110% RESILIENCY
VIENNA, 5/6
I have to admit, I wasn’t expecting much from this week. I mean, I haven’t really been into performing solo shows this year—I have done just a modest handful (half a dozen before this tour, and always only by request…I never solicit them); my head is really actually into The Disciplines, and I accepted the Posies 20th Anniversary shows as a worthy diversion. But, despite the fact you could say I am touring to promote the release of the Covers EP, really I’m mostly playing songs from my albums, the last of which was released four years ago—an eternity in terms of most records’ lifetimes. It’s a compliment to the strength of the music and the hard-won development of my live presentation that I am still being asked to do these shows.
But, tired as I was after my long day of travel from Oslo, I arrived in Vienna with rather low expectations—my 7th solo show in Vienna since the start of 2006. Who could possibly...care? Did I? Not having played a solo show in 2 months (the last one having been in…Vienna!) was I going to be any good?
When I landed and claimed my gear, I found there were *two* people picking me up—Klaus, who booked the tour, and Eva from the National Radio. Turns out that Klaus was going to have to wait for a severely delayed Asha Ali and band, they had missed their connection from Sweden. So, Eva had volunteered to be a second driver, bless her. So she shuttled me to the Szene, a nondescript interior in an industrial neighborhood of Vienna not often frequented…except when there’s a show.
I got settled in the backstage, and
Trouble Over Tokyo’s soundcheck was in progress. TOT is the project of one Toph (long ‘o’, as in ‘toe’), who, due to his popularity in Austria and so far not really elsewhere (I suspect that will change soon), I had assumed was Austrian. Until I ran into him in a bar in London a couple of months ago…and found he is a cheerful (and blond) British lad from Kent. TOT is his bedroom project, I think on the (amazing) album he played/programmed almost all the music. He had been playing shows singing and playing acoustic guitar, accompanied by tracks from his laptop, but now he has put together a live band—he brought his friend Galli from London, who has a hipster beehive (kind of Robert Smith vs. Amy Winehouse) and plays keyboards and sings; he recruited drummer Max, who I knew from when I supported Garish in Salzburg last year—Max is an outstanding drummer, and managed to fuse the drum machine parts of the record and his own feel and beats, seamlessly; bassist Marlene and guitarist Renee, who are a couple, are immensely talented, play in their own band in Austria (voted the best looking band in Austria at one point!) and are both, well, diminutive in stature—but massive in presence.
So, we chatted over dinner a bit. I soundchecked and email checked and met
Asha Ali and her band when they arrived—Asha, her keyboard player Daniel, and guitarist/harmonica player/vocalist Therese.
The venue filled up, I met the A Life A Song A Cigarette guys, and Asha played…I had a ton of email stuff to catch up on and plane tix for Disciplines shows to buy, so I didn’t really get to watch much, but I knew we’d have more opportunities as the week went on.
Then I went on, and straight out of the gate I had one of the best shows I’ve had, ever—by far the best show I’ve done this year. My Vienna track record is unbroken. I was able to play in the crowd to some 300 people, get them all to listen, and they went absolutely mad after each song. So good! I sold an entire box of CDs after my set, a good sign of how people were reacting.
There is a couple in Vienna who have asked me to play at their wedding this summer, and they were at the show and kind enough to bring me a bottle of very fine wine, which, since there was no way it would survive the upcoming travel, I had no choice but to share with my friends. We sat at picnic tables out back, and had a lovely time. Sort of the same story with TOT, I knew I would see them later.
A brilliant night, however—everybody played exceedingly well, and the audience was delightful.
SIDE NOTES
Asha Ali band profile.
Asha is a songwriter from Sweden. She’s ethnically Somali, spent her early childhood in Uganda and Kenya, and is fully culturally Swedish, having lived there since the age of 9. She sings in that pure way that Swedes can do so well, gentle breathy vowels and sweet tone; however, she can also growl and purr in a kind of Billie Holiday way too. She’s incredibly bright and positive. She has big active eyes and is quite thin and delicate looking, but also has great strength.
Daniel, the keyboard player has a kind of 50s tough guy look—slicked back hair, tattooed forearms. He is absolutely gentle and is prone to playing Burt Bacharach when he’s warming up.
Therese has her own band,
Lowood; it’s basically her, singing and playing guitar—also with that pure, sweet tone that Swedes do so well. She harmonizes magnificently with Asha—they sound sometimes like an indie pop Carter Family.
Trouble Over Tokyo band profile.
Toph is Trouble Over Tokyo. He generally records everything himself…it’s a marvelous mix of soaring, dramatic falsetto vocals, programmed beats, strings, pianos…the music has moments of almost Erasure or Scritti Politti but that’s selling it sort. It’s not really retro at all, actually. It’s kind of like emo-tronic Kate Bush, if I had to describe it. He can devastate you with just an acoustic guitar (his set closer is a song that seems to be written from the POV of a couple about to be disintegrated by a terrorist’s bomb, called ‘Eyes Off Me’ that is jaw dropping. It’s like, Glastonbury huge. And he’s the nicest, most cheerful person you are likely to come across. Very unassuming, dressed in jeans and trainers and something stripe-y, with glasses and blonde hair going in various directions. He opens his mouth and you can’t believe what his voice can do. I can’t recommend enough his album ‘Pyramides’. I never once saw Toph in a bad mood.
Galli, also a Londoner, was in a band with Toph BITD, and he recruited her for this and other upcoming adventures. She’s usually seen smoking a local brand of ciggies, and singing along with all the TOT songs—and she sings marvelously with Toph. She has lots of hair, black streaked with blonde piled up in a kind of ‘Winehouse’ but with out the ratty bits. And she plays keys too.
Renee, guitarist. He is an absolute perfectionist—but will also be the drunkest guy onstage—but will also yet play perfectly under the circumstances. He and Marlene take care of each other like two doves.
Marlene might even be quieter than Renee. She has a way of speaking that shows she chooses her words carefully—in English, to be sure, but also it appears to be the same in German. She rocks in such a tough way on the bass…it’s so cool. I guess she is about 5 feet tall, and always looks so serious onstage. Amazing!
Max I realized at last walks like a sheriff in a Western Film. Or he has aviators on, and at that point walks like a Highway Patrolman. “Are you aware of how fast you were going, ma’am?” He is the ultimate van pack organizer—you can’t even help him—just bring the gear close and back off. He is also the main driver, although Renee does quite a bit too. We had two vans for the tour—Klaus, the agent who put this together, Asha & co, plus myself in one; TOT in the other. On the last day, since Asha was off for more shows, and TOT and I were heading home, I spent one day in the TOT van…
LJUBLJANA, 5/7
We were staying in my favorite Vienna hotel, the
Furstenhof. It’s family owned, a little bit rickety and old fashioned, and extremely comfortable. The décor is a bit 70s but the bathrooms have all been redone, it’s in fact just perfect esp. for the price. In the lobby there are photos of guests from the entertainment world—a few indie bands, the odd Austrian comedian, etc. I have been trying to get a portrait on the wall for years now, but I usually have to leave early in the morning—not this time! I sat for my portrait after breakfast and in 4 shots it was done.
Now, a week before the Ljubljana show, the promoter called our agent and wanted to cancel. He begged us to do anything we could to help the show. I asked Chris Eckman, ex-Seattleite now living there, when I ran into him in The Hague, and said—no surprise, Ljubljana is always a disaster. The local media doesn’t support alternative music at all really. The Orto Bar is pretty much the only game in town, so we were at the right venue, but it couldn’t have been at a worse time. On this very night, there was a massive, free music festival aimed at the student crowd. Why our promoters didn’t just move us onto that bill…so, we had 13 people—11 paying, and I had put Chris’ wife on the list plus one. However, it was a nice way for all the bands to bond—we all watched each other’s sets in their entirety. I played mine basically from the bar, walking across the empty show room to approach the shy attendees who were sort of hugging the wall there. I still managed to sell 6 CDs, so it is true that those in attendance loved it…
Afterwards we stashed the gear in the dressing room, and Klaus was too drunk (i.e., he had two beers) to legally drive in Slovenia so we took a caravan of taxis—who I swear were driving 75 mph on city streets—it was like ‘Bullitt’ on the way home. We were in a hostel, just given a pin code to get in and we wound our way up and down stairs til we found our rooms—one for each vanload of people. I bunked over Asha and Therese’s heads, and Daniel woke up every hour or so, having been punched from below by Klaus, in an effort to arrest Daniel’s supposedly out of control snoring. I never noticed it—I was asleep immediately.
GRAZ, 5/8
We weren’t in a particular hurry this morning. Klaus had risen early and actually walked back to the club to retrieve our van, and then we drove back to the club area with Max, who was to drive back and pick up TOT in their van. We parked and went in search of breakfast, which we found in a busy little café downtown. I introduced the Swedes to the mighty burek, my Balkan breakfast item of choice (they are excellent for lunch as well—recall the Zagreb bus ride last month). Oddly, when the Disciplines played in Drammen last week, there was a burek stand in the venue. Well, you can’t keep something that good a secret for too long. My macchiato (which I ordered in the Slavic fashion, saying ‘macchiat’—I had even ordered my burek with meat in Slovenian) was so excellent I ended up having another. Eventually, TOT located us, and we decamped to a sunnier terrace. Asha and co and I walked across the Dragon Bridge (the title of Steve Wynn’s excellent new album, recorded in Ljubljana with Chris Eckman at the helm) and explored the market. Daniel wanted to get a typical local product for his g.f.; I suggested, ‘why not a cabbage?’
Eventually we drove on, thru the beautiful countryside that Austria and Slovenia share at their common border, and in the afternoon we reached Graz. Checked in once more to the dreary Etap hotel basically across the street (they did, however, provide me with an excellent iron and ironing board) and eventually we set up camp at the PPC—you might recall that last year I played the small room (our dressing room for this show) upstairs, to a full house, but was cut off by the thumping (and empty) disco downstairs—then taking the crowd into the gents for more songs, finally ending up in the driveway basically busking—I even sold some CDs to passersby. IMHO, the PPC is a weird place—run by a very un-rock-n-roll family, with unsmiling security guys and basically 0% sensitivity to the artists. And their patrons are known to be the worst kind of audience for me. This is the kind of place that will put on a thumping 120db disco to an empty room while I’m playing to a packed room (and the rooms aren’t isolated from each other) and then kick me out unceremoniously when I want to play to the interested people; it’s the place where 300 people are talking thru mine and Asha’s sets. I did my best, really I did, and I did have some fans there, and I gathered the people around me on the floor comme d’habitude, but I can’t say this was a * fun * one, it was a bit more of a struggle than pure joy. In that sense playing to 13 people was more rewarding, as they were all into it, and they were moved. I did get some great compliments tho. And to be fair, this was TOT’s night to shine…they were immense this night and the people were clearly devoted to them. It was great to be a part of what I think was a very important night for them—it just wasn’t as fun to *play* as some other nights.
I did have the best off-the-cuff line of the night, at soundcheck—when the sound guy saw me putting yet another keyboard in front of TOT’s input-heavy backline, he said, barely concealing his dismay ‘new keyboard, eh?’ I replied, instantly: ‘well, it’s slightly used, but just by a little old lady who used it just to get from A to C each day’.
BASEL, 5/9
The next bonding experience—getting up and hitting the road at 7. It seemed like the entire hotel was surging at the metal grating, waiting for it to lift at 6.30 and permit entry into the breakfast area. I mean, who gets up at 6.30 by choice? It seemed like people were excited to be up and having breakfast at this most inconvenient hour. We simply had no choice—we had a 9-hour drive ahead of us.
Even at the breakfast table I was telling stories and making merry, trying to distract everyone from the pain of the early morning hour. We piled in the vans and headed off, driving across most of Austria, up into Germany for a while, into and across most of Switzerland. We entertained each other as best we could.
My only previous experience visiting Basel was for R.E.M.’s 2005 show at St. Jakobshalle, a small indoor arena that I played deep in the haze of the nasty flu that everyone in the band and crew passed around during the very long winter tour that covered virtually all of January, February and March, and in fact ended in mid-April.
In other words, I have almost no memories of Basel at all. Well, in spring, it’s just a miraculous place. We were playing the Kaserne, which is part of an old military training ground, meaning, a square of extremely solid buildings enclosing a field of grass and a huge paved area—it’s now a park, with people laying on the grass or playing basketball, and the entire region is strung with cheerful lanterns and ringed by outdoor bars and cafes. It looks suspiciously like paradise. The Kaserne has three showrooms, one could easily hold 2000 people; we were playing on a small stage in the bar. The night was a bit too lovely to get too many people inside, I guess we had 30 or so people there. However, it was an incredible show, I was simply deeply into it and felt free to give all I had. I even got a kind of encore—delivering a version of ‘Reveal Love’ that was calling on places spooky by even my standards. I hadn’t planned on selling CDs but I ended up selling three of them, including one for CHF20, i.e. more than I was charging, to the #2 of IKEA—his daughters happen to be Asha’s friends. I, too, was guilty of wanting to be out on the terrace, so I skipped TOT’s set this night and hopped the different little wine bars around the square, eventually joining a table with one of the CD buyers of the evening, and his friends (none of his friends had gone inside with him!). We had some (more) wine, and had a great time talking. I then saw we were loading out, so I helped, and afterwards all the bands transported all the remaining alcohol from the backstage, took over a couple of picnic tables that we joined together, and proceeded to have a bonding session! At one point some Palestinian kid jumped right in from playing basketball, grabbed one of the wine bottles and took a lengthy swig, and ran off saying thanks, back to shooting hoops…we all had a big love fest, although I wisely avoided the vodka bottle, sticking with white wine—Toph and Renee heeded no such restraint. At one point Toph was leaning on the picnic table and said ‘this table is completely staggering drunk—I am trying to hold it still!”
INNSBRUCK, 5/10
The next morning I was just a bit wobbly, stumbling down to breakfast. The hotel, the
Balade, was so wonderful—my room, my bed, the artwork in my room, the espresso at breakfast, my incredibly powerful shower…oh my, best hotel of the tour, if I just sidestep my loyalty to the Furstenhof for a moment. Check out was 11, and I had been on the phone with Claus and Dominique (another cool feature is the direct line number for your room). I jumped in the shower at 10.50 and texted Klaus that I was going to be 5-10 minutes late.
Like it mattered. When I came down at 11.15, Klaus was the ONLY one in sight. Asha and Therese were next, but Renee had to be coaxed out of the room very gently indeed. We were all sitting around the terrace of the hotel restaurant, and Toph was playing me a song on his Ipod, when we were gob smacked by a man who walked up from the park across the street, followed by a duckling. He led the creature to the fountain by the hotel, scooped it up, and allowed it to swim around. It was 12 days old, with fuzz pointing out in different angles of cute-reinforcing perfection from its head. After a short bath, he scooped it up again, and walked off, the bird following at his heels. When he had walked just a meter or two from the fountain, the bird squeaked with concern. We couldn’t believe our eyes; we were being absolutely irradiated with cuteness.
There being no hurry to leave, we walked around the Kaserne fortress after putting our bags in the vans, and walked down to the Rhine. There was a little stand there selling a limited amount of food and drink, and I had 3+ CDs worth of Francs to get rid of, but I couldn’t even make a dent in them—even after a sandwich, salad, glass of wine, and macchiato. We sat at the riverside, watching families of ducks, an anxious dog who was afraid to jump in and retrieve a ball, etc. Eventually we had to leave and start making our way to Innsbruck. On the way back to the van, I was walking with Renee and Marlene, and we saw an enormous metallic green beetle, searching for a place to roost in a bush…it was easily as big as a USB key.
We took the scenic route to Innsbruck—avoiding a 12km/€12 tunnel and driving up into the mountains past the tree line, where everything was still covered in snow. The road winds up thru a few hardy villages and now closed ski resorts. There were people riding bicycles on this route. I mean, really now…
At last we pulled up the Bierstindl, a little theatre with a biergarten tucked up against a wooded hillside. A truly idyllic little spot. Wir haben Weisswurst gegesse und wir haben weisswien getranke. The showroom is a small theatre, indeed they had it nearly fully seated when we arrived, and left it partially seated for the show.
Tonight truly was Asha’s night, I thought she never sounded better than at this show, her voice was just on, emotional and deep. A hard act to follow, really, but I did my best—people dug it, but I think they were ready to rock when I came on.
Over the course of the dates, starting with Ljubljana, I had Therese join me to play harmonica on ‘110 or 220V’—I had forgotten to bring mine along. I played it in G, and she was able to play along by inhaling on her C harp. She added some vocals over the days, and this was sounding great by Innsbruck. We also worked up a duet for ‘Communication’ by fellow Swedes the Cardigans (I introduced the song, saying it was by a great group from Sweden…Entombed). We did an alternating line thing, very Peaches and Herb. Great! Before my set was done, my last CDs had sold, so I guess that was a sign of approval…
TOT was also excellent this night, I preferred their show on smaller PA’s, just a little quieter level made the drums sound more natural and you could hear all the vocals. I’ve said it before, but Toph is just a phenomenal singer. I don’t know how he does it. He can just swoop up to the damn rafters with his falsetto…it’s truly unique, and absolutely affective.
Now, this weekend being a big holiday weekend in all of Catholic Europe, and Innsbruck being a destination for many of said travelers, all the hotels in town were booked. So, we were assigned to two different B&B’s outside of town. As TOT was driving me to Vienna, and Asha was going back to Switzerland for the next show, I was to stay with TOT at their accom’s. It was quite emotional to have the abrupt load-out/farewell to the three musicians, they were just lovely people and we had come to enjoy each other’s company pretty much instantly.
I found room in TOT’s van, and Toph, being the guy that he is, instantly had delicious caramel-filled chocolate that he shared with everyone. It’s hard to imagine someone with a more uplifting outlook on the day. We wound our way up into the hills outside of town, and eventually found our little gasthaus; Klaus had already checked us in and delivered keys to the venue. I went to my room, after we spent 10 minutes admiring the stars visible in the mountain air (equally beautiful: when I went out to the van during the start of Asha’s set to get my toothbrush, and from the hillside vantage point of the Bierstindl’s parking lot, I looked across the valley of Innsbruck, against a backdrop of incredible deep velvet blue—the sky not yet fully night, but just showing the liquid blue evidence of what was once light).
In the morning, I was uncontested when I headed to the common shower room that served all the guests. I was alone with strangers in the breakfast room having my dark bread and liver pate. Eventually we started to assemble and we drove down the hillside to meet up with the freeway, and headed first to Salzburg airport to drop Toph and Galli for their flight to London. Toph being just so damn cheerful, even his goodbyes are happy. Amazing person.
The rest of us drove on to Vienna—the TOT band had to get their rental van back by a certain time, which made it impossible for them to take me to the airport—but they dropped me at the Westbahnhof, and even before my bags were out of the van, the airport bus pulled up. It was leaving in 20 minutes, so I had time to say good bye to Max/Renee/Marlene, buy a newspaper and some water, and was still first in line to pay my €6 and get a seat right in front. I arrived to VIE with time to spare—and thus have been at Caffe Ritazza for an hour, just 30 meters from my gate, and the flight won’t leave for almost another hour.
It’s Mother’s Day—I already called Dom (even tho the French assign mother’s day to another weekend). I’ll call my mom when I get home; I guess they are just waking up in Bellingham now.
Another epic tour—these 5 days have been full of images and experiences as rich as the 20 date Posies tour, in a way. All my musical experiences since I left home April 7-the Posies tour, the Veliki Prezir sessions, The Disciplines shows, the solo tour—34 days, 9 countries, 27 cities, 27 concerts— contain some of the best I’ve had (I would highlight the Posies Stockholm/Amsterdam/ Eindhoven/Den Haag shows, and my Vienna show as the absolute top, perhaps?), and I’ve had great company, and hey, I came home with a little money, too. Now to see the people that need me most, and that I need most, in 3 hours and change.
Love
KS
VIE ‘B’ Gates
