sleep some more. But by the time I’d had a shower she was already up. It was such a lovely apartment, just one room but nicely laid out and with an extremely comfortable bed. We’d lowered the shutters on the tall windows and they rattled in the night, but we were so tired after the show that it didn’t keep us awake at all. We went around the corner to the supermarket to get some breakfast things, it was sunny, so I took my sunglasses. By the time we sat down in the cute nook to eat, it was hailing. There was a girl walking down the street in a bright red coat and a yellow woolly hat, catching the hail in her hands and eating it. By the time I’d eaten that first bread roll, the sky was blue and it was sunny again. By the time I‘d got to my tea it was cloudy. This was how it was for the rest of the day with some rather powerful hailstorms raining down on the cars, clattering loudly on the metal.

(These two photos are taken by Olivia’s mum)

It was a short drive back to Olivia’s parents’ today. We listened to Radiohead (King Of Limbs), I found it to be rather twiddly and uninspired. Random rhythms, none of the magic CAN would have had with similar rhythmic ideas. It has rather vague vocals, I thought, angst for the middle classes. Clearly lacking in the songwriting department, but that’s not what they are about anymore, is it? It really was the classic cliché, a victory of style over substance. I like Radiohead, but this album seemed pointless in the big electronic scheme of things. I think they’ve done much better work in this style. We were happier listening to the hail hit the roof of the car, better rhythm, sonically more challenging.

A lot of people were very concerned about my health yesterday, perhaps these last few days have seemed rather negative, but I have to tell you everything is fine, we are doing exactly what we want to do and having a great time doing it. We travel together, play together, plot together, see the world together and meet amazing people all the time, the gigs are great, the audiences are really receptive, whether they know my musical history or not, and we get to have hilarious moments on stage, as well as thoughtful philosophical interludes. I really appreciate all the kind messages and I promise when I get back to England in March I’ll go get a check-up. So how about some worry-free basic positive news.

Tomorrow I will restring my guitars as we have a couple of free days before the last three shows: Düsseldorf on Friday, a house concert in Königswinter on Saturday and Wuppertal on Sunday. I’m managing to fit in a session with Eric in Minneapolis tomorrow. I’ve been doing fewer sessions since being on the road, but I’ll be back on it in between the projects we’ll be working on in Penzance in March and April:

• Atlantaeum Flood II

• Noctorum V

• Space Summit I

Anekdoten is going to need some serious attention in the coming weeks as we are playing two shows in Canada in and around Quebec City. Olivia and I are also hoping to play some shows whilst we are there, too, Montreal is looking positive. Any ideas for places let Olivia know, mid-May to mid-June. We are back here in Germany for a Berlin show in July. In August we are off to France for two weeks to work on some music with Arno from Sweet Gum Tree and then in mid-August, we fly to America. We will keep everyone posted about that as the facts unveil themselves. On new confirmed releases, at some point, we will be starting a campaign for the new MOAT record Poison Stream, which will be out later this year. Salim Nourallah’s album A Nuclear Winter Feels Warm, that I produced and play on, is coming and then there’s Record Store Day. Where and when exactly Olivia and I record is as yet unknown.

You may not be aware that Olivia is a dual German/Swedish citizen as she has a German father (Gerd) and a Swedish mother (Siv). She will be making two trips to Düsseldorf this week, one for the show on Friday, but firstly on Thursday, she is off to the Swedish consulate to pick up her new Swedish passport. It's taken some serious paperwork since her childhood passport expired decades ago, so this is a real result. Talking of results, next week Liverpool play Atlético Madrid in the Champions League, this Friday episode 4 of Picard will be aired. Life is beautiful.

Monday, February 10th.

The alarm went off at 8 AM, Olivia was going to get the car from the park and ride, thank goodness we did that, saving 165 Euros in parking, but really, convenience shouldn’t cost that much. I awoke, spitting blood, seriously, I was spitting blood. I felt like a boxer after a fight, I had that taste in my mouth, the taste of iron. I thought that’s not good and then I thought things like this happen when you get older, aches and pains, a slowing down. But in reality, I’m rather mobile, I swim, I usually do a mile freestyle non-stop when I’m actually near a pool and this blood thing isn’t regular but it has happened before. I feel fine, really, I feel fine. I thought about the coronavirus and the thousand deaths, those poor people, out of nowhere, life is so fragile.

Olivia left, I stole another half an hour of almost sleep, eyes closed, horizontal, but never really leaving. I noticed the stain on the pillow and thought, there it is again. I had a quick shower and then started to pack everything up. I realized that this was actually a pretty nasty room - cramped, hindered by the slant of the ceiling, a small window covered with a square piece of cheap nylon, strung up and doing little to keep out the light. The walls were somehow greasy, with a fake partition wall that had split this attic into two rooms one side of the landing and two rooms on the other with a shower/toilet in the middle in-between and opposite the stairs. It must have taken a real cold heart to think that you could get four rooms at 70 Euros a night out of a space this size.

In our room, some previous occupants had scrawled something about Brazil in purple text on one of the beams. The sink had one tap with only cold water. The bed dipped in the middle and every time anyone left their room, their door was designed to slam shut rather heavily, making you think it was your door that was opening or closing. Because the stairs were so steep I had to take our bags and our instruments, our lights and our smaller bags down one by one, holding onto the handrail, and down three floors. I made nine trips down and nine trips up. That was 774 steps before 11 AM - am I fit? It’s true, at the end I was hurting, my knee ached, and I was too hot, but I wasn’t dying. I left everything on the inside of the front door whilst Olivia was driving around trying to find a park, in the end, we just had to squeeze close to the parked cars outside the hostel door and I loaded everything into the car as quickly as possible.

The street was full of garbage, scattered around by the storm, it was a real mess and the wind was still up. We’d heard the rain and the wind pummelling the building during the night. It woke us up a few times, we tried to ignore it, tried to incorporate it into a dream. Although it was loud and vicious, it was comforting to be under a quilt in a warm room out of its way and suddenly this rather grungy claustrophobic excuse for a room seemed rather cosy and we were grateful for its protection. When I’d finally got the car loaded, I took the key card back to the office at another hostel a block away. The guy behind the counter didn’t understand my accent. I asked him where he was from, “Switzerland”, I tried some broken German, but he was from the French-speaking part and that’s actually easier for me. I told him we were from “chambre huit” and he returned the ten euro key deposit, finally we were on our way.

It might seem that Amsterdam was a huge disappointment, a disaster even, but it was just an example of what can happen to anyone in life, a random event that changes your plans completely. Financially, it was unfortunate, you don’t get paid for a show you don’t do, but the expenses remain. Ultimately I was in an interesting place with my lovely wife, buying records and experiencing another culture. That’s worth a lot to me and it's fascinating to see the unlikely social experiment that is Amsterdam seemingly work so well, on the surface. Although you can only get a shallow impression in three days, when I was there with The Saints I was there for months and got to know the place from the point of view of a resident and it works at least as well as anywhere else and those liberal laws, rather than causing societal collapse, only show me tolerance at work.

On the Autobahn the wind was blowing the car around, it was a little scary on the bridges and when passing the trucks, you felt the car move sideways as a blast of wind caught you emerging as you overtook. It is Olivia who does all the driving. I don’t drive, I’ve never had a license. I did learn sort of once about 20 years ago, but I never took a test. The bottom line is that if you were giving birth I could get you to a hospital, but you might be better putting the brakes on baby because it might take me a while to remember which pedal stops the car and which makes it go. In other words, you’d be safer without my help.

The clouds were huge in the sky and passing into Germany from The Netherlands the landscape barely changed, just the signposting and the speed limit. I’d bought some rolls the night before to eat for breakfast, but Olivia needed to stop to get something. We pulled over into a place that seems to have a badly designed car park, was this really Germany? The cars didn’t fit properly, it was more like a puzzle than a car park. Was it a test? Olivia found some rather tasty and innutritious items as I looked for a power bar, cranberry and cassis? Really? No newt and guava or butterfly proboscis and kohlrabi?

Sunday, February 9th.

Oh God!!! Nooooooo!!!! Amsterdam cancelled! I started the day a little too early after a late night and a morning session with Tony in Sydney and halfway through Olivia got the message, CANCELLED! It wasn’t just the venue, it was all the parks were closed and the venue was in Vondelpark. Disappointed? Just a bit, we’d already been through this once with the first venue having to close and now this freak of nature. Talking of freaks of nature, already not in the mood, the horrible freak of nature in the bagel place gave me some horrible attitude when I asked if they had decaf, “WHY?”, he said. He reminded me of an animated plasticine character I remember from Vision On, a seventies educational kids programme in England. The characters were often moulded into great balls of bulbous lumps until some caring human rolled them into little men with personalities and useful tasks. This guy looked like he had fallen off the table before they’d finished his face or had a chance to add the brains. He looked like he collected dust. “Why?”, he said again, this time a little louder. We left.

Around the Museumplein, we passed three buskers, one on clarinet, one on saxophone, and a duo on violin and accordion. The latter were playing Vivaldi when we first went by, on the way back both them and the clarinettist were playing the Game Of Thrones theme tune. The sax player just jammed with himself. There are no buskers anywhere else in Amsterdam, just here. Maybe it’s forbidden, I mean, what’s worse, a terrible busker or legal prostitution and drugs? Haha, I think we know the answer. As it was still light-ish I decided to take some final Amsterdam pics and was delighted to find a tacky souvenir shop called Gone With The Wind - quite! The weather was getting worse, it started to rain and by 4 o’clock I was already tired. We couldn’t really walk around, but we had our computers with us so we sat in Starbucks and Olivia tried to plan as I stared at the wall and imagined jewelled serpents, desert trains carrying exotic spices across the Sahara and the piercing blue eyes of the last Martian princess. Soon I awoke and nervous about asking for my normal decaf (espresso macchiato, double shot, medium cup, soya, super dry) I ordered a decaf Americano which I never do and it was horrible. The whole time they were playing awful music, I looked around at all the people, it was a big place. I’m pretty sure nobody was listening. I’m also pretty sure that they weren’t listening because the music had no impact on their souls. No impact on their feet either. At 7 o’clock, as the place had emptied out a bit, I asked them if they could change the music and the lesson here is if you don’t ask you will never receive, they changed it to classical. Relief! Just something else rather than the empty dross that is modern Pop. I have a theory that even the people that like it don’t like it. Grumpy Old Men aside, will they still be listening to it in their 60s? It’s not that all the stoopid Rock music from the past is the greatest thing that ever happened to the world but it did penetrate the soul. Perhaps ‘souls’ were designed differently then. On a positive note, I’m sure young people are brighter than we were but they seem to be craving something that we had in abundance. Perhaps this isn’t connected but walking home the other night, a car opened its door and dumped a white plastic bag of rubbish right there in the middle of the street, I looked in at the occupants of the car agape. The young guy inside just smiled, but I’m sure somewhere inside part of his soul slightly withered.

When I discovered the heavy hitters like Deep Purple, Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin at 14 and probably as a reaction to the sixties and my elder brother’s tastes, my mum used to say to me “But you can’t hear the words”. We are doomed to suffer different generations’ tastes in fashion and music. My dad hated my long hair but didn’t seem to mind me smoking from my 16th birthday onwards. How can we make sense of what is ingrained, dispel with bad traditions and see the sense in new moral judgements based on common sense rather than on fear and ignorance. My dad never knew I had even tried any drug, he would have flipped and yet he sat there every night watching the television with my mum, as she smoked packet after packet of Rothmans cigarettes and drank whisky and American dry, he was just used to it and used to society accepting it as the norm. He on the other hand didn’t drink much or smoke, he had a cigar phase only but that stopped as he got older. My mum gave up smoking in her seventies after smoking her whole life. I asked her how she managed to give up. She said that she had had a cold, hadn’t smoked for a couple of days and then didn’t fancy it anymore, just like that. She died at 80 from an allegedly non-related smoking illness, Pulmonary Fibrosis. My dad went on till he was 93, dying 7 years after my mum from a heart attack. Sadly, still holding on to the values that made them who they were and worse of all not knowing the difference between what was amazing about them and what was totally unacceptable. I’ll leave it to your imagination to figure out what those things were based on their generation.

So here we are, trapped in an Amsterdam Starbucks when we should be on stage at Vondelbunker. The night is still young, but we have a very early morning and a long drive back to Germany for the next show in Wiesbaden. We will leave Amsterdam and its population of the unseen elderly and pleasure seekers, lads with half-shaved heads and trainers, girls with pants that don’t reach their ankles and low cut socks. I will take my long hair and my guitars and sail off into the future, trying to understand them, but are they trying to understand me?

Saturday, February 8th.

It’s just bizarre how the fates can conspire against you and whatever you do, which ever way you turn, the universe says no. It all started with the tree roots attacking the pipes of De Peper, the first place we were playing here in Amsterdam. The venue has had to close down whilst the problem is fixed. On a poetic note, sessioneer Doug told me that roots look for water whether it be natural or in pipes, growing towards the source. All was not lost, they found another venue for the show, Vondelbunker, and so here we are in Amsterdam, a couple of days earlier so we can get a sense of the city, walk around the canals, find the record stores, immerse ourselves in another culture. BUT, we just got an email from the promotor, there’s the storm from hell approaching and the staff at the venue are worried for their safety. There’s something called a Code Orange weather alert going into force and that tomorrow may be too dangerous to even go outside.

So the trip may have been in vain, except of course for the pleasure of being in Amsterdam, taking it all in and visiting Concerto, one of Amsterdam’s great record stores (open since 1955), friendly, too. But with the hard to find Dutch records I found, the 3 nights of accom, fuel for Mr Citroen and eating out for us, it could be an expensive trip with no show income to help with the costs. The worst case scenario is the storm lingering, hindering our travel back to Germany for the Wiesbaden gig. Everything will be clearer tomorrow - except in the sky.

Today actually started with rain and of all the interesting places to eat we ended up at an atmosphere free bakery. The man behind the counter was Egyptian, I, of course, mentioned Salah, his response was “Why should I like him, do I see any of his cash?”. Haha, that’s a first.

From there we walked down the canals, marvelling at the amazing houses, heading for Concerto. What a great store, with a cafe and a large range of new and secondhand vinyl, CD and video. The gems just kept on coming, especially with the Dutch bands, Robbie van Leeuwen’s Galaxy-Lin, Jo Jo, George Kooymans’ solo album from 1971, Paradise Now by Group 1850 from 1969, The Nits’ Work and Tent, The Meteors, plus Blackfield 2, the last Mew album and an Akarma Dark reissue. Heaven in vinyl terms. From there and just a block away we found an Indian restaurant, first in, but when we left it was packed. It’s strange when you walk into an empty restaurant, what’s wrong with it? Why is there nobody here?

The rain had stopped and it was dark. We thought about going to the impressive art deco Pathé Tuschinski theatre to see a film but with only 7 seats left on a Saturday night for Dark Waters, we decided against it. We touristed around the canals some more and took some photos. Earlier we’d stopped at Starbucks and contemplated the future. You might not like Starbucks, but I’m telling you, a lot of interesting plans have been hatched there and their decaf is better than the competitors’ (don’t hassle me for going to Starbucks or drinking decaf). 

We dropped the records off at the accom, Olivia bravely took them up the 43 steps to our cubbyhole, which by the way is full of gear we probably won’t get to use. Underneath the accom is a coffee shop, there was a man outside, some years younger than me (Who isn’t? Especially in the streets of this young persons’ party town). Whilst waiting for Olivia I got in a conversation with him. He grew up in Stoke-on-Trent and presently lives in Oxford. We discussed the interesting phenomena that are Amsterdam, lots of stoned people, lots of drunk people, lots of people who are neither stoned nor drunk, prostitution, easy access to drugs, multiple nationalities, men, women, different religions and NO AGGRESSIVE VIBE. “Not like this in England.”, he said, ”What’s the matter with people?”. He told me he had had the time of his life, had been drunk the whole weekend. He also told me that when he left Stoke the first time and arrived at Euston station he couldn’t believe how multi-cultural it was, he’d never seen anything like it and he decided there and then that he would get to know these people from different places. Wow! What a coherent and reasonable guy, whose intoxication did not affect his humanity.

So now we go to sleep and wait and see if the storm cancels our show. What a disappointment that will be. It’s been such a long time since I was here. That was when I was playing with The Saints, that’s a whole other story, one that I probably won’t tell.

Friday, February 7th.

Amsterdam! It took just two hours and twenty minutes to reach the Dutch border, we stopped just on the other side to get a taste of The Netherlands in the garage shop. Between the garage and Burger King there was a Tesla charging station with six Teslas parked, not part of the garage but everyday Dutch Tesla drivers. It seemed both futuristic and unusual to see so many higher end cars outside a Burger King as well as such a facility being available here. Another hour and half to the outskirts of the city and into the Dutch mountains of glass and concrete before the houses start to shrink and age as the centre gets closer. 

Before you know it you are crawling along narrow streets, full of people, bikes, trams and other cars. As usual at night in a city like this, most people are teens to forty as the older people escape to the comfort of quiet conversation, a welcoming pet or a good book. It’s a cold Friday and the hedonists are out in force. It must be one of the freest cities in the world with an invisible police presence which proves something. People from other countries must go nuts here with the easy drug laws, the red light district and the swarms of international revellers in the streets. After five minutes I’ve heard Spanish, French, Dutch, English, Italian, German and no bad vibes in the air. I just love Europe, what an amazing success it is, people from different nationalities working together, excepting each other’s traditions, and interested in each other rather than there being competition or conflict. This European Union thing is a really great idea, I hope that one day the UK will be allowed into the club.

We found the place we were staying in pretty quickly but the parking was a nightmare. We decided to go into a car park whilst we checked in, it was 2,20 Euros per 15 minutes that’s nearly 10 US dollars an hour (seven pounds fifty). We are staying for 3 days that means if we stayed in that spot it would cost us one hundred and eighty dollars (one hundred and forty pounds) on the day rate. So we unloaded, drove the car out of town, parked for free at Park & Ride and caught the train back into town. It was getting late and we were hungry so at central station we thought perhaps a quick takeaway but the falafel place didn’t have hummus and I’m sorry, but for me falafel without hummus is a non-starter. So we walked into the city and the streets were buzzing. At one point ‘pedestrian controllers’ stopped us crossing the road to let the cars through, but soon we were in the narrow streets and the madness of Amsterdam on a Friday night.

Chinese, Burgers, Indian, Vietnamese noodles, Pasta, Pizza, bright windows full of macaroons and chocolate eclairs, giant glazed strawberries on shortbread pies and kiwi fruit cream cakes. A lot of these places were closing but not all of them and we managed to find a Pad Thai restaurant that was open until midnight. Two men behind us speaking Spanish excitedly, good friends, a table full of young men in baseball caps and hoodies, hair shaved on the sides of their heads, speaking a language I didn’t recognize, a middle aged couple perhaps from Italy and two American girls, one putting in her contacts, the other putting on lipstick. It was a lot of food and we were glad to walk. We passed the windows of the ladies of the night in the red light district, framed by red neon in bodystockings, angled to expose their hips as they slinked around behind the glass. One older woman with crazy hair smiled profusely and waved. Groups of young men were stopping as one to ogle, whilst other girls were in conversations with potential customers, I guess there’s a price list. The smell of marijuana was in the air as we drifted by coffee shops and alcohol affected individuals paused for breath looking quite disorientated in the circus of their surroundings. We headed back to the hotel.

The hotel or hostel wasn’t cheap and isn’t much more than a cupboard. Shared bathroom and toilet at the top of the steepest stairs you have ever seen. If you ever wondered where the Dutch mountains were, they are inside the houses. Three floors up and a test for my dodgy left knee, I’d already been up and down about six times with the guitars and the lights and the merch and the equipment bag and our suitcase and the computers, Olivia was helping at first but later she had to stay with the car. The ceiling is at a slant we have no view and barely have room to move with the gear in the room. That’s Amsterdam and we are very happy to be here to experience it. A day of exploring tomorrow and a show here on Sunday. What a life.

Thursday, February 6th.

There was a star so bright in the sky tonight that it looked like it was moving, twinkling doesn’t really cover it. It was shimmering, just hanging there, throwing out so much light that it was hard to look at as it dominated the early evening sky. It drew attention away from every other thing whilst giving up none of its secrets. A supermoon is coming this weekend and tonight an irregular shaped moon glowed bright beyond the trees, exaggerating an arctic chill and calmly threatening the fierce storm that is forecast for the weekend.

Today’s exploits are all last minute preparations before tomorrow’s trip to Amsterdam. The Citroen is fixed, we have water bottles, Gerd has also fixed the damaged Liechtenstein lamp and a short sharp raid on his CD library will give us music for the journey. Travelling across Europe in January/February can be bleak but it can also be beautiful. It just depends on your perspective. Sleek black brilliantly designed luxury sports cars, streaking across the countryside, efficient, fast, smooth, expensive, high quality machinery - one man’s beauty. Gas guzzling, pretentious, elitist, corporate, capitalist ugly machines, like giant dangerous beetles, destroying the environment, selfishly exacerbating and displaying the vast gap between rich and poor - another man’s ugly.

Rolling misty hills, bright green fields, calm grazing sheep, fast rolling rivers, excitable flocks of birds and smog coughing trucks, cigarettes in the smoking areas of the truck stops, the smell of gasoline, shops full of chemical-filled sweets, sugar overloads, addictive fizzy drinks with lies on the labels, colourful, to make you think that they are worth having, caffeine headaches. Cheerful waitresses, sharing a joke, kind smiles, helpful strangers, sweet children running around the cafe, oblivious to the world. There’s some fundamental process at work in the universe that balances different sides of the story, good needs bad to be good and bad needs good to be bad.

Today’s good was another trip to Nobbi’s record store to pick up the records that I’d put aside, except when I got there, the other guy hadn’t told the owner and he had filed them all away again so all my careful plans fell apart. The records were randomly replaced back in the racks, but I survived, I found them again, including Dr. Z, Three Parts To My Soul, produced by the original Nirvana mainman Patrick Campbell-Lyons. This is one of the world’s rarest Rock albums. I won’t tell you about it here because you really have to discover it yourself. I can only mention oddities such as this in passing until I get some time to review records on the In Deep Music Archive site again. This was just one of many interesting records that I always find there, there really is no end.

The world keeps turning, but things keep flying off. Kirk Douglas (born Issur Danielovitch) died at the age of 103. Who can forget the “I am Spartacus” line? Something is definitely in the water around their house. His second wife Anne Buydens (born Hannelore Marx) married him in 1954 and unbelievably survives him, she is 100 years old. I wonder if those that saw him as the strong patriotic American, realized, that Kirk Douglas wasn’t his given name and that he came from a poverty-stricken immigrant Jewish family from Russia that spoke Yiddish at home?

The road I spoke about yesterday flooded today and was closed, so lots of traffic was redirected. Lots of signs round, saying ‘Umleitung’, it means diversion in German. So why is the first track on Status Quo’s 1971 album Dog Of Two Head called Umleitung? But one might also ask why is the first track on side two called Gerdundula? Neither of these words appear in the lyrics and the band weren’t exactly known for cryptic intellectual texts or messages. Like the sparkling stars, it’s just another example of life’s little mysteries?

Wednesday, February 5th.

Yes! I did it, I did it! I stayed in bed till 2.15PM. That might not be the most exciting piece of news I ever shared, but let me tell you, for me it was a priority. I wonder what the aliens are going to think when they go public? This thing you call sleep where you have to switch yourselves off for a third of each day and if you don’t do it you can’t stop it happening anyway. A third of your life switched off, what a waste. As for dreams, they are always so frustratingly out of reach. Full of meaning? No meaning at all? Random images and thoughts? Frightening nightmares, it’s all so hard to sort out, drawers full of memories, mixed with fears and aspirations, no wonder we’re confused when we’re awake.

Gerd fixed the microphone today, that is he explained that the broken microphone wasn’t broken, it just needs someone with an engineer’s brain to see that. Siv managed to get zucchini into a willing Olivia, disguised as pasta, a definite first. Feliné (the cat) stood at the door, looked out and looked up for the door to be opened and as soon she was out she wanted to come back in, this is a pattern, but it makes sense, if you’re a cat. Nothing happening inside, nothing happening outside, repeat, sleep, where’s the food?

We planned to go on a shortish hike down to the nearest town today but late sleeping and a session with Noel at 7PM and another with Mark at 9.30PM made us rethink and we decided to wait for Siv to return in her car after taking Gerd to get the fixed Citroen. Olivia wanted to show me something - the high Rhine. Apparently at this time of year the waters of the Rhine rise. Interestingly, having just been in Liechtenstein, we saw an early weaker source of this massive river and today the banks were flooded, the footpath and the tram tracks were flooded and they are about to close the road as it does its annual spill onto the land, presumably excess water from Switzerland, more rain, melted snow. The slow long barges that never stop transporting ores and all kinds of industrial goods up and down the river, travelled faster than usual on an angry current today. Whilst standing there, a Belgian boat called Comus went by, you can just see it in the picture. This from Wikipedia:

In Greek mythology, Comus (Ancient Greek: Κῶμος) is the god of festivity, revels and nocturnal dalliances. He is a son and a cup-bearer of the god Dionysus. Comus represents anarchy and chaos. His mythology occurs in the later times of antiquity. During his festivals in Ancient Greece, men and women exchanged clothes. He was depicted as a young man on the point of unconsciousness from drink. He had a wreath of flowers on his head and carried a torch that was in the process of being dropped. Unlike the purely carnal Pan or purely intoxicated Dionysos, Comus was a god of excess.

Comus are also of course a mad Progressive Folk band, that made two albums in the first part of the seventies. If you haven’t heard their debut, First Utterance, be prepared.

When we did finally get out of the house today, I’d expected it to be a little warmer. I’d seen the sun sinking behind the trees and the electric blue of the sky and imagined a mellow early evening but the chill bit down and I was glad of my big coat, especially as I was going down by the river. The Rhineland is a lovely place to visit, especially in the summer with the banks of the river dotted with magical German villages and ancient castles. You can follow the Rhine for miles, take sleeper cruise ships and visit some of these places or hire a car and drive along the riverside from Switzerland to The Netherlands. Which will be our next destination as we leave Friday for another adventure.

Tuesday, February 4th.

Yay! Amsterdam is going ahead. For those of you that had planned to come, didn’t know there was a problem or only discovered there was an Amsterdam show by reading this, the original venue has had to close whilst they repair the damage that tree roots have done to their pipes. You can’t make it up. So the show was up in the air for a while there but they have managed to relocate the show to another venue in the same area. So, De Peper no, Vondelbunker yes. See you there on Sunday, February 9th at 9PM. We also have a show in Germany the day after in Wiesbaden (Frankfurt) at Der Weinländer. After that, a couple of free days and then the last three shows in Düsseldorf (14th), Königswinter (15th), and Wuppertal (16th). Then we are going to Paris, although we will not be playing there unless you own a château in St. Germain with a stage and then we would be happy to accomodate.

I woke up with a headache today, I’m not sure if I’m just tired at the moment, still trying to catch up with sleep or my brain has been infested by an alien parasite. I have been seeing some strange lights in the sky recently. Early morning again, I had a sesh with Rohan in Sydney and actually went back to bed afterwards to try and rid the alien by taking the creature through a labyrinth of positive dreams, it seemed to work. It was a mixed day for sunshine, rain and wind today as if the weather couldn’t make it’s mind up to be nice or horrible, like humans, I guess. Here in this thousand year old German village the bell on the clock tower rings every 15 minutes, once, twice, thrice and four times, before marking the hour every hour on the hour, whilst going nuts at 7AM, midday and 6PM. I was wondering how the Christians would feel if the Sacred Church Of Metal Brothers had their own church and equally played their tribute signature to the masses - RIFFS.

Gerd came home after work and hurried us into the car to get to the garage to fix the Citroen (it broke), whilst going to get our deposit back from the hire car company for the previous week. Olivia and Gerd dropped me off at the record store in Beuel (Bonn), whilst going to sort it out. At this point the weather was horrible and cold, dark with low clouds and wet. Outside the record store (Nobbi’s), the records that are usually outside the door were covered in large green plastic. Inside, I found some records that I’d been researching the last time I was there, I put them at the back of each letter so I could find them again, working on the theory that only someone as mad as me would want them anyway. Andwella, Harper & Rowe, Marshmallow Way and the fourth Hudson-Ford album - I was right, they were still there, where I left them. I only had a short time to look as Olivia and Gerd were back to pick me up soon, but I managed to find a reasonably priced Arkama reissue of Dr. Z, Three Parts To My Soul from 1971 and a lovely copy of the Tudor Rose album (too expensive at 90 Euros) but a lovely and lovingly put together reissue of this Folk Rock Classic, also from 1971. I hope to get back there before we go to Amsterdam, city of canals and more record stores.

I decided to just relax tonight, give myself a break. Liverpool - Shrewsbury wasn’t on (they won), but I did sit and watch what just relaxes me so much, concentrates me quietly and intensely - Snooker, and the world’s greatest player Ronnie O’Sullivan, who shares a birthday with Olivia so he must be good. My Mum loved snooker, I watch it for her as she can’t get back to Earth.

Tomorrow is ‘stay in bed as long as possible day’ and then some seshes in the evening with Noel in England and maybe Mark in Tucson. Later tonight, I listened to the third Warm Dust album, noticed the hard back copy of Ian McKewan’s latest book that I bought, contemplated Olivia’s mandolin with its tuning issue and wondered do I need to restring my guitars yet? Questions for tomorrow as Amsterdam gets near and we get back on the Pferd (horse).

Monday, February 3rd.

A relaxing day today, in fact we have a few days off as we prepare for the next shows. We have 5 left if the Amsterdam show is still on. I really hope it is because Olivia and I were planning on going to Amsterdam Friday for the show on Sunday. We are still waiting to hear if the venue has fixed the problem with the pipes and the roots and if it hasn’t, can we reschedule it for another day before we head back to England at the end of February? Although this was a day off, I still had to get up this morning for a session with Stephen in Melbourne and will again tomorrow for a session with Rohan in Sydney, but Wednesday morning I am so sleeping in! Tonight we managed to watch the first two episodes of Picard, very exciting for Star Trek nerds. We also continued with the Russian series Better Than Us (up to episode 8). Gerd was in the cellar, fixing the broken Liechtenstein light and Siv has gone to an arts meeting. We cooked dinner and ate exactly the same as last night. Ha ha. Enjoying the rest and missing playing.

I was thinking about the future today. There’s so many possibilities for us, so many routes to take. After this tour we are going back to England via our friends Biggles and Colleen in London who we are going to visit Hampton Court with one day and then Abbey Road the next, before we head to Penzance. I can’t believe that I never made it to Abbey Road before. Biggles by the way produced our first demo for Dare and my band True 100s in London in the late seventies, just before Australia (April 1980). He also was the A&R man for Carrere Records.

When we get back to Penzance we will be working on new Noctorum songs, the initial stages of new Atlanteum Flood music, the tentatively titled Space Summit project as well as other sessioneer projects that we hope to grow into real records. We will be visited by Jerome Froese and Anja as well as Nicklas Barker and Sophie - Anekdoten will be playing in Quebec City in Canada in May so we have to rehearse for that one on one, it’s complicated stuff. Jerome and I have a simmering pot, too. Paul Simpson will be thinking about getting vocals on The Wild Swans album I worked on in Liverpool at the end of the year.

As far as records coming out this year, we have an upcoming release for this year’s record store day in April. We have Poison Stream, the second MOAT album, at some point this year and Salim Nourallah’s A Nuclear Winter Feels Warm as well. As far as playing live after this month Olivia and I are hoping to play some shows in Canada in May/June after the Anekdoten dates. There will be at least one more show in Germany in July in Berlin and after a trip to the studio with our friend Arno in France, we will be off to America, will keep you posted on that one as it unravels.

The one thing we haven’t found time to do - yet, is record Olivia and I in the studio. We could record all the live songs we know as a series of CDs, we could write some new original songs, we could do both but we just need to find the time and the budget to do it. So many people who come to the shows want to buy a record that is our sound, but as yet we are a live only thang, we hope to address this issue in the future. But the next release of new material will be the second MOAT record. I guess we will do some kind of campaign to pay for it, will keep you posted on that, too, but after the PledgeMusic disaster we need a reliable platform.

All this music, all these collaborations are wonderful creative labours of love and I wonder how I will find the time to continue to write the blog into the future whilst living and working off the road? I would also like to continue writing about the music I find on the In Deep Music Archive site as I continue to find all kinds of gems in the record shops in the towns we travel to. And then there’s reading, there surely is not enough hours in the day. The Songwriting & Guitar Guidance sessions are hard to fit in whilst on the road but there seems to be time when I am in one place for a stretch.

To finish tonight, I just heard that the Patti Smith Group member Ivan Kral has died. He played bass and guitar on the first four classic Patti Smith albums and notably co-wrote Dancing Barefoot. Gang Of Four’s Andy Gill also gone, I’ve had Entertainment since it came out.

We got a message from Babette’s half-sis Lotte today. She said that Babette really enjoyed our show and enjoyed our chat, I remembered one thing she commented on, she was impressed that I had written a song with Linda Perry (and Grace Slick), she was a fan. Condolences to family members at this difficult time.

Saturday, February 1st.

I awoke at 11.30AM in what Eytan and Céline described as the short bed, no, not shortbread, short bed. It’s true, it was shorter than a lot of beds I have slept in but when you are dying, the length of the bed is irrelevant. I was asleep as soon as I hit the pillow, legs dangling over the edge, I could have slept standing up. Eytan and Céline were already up and in the kitchen, Olivia was still asleep. I came in, sat down and immersed that famous Celestial Seasonings Tension Tamer tea bag in a cup of hot water, added some honey and chatted about language and food till their daughter Ronie and then Olivia appeared. Eytan was making his special recipe hummus for us and it really was special, so special in fact that I smeared it across several pieces of bread and ignored the cheese completely. Grateful for the chance to stay with these smart and lovely people we were soon on our way to Eschwege, about 3 hours away and as reference point, about 40km from Kassel in the state of Hessen.

It wasn’t long before the rain started to come down in torrents, it eased off and then came down again, it was like this for most of the journey. I looked sideways out of the window at the fields and trees and noticed amoeba like drops of water, transparent moving entities, willing themselves across the glass till they eventually and magically disappeared. We were leaving Bavaria, crossing the Thuringian Forest. Steep climbs into mist with guest houses here and there on the roadside for the hikers who enjoy this lovely region of Germany. The roads were a myriad of bends, curving through the hills, entering into tunnels or rising and falling with the gradients of dense wooded slopes. 

As we came back down to the next Autobahn I saw blue lights in the distance on the other side of the road. A black wrecked Porsche stood on the hard shoulder, facing the wrong way, a police car stopped close to it. Based on the car’s crumpled body it looked like it had rolled and landed the right way up. It seemed like it had only just happened, the queues were short and there was no ambulance. I didn’t see any other car involved and I wondered about the driver and any passenger. It’s just so dangerous out there, pointing pieces of fast metal towards your destination and hoping you make it whilst everyone else does the same thing.

We stopped at a petrol station in Gotha, filled up for 65 Euros and wandered around inside, looking for a sandwich and paying for the gas. At this point we were about an hour away from our destination and wondered about where we were playing tonight, because the place was a particular German concept. It’s called a ‘Verein’ and is a voluntary association, like a local club.

We arrived in a small village and pulled up outside a building that was something like a village hall, on the door a cool poster of us made by the venue. We went up some wooden stairs, it was like an old-fashioned community centre, it could almost be the seventies. Greeted by the staff, they showed us into the main room where we were going to play. It was a large room full of couches, chairs and tables of all different shapes and sizes. I love places like this, I love cafes like this. The decor was kids’ hand prints, old paintings, props, photos and an embroidered religious slogan, “Ein neuer Tag, mit ihm ein neues Leben”, “A new day, with him (God) a new life”. It’s hard to know if this was the philosophy of the place or if it had been there for 50 years and life had evolved around it. 

We soundchecked, ate in the kitchen and had a fascinating conversation with one of the volunteers about his job, working on ion-beam therapy, apparently a new way to defeat cancers. The place began to fill up and by the time we were ready to go on stage most of the seats were taken. We saw Peter and Andrea, we had played at Andrea’s cafe before in Landsberg and Peter had been responsible for making this and that show happen. The crowd were receptive, the sound was really good and off we went into our show, the last for a few days. It’s interesting telling stories to a crowd that doesn’t speak your language, of course a lot of people do understand, but not everything and some don’t understand anything so occasionally I say things in broken German or get Olivia to translate a particularly tricky point. We manage well with this method of communication in foreign lands and always try and make the evening an intimate sharing of anecdotes and stories, despite the language barrier. Not sure how we’d go in Outer Mongolia.

The evening was a great success, what lovely few weeks we’ve had so far with more gigs to come starting next weekend in Amsterdam. BUT at this point Amsterdam is in doubt because the place we were playing has had a problem with tree roots and a sewage pipe so we may have to move the venue or move the show. We’ll keep you posted, I know there’s a few people coming to that one. Tomorrow we drive back to Olivia’s parents’ where I will spend the evening doing Songwriting & Guitar Guidance sessions with Eric in Minneapolis, Joanne in Portland and Jed also in Minneapolis, Stephen in Melbourne on Monday and Rohan in Sydney on Tuesday. 

So sessioneers, next week is a good time in-between dates if you want to be in touch. The weekends are full with shows and travel until March 1st when we arrive back in Penzance for a few weeks in the studio. 

Will I be continuing to write the blog on these off days? Let’s see. It’s past 4AM again! Goodnight and thanks for reading.

Friday, January 31st.

Dear home country and US senate, I’m pretty sure you have it all wrong and I feel an overwhelming sadness followed by an unwanted anxiety about it all. Suddenly Olivia and I have a problem as we are from different countries (please no comments about this if you don’t know our situation specifically, it is simply unhelpful). As far as a trial with no witnesses, it’s a guitar with no strings. The “good” news is that we ‘could’ have been killed today or at least had the violins destroyed in the boot - but here we are. The traffic was thick today in parts, driving out of Baden-Württemberg, through Bavaria and into Franconia and the outskirts of Nuremberg. At one point the flow of traffic suddenly stopped abruptly on the Autobahn and there was a car behind us travelling at a ferocious speed that was so close to piling into the back of us but at the last second it swerved into the outside lane and missed us. We live another day, although if I don’t get some sleep tonight I will just curl up and die anyway.

Right photo by Eytan Rubin.

Apart from near death, the journey from Freiburg to Nuremberg was uneventful. Bluetooth kind of worked as we listened to a playlist of every song I ever heard and liked since the early sixties. I spoke to Arno Sojo in France although the signal was dying quite quickly. He told me he was going to see reformed Supergrass in Paris on Tuesday. We will be off to Arno’s hood in Western France in July to work on some material…corduroy I expect. Talking of corduroy, in the seventies the cars you saw were so much more interesting to look at. On this trip the classics have been few and far between. I saw one fiery red MGBGT in Switzerland plus a Volvo 122 Amazon in Germany and the rest are those plastic pods that range from cheap to expensive but essentially they are stylistically the same. Mazdas look like Ferraris and Maseratis look like Vauxhalls. On closer inspection there are massive differences but in the case of the Maserati saloon, it’s the car for the low key Billionaire. We keep on seeing lots of Teslas, I thought they were much rarer. I guess Germans are intrigued by Tesla and Elon Musk, competition for the higher level machines.

I’m struggling to stay awake to write this tonight after last night’s three and a half hours. We were supposed to stay with Olivia’s cousin’s (once removed) tonight but at the last minute it didn’t work out and we ended up staying with a couple from the audience - Eytan from Israel and Céline from France. They sat at the front row table and listened, hold the front page! Alien couple spotted listening to music without interruption, they cannot be from Earth. We have had really attentive audiences on this tour, if the venue suits. Some buildings are built to talk, others to listen in. A bar generally means talk, although Freiburg was a bar. The venue tonight was so hippie ’68. Marcus, who runs it, used to be in a Grateful Dead tribute band and the decor is straight out of Jerry Garcia’s bedroom, with real cats. The venue is now a private club and despite it being a lounge room with a taste, some pretty impressive people have played here before, two that were mentioned were Ted McKenna and Ian Paice.

The gig was lovely anecdotal and a whizz through the songs without a hitch and at the end lots of people came up and said they thought our music was simply beautiful. This is all I can manage tonight I have to sleep or tomorrow will be disaster.

There seemed to be lots of Autobahn and countryside between Switzerland and Freiburg and even when we got close we were still experiencing the bucolic pulchritude of the German landscape. There were herons and hovering hawks, farms and crops, either side of the road and the usual mass of international trucks polluting the very air that is necessary to grow the food that some of them may be transporting. Freiburg was only 2 hours away so we had time to get into the hotel before soundcheck. Der Kaiser is an odd mixture of guest house and restaurant with a weird citrus theme in the rooms, all lemon and tart. White paper butterflies settle on a yellow board on the wall and arty pictures of lemons and kiwi fruit that look like they have been exposed to an overdose of gamma radiation, hang haphazard on the walls.

It’s raining like crazy, Olivia, the angel, went back to the hotel to get the car to give me longer at the store. We drove to the gig, Swamp, via rush hour traffic jam and got there late. Martin, the sound guy, was also late, so it worked out perfectly, compatible tardiness. We met Chico, the organizer, a quiet music lover that was playing The Go-Betweens as we loaded in. Soundcheck went well, Martin seemed to know what he was doing, the opposite of Bern’s frustrations with no soundman supplied. Before we knew it doors were open, we’d missed dinner again, Olivia went to the supermarket around the corner, got some cheese and bread to have something at least before we went on. People started to arrive, including Armin, the Swiss, and his wife and her damaged foot. Armin saw us in Liechtenstein, major fan, knew the words. A nice little crowd, super attentive, you could see swaying, closed eyes and receptive faces, clapping enthusiastically after each song. We decided to do two sets. First set went really well, new strings on the guitars, the audience listened to my stories, some of which I must share with you here.

Last time I was in Freiburg was about 2004, playing with The Saints. As it happened Chico organized that one, too, although we didn’t remember each other from 16 years ago. That was the night that our sound guy picked up my guitar case without checking that the latches were closed and dropped my fragile 1966 Rickenbacker onto the concrete floor of the venue, breaking it in half. Not the neck but the body. The reason that could happen was because the guitar was precariously glued together after it had been through a previous traumatic experience at First Avenue in Minneapolis when the drummer man kicked over his kit that happened to have that guitar carefully placed on top of it at the end of the night. The guitar came into the dressing room crying, broken in half. Rickenbacker said they couldn’t fix it but somehow they did and then Freiburg happened! The guitar is now held together with silver gaffa tape.

We went back on for the second set. Everything was going so well, I played the Seagull for the first 3 songs, the delicate guitar that I play all the capo songs on. The R’n’R 12, the one with the gaffa, I use for the louder songs, the punchy ones, the whirlwind rhythms, and the songs where I hit the guitar a little harder. I told the story of my trip to Jamaica with Jules Shear and how the guitar I brought with me to write a song or two had somehow been badly affected by the humidity and the strings had fused to the neck so I couldn’t play chords on the guitar. I had to write something with lots of silence. The song I’m talking about is Scandinavian Stare, what else would you write about in Jamaica? So I counted the song in, and nothing. My guitar had died as if in sympathy for the story of my dead guitar on that fateful trip. The audience thought it was pre-planned! I had to spend the rest of the night on the Seagull, that changes everything, I can’t play the songs the same way as I would on the gaffa special. You have to be ready for anything in this game, a migraine, an awful sound system, aliens, no monitors, broken strings, a drunk parrot hassling you from the back or your guitar stops working completely at a crucial moment. So Seagull it was for the rest of the evening. We made it through despite the inconvenience. The gig was great, we played till after curfew and that was one receptive crowd, thank you!

I spent a lot of time talking to people after the show, Danesh and Maz from Iran, new fans, Armin who had me sign Sometime Anywhere, Starfish and Untitled#23 vinyl, Gaylord, who knew Michael Collins was on Apollo 11 because, get this, his other three names are Buzz, Neil and Michael! Did I hear that right? Lots of other people from the audience came and we talked about music, signed some records, 3 people bought the MOAT album (new one coming middle of the year sometime). Really warm and satisfying night despite the wet weather. We finally packed up, it was already 12.45AM, we were expecting to find a falafel lurking somewhere but we weren’t going to make it for they closed! Noooo! And then Annette to the rescue. A friend of Helge and Petra who had seen us before at Karlotta’s in the Rhineland said these magic words: “I own a vegetarian cafe, we’ll just go there and I’ll make you some food”. Oh sweet words they were, too. So off we went and spent an hour and a half with dhal and basmati rice for me, ramen for Olivia and a nice cup of Celestial Seasonings Tension Tamer tea with honey. We talked about the universe for a while until we had to go, long drive tomorrow to Nuremberg and the blog to write. We thanked Annette and here we are back in the citrus themed hotel.

But before I go, on the subject of the universe, I came to the conclusion on stage tonight that Brexit was like Pluto. I’ll let you fill in the gaps.

Wednesday, January 29th.

Ah, sleeping in! What a concept. A day off in Luzern so I don’t exist till after midday. Straight from bed to the record player and The Who’s The Kids Are Alright. Today is catch up day, chillin’ day, but also restring the guitars day. But first, chill! I watched Rachel Maddow, then Lawrence O’Donnell, then Bill Maher, not so chillin’ updates but Bill is always entertaining. Lawrence and Rachel always on it. It took till about 4PM to get out of the house although Olivia had to go move the car twice. We had a deal with the dentist downstairs that we could park in his spot as long as we moved the car between 1 and 3 because of a patient. Then the damn patient didn’t show up so Olivia went out twice for nothing! We had lunch, fighting with the Swiss bread, carving it into pieces with a serrated bread knife with gargantuan effort, the resistance was Federer like. The great Andy Cousin called me from England, my All About Eve and Seeing Stars band mate. We discussed the flight patterns of the African Crane, Albania’s river systems and the problem of generating electricity on the moon. Talking of the moon, did you know that third astronaut besides Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong was Michael Collins, no one remembers him because he just orbited and didn’t walk, not fair really. Did you also know that Buzz Aldrin’s mum Marion’s maiden name was Moon, Marion Moon?

There’s a store not far from Swiss Andy’s house that’s a bit new age, called Der Duftladen (The Scent Store), but in the back they have a whole lot of secondhand vinyl. I went there last time we were in Luzern and bought a Zombies reissue of Odessey & Oracle with a completely awful out of context, missing the point cover art, I just had to have it. René, who runs the store, keeps a low profile in the back, kinda out of the shop, leaving you to rummage. It’s a strange place as if it was once really organized and now no longer is, it’s like a house that’s gone into disrepair, the lights still work, but the oven is broken in the kitchen and there’s a missing door handle to the front room. So much of the store is in order but then there’s random lots of records that aren’t. The Beatles and Stones box is the wrong way ‘round and no one seems to notice. Still, professional rummagers have no fear. 

It’s little too pricey here, it is Switzerland, so I was desperately trying not to find anything. I ended up succumbing and buying By The Way by Frumpy (1972), a Marmalade compilation I’d never seen, Town And Country by Humble Pie on Charly Records, German pressing with a different cover to my copy. An odd German record by Rainer R.A.M Pietsch, Norwegian Wood, all orchestral versions of Beatles songs, but with Mary Hopkin, Dan McCafferty from Nazareth and lesser known Scot Ian Cussick, who sang with German band Lake, handling the vocals. Last but not least I found a copy of Ian Dury’s Do It Yourself in a cover I don’t have, that makes it 14, only another 20 to collect, although it has been said that there are more than 34 different covers, all based on crown wallpaper! Check ‘em out.

From there we went to the famous Kapellbrücke, the bridge that goes across the river Reuss in the center of Luzern. Originally constructed in 1365 and housing 147 triangular paintings by the local artist Hans Heinrich Wägmann in the 17th century. In 1993 the bridge was almost totally destroyed by fire and only 30 of the original 147 painting were fully restored. The bridge was rebuilt and as you walk across it now you can see the charred ruins of the original paintings, the picture gone, replaced by charred wood.

Time to get back to the house. Andy was cooking for us again, falafels, risotto and hummus. Mm, lovely, but then I still had to string the guitars. That took a while, the Takamine was screaming, desperate for new strings, insulted that I would leave it this long. The seagull was less hysterical but still wanted equal treatment. So, new strings on both guitars for Freiburg. Now all I have to do is keep them in tune.

Thanks to Andy’s great hospitality and home cooking we are now well-rested and driving back to Germany tomorrow, we’re hoping that we can get to the border without paying for petrol, Swiss prices! That’s it, thanks Andy, “Swiss time was running out”.

Tuesday, January 28th.

Switzerland! There’s no place quite like Switzerland and now with a couple of days off we are staying with our friend Andy in Luzern. Andy is the man behind The Churchhill Garden and The Blue Herons. We were also here in 2018 and I played some guitar on his track The Way You Look At Me. It’s actually Andy who plays all the good bits. Andy also did the Photoshop work that turned Olivia’s mermaid drawing into a fossil for the cover of The Afterdeath EP. We’d booked an Airbnb outside Bern because the prices were way cheaper 20 minutes out of town and on the way to Luzern. When we got there we were greeted by the friendliest cat I’ve ever met (Sunny). She was big, too! Pushing herself against you and head-butting you, constantly wanting attention. We finally had to throw her out of the room so we could go to sleep. When we awoke this morning the weather was a little dodgy so we decided to take the direct route to Luzern rather than the scenic route which might have been a little trickier to drive. It’s only an hour or so from Bern so I thought - a little music. I HATE BLUETOOTH. It managed two songs and then stopped, that was that. So frustrating and completely unreliable.

The scenery is always, what’s the word, charming and/or awe-inspiring. The contrast between the dominating snow-capped mountains, rising stone giants spewed out by an ancient Earth, and the pretty chalets with their slanted roofs, balconies and seemingly multiple windows built by mere mortals in the shadows of the gods. Andy lives right in the centre of Luzern and although there are sections of ancient walkways and old amazing buildings, it’s still a modern city with office blocks and traffic lights, pizzerias and hairdressers with pictures of fantasy women with fantasy hairdos. Andy had come to see us in Liechtenstein so we had keys to his flat. We were inside by 3PM (greeted by a Toblerone). First thing I had to do was check a mix Dare had done of one of the tracks from Salim Nourallah’s new album, A Nuclear Winter Feels Warm, in my role as producer. I don’t have my headphones with me so I had to wait till I got here to listen to it at Andy’s. After that Andy was soon home and cooking. That’s something you really appreciate when you’re on the road - Home cooking! After last night’s search for nourishment in a cold wet closed Bern, this was bliss. And yes, it was Bangers & Mash with carrots, peas and mushrooms. Three different types of veggie sausages and we all went back for seconds. We got some time to talk tonight about the shape of the universe, the colours in space and the invisible curve of the horizon.

So now, with no show tonight, Andy gone to bed and no pressure to get up in the morning, we can relax before tomorrow’s big guitar string day, catching up on all the emails and generally getting ready for the drive back to Germany and the next show in Freiburg on Thursday. Olivia and I were talking today about how we might do this differently after this experiment that we are presently engaged in. More time between gigs perhaps? Beware of the pay to play contracts, book shows much further in advance? In the end all this just leads you to doing a better version of your music and of your planning. But there’s always going to be the occasional dodgy gig, no food, late nights and terrible pillows.

I feel so lucky to be doing this. Sitting here in this lovely flat in the middle of Luzern. The view out of the window is mountains and I’m not hungry. I started watching an interview Michael Parkinson did with Richard Burton and it reminded me what a charismatic fellow he was and made me want to go back and watch his films. I wonder do people remember him? He died in 1984 at the age of 58 and coincidentally is buried, you guessed it, in Céligny in Switzerland, where he lived (Alastair MacLean is also buried there). It must be some kind of artist retreat, probably expensive and beautiful, it’s essentially Geneva. One thing that is difficult on the road when you are just in a car is watching films or reading books, the only thing you have is the music to listen to, grrrr. Ah well, we’ll be back in Penzance in March, working in the studio, listening to records and watching films and series galore (Picard!). But right now we are here in a world of wonders.

Monday, January 27th.

A Monday night in Bern on a cold night at a gig where you have to pay to play might sound like suicide. It almost was but good people always make potential disasters better. Driving from Liechtenstein to Switzerland was like crossing the road and once on the way it was 2 hours and 20 minutes of driving through tunnels and by glassy lakes. We arrived in Bern early, drove straight into the centre and found ourselves outside the gig (ONO), looking at Bern's most famous monument, the Zytglogge (a medieval clock tower). The venue was right in the centre in this ancient street in what seemed to be an old wine cellar, hundreds of years old. We waited in a cafe close by and I had a small bowl soup that cost about £8. We are in Switzerland where money grows on trees.

One wonders why this affluent society wants 370 francs for us to play? This gig could have lost us money. As it happened we didn’t but the small crowd (is it still a crowd when it’s small?) of listeners covered the bill and made the night a success. One of Olivia’s old friends from America, Chantal, came and brought three others with her. There was also Dave and Heather Jordan from Sydney. They had left on Christmas day and were on a mega country hopping extravaganza. When they saw we were playing, they booked a ticket from Prague to Bern to see us. That’s commitment...It seems hard to get the word out here but one local saw a message just today on his Bandsintown app. I can’t imagine how anybody not from here could play here without having some notoriety! Ha Ha. Simply, no one would come.

Down in the venue the ancient walls and the curved roof gave that mixed message atmosphere of ancient in a contemporary space. The venue had no sound person and things didn’t work from the start, cables were down and the two behind the bar, Hannah and Beni, helped as best they could to try and get a decent sound. Monitors were hopeless and over an hour of fiddling around we finally got something acceptable. It was a long way from Angelo’s expertise in Liechtenstein. But it’s not their job and certainly not in my skill set so I guess this venue is Oh No when it comes to problem solving. We briefly met the owner when we arrived, but Salim in Texas had warned me about him because of the pay to play clause. We hadn’t noticed either when we got the contract. When we were having problems with the PA he was most unhelpful and in comparison with where we’d just been with Natalie and Finlay bending over backwards to help us, the guy wasn’t interested. It certainly wasn’t Hannah and Beni’s gig. It was all just maddening after all the positive owner vibes from everywhere else.

I got over myself, apologized to Hannah and Beni for being ratty and the gig was fine with a small but appreciative audience. The money that came through the door went to the venue and we managed to not lose money. But all this messing round with set up had us miss dinner and when the gig was over and we needed food we discovered that Bern was a ghost town. We drove around looking. Even the McDonalds at the main station closed at 11.30PM. Luckily on the way out of town we saw a pizzeria that was essentially closed but made us some chips and falafel pieces (for more than 20 pounds). It hardly passed as dinner but this is what happens on the road, you run out of time and you haven’t eaten and after the gig everything is closed.

It ended up being another long day. The accom was out of town on the way to Luzern at an Airbnb. We will stay two days with our friend Andy but tonight we hear the rain and try to get a full night’s sleep. Our visit to Andy will be just to sleep. We will leave at 1PM and will be on the lookout for more intriguing towns and village names. Today we had Eggrain. But the best seems to be a suburb of Bern. Before, I tell you 'dorf' means village in German. Welcome to Wankdorf.

Sunday, January 26th.

Why do we do this? Why do we travel around from place to place, stay for a short while and then move on? Well, the world is so big and life is so small, there’s a lot to see. A small taste of everything is even better when you are with your other everything, your wife, your travelling companion, fellow musician and partner, there with you sharing the whole experience. This tour is our experiment to see what would happen if we got in touch with a lot of venues we’d seen on other touring musicians’ tour posters. What would it be like to play some smaller venues, some cafes, the occasional bar? We have found out that despite what musicians that have been in bigger bands might think, it is actually rather rewarding on many different levels. Personal, intimate, positive reactions from people that don’t know you, challenging and it does wonders for your skills, your playing, your singing and your ability to communicate your words and music to an audience that needs to be convinced. It mostly works. But there are other advantages of doing this apart from the invigorating experience of playing your music and meeting interesting people that speak all kinds of languages. There’s also the places that you get to see, I mean, we are in Liechtenstein, how else would we get here?

As we were staying two nights here, we got the chance to see some of the sights. Natalie, our host, venue owner and our accommodation told us today that we were going on an adventure. “Meet in the kitchen at midday”, she told us. I was so in need of sleep last night. I managed to catch up staying in bed till the last minute before meeting the kitchen deadline. We left Natalie’s flat above tonight’s venue and all got in the car. Natalie directed us to the mountain road which drove us up and up and up, winding around snowy bends and passing by traditional Swiss chalets till we came to Malbun, a ski resort on the mountain above Vaduz. 

The gear these skiers have to wear, the special boots and the visors and all the clothing, it must cost them a fortune and that’s without the actual skis. Plus, I suppose they have to be taught, it seems like an expensive hobby. Natalie took us to a posh restaurant where we ate strange dishes, I struggled with the menu but finally landed on ravioli with mushrooms, it wasn’t very much food for a strapping Northern lad like me, so I had to order an apple strudel as well. I’m supposed to be off deserts, but starvation isn’t an option. I went through the strudel removing the raisins because I simply cannot eat dead flies. It was so hot in the restaurant that we had to open windows, the other guests agreed. 

I had my migraine eyes attack again. I couldn’t believe it. I didn’t tell Olivia or Natalie, I didn’t want to freak them out. I thought I’ll ride this one out silently. We were served by traditionally dressed older ladies with weird accents. One younger girl was like a cross between Zsa Zsa Gabor and Nico. Attitude for days as she pouted her way between the guests with a look of disdain. At one point one of the skiers bumped into her, an innocent mistake, she rolled her eyes and shook her head, she really seemed to think the world was inhabited by fools. I got up to get some ibuprofen out of my jacket and headed for the loo. I happened to ask the queen of divas where it was, she responded in weary German with what sounded like an Eastern European accent. I can’t imagine how she got the job or how she interacted with the clientele or her elder work mates. Perhaps she was the Prince Of Liechtenstein’s daughter doing work experience, made to hang with the normal people and taking it as a punishment rather than a much needed education in respect and civility that she sorely needed.

We left and as we stepped out into the cold mountain air my eyes were still seeing diamonds. We were going to the ski lift which would take us to the top of the mountain. What an experience that was. The three of us had to jump onto a moving seat, put our feet on small footrests as a bar came over our heads and fell in front of us, stopping us from falling to our deaths. All this with my eyes full of arced flickering amoeba shapes that impaired my vision. Then the seat began to rise, moving up the mountain, higher and higher above the trees, flying, the mountains all around us, snow, and an icy breeze. Olivia and I were wearing gloves, but Natalie wasn’t. “Aren’t your hands cold”, I asked? “No, I’m from Siberia", she replied (she really is from Siberia). At the top of the ski lift we had to jump off the moving seat and at this point I began to realize that this pure oxygenated icy air was helping my head. I’m not sure exactly at what point my vision returned, but the air quality most certainly helped. Usually I feel pretty drab, a dull headache with a general unpleasantness. But the air, the pure, beautiful, rich oxygen from 2000 meters up in the mountains was working as a cure. A lesson learned, don’t sit inside with the curtains drawn, dark glasses and the lights dimmed, sit somewhere fresh and clear your head, blow away the dust and dark matter, stimulate the optic nerve with blasts of mountain air or sea air, wind or even the rain.

There was cafe up there, too, and I had a chamomile tea. By the side of the cafe was a little ridge and Natalie beckoned us. “This is Austria”, she said “and over there, beyond the beginnings of the Rhine, is Switzerland”. You are standing in one country and looking at two others. That’s where we are in the alps where countries meet, where the giants, covered in snow, dwarf us, challenge us to conquer them and astound us with their magnificent and powerful beauty. It was time to go back down on the ski lift. An even greater sensation of flying over the trees and we could see the whole valley below us and the mountains surrounding us. We jumped off the lift at the bottom, found the car and drove back into the other side of Vaduz, dropping Natalie off in Triesen where we played last night and headed to Schaan where we would play tonight. It’s only one road but somehow we got lost - we turned left at the wrong church. Those damned churches all look the same!

Angelo was there at the Black Pearl setting up the PA for soundcheck. I went upstairs and tried to have 30 minutes to assess my head. It was ok, better than I thought it was going to be. We soundchecked, everything was fine. The venue was smaller than last night, but that was ok. We now only have three lights since last night’s dramatic destruction. We went on at about 7.30PM, a family friend from Switzerland, Melanie, arrived just in time. Two fans arrived from their teenage years. We started to play, 30 seconds in the PA died. Ha ha! Well, better 30 seconds in than 20 minutes. Angelo had to turn it all off, reboot the system and so the grand entrance had to be reenacted. It was a tricky crowd in one way, but they were up for some thoughtful concepts as long as they were mixed with some humorous barbs. At a gig like this you are left with no choice but to play it this way. We decided that tonight we would do two sets. The show worked a treat and when people who’ve never heard of you come up to you in a place like this and say they loved it, it makes you feel like all the effort was worth it. It’s not as if Liechtenstein is easy to get to.

After the show we chatted with lots of cool people. Finlay, the booker, Nici came with her tattoos, Melanie and her friend Diana, Stephen the Irish singer who was also in town playing the night before. Mia and Antonella, enthusiastic members of the crowd and Alex the reader. It’s great to know that we know people in Liechtenstein. Who would have thunk it?

Saturday, January 25th.

We left Miguel and Yvonne in a sleepy daze as we had to get on the road to Liechtenstein.

We’re driving South and as we head towards the mountains we start to see the first traces of snow. We are travelling through Baden-Württemberg and then Bavaria and then we are back in Baden-Württemberg again as the road criss-crosses borders. After two hours of driving and 6 degrees and various encounters with the sun we finally see the mountains beginning to rise up, nothing like the Swiss giants we will see in days to come but the landscape is changing. We pull over to get some petrol and realize that to get to Liechtenstein we have to leave Germany, drive into Austria for 15 minutes, cross into Switzerland and enter Liechtenstein from there - four countries not just in one day but in one hour. Don’t you just love Europe?

Finally we arrive in Vaduz and we discover that Liechtenstein is nothing like we imagined. I thought it was an old medieval city/country in a valley or atop a mountain but no, it’s more like a road with a lot of more modern buildings and with Swiss style chalets on the slopes of the mountains above. Not exactly disappointing, more a surprise. Seeing the snow is always exciting and despite it not reaching down here in the valley, we are close enough to feel its mood. We pull up to the venue, Black Pearl, an hour early, get out of the car and breathe in this fresh, crisp mountain air. You can feel its power, taste its invigorating flavour, you definitely stay alive longer with this much oxygen and no air pollution. We saw a supermarket and went to buy some bread and cheese and realized that you can use Euros but your change will be in Swiss Francs. I studied the coins for a good couple of minutes, the 5 Franc coin looks like the same one they had when I was hitchhiking through Switzerland in the seventies. There’s something warm and comforting about seeing the old currencies.

Natalie, who owns the two places we are playing, arrived in her neat Mercedes Compressor, let us in and we began to load in our gear. Angelo arrived with the PA and we all got to work to set everything up. It’s the most unlikely venue for us, a small cocktail bar in Triesen, just a couple of minutes outside Vaduz, but this is Liechtenstein and you have to remember that the population here is only 40,000 people. It’s hard to find venues in some major European cities so the idea that we can play in Liechtenstein at all is enough for us. Angelo is cool and the PA gear is of exceptionally high quality. We meet Nici who’ll be working the bar - she is seriously inked! All done we leave for the accommodation.

Natalie is Russian and her flat is above the venue we are playing tomorrow night, also called Black Pearl. We drive along the main road in a straight line until we arrive. There’s a little takeaway called Vibes across the road and Natalie treats us to a pizza for Olivia and a falafel for me. When I ask for hummus they look at me like I’m mad. Natalie goes straight back to the gig, we load our bags in upstairs and eat the falafel and the pizza. Why am I telling you this? Well, it’s to try and show how we have no time, the schedule is so tight that the last bite leads into putting your coat on and heading back to the venue, which is exactly what we do.

The bar is quiet but our friend Andy from The Churchhill Garden and The Blue Herons is sitting there by the door. He’s travelled up from Luzern by train and bus. We’ll be staying with him for a couple of days in the week and this is the only chance he has to see us in the coming days. You may remember that I played on one of Andy’s Blue Herons tracks in recent months, it was very low key on my part, he did all the good bits. Great to see him! As the bar started to fill up we felt like it was time to go on. You must remember that this tour is our little experiment: What could it be like for the two of us to drive around Europe together, playing music, meeting old fans, new fans and new people in general. Crossing borders, seeing new towns and playing little cafes, sometimes just for the pass around of a hat and other times with fees. Some venues are proper places, others are cafes. Most have a PA of some description, but at least one will be purely acoustic. We are doing a couple of house concerts and frankly, we couldn’t be happier than we are right now driving around together on this wonderful adventure.

As we start to play we realize it will be a challenge, only Andy really knows who we are. Finlay the booker is there. Grew up in Liechtenstein, but with a lovely English accent, seems his Mum is from Exeter. Again, all the people we have met at the venues have been lovely. It seems that at this level that’s the way it is. About 6 songs in two guys arrive, both in obscure Church t-shirts. They thought we were on at 9, so they missed Tristesse and Chromium. They were big fans, knew songs from Art Attack and Spirit Level and were so cool that we played Tristesse and Chromium for them again so they didn’t miss out. As the night went on people were in and out of the place, some people even started to listen! In other words the audience got better, more attentive as the night went on. I introduced songs with the most surreal explanations I could muster, that must have been the reason! Four lads came in together, good humoured, friends of Finlay. They listened and tried but were on their Saturday night bar hop, but as they left, two of them left money for us on the merch stand completely unprompted. Very cool.

The night was done, we packed up and talked to Andy and Daniel and Armin (the fans). They’d driven from Schaffhausen in Switzerland to see us. Armin has 6 kids! As we left we took in that crisp fresh air again and got in the car to drive away. Suddenly, big noise! What was that? It seems in the dark one of the leads from one of our lights was hanging out of the door and when we drove away it got caught under one of the wheels ripping the lead in half and damaging the bottom of the plastic light pole (Gerd!). That was about the biggest drama of the day. Now we are back at the accommodation and I am so tired. I'm going to bed before I die. Tomorrow Natalie is taking us up the mountains! Yay!

Friday, January 24th.

Waking up under the Roman gate, you can almost hear the 2000 year old shouts from the square, Marx is awake and the tourists are out in force along with troupes of school children dwarfed by this giant stone monster, those Romans, they knew how to do chunky, but those massive blocks of dirty stone must have been placed there by slaves. Is every monument or spectacular ancient building the result of slave labour, thousands dying for the aesthetic vision of a tyrant?

Olivia had to get up to move the car, she moved it twice, parked legally and we still got a 15€ ticket, which we will dispute.

We had breakfast with Jonas and Sebastian (pea soup), said goodbye to these groovy folks, Julia, Gubi and Reka behind the counter and the lady in the kitchen (who by the way mistakenly turned the power off last night whilst we were playing) and we were on our way. Driving out of Trier along the banks of the serene Moselle River on the way to Stuttgart where we will be staying with Olivia’s friend Miguel who she met at a Blackfield concert in Berlin in 2014. The sun sat behind a grey haze, low in the sky, slowly disappearing into fog thicker than the other day. We put the hazards on but cars still sped past us into the invisible road ahead.

We drove by Ramstein, the US base from where Rammstein took their name (and added an M). The extra M translated into English makes the word Ram Stone - cartoon teutonic music. Later we came by Türkismühle, translating to “Turquoise Mill”, was there ever a band called that? Surely there was.

We finally got the bluetooth working in the car although it seems so complex and I’m not sure which buttons I pressed in what order to make it work. It was a great playlist of classic sixties and seventies hits, I just wonder if I can get it going tomorrow and will be so disappointed if it doesn’t as it’s about 4 hours to Liechtenstein. There was a bad accident today on the other side of the Autobahn. We saw one truck with a crushed cab that had rammed into the back of another truck. Apparently the driver survived but I can’t imagine how. The accident caused a 16km tailback as the clouds sank low and everything was grey but occasionally the sun would struggle to appear and glare through the trees. It had no affect on the cold day that averaged around zero.

We arrived at Miguel’s around 7 and immediately got into a deep conversation about the universe. He lives in a great open space flat with massive plants in the middle of the floor. We didn’t stay long, it was dinner time and we went to a Thai restaurant close by. I ordered Pad Thai Tofu without egg and discovered that Thai restaurants in Germany (apart from Berlin) might not get asked for that very often. No tofu, and without egg? We continued our chat about the universe along with Miguel’s girlfriend Yvonne and the dog Susi and came to the conclusion that the answer is definitely 42 and that they allow dogs in the restaurant.

We moved onto Miguel’s studio. He works in tech but plays as well and recently bought a Steinway grand piano and in 2 and half years and 7 hours a day taught himself to play. He played us his overture and the framework of what will be a triple box set concept album. I’ll leave it at that because he has yet to write the words and find the other musicians, he says 2 years to completion. The piano is renovated and looks new but is from 1892, amazing instrument and hearing it played live is something else. Some Night Of The Prog friends dropped by and we figured out which bands in the world were the good ones.

I’m stopping now, I’m really tired and need a good night’s sleep. Liechtenstein, here we come, a first, a new country and another new adventure. Two shows in this little place over the weekend. What can it possibly be like?

Thursday, January 23rd.

I am sitting in a room in silence. Only the sound of my fingers on the keys, the occasional stirring outside in the square, a late night bus just drove by, Olivia’s soft breathing barely audible in the background, but otherwise nothing. Through the window of this room, standing there in its own ominous silence is the legendary Porta Nigra (Latin for Black Gate), the only surviving gate of four built by the Romans in Trier, 170AD.

This awe-inspiring monument amplifies the silence, dominating the square, demanding you listen to the nothingness of the night as it imposes the weight of history upon you whilst you contemplate the events carried out below its dark stone, somehow preserved intact for centuries. It has stood there for 1,850 years, so much for planned obsolescence.

Outside in that silent square it isn’t just the Porta Nigra, I also see a statue facing away but clearly visible. It is of course Trier’s most famous son, Karl Marx. Marx was born here in 1818 and went on to become one of the most famous men of history. His intellectual writings and his most well known work, Das Kapital, have contributed hugely to leftist thinking. I did actually visit his grave once in London at Highgate cemetery, Marx died in 1883 after spending years exiled in England. One thing that most people don’t know about Karl Marx is that he also wrote fiction. If you ever see a copy of Scorpion And Felix in English, please let me know.

A small crowd tonight in this small city close to Luxembourg, a vegan cafe in Rindertanzstrasse (“Cattle Dance Street”), run by the coolest people and attracting an audience of interested mostly girls in their twenties who seemed to gravitate to Olivia’s presence at every bow stroke (my secret weapon adding the magic that makes the difference). It’s been 3 years since we’ve seen our friend Polaca that we originally met in Uruguay. She saw and arranged our first ever gig together in a little bar down from the hostel that she used to run in Montevideo. She came to see us with her friend Salwa, one hour on the train from Luxembourg where they both now live (our friend in Hamburg, Dörte, worked with Polaca at the hostel). One fan, Patrick, brought four album covers for me to sign, Starfish, GAF, Touched By Jesus and Ultraviolet, but otherwise the magic came from the willingness of those that had never heard of us, listening and joining us on the journey of our songs and stories.

We had arrived at 4PM and were met by Julia who booked the show, first thing she asked ”Are you hungry, thirsty?”. Then we met Sebastian who set up the small PA, and later Jonas, his partner. These two run the place that includes a zero waste store, a gallery and live events. Friendly staff, listening, receptive and making us feel welcome. Perfect vibes. I talked to Marco in the audience, sitting by himself at the front table. He said that he wasn’t sure what he wanted to do for work but years ago he had biked across India and the surrounding region for a year, hard to compete with that. There was also Chris, he seemed like he was on his own soul searching journey that led him to listen a lot as we talked about music and life as he wondered at his own future. At the end of the night, as a gesture of warmth and friendship, he gave us a crystal, something that meant a lot to him, we accepted it graciously. Both Olivia and I seemed to talk a lot tonight, in deep conversation with these wonderful strangers. Conversations about their issues and their aspirations. Jonas was extremely open about his own situation and the girls seemed so struck by Olivia and our set. One girl, an ex ballet dancer, told me that we had inspired her to start her novel and by the end of the night she was way into chapter one. What a successful connection with people we experienced.

After tonight’s show, at least 4 different people wanted to play my guitar, especially the gaffa tape special. Tonight we most certainly ‘hit a chord’. Tomorrow we head to Liechtenstein, stopping on the way near Stuttgart with a friend of Olivia’s, the journey continues.

Wednesday, January 22nd.

Waking up in the dressing room is something I have rarely done but that was the accommodation at Maria’s Ballroom in Hamburg last night. Not having to move to sleep was a wonderful thing and we had to get up at 8.30AM for a six hour drive from Hamburg to Olivia’s parents’ house in the Bonn/Cologne area. We had to be in time to pick up a hire car for the rest of the tour before the office closed. We were returning Olivia’s Dad’s car in one piece (Thanks Gerd). He’d generously lent us his car for the first week and Olivia’s Mum (Siv) had given her car to him so he could get backwards and forwards to work. Thank you both.

It was a bit of a miserable day for travelling, drizzle, low grey clouds and as we wound our way out of Hamburg South and hit the Autobahn we were welcomed by the familiar site of hundreds of massive trucks inching their way across Europe like herds of elephants. Backwards and forwards they go, beasts of burden, carrying the insignia of their nationalities on the sides and the backs of their wagons, abbreviated country names on their license plates. In England you see foreign trucks, it’s not an unusual sight, but here there’s miles and miles of them - Poland, Romania, Latvia, Lithuania, Russia, Spain, Germany, The Netherlands, France, Belgium, Luxembourg, Ukraine, Sweden, there’s something really wonderful about it, borderless countries, one wonders if it will catch on.

The clouds got lower, a fog rolled in and we descended down towards the industrial centre past Bremen into North Rhine Westphalia, the most densely populated state in Germany. We brought with us a selection of CD’s from Gerd’s CD collection as the car had no input for the iPods. We listened to Goodbye Yellow Brick Road and we tried to listen to Journey’s Greatest Hits but couldn’t make it through. Elton had us skipping a couple of tracks, too. Antanios / Andres from Chile gave me his CD last night (Psychofiction) and we listened to that with its distorted guitars somehow suiting the atmosphere outside, a steel grey.

There wasn’t so much to report on the way down because you couldn’t really see anything properly. The wind towers were half hidden again but this time they didn’t look spooky, they just looked miserable. Usually I can look out of the windows at the countryside, animals in the fields, ancient country houses and the periphery of big towns that the Autobahn cuts through but today it was just a smoky wall of haze. We pulled over to get some petrol, last time was 70 euros, this time it was 70 euros and 1 cent, so frustrating, I’m either losing my trigger action or it’s dodgy equipment. We stopped at another place for something awful to eat. As we walked in a very scary man smoking by the entrance just stared at us, I guess Olivia’s leopard skin flares and red fluffy coat caught his attention or was it perhaps the lobster cage that I was wearing on my head? Inside (not inside my head) I ordered horrible chips, soggy salad and powdered decaf, Olivia saw my horrible chips and ordered a smaller portion. I had some camembert in the car that I’d brought from last night’s green room, so I ran out of the restaurant screaming and brought it back into the restaurant and smeared it onto two bread rolls in desperation.

Back to the house, get ready for tomorrow, eat dinner, repack. I watched Leicester beat Aston Villa 4-1 with the sound down and listening to Peter Frampton’s new Blues album - on Spotify (sorry Peter). Gerd is going to see him play. Apparently he is suffering from a nerve disease and he will be unable to play the guitar anymore so this is his last hurrah. It’s a long way from Frampton Comes Alive that we listened to in the car the other day from Gerd’s collection. It’s all so sad how frailty catches you, catches everybody in the end. Genius or fool, everyone must die. Death is the great leveller. I heard today that Monty Python’s Terry Jones died at 77, sad, but then tomorrow we are playing in Trier, the birth place of Karl Marx, he died, too! Until they find the aging gene we are just going to have to accept it. But I suppose that in the future there will be this elite club of immortals, rich and powerful who will decide who lives and who dies. I suppose it’s better the way it is. Meanwhile, life goes on.

Tuesday, January 21st.

A wonderful gig in Hamburg, the room was full, the spirit was high, the music flowed with intensity and laughter. Thank You Heimo at Maria’s Ballroom and all the Hamburg people for making it such a great evening. I’m always disappointed when watching a film and the exciting first scene had you pinned back in your seat and suddenly a caption comes up…2 YEARS EARLIER. What it means is that you know what’s going to happen because you’ve just seen the future. In this case, you know that we had a great gig tonight and that’s THE most important thing, but we had to get there…9 HOURS EARLIER.

We awoke in the Lübeck loft at 11.30AM, the room was too hot. The heaters were off. That system of the heat going off at night and coming on again at 7AM doesn’t work for us. We need the heating to be on at 2AM and beyond or we are freezing in the room. This was what happened. I was extremely tired, unwell and really cold. I sat and wrote last night’s blog with the quilt around my shoulders. Also, the slant of the roof in the attic meant there was nowhere to lean, there was no table and all I wanted to do was lie down and go to sleep. When I finally did I was too cold to take my top layer of clothes off and so tired I fell asleep in seconds. The alarm went off seemingly minutes later at 11.30AM, we were meeting sessioneer Lars, who was at the show, lives In Bremen but is from Lübeck. Olivia was first in the shower, we’d been told to let it run for 10 minutes so the water would heat up. The water trickled out of the shower head weakly (too high in the house), how come it never does that in shampoo ads? We climbed down the steep attic stairs and met Lars downstairs and went next door for food in the vegan restaurant. Friendly lady, owner (I think), the vegetable soup was lovely, no decaf though according to the waiter. When I left I quizzed the lady “how come a cafe like this doesn’t have decaf”. “We do”, she said. Go figure?

We walked thorough the cobbled Lübeck streets past magnificent old houses and past street signs in old German script. It was cold. An iciness in the breeze and despite mostly everyone is gloveless in these parts and celebrating a mild January, it’s still cold, just not AS cold as usual. We headed for the famous Holstentor. This is a surviving city gate built in 1464 and made completely of marzipan. Ok, that’s not quite true, Lübeck is also famous for marzipan and you can buy a marzipan Holstentor if you so desire, Olivia did for her mum. We walked back to the attic room, loaded the car and set off for Hamburg, just an hour away. We passed by Buntekuh (“Colourful Cow”, believe it or not) and Buddikate, remember we are in Germany, it doesn’t mean Buddy Kate, it’s actually the name of a service station but it’s still an odd name, even in German. 

We were soon in Hamburg and ‘Sat Nav’d’ our way to Maria’s Ballroom, situated in the South of the city on the other side of the Elbe. We didn’t have to drive in to the city proper so missed the obligatory walk down the Reeperbahn and the Beatles nostalgia but that important history is always present when you are here. We pulled up to the venue and met Heimo. There’s actually two rooms to play here and we decided to play in the smaller room and have it packed which is what happened. The stage was a postage stamp, but we still managed to get on there, set up our moody lights and I avoided being stabbed by Olivia’s bow. The dressing room was also to be our bedroom for the night and Heimo had set up some nice snacks for us, again lovely friendly venue owners so far everywhere on this tour. We soundchecked quite quickly, no problems there and we were out the door to a nearby mall to eat. We also needed one of those small flat round batteries for one of my tuners (I always have 3) and there was a big electrical store that also sold vinyl. I found something of course, Echo And The Bunnymen John Peel sessions and the first Grinderman album. I saw Grinderman live once, at a festival in Sydney, I think they were headlining, I don’t think it worked so well, they were a bit too weird for the audience. I guess you can put Nick Cave anywhere these days though. When I saw him in Stockholm in recent years, I couldn’t believe the cross section of people. Men, women, boys, girls, hipsters, bearded ladies, acrobats, the old, the young and the dead, straight and gay, ship captains, pilots, bakers, candlestick makers, aliens, the lot. I also sorted out the records in the store. Billie Eilish was under S, two Pink Floyd albums were in D and the latest Springsteen album was not under the name card with his other albums, I do that in record stores, put records where they should be when they have lost their way, I feel sorry for them.

We went on at eightish, we had to start because of the curfew, but there were still people coming in. We played a slightly different set to last night, as Lars had been there the night before - today was his birthday, I felt like 2 or 3 different songs might be nice. Manfred from Zillo magazine was there, Andres from Chile who happened to be visiting his sister this week, Dörte who lives in Hamburg now but we know from Montevideo, yes, that Montevideo, Henrik came from Denmark and Olivia’s old Hamburg flat mates and childhood friends also came. The set was great tonight, a mixture of powerful and melodic, sensitive and rousing, delivered to an attentive crowd with thoughtful yarns and humorous interactive moments. We couldn’t hope for anything more. Tomorrow we drive back to Olivia’s parents’ house, stay the night there and pick up a hire car for the rest of the tour. Thursday we are off to Trier, the birthplace of Karl Marx.

Photo by Peter Schmidt.

Monday, January 20th.

Oh, how life’s small strokes of luck with seemingly insignificant things can make everything so much easier. Yes, we found a parking spot right next to the accommodation and the gig in Berlin from Saturday to Monday! You have no idea how significant this was for the whole arriving, being there and leaving - and leave we did this morning before 10 AM. Loading up the guitars and the violins, the merch, the pedal bag, the lights, the computers, the kitchen sink. We had to be at the Swedish embassy in Berlin by 11 AM for Olivia’s Swedish passport approval. She is now a passport holding dual citizen of Germany and Sweden whereas I am stuck with whatever inconvenient hell Brexit throws up for those of us that just have a British passport and a transient lifestyle. That’s another complication for the future but now we have to try and find a way to make it through the day with only 3 or 4 hours sleep - yes, we were in Berlin eating falafels at 3 AM, we must be on the road.

The drive out of Berlin via a bakery and two camembert sandwiches was pretty easy - and on the camembert, I have been vegetarian for 37 years, I gave up fish many years ago but can’t remember when, I don’t eat eggs or drink milk but if I didn’t eat cheese on the road I would starve to death! I don’t like so many things, I can’t even bring myself to say the “T” word! The alien-skinned creature, red and round and obviously not of this earth. Food has always been a difficult subject - Olivia and I bond over it. It was a 4-hour journey and we planned to stop on the way to Lübeck but by the time we did finally pull over, the place looked so shabby we decided to wait till we reached our destination. The drive is a rural cruise with few built-up areas North West of Berlin on the way to Lübeck. We started in fog, the wind towers disappearing into the haze, the blades rotating in and out of sight. The towers always look very ‘Hipgnosis’ to me and in fog, they look like the machinery of dystopia.

I nodded off once or twice on the way, I’m not sure how Olivia managed to drive on so little sleep - did I ever say that I don’t drive? I had motorbikes as a teenager, I was never very interested in cars or driving, my only interest in them is architectural - I would be happy to own a Citroen DS and I love old cars from anywhere, their shapes and angles, their character, the faces on their grills. My dad was in charge of road safety in the North West of England, he’d come home with pics of beautiful girls who’d been disfigured in car accidents, going through windscreens and he’d use these terrible images to encourage people to wear their seat belts - I guess at that point in the seventies, seat belts weren’t compulsory and a lot of the sixties cars that were still around weren’t even fitted with them. Coincidentally my dad’s office was in the next block to where we recorded The Wild Swans album backing tracks in Liverpool. 

The Germans have some gruesome tactics to stop fatal accidents, too. On the Autobahn there are these massive signs that show a mother and a child together in a cute and candid family photo with a RIP cross and text that says something like, “Helga (38), texting at speed”. On a more positive note, we are entertained by some of the place names on the way, Ludwigslust and Ziegendorf (“Goat Village”). We finally make it to the outskirts of Lübeck, the fog has cleared and this legendary and magnificent old city is ahead of us, famous for its medieval buildings and marzipan, all these years I’ve never been here and now I’m off sugar for 6 months and have a broken tooth so unfortunately, the marzipan experience will not be mine.

We are too early for Tonfink (“Sound Finch”), the place we are playing, but again we find a parking place right outside, Olivia goes to buy a ticket and finds a record store so I spend the next hour in there and manage to find some gems such as the La Düsseldorf Ich Liebe Dich 12 inch and Eroc 4. They have listening turntables so I could check a few things out and I’m glad I did because that double live Ange album was of very poor quality and those bands I’d never heard of sounded pretty awful - I won’t tell you which ones in case you like them.

We managed to load into the gig, a small cafe and Carolin the owner was a lovely lady who looked after us really well with great food and a friendly atmosphere - that’s what it’s all about and for every A hole there’s 20 nice people, who are smart, helpful and just a pleasure to be around - so why do we always remember the A holes?

We left our equipment at the venue and went off to find where we were staying to drop off our other bags. A cute little place with steep stairs into the loft where I am sitting now freezing to death because the heating has gone off. Back to the venue and soon Cleo the sound girl arrived and we soundchecked, no monitors, playing quietly, it’s a cafe, it’s all good. Soon the place started to fill up and it was time to go on stage, four songs in…bang, the migraine aura. If you know what this is you’ll know what a disaster it is. Diamonds and swirling patterns in your eyes that mean you can’t focus - this ultimately leads to a headache - in the good old days this would have sidelined me for a week but in recent times once my vision returns a dull headache comes and it’s just uncomfortable for 24 hours. The problem is in the amoebas in your eyes and not being able to see the guitar properly. I didn’t know what to do. Should I just stop and say sorry I can’t continue I’m ill? Did you hear about that Americana musician who just did that on stage, apologized and died there and then? I didn’t feel like I was dying and the gig was going so well so I decided to see if I could just ride it out till the break. I know these songs, my fingers play them automatically, I know the words but still, I have to perform, to sing, play to an audience, talk, communicate and I certainly didn’t want to give anything away about my condition. I got through to the break with my eyes going crazy, I went outside into the cold to get fresh air, I even had a German Fritz Kola for the caffeine even though my sugar regimen has been so very strict. We had a strict curfew of 10 PM so despite my eyes still not working properly I had to go back on, I thought “it has to end soon”. Eventually, it did end and I made it through. It’s only happened to me once before on stage and that was many years ago. The lack of sleep, bright lights ripping into my eyes, it’s going to happen. I was never able to be around strobes, that was always a problem, add in the stress of no sleep and this is what happens.

In the end, because of this issue, the gig became extremely intense and emotional as I tried to keep it together and as I got halfway through set two my vision returned. The trials and tribulations take you through many unforeseen circumstances but I really wouldn’t change it for the world. I love being here, playing little shows, seeing the world with my wife. Tomorrow we will check out this interesting city, sleep in, get up late and drive just over an hour to Hamburg where we play next. See you then.

Performance Photos by Suse Maentel & Priscilia Valenzuela.

Sunday, January 19th.

Amazing gig in Berlin tonight at 12 Grad Aetherloge, a steampunk bar transformed from smoking Victorian robots, grinding cog wheels and arty metal objects, fashion accessories and futuristic artifacts from the past into all kinds of different types of humans, listening, engaging with us and enjoying our music and stories. Not that I expected anything less from the sophisticated Berliners but in a world of self-obsession it was nice to see a mixed audience of fans and new faces respond so enthusiastically.

The day began 11AM with sessioneer Tony in Sydney, working on his songs, making great progress helping with ideas and direction. From there to the other Marty (the man who put on the gig) and his wife Sylvia who we met outside the accommodation at 1.30PM so they could drag us kicking and screaming to the flea market where I could be forced to look at records.

I love the Berlin flea markets, they are exactly what you want a flea market to be - boxes of junk next to tables of fascinating objects, hand-made art, furniture and boxes and boxes of records. There’s always something to buy. I was talking to one of the sellers and he was telling me Berlin was great for records because of the transient population over the years who often left their records behind (especially the Americans who didn’t want to cart them back to the homeland). Also, you find a lot of East German pressings here on the Amiga label. A lot of records were censored back in the days of the wall but some were allowed and they are often famous bands compiled with different cover art, not the best quality cardboard and I hear not the best quality pressings but you don’t buy them for their quality, you buy them as curiosities.

So I found an Amiga Beatles record with lots of tracks from the early EPs compiled. Some Eastern German bands I’ve never heard of and some Western German sixties band Best Of albums by The Lords and The Rattles. Others that I remember - a Carol Grimes record, we talked about how no one remembers her. A German pressing of the second Renaissance album, Illusion, originally only released in Germany with a completely different line up to their next album Prologue, the first with Annie Haslam. I guess you have to be a record nerd to care about all this so I won’t go on about it except for the lovely Spooky Tooth Pop Chronik compilation album and the, and the, and the…

Meanwhile Olivia had found a nice cafe with Marty and Sylvia called Lisboa next to the flea market. With Brexit coming soon Olivia and I are looking seriously at moving to Portugal, so she gravitated towards that place with that in mind. From there to a Thai place for an early dinner (pad thai tofu, no egg) before soundcheck and the load in where I spent most of the soundcheck watching Liverpool beat Manchester United 2-0 to go 16 points ahead at the top of the premiership. I guess you have to be football nerd to care so I won’t go on about it - did you see Leicester lost?

Soon people started to arrive for the show. At shortly after 8 we began to play. Jerome and Anja were there, Ryan and Tomoko who have graciously let us stay with them on previous visits to Berlin and from the All About Eve past, Justin, who told me he had lived here for 17 years and spoke fluent German. Was All About Eve really so long ago? I won’t give blow by blow accounts of the set, you had to be there and I realize that details are only of interest if you can relive it through the accounts of what it was like. And in today’s blog I find myself telling you what I’m not going to tell you about! Odd. I can say that Olivia really ground that bow into the strings tonight, I both thrashed and caressed the 12 string guitars and sang the songs to an audience that was receptive. It makes all the difference in the world. You give them something, they give you something and between you create something amazing. It doesn’t always happen that way and consequently everyone loses but tonight it gelled and we are forever grateful for the chance to give back what we received.

I’d forgotten to mention that on our drive to Berlin we pulled into a garage followed by 17 police vans (I counted them). I asked one of the policemen what was going on, he told me Angela Merkel wanted police from other areas in Berlin for security during the Libya conference (you may not have seen this on the news outside Germany). The reason I mention it was because during one of the mad bits in Time Is Imaginary a perfectly timed siren sounded outside as a police van shot by enhancing and absolutely nailing the rising dynamic of the song (Olivia’s lower octave violin, the cellolin, sounded like a tank destroying a house - fabulous!). The other thing I forgot to mention when we left Leipzig was our passing by a large building with a very dodgy mural of a scantily clad woman above large letters that spelled out BORDELL. Over the door a sign that said Double XX. Prostitution is legal in Germany and it’s fascinating how different cultures deal with this and other issues. Buildings are specifically designated to serve this one purpose, there’s one like this in Düsseldorf, too, we always pass it when we get the train there as it’s right next to the tracks. I imagine they are everywhere in Germany. How is it that this tight-knit community in Europe (excluding Britain of course) sees the issue so differently. All these countries all squeezed together with completely different philosophies despite the EU trying to bring them all together to conform to a central government. Britain voted out demanding autonomy from the rule makers but as I see it, European countries do get to keep those institutions and traditions that are special to them - like snus in Sweden, or the German Autobahn sections with no speed limit. These things are special to these countries separately and remain under their control.

Tomorrow we drive to marzipan land, that is Lübeck up in the North. I’m off sugar so I won’t be indulging, but I will be looking for a marzipan Holstentor. Check it out, this is one of the reasons we travel. Sleeeeep….

Saturday, January 18th.

And so we hit the road to Berlin but not before a rather interesting detour that takes us half an hour out of Leipzig on the Berlin road to a town you’ve never heard of called Halle. This was in fact the birthplace of one of the world’s most famous classical composers, Georg Friedrich Händel, and although he wrote the famous piece The Water Music (premiered in London in 1717) and one of my songs is called Water, this is not why we came here. The reason was because this is the site of the world’s largest Beatles Museum. The fact that it is here in a town that most people outside of Germany wouldn’t know, is another piece of evidence for my theory on the role The Beatles played as ambassadors in the reunification of Anglo/German relations after World War II. The museum, originally in Cologne, moved here as it outgrew its space as the German love affair with The Beatles music continues. Thorough doesn’t really cover it - three floors of rare records, pictures, puppets, photos, equipment, clothing, and endless Beatles paraphernalia, all soundtracked by rooms piping out songs and screens showing legendary Beatles performances. This pleasant distraction made for a relaxed journey to Berlin, two hours further down the road.

The rural state of Saxony in the East is contrasted by factories and industry dotting the skyline. Chimneys bellow out smoke, great square metal warehouses house unknown products. A sign off the road points to the Porsche factory (Cayenne and Panamera models are constructed here). You might have guessed that today is a day off as we casually amble across the countryside until we start to see the signs of that great metropolis Berlin looming and beckoning, sucking us in to its ventricles. Although we are off today we have to find the venue, load the gear in and check into our accommodation which we do with consummate ease, meeting my cheerful namesake Marty at our destination. The venue is a steampunk bar imaginatively called 12 Grad Aetherloge that usually allows smoking, but not tomorrow. I can already hear those fragile lungs breathing a sigh of relief. Berlin never lets go of its image as a city of alternative culture. On leaving the venue I had a pleasant exchange with a green skinned alien with long blond hair and green tights. I couldn’t work out if he was the act, the DJ or just a fun loving visitor from outer space but he did tell me he was from one of the moons of Jupiter, Ganymede as I recall. Articulate and fluent in English we discovered later that he was Gasher the 14th of Greenskull, the violinist in Clash Clash Bang Bang, the night’s entertainment.

It was time for us to leave and travel into Kreuzberg to meet Jerome Froese and his partner Anja for dinner. Jerome and I have been working on a project together and we haven’t seen them since we wound up those initial sessions. Although I can’t imagine anything appearing before 2021 I do know that Jerome is going to take what we had and turn it into a sonic treat - that’s what he does. I might add that Jerome was an active member of Tangerine Dream for fifteen years. Of the real Tangerine Dream.

It takes us three trains to get to Kreuzberg. That old familiar smell of the Berlin U-Bahn wafts through the entrance hall of Frankfurter Tor where we take the U5 to Alexanderplatz (you can see the famous TV tower from the entrance of the station). Friday night and Berlin is happening. Different languages are being spoken, people of all shapes and sizes, creeds and colours (including green), some dressed to the nines, others disheveled, clamber down the steps and on and off the trains. We change to the U2 at Alexanderplatz, walking the tunnels underneath the city (via an extremely talented busker singing and playing guitar) to get to the other lines and then take the U6 at Stadtmitte to Mehringdamm before rising out of the earth to a cold but busy Bergmannstrasse. Sweet conversations and dinner with our friends before we did the whole journey in reverse, finding our way back to this cosy little nest in the heart of one of the world’s most vibrant cities. But now I must sleep.

Friday, January 17th.

After the Leipzig gig, let’s call it an appearance, like a ghost haunting an unimpressed victim who looks right through you (literally) - we reflect. It’s not that me speaking to the audience in Swedish and then Spanish (there was one guy from Argentina there) that provoked the disinterested and perhaps even the interested (that’s pushing it) to leave or my telling them to beware of turning into their parents by not concentrating now because it would cause them more harm than concentrating on qualifying to be enslaved for 30 years condemned to early mornings and a thankless existence. I might add that on the way we passed through the land of Goethe and Schiller and they knew a thing or two about that. I mentioned them at one point and a cynic in the audience suggested it was a cliché, on digging little deeper it seems the provocateur might have been in Liverpool and failed to not, not mention The Beatles. Hm.

One wonders when the listeners see the non listeners carrying on that they don’t say something. Like, “I’m trying to listen”, but in truth, I suppose, some are not really caring either way and the ones who care a little bit more don’t need another battle in their lives. And after all we are playing our music in a hipster hot dog bar - a fine concept by the way with two lovely people running it, Daniel and Fred plus Eva and Annelie who greeted us so kindly when we arrived. But in essence it’s a modern falafel joint with take aways and tables with added booze for those who want to stay and well, not be bothered or pressured into actually looking up at the two hapless figures sat on the stage. After all they are there for hot dogs, beer and talk and not live music, ok maybe in the background, but for GOD'S sake why does he keep challenging us to listen!!! Can’t he see we’re texting whilst ignoring each other? Banksy would be proud. But really give them a break, they did talk to each other, too, although my generation can’t imagine how they can be so distracted by their phones when we had each other. One might mention that the man playing the oud like a demon in the falafel joint might not get much credence either, especially if he started, well, communicating.

When I say, look up at the stage, I mean look up! It didn’t help, an elevated tree house above the bar looking down on the poor souls. I was sure to intimidate them with ease by even mentioning the concept of artist audience engagement. If I’d said “How are you down there?”, they might have thought “What does he mean by down?”. At one point a dark gloom sank into the room. Instead of seeing me as being entertaining they saw me as being provocative - it doesn’t take much. After that, they did listen though, all of them, we can be thankful for that result, but it takes extremes to succeed and one wonders why they don’t presume to be interested, before they are annoyed. I suspect they aren’t moved that often, who is these days? Plus everyone tends to have their own agenda, don’t they? Who am I to criticize that? It’s their right to choose who to love, who to hate, who to ignore. It’s those that get swept into the conflict that suffer the most, the quiet ones, the attentive ones.

I guess me talking about being in Berlin in 1977 meant little, too (well we are in Leipzig!). Yes, but it reminded me of Berlin in the seventies - graffiti everywhere, bars and secondhand clothes stores, the difference though was that here everyone is 25 (in East Berlin in 1977 everyone seemed to be 75, in West Berlin, 25). Still I made the point that as we are in East Germany in 2020 and I was in East Germany in 1977 and despite them all being German (apart from the Argentine and the Austrian) that I had a perspective on Germany that they didn’t. I wondered if that was also an irritant, probably. One man who thought we were better than he expected despite not knowing who the hell we were, complimented us by asking us to play The Space Cowboy and proceeded to whistle it - sort of. He didn’t know the real title or who it was by (he meant The Joker by Steve Miller) and when I told him that, it seemed to go in one ear and out the other, rather like the melody of the song must have whenever it was he heard it. His table talked through the whole thing, when we played super quietly in the middle of a song, they lowered their voices without looking up, when we got louder, they got louder, it was like we had them on a piece of string. In their minds we were something of an amusing sideshow, they at least were not particularly irritated, we had so little impact.

So we played through our songs, some interested, some not until after the first set most people left to give way to the other late night take away hot dog buyers who were completely non-plussed by the two lonely musicians in the loft. We could have been hanging there like two corpses and they wouldn’t have flinched. So we stopped as soon as we had delivered what we felt we should musically and we folded our leads nicely, we folded their leads nicely, left the place as we found it. Fred the owner thought we were great as did Daniel the booker and sound guy - unfortunately he was ill and had to leave but Fred said this is the highest rehearsal room in Germany, you can only play here if you don’t care about the people, nobody has ever listened. I think that we were the first that had ever created a silence, difficult though as it was. If Jim Morrison had sat there in leather pants and sang Riders On The Storm the hot dogs would have got the claps before he did. We live and we learn, no more gigs like this for us. What a contrast between yesterday’s attentive older crowd and today's irritated youth and casual bystanders. It was like going to meet a friend for coffee and someone tries to sell you a lawnmower - a high quality lawnmower mind you.

Reality really hit home as we left after another veggie hot dog (nothing like 5 hot dogs for dinner). We were staying in an old DDR (German Democratic Republic) apartment around the corner, whilst Olivia was picking up the keys and trying to figure out exactly where it was, I started talking to a fellow outside one of the bars - I do that. We talked, he asked me where I was from, “Liverpool” I said. It always makes peoples faces light up when you are in a strange country and you say “Liverpool” - it’s The Beatles thing again. I tried to draw an affinity between the Germans and the English in my one-sided conversations with the audience. I considered the idea that the main thing that had brought the German people and the British people back in to step with each other was The Beatles. I think it’s a relevant point that I haven’t actually heard anyone else make. Hm. But outside the bar waiting for Olivia, I discovered that the man I was talking to was Egyptian and called Mohamad. Another glorious Liverpool moment which I won’t explain here because you will either know why it was glorious or you really won’t care. But reality really struck home after I told him we were musicians and I asked him what he did. His response “I’m a trauma surgeon.”. Suddenly any drama that the night had spawned felt meaningless. Do people actually realize what does and doesn’t matter? What you should move on from and what you should care about? Grudges against trivia, fighting with the shadowy ghosts of insignificance, the mistakes we make seem so obvious afterwards but not in the moment! Why is that? The melting ice from an overheated planet might mean more to you if you live on The Maldives. So it’s back to our own personal agendas again. If it doesn’t talk to us specifically, we don’t care. Whether it’s the oud player in the falafel joint, the stranger getting beaten up in the street or the dilemma of which bathroom you can use if you’re transgender. In my lucky life I endeavour to remember that, it’s just my irritating habit of reminding everybody else that is so unforgivable.

Thursday, January 16th.

Leaving North Rhine Westphalia, for the first show in Bielefeld, 3 hours away to the North East. 12 degrees, a baby blue sky with cotton wool clouds it felt like we were driving into someone’s bathroom although it was hard to explain the trees and the hundreds of giant trucks, the roadworks and the traffic jams that confronted us on the autobahn. People outside Germany believe that there is no speed limit on the autobahn, that’s true but only in sections, not the whole way, but when you hit that spot the cars fly past you like bullets, sometimes in a blitz of 3 or 5 vehicles, a blur of Audi, BMW and Mercedes Benz. We trace their vapor trails from Olivia’s Dad’s Citroen Berlingo and feel happy to be the tortoise not the hare.

On arrival in Bielefeld we quickly drop off our bags at the Golden Tulip hotel before heading for load in at Bunker Ulmenwall. Greeted by Cayan and Dominik, promotor and sound tech, welcoming us, beaming, enthusiastic and helpful, a lovely way to start a tour. The venue, literally a converted bunker, is warm and cool (thanks Tom Verlaine). We set up our moody lights, guitars and violins and prepare for our opening night, running through some songs, checking the monitors. It’s the first of a routine that we will perfect as the days go by but the first night always has a certain feeling of anxiety as you wonder if you can remember all the parts, all the words.

Trepidation turns to joy as the intimate audience settles down for our set of two hours with a 20 minute break in between. A couple of familiar faces in Christian and Annie who we played with at Burg Sternberg last year. A great response from the audience right from the start puts us at ease. If you have been to any of our shows, it’s generally a mixture of good humoured anecdotes with a selection of songs from all my projects. We play cascading melodic riffs with frantic rhythms, the violin and the 12 string tussling and kissing throughout the evening. We aren’t really sure what kind of music we play - it’s not really folky or Indie or Rock. It lives somewhere in between all those genres and is just us, Olivia and I, together on the road. Tomorrow we head into the old East Germany where we play a hipster bar in Leipzig. Hold onto your hats, this next one could be hard to call.