CIVIL CIVIC

G-Berg nights (Raped again).

2011-08-28T19:57:00.000+01:00

There was this one night back in November last year and we were in Gothenburg, Sweden.

Gothenburg is one of those cities, you know the ones. De-facto cultural capitals where art roams the streets and the hipsters regularly out-hip your wildest and most complicated hipster dreams.

¨Big city, dum da dum, big city niiightsss¨

Me and Le Baarone and Alexandra Cecile Bouche were at this sleazy/tastefull hole called Jazzhusset waiting to play a musical concert for the cream of Gothenburg youth.

Some skinny punk fuck-up called Jonk "Jonas" Haglund had booked us to play there, but he had called to say he was stricken with herpes or some such thing and couldn't make it.

Yes officer, that´s him in the middle there. Slap the cuffs on.

It was buuutttttt......ffuuuuuuccck .....freeeeezing outside, so after soundcheck we just hung around the bar lookng awkward and failing to be recognised. Are you getting a picture?

I was tired and irritable, and had stuffed myself into a dark corner of the bar, hoping against hope for some peace. I was lost in a reverie when I felt something slam into me, a human body of some sorts.

A sweaty, gin-soaked voice rasped in my ear.

"You better be good, fucker, because I told my fucking freinds to come here. Can you handle that kind of responsibility? Can you take the fucking pressure?!?"

Sweet Jesus, it was the awful Daniel Strandman, a dangerous drunk, sex-offender and celebrated Scandanavian fashion personality.

I instantly felt The Fear, but I tried desperately to conceal it. One whiff of panic and who knows what he'd do.

I decided to try and buy time by flattering this dangerous creep.

"Looking super-flexible there D.S." I gurgled "What's on the agenda of a swinging guy like you on a night like this?"

He gave me a blank look and tossed the rest of his drink down the front of my shirt. "I'm here, waiting to see your silly act, baldy".

"Nifty." I said, ignoring the Beefeaters and Schweppes soaking into my chest-hair. "Maybe we can take some girls out for pizza afterwards, and make them pay."

A "good night out" for Daniel is an ugly and complicated thing.

But the Strandman was only half listening. He started tugging at the sleeve of my shirt and staring at something on the other side of the room.

I looked down his sightline, but it ended in an empty patch of wall so I couldn't tell what was bugging him. Maybe nothing.

But the look on his face was troubling and he leaned in, like a man with a secret to tell.

"Your buddy Aaron has got it coming to him!" He hissed. "It's time for that guy to pay the fucking piper!"

He elbowed me hard in the ribs for emphasis, then grabbed somebody's drink off the bar and threw it down his throat. No-one protested.

But his tone had a truly mean edge to it and I was genuinely shocked and afraid.

"What the fuck are you talking about?" I wheezed, "The Baaron can't have enemies here."

I mean Jesus. Look at that evil fucker. Who would want a piece of that??

Strandman just laughed at me and gave my cheek a friendly slap.

"He's got a talent for it, doesn't he?" He slurred. "There's schools of micro-shrimp in the North Sea that want to put the hurt on that fucker. There's particles of ice in Saturn's rings that hate his guts! This is Sweden, shithead. You guys are totally out of your depth."

His words had the ring of awful truth, but I just finished my beer and said nothing. Daniel smiled warmly and grabbed another drink off the bar.

"I'm going to go keep an eye on that poor skinny bastard. You go take a big shit, grandpa. You look like you need one."

He let out an evil, throaty chuckle and lurched over to where the Baaron was chatting to a local nerd of some kind. He jabbed his forefinger into the small of The Baarons back and Von Cuddles squawked like a chicken and spilled his soda-water all-over a bored looking proffesional couple who cursed him and shoved him away. Then Strandman thrust his gin-reeking mug into Von Cuddles ear and said something that instantly made The Baarons face turn grey. Then they both walked quickly out of the bar.

I never did find out what thorny doom was hanging over the Baaron that night, but I quickly decided not to worry. Anything that Von Cuddles can't handle is way beyond my capabilities, so why fret about it?

Both he and Strandman seemed loose and smug when I found them guzzling cooking sherry and telling ugly sex stories back in the kitchen. They were hanging around with a jittery Japanese guy who kept patting his pockets and mumbling and kicking things.

This was Strandman's hired-gun photographer, who had been flown in at short notice from Helsinki to take a few snaps of the Baaron and I in some Julian Red "casual" wears. He seemed angry and nervous for some reason, and during the shoot he kept shouting at us and smacking us with a long flat piece of wood. We complained to Strandman, but Daniel just kept necking that disgusting sherry and laughing at us and groping a leggy blonde model-type who had wandered in from the bar to check up on him.

It all went pretty well, and we scored some fine JR clobber for our time and trouble.

********************

The atmosphere in the club was tense and there were lots of ugly scenes in the crowd that night.

Denis from Fucking Wherewolf Asso had gone into some sort of boozy judo trance and was fighting off many imaginary attackers. Sara Shakarchi had lost patience with a group of preppy tourists and laid several bodies out on the greasy carpet. Right in front of me two under-age shoegazer types where pushing and elbowing each-other visciously for almost the whole gig while their drunk girl-friends rolled their eyes and giggled and every so often Strandman would lurch hideously out of the front-row and yell something really rotten and insulting at us.

The Baaron falls asleep, Mark Knopfler style....again.

Shred and tweak and shred and tweak some moooorrrreeeee.

As gigs go it was strange, violent and troubling, but we plied our trade regardless, bagged as much booze as we could and made it to bed alive that night.

Just another day at the office, really.

Slow morning on the floor at Chez Jonk.

The rest day was pretty laid back. Some slothery at Chez Jonk and a few hours tooling around the city pretty much took care of it. But once the sun went down The Baaron, The Bouche and myself were sucked into an all-night test of strength and skill against The Jonk, The Julia and Sara "Motherfuckin" Shakarchi.

It was brutal and it started with bowling.

Jonk expresses triumph and contempt for social norms.

Reinforcing what we´ve all known all along, the scoreboard decalres that The Baaron is a nameless error.

A furious Lady Alexandra picks a fight with Julia over Julias´controversial technique, while Shakarchi chuckles into her tonic water.

We managed to fit in a photoshoot for Shakarchi and the Baaron´s hot new darkwave act, Hoarfrost (touring January 2012. Contact fabrizio@supercoolbookingagency)

I wasn´t allowed to play fussball, because everyone said I smell.

Poor Cuddles doesn´t get to drink much on tour, being the designated driver and all, so rest days are a real bonus for the little scamp.

Creepy, boozy, homo-ironic Nazism really takes the edge off. Doesn´t it???

Anyway, you get the picture. Another 48 hours down the G-hole and we´re still none the wiser about what makes these weird northerners tick. Burn their idols and convert them all to christianity at the point of the sword, I say. That should straighten them out.

The Shadow Over Limoges and other Weird Tales

2011-08-21T20:00:00.000+01:00

"I have looked upon all that the universe has to hold of horror, and even the skies of spring and the flowers of summer must ever afterward be poison to me".

Hello. My name is Ben, and I am a senile old crank with a head full of bile and many insane prejudices.

When I see a band turn up to a gig wearing short trousers of any kind, my snap judgement is that these people are either...

A. Fops

B. Jocks

C. Nerds or...

...and should be kidnapped and dumped in the outer suburbs of Cairo with no money, I.D or shorts.

Yep, it is my screwy and probably to be revised conviction that good bands do not never ever wear shorts ever*.

Take myself and Baaron Von Cuddles for example. One fine day in June of this year we arrived in a small village on the outskirts of Limoges, France, to perform a musical concert. On this particular day it happened to be 46 degrees Celsius in the shade. The tar on the road was almost completely molten and small birds were falling dead from the sky, but did we yield our dignity to the mindless onslaught of Mother Nature? Fuck NO!

We were wearing jeans.

Filthy black jeans, just like mamma used to make.

Our legs were slowly being broiled inside their greasy denim casings, like big sweaty chunks of pork, yet we adhered to the fucking code, damnit!

Anyway, this all has little or nothing to do with the tale I'd like to tell. Make of it what you will and let´s move on.

Now this musical concert was to take place at a club called La Forumi, situated on the main street of the aforementioned French village. We pulled up out front and wearily loaded our crap inside, assisted by the cruel and devious Andyinglis and our booking agent, Almond The God, who were both travelling with us at that time. We made a pile of gear on the stage and then did the rounds of the venue staff, shaking hands and exchanging pleasantries and whatnot, but nobodies heart was really in it.

"It´s so damn hot!!"

Like us, the staff were all listless and irritable due to the brutal heat, which made even standing upright seem borderline impossible. You could feel the hairs in your nostrils being singed with each intake of breath and whenever I bent down to tweak my pedals my belt-buckle would touch my flabby stomach and burn me like a soldering iron.

But the venues' fridges were on full blast, so the beer was icy cold and on that solid footing we proceeded with the task at hand.

Checka checka checka checka sooound-checkin'!

After our sweaty soundcheck we retired back-stage to be interviewed by some local radio station. I don't remember the name of the interviewer (or the station), but I was deeply impressed by his professional methods.

Rather than asking a string of questions designed to familiarise his listeners with the band and it's music, he threw out a weird bunch of challenges, cynical observations and digs at our personal style which bordered on flat-out abuse. Our role in this little drama was obviously to become hostile and defensive and to mouth off about his stupid haircut, stupid public radio, stupid France ect.

It started out pleasantly enough.

Voices were raised and there was some pushing and shoving, but we all quickly agreed that the unbearable dry-heat made poor fighting weather, so we turned our attention to the snacks and drinks and became freinds.

The hours passed slowly. Andyinglis slumped like a pile of Scottish offal onto an old leather sofa next to the bar and started moaning softly. Baaron Von Cuddles went out in the street and did one hundred push-ups on his knuckles for a small crowd of local children, who cheered him wildly and then pestered him for donkey-rides. Almond had gone to grab some food with Julian, the local promoter, and everyone else had gone home to stuff ice-cubes down their pants.

Feeling drained but restless, I wandered away from the club and after ten minutes of directionless rambling found myself at the banks of a broad, slow moving river.

Overjoyed at the opportunity to get wet, I stripped naked and sat down up to my neck in the slimey, muddy water. Aaaahhhhhhhh.

...and that's when it started.

A fleeting shadow in the back of my mind. A wild music, as of ancient stone flutes half-heard at a great distance, behind which lurked some kind of terrible, brooding presence. I felt that a vast. cold intellect was scooping me up out of the water and drawing me into the blackness and terror between the stars.

I began to see things.

I saw a great city lying in ruins, it's monstrous idols toppled and their temples choked with weed. I saw a throng of people, a multitude, singing and walking slowly into the ocean to vanish forever beneath the waves. I saw.....

Suddenly my eyes refocused and I looked up at the sky. It was dusk.

Holy balls! I must have been sitting there for, like, two freakin' hours!

In a fog of confused urgency I scrambled up the bank, dragged on my filthy black jeans and jogged straight back to the venue. There I found a motley collection of nerds, stoners, rural-hipsters and red-necks milling around in the street, babbling in the local dialect and eating long strips of jerky.

I must have looked obviously out of place, because they jeered and laughed and shoved me around as I tried to get into the venue. One skinny girl with coke-bottle glasses and a Mudhoney t-shirt jabbed her forefinger up my arse so hard it nearly put a whole in my pants. I squealed but made it through the door with a great leap, while behind me the crowd whooped and cheered. The Baaron, who was just inside setting up a merch table, snorted in derision and called me a loser.

"You need to grow some balls, Green." He said. "They can smell your type a mile away. You're like an open can of dog-food at the city pound."

I could see his point, but fuck! all I wanted was a few minutes of peace and five cold beers before the time came to hit the stage and entertain these dangerous French fucks.

As the Baaron tweaks filters for Satan, a fearfull apparition appears at stage left and flies towards him. Is it the unspeakable Yog-Sothoth, trying to enter our world from The Beyond?

No, no it isn´t. It´s a confused bass player trying to squint the sweat out of his peepers.

I don´t remember this part at-all.

Despite my misgivings, it was a fine show. It was so unbelievably hot under the stage-lights that The Baaron and I drifted into a trance-like state and played the entire gig with little or no awareness of our surroundings. The crowd seemed to appreciate this and made us welcome, Some heckled us noisily, some danced like sick weasels and others just swayed to and fro in their individual pools of sweat and rancid air.

I'm pretty sure we played at least one encore.

Andyinglis had emerged from his catatonic funk in rare high spirits, and was ordering rounds of strong booze for a clutch of locals who had adopted him as their mascot. A deejay started cranking some big, dumb blog-house through the sound system and everyone got down to the serious business of getting drunk and pulling "tarded" moves.

It was at this point, amid the noise and drunken confusion, that I once again started hearing the call.

As it crept into a far corner of my head I knew it was the voice of our ancient father who dwells in the pitch dark beneath the waves. At first it was just a distant echo, a shadow too swift and pale to grasp, but it grew and grew until finally it filled my sweating brain to bursting and seemed to shake the walls of the club.

I saw that Andyinglis and Julian were behaving strangely, twitching and baring their teeth. They too were being summoned by the horror in the deep, and in their minds could hear, as I did, that terrible, cacophonous whispering, as of waves crashing upon black shores at the far ends of the universe, where the very stars in heavens' vault tremble in naked terror of that which lies beyond.

The three of us lurched out into the street, immediately stripped down to our underwear and then loped like booze-crazed wolves through the village and down to the river. We were barking and moaning and flapping our arms in an all consuming fever, a hot madness sent from the bottom of the ocean by He Who Shall Not Be Named.

Oh ancient one, who dwells within the cyclopean ruins of R'lyeh in the blackest depths of the sea, we come!!

The stars wheeled in the sky and were snuffed out. The dreadful music of the outer spheres rose in our brains like a great destroying wave, erasing thought and time and whipping away the last shreds of our sanity like wisps of smoke before the howling winter gale.

Do you hear it?? The voice of the frogs!?! That terrible croaking??!! They are His children and they would summon Him!!! Oh unhappy mortals, flee and hide ye faces, for He awakes!!!!!!

NNNOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!

I awoke next morning in an abandoned petrol station about a mile from the venue. My body was covered in small, purple bruises and I stank horribly, like a dead cat soaked in urine.

It took me some time to get on my feet, because I had an overwhelming feeling that the instant I moved something terrible would happen, but the feeling subsided and eventually I emerged into the sunlight.

When I found the others I was told that during the night....

A: The Box had been elected village Mayor, running unopposed, and had outlawed the internet.

B: I had been tried (in-absentia) on eight counts of sodomy and arson but acquitted on a legal technicality even though my council was passed out under the stage ...

C: The Baaron had married a fine local horse (a three year old gelding called Nips who went missing shortly after the ceremony and has not been seen since).

Good times, dear reader. Good times.

There are two keys lessons to be learnt from this sorry story.

A: Seek ye not the deep and submarine paths to ancient R'lyeh, where Cthulu, old and terrible beyond mortal thought, abides in the slumber of dark aeons and....

B: If you're in a band please wear jeans, or at least a nice pair of slacks. Shorts are not on.

Thanks to No Brain No Headache and the La Forumi posse.

Two of them live shots stolen from Laurent Legarde

"But are not the dreams of poets and the tales of travellers notoriously false?" Howard Phillips Lovecraft

*Except various groups associated with "skate-rock" between 1982 and 1987

Noise, Shame and Rats in The City of Lights.

2011-08-12T00:51:00.000+01:00

Paris, July 2011.
Cast of characters.

- Baaron Von Cuddles III : Shredmaster. Face-puller. Overlord.

- Benjamin James Gross : Bass guitarist. Fool. Overweight.

- Thee Box: Drummer. Square thing. Loud.

- Andyinglis: Ruthless manager. Nihilist. Well mannered.

- George Bush: Sound Engineer. Complete soak. Pulls da mix.

- Almond The God: Booking agent. French chick. Arse-kicker.

- Buke and Gass: Bespoke prog/folk duo. Nice. Don't drink much.

Baaron Von Cuddles lays down the law at a pre-gig strategy meeting. George Bush is offended and even Andyinglis is dubious, but Almond The God gives it a big thumbs-up.

After confronting the nightmare of peak-hour Parisian traffic we were all nervous and snappy. The Baaron had retreated into his "battle-mind" and was unresponsive while I was sweating heavily and singing the Judas Priest hit "Turbo Lover" at top volume. George Bush and Almond were just plain ornery. Annoyed.

We pulled up outside the venue just in the nick of time to avoid some sort of hyper-aggressive scene inside the moving car.

Shifty Parsisans loitering around the stage during soundcheck.

Said venue, "Glazart", is a slick, mid-sized nightclub with a fenced off area adjacent, featuring a small concert stage set on an artificial beach, complete with tiki huts for the bar and mixing desk. It seemed hideously out of place, situated as it is in a sleazy, garbage strewn neighbourhood full of tough-looking arabs, winos, pickpockets and tough-looking arab wino pickpockets.

The wierdness got into full swing as The Baaron and myself were hustled out after soundcheck to pose for pictures. A photo-shoot had been arranged with Remy Grandroques, a slick Parisian fashion photographer, who expressed loud dismay at our filthy appearance, homo-erotic toilet humor and our reluctance to put our beers down during the shoot. But the Baaron twisted his arm, I screamed the lyrics of Born To Be Wild at him in a comedy German accent and after that he became pretty docile. The shoot went smoothly, as you can see from the documentary evidence.

We took dinner in a cheesy grotto/smokers-garden at the rear of the venue, which was swarming with giant rats, the size of young rabbits. They had dug themselves a complex warren around the water feature and were darting from hole to hole, obviously crazed by the smell of fried chicken, but unwilling to make a frontal assault on the picnic tables where we were dining.

The Baaron almost lost a finger when he dangled a piece of chook-flesh near one of the tunnel mouths and a truly monstrous black fucker darted out and lunged for it. The Baaron screeched in terror and recoiled, but Andyinglis, fast as a weasel, threw a steak knife with near deadly precision which buried itself in the dirt next to the rats head in the instant before it disappeared back into it's dwelling.

We all drank a toast to his skill, even though the rat lived. Sometimes near-enough IS good-enough.

But Andys mind was elsewhere. He was smitten to the core of his tortured being by Buke & Gass singer Marnie, and was running his sickening Scottish country gentleman routine on her. She seemed vaguely uncomfortable with his attention, and made several attempts to strike up conversation with George Bush, but our hired sound-gun was already so hopelessly drunk that he could only stare at her and moan softly for help.

Good old George Bush. He loves a drink.

Fortunately for us he crawled under the pizza van parked next to the outdoor stage and at least partially slept it off during B&K's set. When he emerged and hour later he was covered in dirt and axle grease, but seemed to have settled into some sort of reliable form. Our front of house sound was good, I'm told.

Buke and Gass folk-prog your ass.

Von Cuddles checking The Box for lice.

A great example of my "Game Face".

After the show we joined our old freind John Zorns Illegitimate Daughter (JZID) for drinks and loose talk. She had brought a motley collection of French fuck-ups and petty-criminals along to the show, all spastically drunk and obnoxious, for which we were thankfull. Spirits were high, and this is where it gets a bit spotty, for me.

JZID appears unconvinced by my story about fucking Kylie Minogue behind the Bondi Pavilion back in '92.

Andyinglis chums up, mafia style, with Pierre le booker.

At some point I became so drunk that I switched to "Squirrel Mode", a defence mechanism I learned during my time embedded with Russian Special Forces in Chechnya. Chicks love that shit.

Almond tries to hide from the horror, the horror, while George Bush sends pornographic text messages to his 8th grade maths teacher.

All I know for sure is that I contributed to the worlds lamest human pyramid and at some later point made it to our nearby roach hotel to hit the greasy mattress like a big, dead fish. Rumor has it that Andyinglis left the venue with a clutch of notorious local whores, but saw the sunrise with his slacks un-creased and his virginity intact, along with various other miracles, signs and portents.

The Baaron says I snored heavily and kept asking for another beer in my sleep. I refuse to dignify that kind of slander until he produces video evidence, and probably not even then.

Never trust a Baaron. They think differently to us.

Mixing, touring and face-palming. It's a CC life.

2011-06-24T16:55:00.000+01:00

Among the eight of you reading this, there may be one or two who feel inclined to ask...

"What the fuck happened? Why the five month holiday from posting, you lazy, bass-plonking pigfucker. What happened to esprit de corps/the show must go on/duty to the customer (ect), you slack piece of shit?!?"

Artists impression of what everyone assumes my life is like in Barcelona.

The answer is a long one of a highly personal nature. Let's just say I was "sad".

-Not the kind of sad you get when you find out the Easter bunny isn't real or that "Metro Station" exist.

-More your "screaming-into-a rolled-up-towel-so-the-neighbours-wont-hear" kind of sad.

You know, the really good stuff.

Stare at this picture and get in touch with your innermost feelings. Even worse than that.

Aaaaaannnnyyhhooooooooo......

..... in coming posts I'll try to backtrack occasionaly and pick out a few of the humiliating lowlights of our last tour and bring some closure to the cruelly interrupted "Bushweek" saga. But right now it's all about right now, at the moment now...

...or at least the last couple of weeks. As I mentioned last post, things are back in full swing here at Civic HQ, with many irons in the fire and the constant wailing of sirens and roaring of heavy machinery keeping us up all night and grinding our nerves down to a fine edge.

The general mood can be neatly summed up as.......

....ish.

The Baaron and myself are currently locked in a deep subteranian recording pit somewhere in the City of London, mixing our DEBUT ALBUM (which will shatter the minds of the weak, uplift the souls of the strong and make grumpy, cancer ridden old women stage-dive off the cash-registers at Carrefour).

Every 6 hours a microwaved pizza and a bottle of generic cola is lowered down to us in a wire basket by a short, unpleasant woman called Gina. She's the abrasive, short tempered immigrant who the Baaron rescued from a savage rape/mugging in Hyde Park and who now works as his P.A. and housekeeper.

She yells encouragement, tells us what day it is and reads our email to us in her thick Maltese accent. She is a good woman, at heart. Hideously ugly and socially inept, but loyal and hard-working.

So the mood in the studio is upbeat and energetic, as you can see from this happy-snap taken only hours ago.

Fact: A volcano of terror and ugliness erupted late last week when our master hard drive "shat itself" in a shower of sparks and purple smoke, and the back-up drive proved to be missing many key audio files. The album appeared doomed, but the Baaron has many strange contacts in the shadowy world of tech-nerdism and after a few hours screaming into his phone he had the name and whereabouts of a semi-vampiric, drug-saturated studio-tech gothwizard with legendry powers of data recovery.

Two grams and a pack of Camels later, the album is back from the dead!

Fact: Our show at the Shacklewell Arms in Dalston (innit) was a "hoot". We played along side notorious Norsk prog fucks "Ungdomskulen" and the gig was loud, stupid, boozy, well attended and included an ultra-exclusive, Retards-Only aftershow discoteque hosted by the 'Skulens themselves, with only me and two drunk chicks to back them up.

This video, taken by a Japanese tourist who got lost trying to find the Victoria Albert Museum, fails to capture the dizzying heights of SPACK that were reached, but I include it for scholarly reference.

All this dance-tastic action had to go down without the Baaron, who had drunk himself into a dribbling stupor before the gig. He guzzled two litres of Baileys Irish Cream in the car-park and fell asleep in the middle of the show, just like Mark Knopfler!

Quick! Someone wake up the Baaron! He's missing his own guitar solo!

In honor of this fine performance, I am seriously thinking about upgrading him from Baaron to Sultaan.

Hangovers bedamned, the very next day we stuffed the cruel and devious Andy Inglis (pronounced Ingles) into a big black duffle bag, loaded him into our well appointed hire-car and set sail on the Dover fucking ferry for motherfucking France, to lay some heavy noise trips and bad vibes on those stinky, lazy, wine-sucking fucks.

Andy kicked and struggled and cursed, but the Baaron applied his freakishly long index finger to a pressure point near Andys' jugular, paralysing him from the neck down, and we didn't hear another peep out of him until we'd hit Dover and cleared customs.

But Inglis recovered nicely once on-board and we strolled the upper decks to get some crisp sea air and score pills from a gang of dirty, scary teenagers who were smoking mushrooms in the stern and trying to burn cigarette holes in the life-boats.

But that's a long and turgid tale in itself, so just count yourself lucky and go do something usefull. I'll find you when I need you to spell-check the next post for me.

Until then, straighten up and fly right, losers! You're not fooling anyone but yourselves!!!!

P.S. Check our LATEST SINGLE the fuck out and leave some childish, abusive comments. LOL.

Back on the bloghorse - Operation Nimbus is GO!

2011-06-16T13:30:00.000+01:00

Much dark and troubled water has passed under the bridge since we last met, dear reader, and the scabby hands of fate have dealt out many chinese burns, crowpecks and painfull wedgies.

Pour moi, the first few months of twothousandandeleven were dominated by physical injury, unemployment, bankruptcy, relationship breakdown and complete nervous collapse......and that was the fun stuff.

But avast that weepy bullshit.

Who needs to listen to some booze addled bass player whine about his personal waking nightmares when the CC Special once more has a full head of steam and is heading straight for True Greatness, stopping at Fun Town, Party Central, and Piercing Feedbackville along the way. We will crush those who oppose us, burn their cities and pave the way to Valhalla with slabs of pure Civilian noise!!!!

Our new single, AIRSPRAY, rocketed to the top of the Indonesian pop charts within hours of being leaked, resulting in massive street protests and a fatwah for our deaths being issued by a number of radical clerics.

It turns out that combining fuzz bass and plinky synth to make summery smash hits is considered sinfull in some circles, which is perhaps understandable. During our extensive focus group testing we found that while the majority of patricipants experienced feelings of elation and wellbeing, a significant minority suffered severe nausea, headaches and feelings of extreme hostility.

Security camera footage from a recent focus group conducted in our top-secret underground research facility in Turkmenistan.

In other news, our lifestyles were slandered and ridiculed after this suggestive photo was leaked to The Saudi Gazette and featured in a double page spread on "Decadent Western entertainers who have sex with inflatable objects".

When will handsome young men be able to squeeze half-inflated beach-balls and touch their breasts without the arab press going ape-shit and reading all sorts of weird shit into it??? Really.

On a lighter note, a shockingly large number of fine, discerning humans have seen fit to hasten the dawning of the next Golden Age by pre-ordering our forthcoming debut album.

Having spent our last pennys (down to the 2 pounds we found under the cushions of the Baarons antique leather smoking chair) on recording and mixing, we are now appealing to the general public to fund mastering and pressing of this masterpiece by placing a pre-order HERE.

As if all this high-speed Civiccy action wasn't enough, we also took to the road recently to bring our home-spun, box-driven awesomeness to the euro-publique. This five date mini-tour was code-named "Operation Nimbus" and conducted in an atmosphere of rude hilarity and moronic jubilation.

There is no connection whatsoever to the French dog-poop-bag dispenser program of the same name. None at-all.

Nauseating details of this wrong-headed vanity project will soon be available for your perusal in this very blogular space, but in the meantime please get your virtual arse over to that thar indiegogo page and place your order.

'Tis a matter of great urgency and stuff.

30 Nights Of Bushweek - Berlin

2011-03-14T11:05:00.000Z

We now return you to our regular programming, in which a cranky bass-player serializes his experiences of touring as a member of instrumental pop group "Civil Civic"and waxes bitter about various aspects of what John Fogerty referred to as "Playin' in a Travellin' Band".

Andy whimpered and mumbled constantly in his sleep. He seemed to be haunted by the awful specters of a life of ill-deeds. Or perhaps it was just the Czech food failing to agree with him, you can never tell with these kinds of things.
Either way, I was sharing a room with him and my sleep was disturbed by his mutterings.

But he seemed well rested when the time came to gear up next morning, and once breakfasted, he made snappy farewells and headed out to the Praha airport to catch a flight back to London while the rest of us (Dr. Yasmine, The Baaron and myself) loaded the Galaxy for the drive to dirty Berlin.

Dirty, dirty Berlin. I had not been back there since I bailed in the winter of aught-five, after living for 2 years in a tiny apartment on Weser Strasse, Neukolln. People tell me Weser Strasse is now some sort of hipster miracle mile, but when I lived there it was just left of nowhere's asshole. Just another row of ugly boxes smeared with frozen dog-shit and inhabited by strange, downwardly mobile "easties" who looked like they ate cat food and prayed to the television.

I used to sit in this "Shultheiss" after work with the middle-aged plumbers and winos and cry because everyone I knew lived in cool neighborhoods and knew where the parties were at....

...but once the anti-gentrification stencil-art appears, you can pretty much call the battle over, and anyone who doesn't have sleeve tattoos and an iBook is on the losing team.

Well, come to think of it, I suppose there was that crew of fixerati-dressenger girls who lived downstairs and used to sneer openly at my dorky bicycles, but they definitely seemed out of place at the time. Far more representative was my next door neighbor, who played video games 18 hours a day at deafening volume, drank his weight in bottom-shelf red wine each night and looked almost exactly like this....

So, what do you think about Hansa Rostok? Heavy Metal Pussies?

Aaaaahhh, memories.

But getting back to our trek from Czech, the drive was singularly uneventful until German federal police stopped us on the border and we became embroiled in some sort of demonstration of force for a TV news crew. The cops nosed around our car and barked questions and poked us with assault rifles while the camera crew scuttled around like big crabs, getting shots of Deutschelands finest keeping the fatherland safe from suspected Australian terror groups.

Doctor Yasmine got surly with one of the stormtroopers and was almost hauled away for a beating, but she was unhanded after a last minute flurry of grovelling, apologetic noise from The Baaron and myself. In the end we were allowed to continue our journey after 25 minutes of pointless intimidation with our persons and possessions intact. Apparently we posed no threat to German national security.

This is, of course, just a file photo, but it gives you a rough idea of just how baden-baden these German feds were. Scary shit, people.

We arrived in Berlin around 5pm and drove immediately to the Michelburger Hotel on Warsauer Strasse. The Michelburger is a kind of new-generation hipster hotel, catering to the armies of vacuous, self absorbed iTwats from across the globe who flock to Berlin every year in search of inspiration, or affirmation, or something. Perhaps some ketamine.

Cookoo clocks, suitcases, a Ben and a Baaron. There is a truly great folk song in there somewhere.

It's a very nice place and I recommend it, especially if someone else is paying the bill, but the other guests filled my heart with so much hate that I had to syphon off the excess and store it in an empty 4 litre Coke bottle under the bed. Figuratively speaking.

Having said all that, there was a fine treat waiting for me at the Michelburger when we arrived. It was six feet tall, French and stoned. Yes, it was my one and only true love, the disgraced ex-super-model stoner-witch from Brittany, Lady Alexandra Cecile Bouche.

She was sitting on a rickety iron chair in the hinterhoff smoking reefer and reading a Portuguese translation of Winnie The Pooh, with eyes like over-ripe tomatoes and a slow-burning grin plastered across her face, despite the freezing temperature. I snuck up behind her and prodded her ribs and she whinnied just like a horse and smacked my face good and hard. What a woman.

Eyes as red as fire and a smile that could power a small town. That's the Lady Bouche.

But enough background fuzz, let us talk shop!

I had been to Magnet on Falkenstien Strasse only once before, to see Diplo back in aught five and I remembered nothing about the place except being rudely ejected when I was mistaken for a local coke dealer called Holgar who had gone berserk and attacked the cloak-room girl the week before.

Many things impressed themselves upon me throughout the first couple of hours in there, most of them to do with the handsome snack platter back-stage. There was a range of vegan small-goods that were particularly impressive. The woman from the promotion company, whose name escapes me, was a one of the on-the-ballest humans I've ever encountered in the musical sphere. She did things for our benefit in the fluid moments before we even thought of them.... like magic, motherfuckers, magic!

The gig ended up being one of those shows that is kind of awesome, but only in context. It's not like people went crazy or anything, but the atmosphere of good natured indulgence we recieved seemed so much more convincing because it was coming from a Beeeeerrrrrlllliiiinnnn crowd. Know what I mean?
Maybe not, and if not, you are doing something right in your life. Keep it up.

Here The Baaron appears to be suffering from that Heavy Guitar Syndrome which caused him so much grief in Switzerland. I, however, am upright and fighting fit.

No, wait! He's straightened up again. Good for you, Cuddles!

Anyway, post gig the lady Alexandra scooped up some scrap MDMA that was lying in the bottom of her handbag while I made good use of the huge quantity of beer I had hidden in my soft-case during soundcheck. We spent a good deal of time backstage having disjointed conversations with the guys from the opening act and laughing like giddy children at nothing in particular.

At one point I wandered back into the main room to catch some of Theopholis London, the headline act, as he crooned along to MP3s' wearing an ostrich feather bath-robe and a huge purple fedora. It made me feel strange inside, so I became afraid and punched his front-of-house engineer in the chest. After alot of pushing and yelling I managed to make my position clear to the poor old creep and in the end he wished me well, but it was touch and go.

I have scattered memories of trying to find a reggae bar I used to frequent in an abandoned railway depot out back of Warssauer S-Bahn station, but it was a fruitless search. We ended up back in our hotel room drooling and sobbing and watching the endless loop of The Big Lebowski that the Mickelberger shows on one channel of it's in-house TV.

…and to me, that smells like VICTORY. We came, we saw, we drooled and sobbed in our hotel room. What did YOU do on the weekend?

The Perils Of Touring - 4: After The Goldrush

2011-02-23T10:38:00.001Z

When I woke up in my own bedroom after six long weeks on the CC Special a wave of relief washed over me that was so profound and physical that it literally paralysed my brain for about four hours and left me slow-witted and forgetful for days.

But after a week or so of pottering around my apartment in a bath-robe normality had well and truly reasserted itself, and along with it a vague, cloying sense of disappointment and longing for the various manic kicks and satisfactions of the road.

Suddenly I felt like a water-headed teenager from some dust-farm berg, so desperate for new horizons that one summer he goes wild on sugary red wine and runs away with the circus.

He finds a whole new world. Life on the road, big cities, elephants, bi-sexual acrobats and fearless lion-tamers with 3-gram-a-day coke habits. He mucks out the horse-floats and runs the shooting gallery and sneers at the seemingly endless parade of goggle-eyed rubes packing the big-top with their fat children, all ripe to have their pockets picked by the Russian cigar-smoking midget who reads him bed-time stories and tells him he has found his true home.

But after a few months he starts to miss his parents, his bed, his buck-toothed, illiterate girl-friend. You know, the little things. He pauses while scooping up mounds of gently steaming elephant poop and leans for a moment on his shovel, staring whistfully into the blank blue sky. His thoughts drift back in time and space to home. Home. Home.

Then, one night the Ringmaster and his amiable three-breasted wife invite the kid out to a bar for a few stiff drinks and some friendly talk about his bright future with the troupe, and the last thing he remembers is that strange, charismatic old man leering at him over a glass of black rum.

Then he wakes up, dumped like a bag of garbage right back on his parents doorstep at five in the morning on a teusday- no wallet, no shoes - in the middle of a blinding hail-storm.

Next day he is sitting back in school with his slack-jawed, hay-seed class mates who now treat him like some sort of freakish cross between a convicted rapist, a mythical beast and a failed entrepeneur. He reflects on the totality of his personal journey into the unknown and he realises it was all a kind of technicolor bullshit.

The angst and itchy adventurism that launched him into the world was just as much of a trojan horse as the weepy nostalgia and insecurity that made him long for home. That big wooden horse was full of lazyness and fear. None of it made any sense or served any purpose at-all.

There is a point to all this drivel, by the way. I'm just working out what it is.
Wait......it's coming.....

Well, I suppose this is all just a bloated, wide angled way of repeating that old saw "You Can't Go Home Again". The routine sense of displacement and the constant, grating anticipation of a return to normality that sets in towards the middle of a long tour are things that you can learn to miss, no matter how perverse it may seem at the time.

It's not so strange, really. Some people chop their own legs off because of a nagging sense that the legs just don't belong to them. Is it wisdom to hinder these people? Can we really tell them they are wrong?

I suppose we can, but who wants to take responsibility for keeping a close eye on a loved one who really, really, really wants to chop off their own legs? The Reverse-Phantom-Limb crowd make everybody nervous, and why not? They are wierdo royalty. They fly a flag of wierd that makes necrophilia look like a gimmick, a cheap attention grabber. When the forces of wierd turn on each-other and make wierd war for strange supremacy, my money is going on the cats who want to dismember themselves, but have difficulty explaining why.

Oh Christ, what the fuck am I babbling about now? Have all these anti-inflamatories shrivelled my brain down to a little grey nut? Did the bowel churning drones of the MRI machine fry my reason? It may be so, but that's another story.

Fuck it, this is a quasi-humorous, mostly depressing rock'n'roll blog, not a scientific journal. I'll make sense when there's sense to be made and not a moment sooner. Everyone go back to your meals. Nothing to see here.

30 Nights of Bushweek - Prague

2011-02-08T11:25:00.001Z

*******

We had no choice. About an hour into the drive Von Cuddles started showing clear signs of fatigue. Slow reflexes, impaired judgement, uncontrollable giggling ect.

He hadn't slept a wink at Janos' haunted mansion in Zurich because of what he described as "a sub-human wailing noise" that at times seemed to be coming from outside his window, at others from beneath his bed. Then in Munich he´d stayed up until 5am drinking reisling with the Soft Nerds and passed out in his filthy clothes on the kitchen floor.

The poor fucker was spent, his reserves of creepy, inhuman stamina finally drained. He pulled the Galaxy over at a frozen rest-stop and slumped into the back-seat like a laundry bag full of broken tent-poles.

The cruel and devious Andy Inglis (pronounced Ingles) took the wheel.

Andys' behavior while driving was nerve-shreddingly erratic.
Pointless bursts of acceleration, swerving at invisible obstacles and wandering like a bumble-bee between lanes, all the while fiddling with the mirrors, the stereo, his cuff-links...anything he could get a free hand on.

The man has as much calm, focused assurance behind the wheel as a weasel on cheap speed, so I just kept reaching back into the hamper for fresh beers so that when the crunch came I would be nice and relaxed for impact.

But the only really dicey moment came late in the drive when we were passing the scene of an accident on the highway. Andy had just started slowing down when an ambulance...a fucking ambulance...lurched onto the road from behind a parked fire engine no more than 15 meters in front of us.

Here´s a team of top-dollar actors re-creating our pant-shitting terror. Isn´t the Baaron cute?

Andy instantly mashed the brake pedal to the floor and the Galaxy lurched and slid and swerved to a halt about 3 feet from the now stationary ambulance. That was when, through a fog of adrenaline, I saw the ambulance driver staring at us. It was a fucking kid, a teenage Czech hillbilly with eyes like cigarette burns in a boiled turkey.

Yep, that kid from Deliverance could sure pick a tune, but would you let him drive you to hospital?

He continued to stare dumbly at us as we passed him, howling abuse and threats and beating the dashboard with our fists. We were all incoherent with rage at this filthy little hay-seed and even more at whatever mind-boggling rural bureaucracy put his drooling arse in the drivers seat of a fucking ambulance!!!

Welcome to the Czech Republic.

Once we hit Prague we drove straight to our hotel. The Baaron and I dealt with reception while Andy drove in circles looking for a parking spot. The Barbie doll behind the desk seemed to be gunning to be the sleaziest receptionist in the entire global hospitality industry.
"Hello boooyyyys." She said with heeeavy emphasis. "Are you the Rat-a-tat?"

A profound question, mademoiselle. Let's retire to my quarters with a bottle of something sweet and get to the bottom of this "Are you the Rat-a-tat" business.

Oooh, ooooh, did I forget to mention our gig was a support for Ratatat? At a massive converted meat factory that housed two concert stages, an art gallery and a community centre? Maybe I did.

But that wasn't why The Baaron was sweating and fidgeting while our room-keys were being doled out. Doctor Yasmine T. Lanbert, his brilliant but trouble prone lawyer fiancé, had flown into Prague that afternoon and was already upstairs in their room, getting hammered on miniature Johnny Walkers and watching ancient Soviet porn on the tube.

Two weeks of bottled up lust was raging like a tornado through Von Cuddles' whip-like frame, and I assume the receptionists' crude, cleavage splaying come-ons were not helping. So once he had that key in his big, sweaty palm he rocketed into the elevator like a burning rat and we didn't see him again until we saddled up for sound-check.

*******

Welcome to The Meet Factory.

Well, I'll spare you the usual blather about the routine confrontations, humiliations and barely averted violent episodes that seem to constitute every soundcheck we've ever had. Suffice it to say that we did, in fact, make it onto the stage and that this gig went straight into the "Top 5 Shows of the Tour" list and stayed there.

The crowd didn't pull any of the cautious, reserved bullshit that young, fashionable people tend to throw at unknown support acts. They were curious. They wanted to hear what we had up our sleeves and they wanted it to be fun. In other words, they were Czechtastic and we got on like a house on fire.

Baaron Von Cuddles tweaks it for Satan as the crowd screams in ecstacy.

Who could blame them for their curiosity when the Meet Factory flyer described us thus...

"You gentlemen have created. If you want to convince our ears, stops on Thursday 18 November to MeetFactory where reckon receive its Czech premiere. They will be younger number two in Europe Civil Civic naturalized Australians with post-rock fusion guitar!"

That kind of copy can get even the most jaded scenester out of the house.

Now, I am an angry old man and find todays pop music both frightening and confusing, so I'd never listened to Ratatat before. But I'd seen them used as a point of reference in several articles about us. So I was eager to see them do their thing and make my own comparisons. I already knew they had their Stare-At-Laptop-Ignore-Existence-Of-Support-Band chops honed, but what about the tunes, bru, the jams!?!

Well, they hit the stage to hysterical applause and screaming and weeping from the crowd and ripped into their Dungeons & Dragons infused IDM with great verve. It sounded like an epic battle between Goldfrapp and Manowar, and if I'd had a broadsword at my side (or a big fluffy owl on my head) I would have brandished it aloft during every soaring, harmonised guitar solo.

Their disturbing, druggy bird-fetish visuals were pretty cool too. Nice work.

Just for the record, I really don't think we have that much in common with them, musically.
I just can't see anyone storming a castle to one of our "joints".

We are more of a bumper cars/awkward kissing sort of act.

In summary, it was a good night at the meat factory and did wonders for team morale. The only grumbling came from Inglis, who had fiendish sexual plans for the venue production manager (a tall, elegant, yet strangely vacant young Czechitta) but was brutally "cock-blocked" during the crucial chat-at-the-bar by one of the Ratatat boys.

And the angels wept.

Non stop fun-times on the Civil Civic express!

30 Nights Of Bushweek - Munich

2011-02-03T11:36:00.000Z

I'll be keeping this one pretty snappy, folks. I've found a new secretary, but she doesn't start until next week, so I'm still typing with one finger and relying on a mouldy old Roget thesaurus to avoid using the words "awesome" and "shit" to describe every single thing in the world.

But who cares? Let's talk about Munich.

Some gigs just look flat-out wrong on paper.
The Venue?
A community centre/restaurant. (Warning lights begin to flash).
The Accommodation?
Support bands' drummers' house. (Oxygen masks drop from the ceiling).
The Fee?
A...ummm...door deal. (Cabin fills with smoke, engines on fire, people screaming and clawing at each-other).

This is a rough but effective illustration of how I saw the night unfolding.

But it´s in the book, so you go there and you do it. Shut-up.

We dropped Inglis at his hotel and drove to the venue through the wealthy gigantism of Munchen. This is a rich town, an overstuffed seat of old money. Miles of grand public buildings and a big, sleek BMW in every parking space. The trees are already strung with fairy-lights and a berserk, uniquely German Christmas fever is to rip through this grand, brownstone town.

Roasted mushrooms and apfel gluhwein and riding the ferris-wheel at the Weihnacthsmarkt in the bitter cold with your girlfreind while a big, fat ecstasy pill dissolves slowly in your stomach and your parents and relatives scoff bockwerst and check out the carollers, somewhere down there in the awesome, cheesy maelstrom.
Just get through it, man. NYE is going to be fucking mental! Claude Von Stroke and Switch and that acid that Heinrichs' bringing down from Hamburg and .....

ICH BIN SOOOO GEIL!!!!

Shit, what the fuck am I saying now? Forget that last bit. Let's move on.

Sooooo, we arrived at the venue (called Glockenwerkstatt) and had to wait for a while before we could load our shit in, because there was a childrens kapouera class finishing up in the small, box-like room where the gig was being held.

A childrens kapouera class. That is correct.

I rolled my eyes and muttered something poisonous, but the Baaron poked his finger into my chest and demanded better behavior.
"Ne-ga-tive creep!" he hissed. "Why can't you just pretend to be a good-natured, enthusiastic guy, at least in public. If you start laying your doomsday bullshit on these people I swear I will smite thee. Let's get a drink."

*******
The Baaron was right again. This place was actually a little Munchenische treasure chest.
Our drink tickets got us big bottles of rich, brown dunkelweissbier and our food tickets got us some of the best cooking we'd tasted in weeks. The small but powerfull sound system was run by one of the freindliest, most competent guys imaginable, the venue provided a brand new SWR bass amp for me to use and the support band (Soft Nerd) were a bunch of flat-out sweethearts.

Soft Nerd, keeping the streets safe for....ummmm....something..I forget.

After soundcheck I hid from the Baaron in the toilets and trimmed my nails. Andy went to do some sightseeing and ended up getting locked inside a deserted cathedral for two hours, and Von Cuddles went upstairs to work on his complex scheme to bring all the peoples of the Earth under his rule by 2015.

He explained to me once how the band fitted into the larger strategy, but I was drunk. I just remember him pacing up and down in that hotel room, whacking his thighs and shaking his fists and yelling things like "A golden age lies before us, Green. Do you want a seat at the table? Do you want in?"

Thus the maiden of evening slowly made way for mother night, and our thoughts turned to assaulting a bunch of innocent people with a hideous, screeching racket and making them pay us for doing it.

A small but vocal clutch of Munchener misfits turned up and went stone bazonkers during Soft Nerds' bouncy, poptastic performance. Even the guys danced. Andy was released from his sacred prison by a confused Catholic priest, The Baaron fell in love with a tiny Argentinian girl who was hovering around the merch desk and a pair of young women in outrageous, post-hipster outfits had a full-tilt, friendship-ending screaming match in the middle of our set. It was a hoooot!

But it kept getting better.
The drummer from Soft Nerd (Meikel) got us a secure parking spot near his house, which turned out to be a beautiful, old rambling attic apartment with a cosy bedroom set aside for us. We sat up drinking heavily and cracking wise with the Soft Nerd posse for many hours, The Baaron pontificating on modular synthesis and me sliding gracefully into a drooling stupor. It was like having a crew, ready-mixed.

My bicycle-nerdness went into turbo-mode when it was revealed that Meikels grandfather was a champion artisanal cyclist back in the thirties.

It was too short. I could have settled into this vibe for a month. Gigs at Glockenwerkstatt with the Nerds every night, fine food, weissbier, lights in the trees and strange girls shrieking blue-murder at each-other in German. Sometimes people and situations cut straight through the stinking fog of cynicism and hatred that I weave about myself and pierce my very heart.

This was one of those times.

Thank-you, Soft Nerd posse, Glockenwerkstatt and Learn To Swim Shows.

The Perils Of Touring - 3: Harold Koop Disease

2011-01-29T12:31:00.000Z

The path of the dedicated semi-professional is a faint and wandering line in the sand of life. It burns like a river of lava in the eyes of the poor geek who's following it, but that changes nothing. It can still be obliterated at any time by a strong wind off the bay.

Be it a musician or a polo player or a stamp collector, the same dilemmas and confrontations with the "real world" await every one of us, and watching helplessly as mean, stupid, talentless thugs get rich all around us is the least of our problems.

The real problem is carrots.

Meet Harold Koop from Dordrecht. He might look like just another giddy old Dutch crank, but Harold has an ace up his sleeve.

He fucking loves carrots.

He grows competition carrots in a green-house in his tiny back-yard, carrots which have garnered over 2500 euros in prize money over the last 5 years.

His living room is festooned with medals and cups and ribbons, physical testimony to the all-out, death-or-glory, devil-take-the-hindmost attitude Harold brings to the table when it comes to growing a carrot.

Go Harold, it´s ya birthday...

Back in November of last year he took his finest ever carrot (a truly jaw-dropping motherfucker which he named "Asmodeus") to an agricultural show in Delft.

Asmodeus blitzed the whole field, collecting blue ribbons in both the "root vegetable" and "open" categories and as a direct result Harold almost got himself lynched behind the portable toilets by a mean gang of rival growers.

Harolds´adopted Philipino daughter, Linda, poses with Asmodeus, Boss Carrot.

There was six of these scumbags, fixing to beat his secrets out of him, to seize his hard-won carrot-knowledge through violence. But right when things were about to get ugly some local teenagers wandered back there to smoke some ice and frightened the carrot-thugs away.

Harold reported the incident to the Judges panel and the ring-leaders were banned from competition for 12 months. Fuck them, fucking hacks! They could have done their worst. Harold would never have talked.

It is rumored in market-farmer circles that the assault was masterminded by this man, Micheal Von Apeldoorn, the Dark Lord of competition vegitables, seen here hatching evil thoughts behind one of his freakishly large onions.

The local papers covered the story and Harold was portrayed as a Galileo-esque genius, beset by ignorant, blood-thirsty scum. Even the ice-smoking kids got their picture taken.

Harold even received a fan-letter from a woman in Gent, who said she'd been thinking about root-vegetable cultivation for years but had always shied away from it until she read about Harolds' tale of heroism and triumph at the Delft fair.

The legend of Asmodeus inspired the formation of a name-sake psychobilly band, who made a concept album about Harolds´exploits entitled ¨Diggin´up the King¨.

So yeah, when you think about really big, shapely carrots with perfect texture and coloration, think Harold Koop. His carrots bring home the bacon...two times.

Unfortunately when we break that 2500 euros in prize money down against the time Harold has invested in research and cultivation over the same 5 year period we find that his carrots have paid out roughly 0.5 cents/hour (well below the minimum wage in Holland). Factor in material expenses, entry fees, transport and accommodation for out-of-town events and we see that his awesome tubers are in fact a financial liability... a big, orange albatross around his flabby neck.

Yes, Harold needs to put food on the table just like the rest of us. But his carrot-knowledge (profound as it may be) is not a particularly marketable commodity. So he grinds away at a dull, poorly paid office job so that he can pay the bills and still have just enough time, money and energy left over to get those fucking carrots really boomin'.

Which is fine, on a day to day basis. But he is nearing retirement, has no savings, a dead car and a giant bill for the latest batch of state-of-the-art fertiliser is on the way.

The pressure is mounting.

God damnit, why does his wife have to keep thrashing away with all that "Harold, it's me or the carrots!" shit?

Why do his kids roll their eyes when he invites them out to the green-house for a look at some promising new cross-breeds?

Why does that rheumy-eyed sot who runs the grocery store have to keep telling the same fucking carrot-themed jokes every fucking time Harold goes in there?

And why do all his careerist friends secretly view him as a coward and a failure and why can't all those smug, bland, overpaid cocksuckers understand his passion?

He just wants to grow some arse-rapingly, brain-crushingly mad-as-fuck carrots!

Is that so wrong?

The noose gets tighter every year, but Harold is powerless. He must stick to his guns. He's invested so much time, so much thought! So, much, in fact, that any possibility for a different life and broader horizons passed away years ago, without Harold even noticing.

But finally, on the day before his 60th birthday, he sees it. The mono-maniacal, conceited, fear-preaching demon that all along has lurked inside the only thing in the world that ever separated Harold from the faceless masses.

"God in heaven," he screams at the pitiless January sky.

"Why did you put this accursed love of carrots inside me!!!"

******

The more perceptive among you will have caught the drift of this weird, hysterical screed in the first couple of paragraphs, so I won't insult your instincts by spelling out the obvious.

But back in the misty depths of the mid-nineties, when I packed all my belongings into my decrepit Renault 12 and moved to Melbourne with the intention of giving "the music thing" a serious whack, my parents looked on my passion and idealism as a kind of terminal brain-disease which would swiftly turn me into a social cripple, a pauper and a deep source of family shame ... and they said so at every opportunity.

But shit, there were plenty of other "adults" around who told me "Hell yes, do it now. You've got plenty of time to pursue your dreams and still come back to the stiff world if it doesn't work out. I wish I'd made a move like this at your age" ect. ect.

Well, I burned that greasy bridge a long time ago, and now I put my hand on my heart and tell you....If I was the father of a talented 17 year-old who sat in his room practising guitar 16 hours-a-day, I would first ask myself a serious question...

..."Does this kid of mine have the kind of brutal, muleish will-force necessary to carry the flag of music through thick and thin? To keep shredding in the teeth of the gale, looking neither left nor right even while perched on the very precipice of hell itself?!?"

And if the answer to this grave, searching question was "Yes, damn right he does!", I would take a gun, load it, and shoot that poor little bugger straight through the head.

Because when it's got to that stage the brain has already started to calcify around a single, overpowering point of focus that will make the whole idea of "getting ahead in the world" a bad joke for life.

There are a variety of stop-gap remedies that can be applied, but they all fail in the long run and the terrible truth is that there is no final cure.

The organism is doomed. Snuff it out and concentrate on the one that's good at maths.

30 Nights Of Bushweek - Zurich

2011-01-27T11:14:00.000Z

Ever wondered what happened to the estimated 1.6 billion dollars Richard Pearle made by selling fat young Iraqi orphans on Ebay to wealthy sexual predators and secret psy-warfare laboratories in places like Turkmenistan and Estonia? I have.

I am cursed with an inquiring mind, which over the years has led to getting spanked in front of Primary School assemblies, getting fired from easy jobs and losing many fair-weather friends. I just can't help myself. I have many bees in my bonnet, as the saying goes, but they never make any fucking honey.

Soooo... when we arrived in Zurich my first order of business was a quick visit to the central offices of the Swiss Private Commerce Bank, which is a sleazy, up-sclae institution mainly patronised by arms dealers, diamond merchants, Russian energy barons and other reptilian scum. It is a repository for some of the most gore-stained money on the planet, and word is that even the state of the art ventilation system can't entirely get the stink out of their high-tech head-quarters.

They removed the "all seeing eye" from the top of the building after a rash of bad press and some angry phone-calls from local free-masons.

"It's pretty bad in the summer." A low level staff member once remarked, on condition of anonymity. "Last July we had some really hot, still days and the stench of blood was overpowering. The building became surrounded by stray dogs, howling and pawing at the windows. It was terrible, just terrible."

I had tracked Pearles' pedo-profits here through long hours of intensely dull research and by the time we hit town I felt the need for direct action. But I was extremely fuzzy about what I planned to do when I got there, beyond causing a minor scene.

It didn't matter. The middle-aged, solarium tanned functionary who met me in the lobby was coy at first, then downright hostile as it became clear my homework was in order. So I snatched the expensive toupee off his head and ran outside, where I threw it into a muddy puddle and continued to run at top speed before expensive thugs appeared to put a black bag on my head and turn me over to Richards' people.

I ran all the way back to the grand suburban mansion where we were staying as guests of Janos Szenogrady, a famous Swiss musician and art collector and an old freind of Andys'. His dapper son, Julian, had organised our Zurich show and was also the drummer in the support act, Summit.

The two lived by themselves in this giant, rambling gothic pile which looked and felt like something out of an old episode of Scooby Doo. There were leering portraits with eyes that followed you around the room and huge fireplaces dominated by hideous gargoyles and medieval weapons. If crockery had started flying around or pale spectres appeared on the staircase I think I would have been more relieved than surprised.

Anyway, the sepulchral vibe was clearly having an impact on The Baaron, who suggested some sightseeing to deal with the hours before soundcheck.

"Let's get the fuck out of here." He said to me in a hoarse whisper. "The fucking doorknob to my room keeps turning by itself, and I think I heard a woman crying in the attic".

*******

Since both the Baaron and I are big fans of synthesisers, social satire and moral decay our first stop was a visit to Cabaret Voltaire, where we drank thick black coffee spiked with absinthe and got in an argument with a young professional couple about whether or not Hugo Balls´1916 manifesto made our music redundant, thus making the continuation of the tour both uneccesary and un-natural.

Then off for some shopping. The Baaron was hot to add a genuine Swiss mountain goat to his impressive stable of trophy heads, but after checking out a few select emporiums he became angry at the small size and mangy appearance of the specimens on display.

"This is bullshit!" He snarled at one frightened old shoppe-keep. "I could just walk up a mountain with a fucking carrot and a rusty steak-knife and come back with better heads".

In contrast my own shopping mission was entirely successful. My long-held fantasy of owning a 500 euro pair of studded, fox-fur lined, white-tiger skin ugh-boots came to fruition at last.

Thank you Zurich, city of dreams.

Finally we took a stroll through the park by the lake, where we stumbled upon this, the worlds' first solid-state overdrive pedal, made in 1812 by a local crank named Wolfgang Driestuck, whose other inventions included the water-proof grandfather clock, the steam-powered "female comforter" and the wizard bong.

Anyway, to cut to the chase, we ended up having a pretty fun night in Zurich. The show was poorly attended, partially because both Best Coast and The Bloody Beetroots were in town and syphoning off any individual under 40 who gave a shit about, y'know, going to see bands and stuff.

So at least half the audience at our own spectacular concert were strange, spectacled, middle-aged men who all went completely berserk as soon as the music started. They danced like chickens on meth, screaming constantly in German and spilling big glasses of gin all-over the floor.

No-one knew where they came from, but they were enthusiastic, so I took them at face value and tried not to be disappointed at the complete absence of loose, trashy hipster girls and high-powered booking agents in the crowd. The road is, as I've said before, long and winding.

Note the copy of Cosmopolitan, in case of technical issues.

Summit busted out some carefully crafted pop numbers, and it was a rare treat to see Julian (a gifted drummer) bashing out the kick and snare patterns on a cheesy old Roland drum machine. They created a nice, warm atmosphere in the room, which we then destroyed with our abrasive, thuggish noise.

On a side note, I was bitterly disappointed at discovering that we had just missed both the renowned Meh Stuff! Metal Festival, showcasing some of the most uh-huh metal talent on the planet...

...and a rare public appearance by Land Uber, one of my Top 5 acts of 2010.

The venue was generous with beer, despite the slim turn-out, so by the time we got back to the mansion I was in a thoroughly obnoxious state. The Baaron had to wrestle me into a broom-cupboard and lock the door to prevent me from doing back-spins on the giant oak dining table and Andy punched me in the solar-plexus after I started singing "Mull of Kintyre" at top volume while he was trying to enjoy a camomile tea.

I remember none of this, but it sounds right, and why would they lie to me anyway?

We are, after-all, serious men with a serious job to do, and making up weird stories about each-others personal behavior is not part of our brief.

Many thanks to Julian and Janos for their generous hospitality.

The Perils Of Touring - 2: Dietary Concerns.

2011-01-23T21:20:00.001Z

As we loaded the Galaxy in preparation for our departure from Milan I went through my morning routine of taking all the pilfered sandwich meat and olives out of the pockets of my duffel coat, putting them in a ziplock bag and throwing it into our bloated food hamper.

I had a nagging hunger that morning, and I remembered that at dinner in Metz I had casually swiped 4 whole fried chicken breasts from the Pompidou staff kitchen. They were still sitting in the bowels of the hamper, wrapped in tin-foil, but I was afraid to touch them. A really bad bout of food poisoning can have knock-on effects that will derail an entire week of touring, and I didn't want that on my conscience.

The hamper was less your wholesome wicker number filled with goodness, more a kind of big, plastic half-way house for trans-fats down on their luck.

The hamper was constantly overflowing with cans of soft-drink, stale sweet-breads, miniature Mars bars, potato chips and many bottles of beer. One thing we had learned on our last tour was that hunger and thirst can strike anywhere, at any time, so we saw each free snack platter and complementary buffet breakfast as an opportunity to keep costs down and insure ourselves against deprivation.

Hi. My name is Ben and this is my good friend and colleague, Baaron Von Cuddles III. Is this zebra carcass yours?

This scavenger mentality is common amongst people "on the road", and is usually the unspoken prerogative of the headline band. If you are going to fuck with that unwritten law and heist, say, a big cheese platter from the back-stage fridge, you have to do it while the headliners are on-stage. But make sure you're not around when they finish, because once they realise what you've done there will be very ugly vibes backstage, and possibly violence. I myself have gone stone-crazy bazonkers with black rage every time we have been the victim of even minor support-act piracy, despite the fact that I am a repeat offender on the other side of the coin.

*******

Would you remain in the car after someone fed this huge sandwich directly into their gullet, in one piece, like a fucking pelican?

Baaron Von Cuddles' eating habits are worth mentioning here, if only because they are another facet of his overall super-humanity.

For days he will eat nothing but a few nuts and seeds, like a parrot, always shrugging and saying he's "not that hungry" when a meal gets laid out. But every so often he will sit down at the dinner table and inhale about 10 kilograms of pasta or rice salad in under 10 minutes. It is a hideous spectacle.

The first time Andy saw this happen, at dinner in Lucern, he was so sickened and disturbed by watching such a massive volume of food disappear inside The Baarons skeletal body that he fled outside and threw-up in the snow. After that he took to eating by himself, which suited us fine.

My own habits were far more predictable. I saw every free meal as a once-in-a-lifetime golden opportunity, and ate like a stray dog locked overnight in an abattoir. I would also stash left-overs in my bass-case and swipe things from the plates of venue staffers while they were in the toilet. The net result of all this was that as the tour went on The Baaron looked exactly the same as when we left England while I was blowing up like a balloon.

Computer simulation of bass-player weight gain over 3 weeks.

Furthermore, because Cuddles was doing all the driving, I was free to sit in the passenger seat and drink massive quantities of beer during each days drive. Within an hour of setting forth I would be obnoxiously drunk, singing and farting in the car and writing long piss-poems in the snow at every fuel stop.

This too had an expanding effect on my waist-line and I was rapidly becoming a social embarrassment and a PR liability. Everyone knows that guys in Indie bands are supposed to be pale, anaemic spectres, like Von Cuddles. But now people I'd never met before were making "when are you expecting?" jokes and only creepy, nerdy boys would talk to me after the shows.

*******

It made me reflect on the Goode Olde Days, back in Australia, when my friends in successful bands would return from Europe with wild tales about being fed like prize-winning pigs, for free, by the venues. I would screw up my face and tell those sleazy liars to fuck off with their crazy tour-yarns.

For me, the concept of venue catering lived in the same universe of flimsy horse-shit as original sin, the cheque that's "in the mail" and the Loch Ness monster.

It was totally inconceivable. You could play for ten years in all manner of venues "down under" and never even be offered a dish-rag to suck on behind the monitor desk, let alone a fine home-cooked meal, with salad and dessert!

Stitching the Melbourne to Brisbane run together with shows in places like Albury, Wollongong and Coffs Harbor was a kind of brutal, crash diet. You'd usually get a ten dollar per-diem, with which you were expected to do whatever was necessary to keep your body up and running. But that tenner would disappear at the first fuel stop, on a pack of Peter Styvesent reds and a can of Coke and after that it was all about will-power, shutting out the deep, volcanic gurgles rising up from your knotted stomach.

The very idea that I would one day gain 8 kilograms in the first 20 days of a tour was complete nonsense, a fish-tale dreamt up by the same giddy water-heads who think that if you have a song on the radio you must be rich.

But there you have it. If the venues had thrown in free packs of Camel lights and chewing gum I wouldn't have spent a single cent on the whole tour, except on that 2 euro beanie I bought in Gothenburg to stop my scalp freezing and peelingoff my skull like old wallpaper.

To summarise, having a full tour-tummy is not really an issue on "the continent", unless you set out to make it one, for personal reasons.

I wish I had.

30 Nights Of Bushweek - Milano

2011-01-19T10:18:00.000Z

Full and frank disclosure is the keystone of this groundbreaking blog, as my legion of 6 dedicated readers will surely testify. There is no tale too humiliating or painful to The Baaron that I would not record it, for posterity, in all it's festering details.

But fate struck me a savage blow over the weekend, when my secretary, Mariana - who has faithfully ghost-written all my posts based on scrawled notes and boozy dictation - handed me her resignation.

As you can see, as well as being a gifted writer and a wizard with personal finance, Mariana is a circus trained contortionist and can also play tenor-sax like a fucking tiger!

She said it was the atmosphere in the office that had been getting to her. She told me I was a sad, bitter old tick and that she could feel her youth and vitality being sucked away every minute that she spent in my company.

So she has gone back to the accounting job at the Baghdad, where we first met a year ago at my old freind Ramon Guiterez Callabres Gonzagas´ bucks-night (which made the morning papers, for all the wrong reasons).

So nowI'm left to try and replicate her mean, snobbish style on my own, with my left arm encased in plaster and my eyes swollen and bloodshot from crying.

The famous Sala Bagdad, just off Avenuda Paralell, near the Apolo. A fine establishment, but their tax returns are a mess.

Well, enough of that bullshit. I just wanted to provide some background on why in this post I'll be whipping out a snappy, capsule account of our gig in Milan, rather than the usual long, reeking essay of shame.

The gig in Milan was our last support slot for the 65 Days Of Static Boys, who had also hosted us in Eindhoven and Lucern. For The Baaron and myself it was our ninth consecutive day of driving and playing, so both of us were exhibiting clear signs of mental and physical erosion.

The Tunnel. Look at the size of that fucking ball!

The venue was a converted railway tunnel right in the metro-centre of Milan, run by a ginger-haired giant who managed to radiate calm authority while at the same time looking like an alcoholic lumber-jack. The venues most outstanding feature, in my eyes, was it´s disco-ball, which was among the largest and, umm, sparkle-iest I´ve seen.

But the part of Milan it was located in struck me as a bleak maze made of dog-shit and concrete populated by sleazy young Arab thugs and elderly winos. So between sound-check and stage-time I crawled into the back of the Galaxy and slept, rather than wander through the rain with Andy and The Baaron to find a kebab stand.

Sort of like this, only with a whole lot more dogshit and sequined Dolce Y Gabbana ski vests.

The show itself was unremarkable, for us. The crowd was clearly just marking time until the 65s´hour-long romatic crescendo kicked off. They seemed to view us with the kind of interest you would pay to a bad car crash, or a dying horse.
My clearest memory of the night is sitting in mournful drunkenness beside the mixing desk and watching a hoard of Italians in puffy, wet-look parkas buying thousands of euros worth of 65 DOS merchandising.

I have no memory at-all of the scuffle with 65s' tour manager as we were loading out, but I'm told that I grabbed him by the throat after he made some off-hand comments about my personal appearance. Apparently everyone was confused by my behaviour except The Baaron, who knew how I felt about that smug, weasely scumbag.

Anyway, no-one was hurt, and I was so obviously out of my mind with fatigue and booze that the whole thing got written off as a routine outbreak of tour-angst.

A picture that says a thousand words. Bloated, angry bass player chain-smokes and wonders where it all went wrong while lean, alert guitarist bones up on Tolkien.

I should probably go into some detail about the bad scenes at our hotel, where The Baaron almost got us beaten and ejected by in-house heavies for cooking two-minute noodles on a fire he built in the bathroom sink.

But honestly, this is the best I can do until I get a new secretary.

I'm almost completely helpless. I just can't think straight, my huge piles of reciepts are in total disarray and the cast on my arm doesn't come off for another 3 weeks.

Anyone interested in applying for Marianas´ position should contact me via the Civil Civic Facebook page. I´ll be starting interviews on Tueday morning.

30 Nights of Bushweek - Aarau

2011-01-14T12:27:00.000Z

*******

Our day began with time to kill, so the three of us settled into a few hours of lazy tourism in what has to be one of the most absurdly pretty/obscenely wealthy towns on the planet, Lucern, Schwiez Reich.
Who knows what dark wealth paved the streets here. Nazi plunder, blood diamonds, Arab dictators, Belgian King Leoplold II's gore drenched rubber profits. They've all played their part, no doubt.

Kooky old Leo became fantastically wealthy by turning the entire Congo delta into an open air labour camp run by psychotic goons who chopped babies up for fun. So he remains admired as a no-nonsense businessman by many key patrons of the modern Swiss banking industry.

But I'll get into all that soon enough, when I tell you about my attempt to track down Richard Pearles' secret accounts in Zurich. For now, let's just look at some pretty pictures.

Waking up in the morning in a strange apartment with a throbbing skull is a whhooole different thing when this is what you see out the window.

Lake Lucern. Dirty, ugly and depressing.

It was against this picturesque backdrop that we tooled away the luncheon hours, following Andy around on his quest to buy "a nice scarf". The brutally expensive but understated menswear stores that litter the streets of most Swiss towns are like catnip for Inglis. He will happily spend all day frowning at displays of argyle socks, if time allows.

It's funnier if you imagine him saying it with a Scottish accent.

Well, why not? At this time his meal-ticket (revered London venue The Luminaire) was being squeezed out of existence by dark forces beyond his control. So under the circumstances I was surprised that he could concentrate on anything at-all.

Meanwhile I was feeling increasingly uncomfortable being out in public. Every single person on the street was sickeningly healthy and rich, while I was dirty, tired and broke. My fragile self-esteem was cracking up fast and even The Baaron was getting tired of feeling, in context, like some sort of foreign hobo.

So we hitched our wagon and drove off into the postcard Swiss countryside, listening to Andy yarn about the foxy little sales-girl who gave him "the look" while he was modelling a nice pure-wool tartan number, and the wretched, degrading things he would have done to her if he'd gotten her alone.

*******

We were on our way to a mega-venue on the outskirts of Aarau, called Kiff (which is Deutsche slang for smoking bannana peel). Perhaps I can cut down the blather quotient in this post by listing some of Kiffs' outstanding qualities in point form. To whit...

Generous, tasty catering on-site.
Big, meaty sound-system and alert, skilled tech-staff.
Seemingly unlimited free booze.
Big, comfy back-stage with adjacent bunk room for overnight stays.
Chunky home-stereo speakers bolted to the roof in the backstage toilet so you can hear what's cooking on the main stage.

Any venue makes it possible for the "I just want to take a long shit and read the paper" crowd to listen to the band in comfort goes straight to the top of my list.

Any venue where this guy asks you if you'd like a bottle of Highland Park in addition to 6 crates of boutique beer is just, y'know, off the fucking chart.

But the thing that really made our night was the punters. We were forced to abort our first song half way through, due to off-stage technical issues. But instead of the awkward, shuffling silence that I expected from the crowd while the bugs got ironed out they hooted and jeered and wolf-whistled like whiskey-drunks at a cockroach-fight. That set the tone, and thenceforth they grooved spastically to our beats and sent up a barrage of appreciative noise after every song that almost made me weep.

Von Cuddles was complaining that his guitar "feels, like, really heavy tonight" and spent most of the show folded in half, like a big pair of barbecue tongs.

...as you can see here I shot him up with an anti-inflammatory mid-show and he managed to straighten up a bit.

Ooooohhhh, you boxy, boxy, little box, you. Gimme a kiss.

Hello. My name is Ben and I'm 9 years old. I play electric bass guitar in a pop group! It's exciting and lots of fun but sometimes it's too loud and I get a headache.

It was a fine experience, blasting our klang at these noisy, goofy, fun-loving volk, and we left the stage as giddy as kittens. So naturally we then both proceeded to become slobbering, staggering drunk.
I have no clear memories of the rest of the night, but at some point Inglis went to sleep on a couch in the back-stage area while The Baaron and I eventually weaved into the bunk room and passed out.

*******

I woke up around 11am the next morning, and while I was dragging my putrid jeans on I noticed that a there was a third person in the room whom I didn't recognise. In one of the spare beds, sleeping peacefully, was a crushingly pretty young woman.

She looked so pale, so innocent and vunerable, lying on her back with her breath whistling softly in the heavy silence and her fine, blonde hair splayed like a halo across the pillow. I was mesmerised. Who was she? Was she already there when we went to bed? Did one of us, y'know, "make out" with her?

Before I knew what I was doing I was kneeling beside her bed and my face was about 3 inches away from hers.

Artists rendering of what was going on in my misty, mushy brain.

But I was startled out of my reverie by the The Baaron hissing urgently at me from his bed.

"Get the fuck away from her, Green. Are you still drunk?"

I straightened up and took a step back.

"Mind your own business, Cuddles." I hissed back. "I was just checking her eye-flutter patterns, to see if she was dreaming. Is this your doing?"

He shook his head and yawned, laying his head back down on the pillow.

"Just leave her alone." He muttered. "Don't make trouble".

But I was fascinated by this precious, waif-ish creature that had stolen into our room in the chilly dawn hours to rest with us, and despite myself I moved back in for another close inspection. She was so beautiful, so fine, and she smelled of shampoo and jasmine.

At that very instant the girls eyes snapped open and she jerked upright like a puppet being yanked on a string. She ripped out a blood-freezing shriek and her fist shot out like a tiny cannon-ball, hitting my cheek square-on. I stumbled backwards, tripping over The Baarons clothes-bag and landing hard on my tail-bone.

Then suddenly, with sickening speed, The Baaron leaped out of bed like a giant ape and kicked me hard in the kidneys before I could stand up.

"It was fucking terrifying, man. This really pale, skinny guitarist just fucking materialized and started tearing me apart!"

"Pervert! Child-toucher!!" He screamed and tried to kick me again, but I rolled up onto my feet and scuttled out of reach. Meanwhile the girl fled, out through the back-stage room and down the stairs towards the exit. She'd been fully clothed under the covers, but her sneakers and her hand-bag were still sitting on the floor next to the bed.

Von Cuddles picked up one of the sneakers and bounced it off my forehead.

"Great, Green!" He snarled. "Now we're fucked. She's going straight to the cops"

"Bullshit!" I snapped "I was just looking. There's no law against that."

"How the fuck do you know?" He yelled, flapping his hands and spraying spittle. "Look at what happened to Julian Assange! This isn't Collingwood! For christs' sake, chewing gum is illegal in Singapore, and you can be locked up forever in the Emirates, just for owning a dog!!"

He slumped back onto his cot and covered his face with his freakishly large hands.
"When they come for us I'll have to tell them the truth about you. Your history!" He moaned. "I can't sit back and watch my life get flushed down the toilet, just because you can't respect other peoples personal space."

I would have argued with him, but at that point Andy wandered into the room, looking sharp and refreshed and ready for breakfast.
"Hoo was tha' birrd?" He asked cheerily. "Shee loooked laike a goode piece!"

*******

Well, we never found out who that girl was. We left her stuff where she'd abandoned it and piled into our Ford Galaxy with all the left-over snacks and beer we could find.
Sound-check in Milan was at 6pm, and we didn't want to hurry through the alps.

*******

Seriously huge props to the Kiff staff and patrons. Additional live photography courtesy of Gar Photos.

The Perils of Touring - 1: Cinderella Syndrome

2011-01-10T16:20:00.000Z

I remember a short, boozy conversation I had with the cruel and devious Andy Inglis shortly after he had agreed to become our "Encourager" (a term he coined himself, because the word "Manager" raises painful boils on his neck).

He told me about a side-gig he had going, lecturing at a performing arts college on the subject of the Music Industry. I believe the unit he taught was actually called Music Industry Studies, or something equally nauseating.

"My god." I mumbled, shaking my head. "That's fucking awful. What do you tell those poor kids?".

He shrugged and refused to make eye contact.

"I tell them the truth." He said.

I was shocked. What sort of institution would employ a known misanthrope like Inglis to take a room full of dense but ambitious 18 year-olds and systematically shit all-over their most cherished dreams?

"How do they take it?" I asked after an uncomfortable pause.

He just screwed up his face and started fiddling with his cuff-links. He didn't answer the question.

This is a slightly sideways lead into the topic I actually want to discuss today, the dreaded Cinderella Syndrome.

There is a certain kind of limited schizophrenia that will grow like a tumor in the brain of any sensitive person who tours on the particular limbo-level where we (CC) are currently operating. It is dictated by circumstance, and is therefore fairly predictable in it's movements, but not it's effects.

Some people can jockey it like a cheap carnival ride, because in the end it is just as temporary and meaningless and if you're lucky it won't even cost you any money. But fools will be swung high and low by it's long arm.

Try it out.

There will be nights when that rotten pumpkin you've been driving around in will turn into a golden carriage without you even noticing. Looking like an animated pile of cold shit in tight jeans, you will wander up to reception at a ritzy hotel that you could never afford to stay in on your own resources and the clinically sexy young woman behind the desk will smile as she hands over your room key, and you will suddenly be gripped by the idea that she wants you.

Yes. It's so clear to me now. I have beaten the system. These people know in their hearts that I am loaded and famous and more talented than Da Vinci. There is no other way to explain why I'm here at-all, stinking and ashing in the potplants and making the other guests uncomfortable.

Fluffy white towels, artfully recessed lighting, movies on demand, miniature Glennfidichs, washing your putrid socks in a designer sink and admiring your blackheads in gigantic, spotless mirrors.

"I thought you said soundcheck was at seven-thirty.
Well okay, let me finish this."

Then it's off to the big, slick venue where they feed and water you like a trophy-winning racehorse and where an alert, black-clad tech with a Mini-Maglite will suddenly appear, ready for anything, if you so much as frown during soundcheck. You wander around the big stage like some sort of electrified aristocrat, looking for a spot where the sound isn't quite right, but you don't find one!

"Uh, Frank, can I get a little bit more ME in the sidefill?"

Then more fine booze, a boutique meal backstage, random people telling you how infectious your latest single is and then it's back on-stage to strut around and revel in your own magnificent noise. The seething masses of arch-hipsters howl and weep and tear at their well curated outfits and throw big rocks of MDMA and old iPhones at you.

Aaaaahhhh...The POWER!

The glow can easily last another 24 hours, until you turn up at some greasy little brick box on a filthy side-street in an ugly University town to play first-on to a gaggle of talentless nose-piercings for 30 euros and a spot on the promoters rancid living-room floor.

The sound-system is pure shit, the house engineer resents your very existence and the borderline-retarded drummer from the "headline act" steals your six-pack of domestic beer right in front of your eyes.

Remember that community center gig in Krakow, where that creepy middle-aged covers band pushed us around and took our sandwiches? And that junkie midget kicked me in the balls and you got food poisoning and while you were vomiting in the carpark the cops picked you up because they thought you were a dangerous foreign drunk and I had to spend the entire fuel budget for the tour getting you out of jail? Well, they've invited us back.

A handful of stale potato chips, a brief line-check to allow the house engineer to make absolutely sure you sound like wet turd and then rip into it. Half an hour of criminally wasted effort trying to win over the twelve teen-age beer-drunks that are standing like statues of pure contempt at the back of the room.

But they hate you for wasting their time with your silly racket, for using up valuable oxygen before the local boys can take over and play their badly disguised My Chemical Romance covers while their whorish, emaciated girlfreinds gyrate in front of the speakers and their mongoloid, tribal-tattooed buddies nod along seriously to the beat. Oh God, the horror.

But it's not over yet. You are stuck there, until these walking bags of premature senility are finished and a hair-gelled afterbirth deejays chill-house for 3 hours. It is a grinding eternity before the bar closes and the lights go on and your 30 euros gets doled out like kidney-stones by the surly bar-manager, who somehow makes you feel like you are stealing from him.

Then you peel the rain-sodden parking tickets off the windshield and drive to some tiny, reeking apartment where you must be vocally grateful for the luxury of curling up on the greasy carpet to cry yourself to sleep while a three-legged dog snarls at you from a dark corner and the promoter sits next to your head playing Call Of Duty and sucking bongs until 8am.

"Just make a space, guys. I'm gonna stay up for a while."

Strong minds have been shattered by far less stark reversals of fortune, and remember that this one has happened in less than 48 hours!

So it takes a peculiar kind of mental flexibility and a queasy vacuum in the soul to not only cope with this sort of existential whiplash but actually get a quirky boot out of it.

Well, I possess those qualities, and so does my shredding colleague, Baaron Von Cuddles. That's why small samples of our DNA are on file at a private facility in Denmark, and are being diligently combed for the mutant gene that will one day deliver a marketable drug which will be hugely popular among bankers and traders when the freak tides of finance suck their multi-billion dollar sand-castles away into nothing overnight.

Cruel Fate will be left punching at thin air and it's victims will just giggle and roll their eyes and move on to other things. Then we will be the billionaires, me and The Baaron, and we will pay to play un-promoted Monday night support slots at suburban youth centers in Tashkent, just for kicks.

In the meantime, please stay tuned to this fine, righteous blog as we continue to feature "30 Nights Of Bushweek", the only live-music journal on the interweb that brings the diseased chickens of the Cinderella Syndrome home to roost in your tender brain.

You're welcome.

"Your everyday Nervous Breakdown is nothing compared to the hopeless Craziness of a man who woke up as a Prince and goes to bed as a Toad....if you don't go insane from suddenly having to see everything in the world from a point only two inches high, your brain will surely be churned into cream by having to crawl, head-first, with your eyes open, down a muddy hole in the ground just to have a place to sleep."

Hunter Stockton Thompson, Doctor of Divinity

1937 - 2005.

30 nights of bushweek - lucern

2011-01-07T18:23:00.000Z

The Baarons’ abiding fascination with the sub-atomic world is well known, as is his caustic sense of humor, which places heavy emphasis on disorienting the victim. But until we crossed into Switzerland these two things had seldom had the opportunity to operate at peak level simultaneously.

So the prospect of a visit to the Super Hadron Collider on the French-Swiss border caused us to leave Colmar early and speed through the black-metal landscape listening to Steven Hawkings books-on-tape and devising strategies for annoying any physicists we might run into at the site.

This is what I mean by “black-metal landscape”. You get it, right?

I suggested pretending to be graduate students from Bond University and horrify them with our ignorance, but The Baaron shook his head gravely. He was obviously formulating his own plan.
After a few minutes of concentration a wolfish smile spread across his face and he started tapping the steering wheel meaningfully.

“Let’s just run a flat-out bogan trip on them.” He said.

“Perfect.” I replied. “They’ll be totally unprepared for an angle like that. Can you imagine the pedigree of ultra-nerd they usually deal with? When we start talking like sheep-shearers from Dubbo their brains will completely freeze up.”

The Baaron nodded and let out an evil chuckle. “That’s right, total culture shock. Everything that comes out of our mouths will make them feel like someone is dropping live cockroaches down their shirts. But they’ll still have to answer our questions.”

Having reached the facility at around 10am we drove at once to the slick, well-funded visitors centre and paid something like 65euros each for a short guided-tour. Our evil plan came into sharp focus when our guide turned out to be a scholarly, middle-aged man called Rene Seidlemier, who was also a part-time research assistant to the colliders’ Special Engineering staff.

High-end Science People are generally unsettled by having to answer questions from laymen of any kind. Poor Rene got us, laying this trip on him.

I decided to start in on him right away.

“G’day Rene, how’s it fuckin’ hangin’ mate?” I drawled, in the thickest accent I could muster.

He was obviously shocked by this weird mangling of the English language, but he recovered quickly and seemed to understand the question in context.

“Very well, thank you, very well.” He said with a nervous little laugh. “Shall we begin? This way.”

Applied-science brain-monsters hanging out at the LHC. Mr Seidelmier is the one up the back, next to the guy with the hat on. Can you feel the hatred?

He bowed slightly and we followed him to a near-by building, into a cluttered room full of lab-coat types in civilian dress who were tinkering with large pieces of tech. Just as he opened his mouth to start his well-rehearsed spiel The Baaron cut him off.

“So, Rene. Must be fuckin’ grousse smashin’ fuckin’ electrons and quarks and shit all day, eh?”

“Yeeeah,” I slurred “Have youse cunts cracked the fuckin’ riddle of the universe yet or what?”

Rene cringed slightly and for the briefest moment I could almost hear the fine little cogs of his Swiss brain grinding against each-other.

If we hadn’t been playing our roles with total commitment he would have immediately assumed that we were blatantly mocking him. But, as it was, he was forced to confront the idea that for the next 45 minutes he was actually going to have to baby-sit two drooling retards from the “outback” who, for some incomprehensible reason, had decided that a guided tour at the Super Hadron Collider would be “fuckin’ awesome”.

The funny thing is, it is fucking awesome.

The tour itself was fascinating, and it was a struggle to stay in character in the face of raw, world shattering science, especially after the joke lost it’s zang about half way through. But every so often The Baaron would pipe up with a highly informed, technical question for which Rene was visibly gratefull, but which also deepened his confusion almost to the point of madness. By the time we left I was sure that he would take the rest of the day off and drink heavily.

It was a fine mornings entertainment, and provided much fuel for conversation on the short, picturesque drive to Lucern. But I have wasted many words relating this sad tale of juvenile science-hazing, so now I’ll have to wrap up the tale-o-the-gig in short order.

Quoth The Baaron, nevermore. I have a keen eye for omens, so this sight did not hearten me.

The ravens were circling when we arrived at Schuur, a venue that looked like a cross between a Swiss chalet and an executive cowshed. It had everything, from state of the art sound to a mixing console housed in a spaceship to a large, fibreglass igloo in the beer-garden which apparently served as a (tee hee) chill-out room.

The star-trek mixing booth.

The, uh, igloo.

Once again we were supporting 65 Days Of Static, which was initially awkward because of the violent confrontation we’d had with them in Holland only a week or so earlier, but fences were quickly mended over dinner and spirits were high by the time we all got down to business. Only BVC seemed downbeat, and under interogation revealed that he was starting to feel a little homesick. So I palmed him half a gram of flour, told him it was ketamine and pretty soon he was reeling around like a wino and giggling in placebo heaven.

Cuddles having his supper and missing his mummy.

Another point of discomfort was the appearance of the cruel and devious Andy Inglis (pronounced Ingles) who had flown into Lucern that morning to join us for the Swiss leg of the tour. He appeared suddenly during soundcheck like a neatly dressed spectre of hate and spent most of the night standing at our merch table, terrifying potential customers and firing off angry emails from his iphone.

Aaaaaah, merch. Merchy, merchy merch.

By this stage of the tour both The Baaron and I were starting to feel our onions, from a performative standpoint. So between that fact and the big, meaty stage-sound and the curious thrill of playing in the country which gave us all the “Swiss bank account” and the Von Trapp family, I had an absolute ball on stage. The crowd was polite and attentive, which are not necessarily the qualities we look for, but it beats the puss out of hostile and dismissive.

Here´s what it all looked like from Andys´perch in front of the subs at stage right.

65 D.O.S did their crescendo laden thing and made more than a few of the polite, attentive Swiss gig-goers completely hysterical. I almost shattered the truce between our two camps by leaping up and bolting across the stage after forgetting the access code to the backstage door, but that too was smoothed over, with the band at least (their tour manager never did forgive me, as will be seen in later posts).

Happy Birthday to URSI! She doesn´t like cake, but she runs a tight ship nevertheless.

All in all, a fine day on the road. Giant big-ups to Schuurs’ foxy and mischievous venue-manager, Ursi, who surrendered her living room to us so we could both sleep in comfort and save some francs, and to the 65 boys for not really giving a shit about my sudden appearance in the middle of their show, which relies heavily on atmosphere and is not assisted by old drunks streaking across the stage at random.

The road winds ever on.

30 nights of bushweek - metz

2010-12-30T09:31:00.000Z

A modern artists depiction of the "Graoully", saying "RRRR".

Sometime in the first century A.D a young, scrappy christian called Clement arrived in heathen Gaul, on orders from Saint Peter to knock some Christ into the locals. Upon his travels he found a Roman struggle-town on the banks of the Mosselle that was being terrorised by a monstrous winged reptile that lived in the local amphitheatre from which it would occasionally stir to eat babies and fill the air with poisonous fumes.

Clement faces off against the Graoully, while the locals totally freak out.
"For fucks sake, dont piss that thing off!" Screams the woman at foreground left.

Well, Clement beat the mortal puss out of that dragon and banished it into the void beyond the world. The townsfolk declared themselves "stoked!", swiftly converting to Christianity and making Clement their first Bishop.

But today the town of Metz in northern France faces different problems, like being slandered on the internet by a self-important bass player from Collingwood. Where's your fancy Bishop now, losers?

Centre Pompidou Metz. Not your average sticky-carpet joint.

Anyway, we had been booked by the Musiques Volantes festival to open a three band bill at the futuristic Pompidou Centre, in return for a tidy purse, meals and accommodation.
We parked at a loading dock around the back of the building and were met with snacks and good manners by the wonderfully freindly production staff just as the headline act, "Plectrum"*, was starting their soundcheck.

Having been told all about their fine pedigree and famous singer/guitarist P**** K**** I was eager to watch them and form my own opinions about their sound.

File photo of the unhappy Mr K**** , desperately trying to tweak some life into it.

When I wandered into the hall K**** was in the middle of some sort of rigidly controlled hissy fit, pleading ominously for "More loops in my monitor....Alot more. ....Alot....Alot! More! No, more...alot more!"
He was rubbing his temples and screwing up his face, like a man trying to conduct a symphony played by 8 year-olds. He would bark little demands into the microphone and then run around the stage like a six-foot chicken in a whirlwind of hilarious micro-managing.
He would bound over to the other guitarists amp, move it an inch to the left, feverishly tweak the knobs for a few seconds, then leap over to the bass amp to move it an inch backwards and fuss over its' settings, then back to his microphone to whine and cajole the house engineer some more. The guitarist and bass-player just watched him in dolefull silence as he moved their shit around and changed their settings. I was stunned.

When they actually started playing a song he would stop the band after every few bars and lecture the guitarist on the correct hand posture for an F chord, or how to hold his pick, or how to suck eggs ect.
Again, I was stunned.

It´s available in pedal form? Man, I can´t wait to let him know!

This circus of obsessive-compulsive behavior went on for what seemed like years. By the end of it I thought Mr K**** was going to cry, right there on stage. The sweet, sweet icing on the cake came after they had finished, when he paced up and down one side of the stage for two whole minutes, leaning his guitar against the railing, then picking it back up and moving it a few feet, then picking it back up and pacing some more.

I was completely enthralled. What the fuck was he doing? What was this strange pantomime, and where would it end?
It ended when he gingerly leaned his guitar against the railing, as if it was made of spring ice, waited a few tense seconds with his hand hovering in space, and then turned to the other guitarist who was loitering a few paces behind him. "Put your guitar here" he ordered "The temperature's good".

Well, I have to say I was completely awed by this display of obsessive/compulsive, micro-managed lunacy.
I mean, I probably wouldn´t laugh at Django Reinhardt if he pulled that stunt with his 15,000 euro, 85 year-old classical...but...
Hats off.

Bitter old creep wanders around on stage, waiting for some guy he calls "The Baaron" to finish his bucket-bong and get checking.

Anyway, we finally got on stage and checked our shit. The house engineer got us the best stage-sound of the entire tour, in about 12 minutes, and then we headed upstairs to the caffeteria to stuff our faces and mix with the Pompidou staff.

The gig itself was okay. We played well and the mix was splendid, but the crowd had obviously come for the Plectrum sound and did not seem overtly inspired by our tunes. That´s fine.
Well, they got Plectrum alright. A full hour of crawling, overblown slop that made me feel like I had smoked bannana skins all day on an empty stomach. Fantastic stuff.


Plectrum lay their turgid "jams" on the rapt audience. I'll be down the back gobbling fistfulls of Iboprufen and moaning along with the chord changes.

Not much more to say about this one. Got drunk, failed to score any drugs or pussy (I mean, this is the Pompidou after-all), went to our neat, attractive little hotel where I picked a fight with the hair-dryer and then fell unconscious on the bathroom floor in a thin puddle of drool and flat Carlsberg.
Pretty much the usual.

Thankyou indeed to the festival folk and the Pompidou production staff who were about as proffessional and hospitable as could be....and to the cook. She knocked up some killer vittles, fo sho.

Next post we will cross over the border into Switzerland, in search of Nazi gold and fine chocolate. In the meantime, take it easy on NYE, right? Right.

* Names changed to protect the innocent.

Festive big-ups to all yáll

2010-12-24T10:35:00.000Z

It´s been a banner year for the humble young do-goods at Civil Civic HQ. Slobbering, effusive praise from dark corners of the internet, not one but two blockbuster European tours, a confusing single out on "Too Pure" (a fine, gentlemanly imprint) and a feeling around the office of impending DOMINATION OF ALL LIFE ON EARTH!

The small hoard of individuals who have contributed to this atmosphere of triumphant hubris are too many too mention individually, but to use a wretchedly tired cliche, "you know who you are"!

If you´ve booked us, or written nice things about us, or bought one of our fine musical releases, or paid to see one of our shows, or any of that stuff, we salute you and confirm that when our Thousand Year Kingdom is established on Earth, you will have a good seat at the table. It´s a lock.

Here´s to you, you fine human specimens. We will do our damndest to deserve your efforts in ´11.

BANZAI!!!

30 nights of bushweek - colmar

2010-12-22T14:07:00.000Z

.
Yesterday I received an irate email from my good freind Baaron Von Cuddles III, acusing me of a wide variety of transgressions, ranging from character assassination and poor spelling to securities fraud and supplying alcohol to a minor.

Von Cuddles busted me selling these things to primary schoolers a few months back and has not forgiven me.

His main beef, as regards this blog, was that my representation of him as a two dimensional sociopath is not only highly selective and lacking in context, but also getting pretty boring. Personally I find his poor grasp of social norms and vile temper hilarious, so I've never really felt the need to present his lighter, more humane side to my massive global readership.

But he does have a point.

The Baaron is nothing if not a complex man-of-the-arts, and his sporadic outbursts of weird violence, paranoia and glee-full poor taste are certainly the exceptions rather than the norm of his behavior. Most of the time he is just an articulate, well-mannered young axe-slinger who is very serious about his work and eager to make the Civil Civic experience an uplifting one for all comers. No shit, mate.

Anyhoo, with this in mind I'm going to keep this post (relating the general events surrounding our gig in Colmar) fairly brief and to the point.
The day begins in our battery-hen style suicide-hotel on the outskirts of Lyon. After four hours of troubled sleep I rose, sobbed uncontrollably in the shower for 20 minutes, took a couple of whacks of gin to get the blood moving and hurled myself like a bag of filthy laundry into our Ford Galaxy, which Von Cuddles had already packed and primed for the days journey.

I was feeling a little tense, and on the way out of town I tried to crawl out of the passenger window of the moving vehicle and the Baaron was forced to drag me back inside by the hair while keeping the Galaxy running in a straight line at 140kph.
"What the hell is wrong with you?" He demanded. "Did you see something shiny on the side of the road again?"
"Just a panic attack." I assured him. "You threw my pills out of the starboard porthole last night, remember?"
"Right." He said, nodding and smiling. "Don't worry, we'll get you better pills. Ones that will make you strong!"
That sounded fine, but in the end all I needed was another snort of gin, after which I slept like a baby all the way to Colmar.

I have learned recently that the centre of Colmar is actually as pretty as a little brass button. It just goes to show the sorts of things that pass you by when you´re on a shoestring tour.

We arrived at dusk and the GPS deposited us in a huge open-air car-park on the outskirts of town, with a shopping centre on one side and what appeared to be some sort of steak-house/discotheque on the other. You guessed it, the steak-house was The Venue.
It was a big place, with highly specced sound and lights and a high, broad stage. None of that impressed me as much as the snack buffet lined up on the bar...

..or the picture of the late Ronnie James Dio above the lighting desk. The Van Halen logo was an added plus and made me feel very comfortable, like the whole venue had been torn from the back of my 6th grade maths book.

The night was part of a regional music festival, and the promoter was a sly character called Pierre, who for some reason had taken a liking to our racket via the interweb and booked a couple of shows for us. We got aquainted with Pierre and his cohorts over the course of soundcheck and dinner and discovered he was a senior member of a small terrorist network dedicated to independance for Brittany and was wanted by both the French Federal Police and Interpol. Who woulda thunk it?

If you see this man, do not approach or attempt to aprehend him. He´s okay really, and his girlfreind makes a killer quiche!

After din-dins we took advantage of the large, comfortable back-stage area for a little CC nap-time. It's important to be well rested before a show. No-one likes a grumpy, tired band now, do they? No.

Little Baarony Waarony has his nappy naps.

Fortunately we were playing first-up on a large bill, so our duties were over early in the night. A smattering of French bumpkins from Colmar and surrounding villages dribbled steadily into the venue and were completely unmoved by our noise. From the posters on the wall outside and the graffiti in the toilets I got the impression that this town was ruled by fanatic psychobillies, and that isn't really our bag. But there were, inevitably, a couple of young kooks who dug it, so we sold them some vinyl and the Baaron smuggled them some beers out from back-stage to offset their costs. Now THAT is customer service.

Obligatory sound-check shot. We played to more people than this, but not that many.

For me the hi-light of the evening came from the second act. I once toured Australia as guitar-tech/driver/support-act to the great Bob Log III, so the rash of copycat trash-blues one-man-bands that have plagued the earth in recent times do not impress me, at-all.
But I was enthralled by the flat-out awesomeness of Urban Junior. He's an amiable Swiss-French nut who does a clever, beefy variation of the BL3 schtick with massive energy, skill and ugliness. He tore shit right up, and I instantly decided that if I ever get married I will spare no expense to fly that fucker out so he can headline at the reception. Well played, sir, well played.

Urban Junior gives the kids what-for!

Anyway, by the time he'd finished up I was slobberingly drunk and whining at the Baaron about getting the fuck out of there. I wanted my bed-time, and fortunately so did Von Cuddles, so we unobtrusively man-handled our crap out of a side-door and loaded up the Galaxy.

All in all, not a night of triumph for the CCs', but as I've said before, the road is long and winding, and we were just keeping our powder dry, innit.

Shout-outs to Pierre and Hiero Promotions and to Urban Steve. Keep up the good work.

30 Nights Of Bushweek - Lyon

2010-12-19T11:45:00.001Z

An artists impression of satisfied patrons leaving the venue.

Getting into the centre of Lyon at peak-hour is a wretched, bamboozling experience. Like trying to unravel an enourmous lump of twine covered in motor-oil.
The maze of overpasses, underpasses and tight, curling offramps completely un-manned our TomTom GPS unit and drove the Baaron into a spitting apoplexy of road-rage. By the time we pulled up at the address we had been given for the venue he had beaten his palms bloody on the dashboard and his eyes were filled with blood and darting around like gnats.

Be afraid.

The last straw came when we realised the street address provided to us didn´t exist. We were on the bank of the river undernieth a bridge, with nothing but the water on one side of the street and a string of "bussiness traveller" hotels on the other. The Baaron looked stunned for a moment and then started walking off into the night in disgust.

It was then that I noticed the big, rusty cargo boat moored next to us. I suddenly realised that it had the word "sonic" stencilled in huge black letters on the hull.
Ye gods. The venue was a motherfucking boat.

I´m on a boat, motherfucker, don´t you ever forget.

Proceeding below decks we encountered....well...a small venue. Apart from dead giveaways like... y´know...the port-holes and shit, it was more or less indistinguishable from any other 100 capacity noise-hole I had ever been in. The staff (or "crew") greeted us with fine French lazy courtesy, complete with booze and snacks and calm humor, and the business of soundcheck proceeded.

Obligatory "Portrait of a Baaron and his Box".

In a humiliating side-episode, my self-esteem suffered badly when the only toilet on the boat proved to be completely blocked, forcing me to shit in a plastic bag and then wander three blocks down the street in search of a bin to put it in. There´s nothing like walking down a busy metropolitan street with a bag of your own shit to put your life in perspective.

After soundcheck we dined splendidly with the crew and support band in the tiny galley and traded salty, sea-faring jokes until the first patrons started to filter in and the night began to find it´s "sea-legs".

Our name, up in lights, above a port-hole, next to a mounted fish-head. Just like in those dreams I used to have in high-school, except without the women in clown masks laughing at my penis.

While the support duo were noodling through their prog-swill (which sounded like a mating of Tortoise and Rick Wakeman. Yes, that bad) I was on deck with the Baaron, smoking cigarettes and heckling him about his inability to grow a beard. This is a sensative subject for the Baaron, and he was becoming more and more agitated when suddenly a gorgeous young woman appeared next to us and held out an envelope with "Civil Civic" scrawled on it in blue crayon.

"Hi guys," she chirped while handing me the envelope. "It´s a message from Amande*."
Thinking nothing of it, I opened the envelope and found two updated day sheets, detailing itinerary changes for upcoming shows. But the Baarons´mind predictably ran off in a paranoid direction.
"Sooooo," he drawled menacingly, "you´re here to fucking spy on us, right?".
The girl chuckled politely at the "joke", wished us a good gig and turned to walk away, but the Baarons´hand flashed out like a striking cobra and took a savage pinch-hold on the flesh over her ribs.
She shreiked and twisted herself free, backing away a few paces and clenching her fists in fury and disbelief.
"What the fuck is wrong with you?!" She screamed.
"People get wierd under the microscope, bitch." the Baaron hissed, and took a step towards her.

But this exchange had not gone unoticed on the crowded deck, and suddenly we were surrounded by angry French hipsters, spitting curses and throwing lighted cigarettes at our faces.
Things looked grim, but I reached into my mental bomb-diffusing kit and pulled out the hammer.

"Tourettes!" I yelled. "Tourettes!"
The Baaron cottoned on fast.
"Pussy, pussy, cock, pussy, fuck, shit, cunt FUUUUCK!" He bellowed, twitching and slapping himself in the face. He was raising hideous red welts on his own cheeks and the fury of the on-lookers quickly turned to morbid fascination. They backed away and stared while the Baaron convulsed and screamed obscenities and harmed himself with complete abandon.
"Good," I thought "this´ll get it out of his system."

And it did. The Baaron was pliant and reasonable, right through our triumphant, mind-blowing set until the end of the night when we "put to shore" and drove to our miserable suicide hotel for a few hours of black slumber.

On the whole, it was a successfull evening. We sold a bunch of singles and t-shirts to curious land-lubbers who seemed to appreciate our racket and we escaped unharmed from the real possibilty of a savage Franco-Hipster stomping. Dang, we are GOOD at our job! Say what you like about the CCs´, but never say we are not proffesionals.

So tune in next time for more salty yarns, as Civil Civic point their prows at the horizon and set a course for Funtastic Good Times.
Aaaarrr.

*Amande Dagod is our charming but sly European booking agent. She´s an employee of the Julie Tippex corporation, a giant entertainment conglomerate with dark global designs and rumored ties to human trafficking and the small-arms trade in central Africa.

***BUSHWEEK - Australian colloquialism. An unreasonable demand or behavior.

"Stop givin´ bits of me birthday cake to yer fuckin´dog, Nathan. Whadaya think this is, bushweek?"