COME SEE KS &
THE DULOKS AT
THE FLY IN LONDON 7/18!!!!
Another huge week. Another green world.
This has been, even by my standards, an incredibly diverse week, full of adventures in a few different places.
I’m pretty much breathless (and…speechless? NO. But I am saving my breaths and speechths for the 3D world…you need a lot of hot, gabby, air to keep your thought balloons afloat in the atmosphere of London, and I have a few more days left here, so I have save some mojo) from the majesty of the Duloks set at Latitude festival – we slayed ‘em with the triple threat of short & sharp songs, hummingbird-wing-quick comedy, and lots of FOG. More on that in a minute.
Last Sunday I went up to the 18eme to see
Konono No. 1 play in a rather odd park that has been installed along some unused land adjacent to all the tracks running into Gare du Nord…I was late, according to the posted start time, and had to figure out my way to this place, which I never been to before, but it wasn’t long from the metro stop before I could just follow the music in the air. If you aren’t familiar with K. No. 1’s music, they are from Zaire, and have been a band for at least since the mid 1970s. An album of their music released more or less worldwide a couple of years ago, called “Congotronics” was very popular and brought the band in contact with a very wide audience. The record is a very accurate representation of their live show, based on what I saw this day. In the 7-piece band, there are three people playing thumb pianos, thru guitar (and in one case, a bass) amplifiers. The notes are limited to a pentatonic scale in just an octave or two, but the three instruments playing against each other rhythmically plus all the percussion makes for a danceable, complex jumble of noise that is oddly frantic and hypnotic at the same time. The thumb piano playing thru the bass amp sounds remarkably like a bass guitar, with a deep booming resonance; the higher ones you could compare almost to steel drums but with the amp distortion it’s more a more intense sound. The ‘bass’ player also toasts and sings, and there’s a female singer, who makes infrequent affirmative shouts, and then in the back there’s a guy playing drums much like conga drums, but with thinner shells and no tapering at the bottom, plus he blows a whistle (this guy is working hard, there’s not one second that he can let up, to keep the groove going); a drummer who simply plays fills on a snare drum and occasionally hits a super trashy cymbal made out of squarish piece of scrap with huge rivets in it; and guy playing agogo bells. The stage was small, and the sloping land behind the stage was cut into steps so you could sit down behind the group, or stand in front. I did both, and walked around, it was really cool to pick out the separate elements individually as I made a circle around them. They also have their own lo-tech PA set up alongside the normal PA. I couldn’t tell what was coming out of it (this would look really odd, coming up to the stage and cramming your ear in each speaker one at a time). It started to rain soon after I got there, but nobody seemed to mind…there were about 300 or so people there. KN1’s songs are all fairly similar rhythmic jams, lasting for 15-20 minutes or so. When I got too wet I finally left, stopping for a café at one of the many rather rough looking joints around the Stalingrad metro.
At home I listened to the Wimbledon Men’s final on internet radio…it’s not shown on regular broadcast TV in France and we don’t have cable…I hope I can actually see a video of this match…it sounded great and that’s hard to pull off, describing tennis in words. Maybe the announcer was even better than the match…but I have a feeling it was pretty good.
Monday—this was a SUPER productive day, as I learned (or so I thought!) the Duloks’ set in its entirety. I was going to play tennis but it rained for the exact hour that Remi & I had the court reserved! So I had no choice but to hunker down and get Dulok-ular!
On Tuesday I was up at 5am!! and in the cool morning’s dim light (I love Paris when the streets are empty—like at the end of August when everyone’s on vacation…it’s the best time to be there) I walked to Gare de Lyon to catch a train to the other side of France, and then a bus up into the Alps. I was going to a ski resort called Les Arcs—there are actually several clusters of chalets and services on the same mountain, all called Les Arcs followed by the elevation—I as at Les Arcs 1600, which has a pretty large hotel, and a few shops, all clustered together. What was I doing there? I was there to work on preproduction for an album I’m producing this summer for a French artist named Mateo. I met Mateo when I was playing bass for Olivia Baum; Mateo is her guitar player. He and his band, who are Parisians but do a residency at the bar at Les Arcs each summer as a kind of getaway (with free room and board, no less). So they brought me over so during the daytime we could run thru their assembled songs and see if they could benefit from any changes in arrangement etc. and also dither down the number of songs from the 20 or so contenders to the 12 we have a reasonable enough time to record. We did some great work, some of the demos that I really liked that they weren’t sure about came to life, and the songs they were confident with grew as well, it was really….uh, productive! We worked all day Tuesday and Wednesday, and then on Thursday until I got on the train in the afternoon. On Tuesday night they played their show, and I hung out – there are not many people in the resort so mostly hanging out in the bar are some of the staff and a few kinda biker looking guys. Eh, fun!
The way back was done by funicular (funicular? I hardly knew her!) down the mountain, and then two trains back to Paris, and then walking home from Gare de Lyon. So…the next day
I went to London, on Friday the 13th in the morning! I have been here so much I felt totally at home upon arrival. I met up with Mira Dulok, and a lamb tikka and drove across almost all of London to the Tent Street house to have a Duloks rehearsal…and try on outfits! Duloks rehearsal is mostly gossip and talking about Canadian indie rock (Mar Dulok is a homey from Vancouver!!) and occasionally playing a minute and a half song about eating fish while claiming to be Mick Jagger. So it took like 3 hours to do the 30 minute set. Ready!!
SOUTHWOLD 7/14
Saturday we were on the road at the crack of 9, and drove BACK to Tent Street (SheBu to East London), picked up the gear (easiest band in the world to load—one suitcase, one casio, a keyboard stand, and an electronic drum kit frame that weighs less than a paper bicycle). Then we worked our way to Suffolk, which means going up to Ipswich and then heading for the sea. But not quite getting there. Latitude Festival is held in a big pasture (of course) that is watched over by a really lovely arch-shaped house. We rolled in, and I started to run into friends left and right (Carina who put on the Disciplines’ Borderline show; Gilbert, who tour managed a big portion of the Frosting on the Beater tours for the Posies!), always a good sign. We had catering for lunch, got the lay of the land, and set up our gear. Then Radio 1 interviewed all three of us in a boat on the lake! It was very sweet of Huw and the crew to treat me like a real Dulok. So, we were relaxed and confident by our 4.30 show time…I can only say…Viva Duloks! We slayed ‘em! Mira and I have a great comedic rapport in daily life, so, it was easy to project that onto the audience, and spray them with rubber bullets of funnies, jabs, and double entendres! Mira really had her thing together, stomping and screaming and ruling the stage (and the ground—I reminded her just in time not to jump off the stage with her broken toe!) and Mar looked super cool (I saw photos right after) and pounded away. I was awful of course but it was really fun…Mira and I rehearsed in the trailer and we forgot to go over “Best Mistake” which you’d think I’d know but I am just the lead singer of the D-plines so I totally went blank when we played it onstage and just made up the chords…awful! It’s STILL the Duloks’ best song, tho! Hahaha!
Well, after the set Mira was so thrashed she barfed, but I felt great, people really loved it and laughed at all the jokes and we were ROCK STARS par excellence. Once we were done, it was our duty to hang, schmooze, run around in our underwear in the backstage, watch some bands—we were too satisfied by our own majesty of song to really appreciate much…I had wanted to see Rickie Lee Jones as I really like her new rec. but her live show was ill suited to a tent on summer day with the sun still up. It wasn’t happenin’…a lot of wailing but the band wasn’t that together…there were no drums so it was kind of hard to lift the mood to match her singing, which was really intense and wailing. We also watched CSS who are so hyped at this point…it’s kind of hard to go YAY! when you’ve been beaten over the head with how great they are. They are pretty good…but let’s get this clear: THEY ARE NO…ME!! If you have a lead singer, you really need that person to step up and do split kicks and crazy shit. This was not happening. I’m From Barcelona! was really fun…hmmm. Then we had to drive back in the middle of the night and load the equipment…aiyee.
Sunday Mira and I met somewhere in the hall and we each came to the conclusion that the downstairs toilet was not working…and we had each pee’d in it on separate occasions…eew. Well. We drove up to the north of London, I wanted to see St. Etienne at the Rise Up Against Racism show in Finsbury Park. The traffic was awful, and parking…forget it! Thousands and thousands of people had converged on the park, and now, you can’t park. But we…er * I * had the brilliant idea to ask one of the little hotels if we could park in their lot and they let us, for only 5 quid! We hobbled on into the park (remember, Mira still has a broken toe) and watched a bit of St. Etienne, and then went backstage—we had passes, which enabled us to have VIP access and free barbecue! As we crossed the VIP area, which wasn’t crowded yet, we ran into the mayor of London, Ken Livingstone! Mira marched right up and introduced herself and myself! Then, since it was kind of a non-rock festival, and it was 2pm on a Sunday, there were no typical scenesters around—meaning we could walk right up onstage and watch St. Etienne from like, right behind the drum kit! After they were done, we helped ourselves to le fleisch grillé, had some water, said hi to St. Etienne, and started to walk back to the car…BOOM, the sky opened up on us right as we were the absolute furthest from shelter possible, in the middle of the park. We were drenched to the bone, really, like, wringing wet. Haha, my thin, pilates-toned body looked really good with a wet shirt clinging to it! Mira actually took her jeans off in the parking lot and drove home in her top and skivvies. Good thing she looks like a dude.
Tonight I’m hanging at the Social, it’s a night of French music and one of Dom’s bands,
Shaolin, are playing—thus, yay, Dom is here!! The DJ for the band (it’s a hip hop act) bought his plane ticket online and used his stage name, so he was turned away at the airport this morning—and he can probably assume he’s on a terrorist watch list by now! Several hundred Euros later, he arrived by Eurostar last minute. Le d’oh!!
Hope to see you all at the Duloks show at 10pm on Wednesday the 18th!! I’ll be playing!!
Love
KS
London
