schattenraum

day 2: saturday, sept 15.

location: leeds
shirt: rütli
mood: excited

Today was probably our only lazy day of this tour. We slept well into the day and had an extra slow breakfast. Paul took us to see some cool church ruin and we picked up some beer at the supermarket. This little walk maybe was the best idea as some fresh air and sunshine was excactly what we needed to recharge our batteries.

Back at Paul’s, we packed our stuff and went to the first venue, a pub called „The Pack Horse“. Soundcheck was quite uneventful apart from the microphone giving electric shocks to Theresa holding her guitar (after replacing all the cables and swapping microphones we settled on using another guitar amp).

We had our lunch at some curry/pizza/döner takeaway next door. Although being desparately hungry, neither of us managed to finish as the pizzas turned out to be bigger than expected.

Fast forward 30 minutes: The gig starts with „Quip“, a one-guy-guitar-and-laptop outfit, building up sonic landscapes while projecting images of paragliding over mountains, something that worked quite well together.

The second act was „We’re not the cool kids“, a one-girl-microphone-and-laptop outfit, singing and screaming her songs into her chaotic filter setups, building  them up to droning feedback and harsh clipping noises. We’ll be seeing her again in London on Tuesday, although she will not perform again.

Next: The golden diskó ship embarks on her first sonic voyage into the hearts and heads of the English public. Not much to say about that really, as Theresa played wonderfully (as expected) and the crowd liked it (as expected). No sound problems as far as I could tell. A very good start to the tour.

Finally, „The Pattern Theory“ was on stage, four guys (drums, bass, two guitars, no voice) building up very dense atmospheric sounds, very art rock style. The drummer was exceptionally great, keeping very odd measures without problems and even playing the xylophone at the same time. I bought their ep which was on sale for £3. It was a great concert night.

Leaving the pub, we ended up on a private costume party we had been invited to by somebody from the audience. It was somebody’s 26th birthday party and it was completely mad with people dancing in one room filled with smoke from a disco fog machine and weird stroboscopes. Everybody was very drunk there. We agreed that everything looked not like a real party, but like a party set up for a movie „party scene“. We ate chocolate cake and drank the Carlsberg we had brought along. Finally all of us walked home to Paul’s place and went to bed.

Things learned:

• I don’t really think there is something similar to a British „pub“ in Germany, where normal people of all ages sit downstairs while rock concerts are played upstairs.
• Also, I never heard Underworld’s „Born Slippy“ played at full volume in a German Kneipe. Lager, Lager, Lager, Lager.
• Ah, Lager. In England, you basically have a choice between rather dark traditional beers and quite watery Lager imported from all over the world. „Bier ist auch Gegend„, as Katz&Goldt say, so I naturally opt for those ales and bitters.

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 16th, 2007 at 14:53 and is filed under Ich, Musik, Pop vs. Kultur. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.