You are currently browsing the monthly archive for December 2001.
[w/ Stereolab]
Ah, the Ambassador. Used to be, as a kid, they’d have Indiana Jones or Star Wars on there, and yid sit there, wishing it was you up there, on the big screen.
Well, I was us up there, (not on a big screen mind) and it was fucking freezing. As Simon would argue, architecturally the auditorium is built all wrong to capture any acoustics, so the sounds is different any place you dare stand, due to the circular walls and that. Did we care? Bollix. Stage was big.. real big and we had a monitor engineer and lots of other people to look down on us, and we had selection boxes and cripps and booze backstage… and we got see Stereolab for nuttin.. and enjoy a load of who-the-fuck-are-youse? Trying to get into our dressing room to ‘hang’ after the show. Are you mental? There’s fucking TEN (at least) of us in there already… and that’s nearly ten too many. We must have got the puppets dressing room.
[w/ Connect Four Orchestra]
Temple Bar Music Centre Fully seated show is it? Extra musicians are there? Bony arms do they? Who do they Jimmy Cake think they are.
It went swimmingly, but for missed rehearsals, broken basses, transducers that didn’t work, bottles of cheap beer, more bottles of really, really cheap beer, the nightmare logistics of all them people and that awful beer. We enjoyed this show. Mercedes and Brian added some strings to the proceedings, Mick had some flute, and Smyth brought on the noise. Such was our mass, at one stage we had 15 people on stage. 15 sir! When the cakeettes joined to whinny on Hungry Ghosts.
It was all very huge and impressive, I’m sure. Just to add icing to our cake, someone nicked all our money. Joy unbounded. and fair play to the C4O, who just managed to find enough room on stage amid our clutter.
An energetic performance
Such a pleasant drive down compared with the sojourn to The Real Capital mere months before. We got there in plenty of time to hang around the freezing venue looking useless and admiring Jurgens new Hammer Dulcimer. Deadly.
So much time on our hands we had, that we found ourselves wandering Galways cobbled streets looking for booze and hostel. The girl in the hostel had taken it upon her self to append our little faces, gleaned from our rather earnest looking flyers, onto our little keycard thingies. The sweetest thing. We were chuffed to bits. We stuck her name on the guest list in breathless appreciation and went for dinner. Nice one.
So we trudged back to the venue. They played indie noise, like it used to be. We had a few beers and ignored the carpet. Waiting for our cue. We sat behind the stage tuning and avoiding the sticky tables. They play Deus as a signal for us to go on. We play away, being loud and brash. Some mincer asks for Good Vibrations.
Does he think us too loud? At least we’re not consigned to our beds for twenty years and suffer from artery swelling , stroke inducing cocaine habits. How dya like that. It’s a good reaction, though slightly hard to gauge as front of stage is pitch black. We sell some cd’s, all to the same bloke. We sup on booze and praise fuzzy pink Jesus. The night doesn’t end for some, and covered in bits of breakfast, stinking of booze half a day old, head lolling against the seatbelt is the valediction of certain members, as reluctantly start the drive home. Gift.
The best bit though, was when Brownfury dropped his bags and hopped into bed with Sleeping Simon.
The TRAUMA that ensued…. Classic.
Ah money. Money makes you do the daftest things. Mono though, sticky to touch and underfoot.
We soundchecked at 9, leaving a scant 3 hours before we were due on stage. At this stage, of
course, we’d already spent far too much money on playing Who Wants To Be a Millionaire and booze. We were considerably ‘loosened’ by the time the man with the torch directed us stagewards. The entire ‘crowd’ could have fitted into Vinny’s bedroom. Perhaps we could have played there instead. Grubby hands grab sooty notes, free beer is passed around. Dutch Gold beer. Hangover city. Some bands make some noise. Sir Duke makes me want to vomit. The air on the stairs is that same stale rancidity… like there’s a corpse hidden there somewhere. Maybe next time we’ll bring shovels and see if we can find it. Perhaps it’s our dignity.
We play with all the subtly of a perverts hand. Ahhhhh, sweet release. No we can get serious again.
Our curdled custard appeared on this robust release.
Ah lazy bird. They ask us to do something on the little stage. Crumbs of the Cake not the entire pudding. So with this in mind me and Lisa and Jurgen produce one they prepared earlier. Who would have known five other Cakers would ransack the joke. From our faux-lounge version of This Used To Be The Future and our fad-jazz version of Deathfall priest to our cleverly hackneyed Steve Reich rip off, it was nutty to soupy. Could have been worse though…People might not have even laughed. A lesson in non restraint. Lazybird is nice though, and necessary, and John and Dee played records like mental afterward
