DUTCH TOUR DIARY PART 5: Hamburg- The German Leg of the Tour

For those of you just tuning in, this is the penultimate chapter of the Moutpiece 5 day tour of Holland and 1 day tour of Germany. These diaries date from a time when life was simpler for Moutpiece. Due to the way in which blogs work, the entries are in reverse chronological order. We pick up the story the morning after, what this writer stated was the highlight of his musical career...and an absolutely banging night of revelry.

All of the euphoria of the night before evaporated in the morning. I was hung over. Somehow I’d managed to avoid hangovers thus far. I’d been drinking like hell for over a week and I still felt fine every morning. My muscles didn’t even hurt. This morning though, I was hung over. I wanted a day to take it all in, get my head back together and relax, but we had the longest drive of the tour ahead of us and there was no time for it. It was straight to the venue to pick up the gear. The lads were all sitting out on the front steps of the Vera havin' a few cans. I thought it was a bit rude, it’s illegal to drink on the street in Holland and the owner, who’d been so nice to us, was around. I was feeling decidedly un-rock and roll, wishing I could just relax and enjoy the ride.

The drive to Hamburg was fairly uneventful. I was in the horrors and sat up front for much of the time. Away from the lads and their ranting. My head was pounding and everyone was getting demented. We stopped for petrol, a snack, a few crates of beer, and some directions once we got to Hamburg. A man in a gorgeous vintage Mercedes pulled in and began to fill his car. I noticed right away that there was an immaculately dressed woman with a very regal hat on, sitting in the back seat. What I didn’t notice straight away was that she wasn’t a real woman. This guy was chauffeuring around what I would guess was a life size acrylic replication of a former love or even more likely a former unwitting object of his desire. We all got a great kick out of that and no one made any effort to hide our laughter from your man and his pretend bird. Groups of men cooped up in vans for days on end, living on warm lager and never being told to stop doing anything, no matter how inappropriate or socially frowned upon don’t seem to worry as much about the feelings of the less sane members of the populace who have the unforntunance to sometimes frequent the same petrol stations.

Adam was staggering around the forecourt and as soon as our eyes met he jumped into the same routine he’d make every time our eyes met the whole tour. He leaned back and hooted ‘hey!!!’ and made a toasting motion with his bottle of beer. Everyone in the place watched him stumble inside fall over laughing, buy a bar of chocolate and come back out. They missed the fact that he had stroked 30 Euro worth of hard-core porn. Two magazines, including a “Reader’s Wives”, a “Looking for Love”, and a DVD. These were the subject of all conversations, guffaws and ewww’s for the rest of the day’s journey. Back on the road and looking for the football stadium as Tommy was adamant that he could catch a St. Pauli game before the gig. They are a real working class team. A bit like our local team in Phibsboro except that 25 thousand people come to see all of their home games. We shoved him out of the moving van once we saw the crowds and kept looking for the venue.

The venue was in the middle of no-where. I don’t mean middle of nowhere like out in the countryside, I mean middle of nowhere as in being in the middle of miles of faceless and unnamed industrial estates. There were no signs, no road names and of the one or two people we saw in the area, no one seemed to know where it was. Somehow, by sheer dumb luck, we found it. It was the most surreal place I have ever seen. It was like Mad Max. A lot like Mad Max. It was what looked like a junkyard. Debris everywhere. The road was dirt and full of potholes. But there were little tin cabins poking out here and there. Hidden at the back of little lanes, each with a little smoke stack jutting out of the roof. There was a massive garage in the middle and a wooden shack with a couple couches sitting outside of it and Slayer pumping out of it at full volume. As we pulled up, Gary saw a little old man sitting out in front of his cabin with a bald head, a long beard and a bottle of red wine. Gary jumped out of the moving van, hurtled over the pack of dogs that had been following the van and rambled up to the old man. Neither one of them spoke each other’s language, but I am sure that they understood each other instantly.

The place was stunning. The most punk rock lifestyle I had ever seen. I just couldn’t get over it. The wooden hut was the venue. It had a stage one end and a bar at the other. The kitchen was right in the middle and was amazingly clean considering where we were. They had plenty of warm beer and dinner was cooking away. We hung out in the evening sun drinking and listening to music. Dinner was lovely and they even had some chicken sausages they were cooking on a giant grill that I am fairly sure had begun its life on the front end of an articulated lorry.

Gary and I were sitting on the couch contemplating whether the window that was propped out above our heads could come loose and smash straight into our faces when I noticed Tommy arrived back at the site. He had had a simply wonderful afternoon at the football. “Nobody told me they sold beer at the football!” he kept repeating in a manner in which all of the words seemed to miraculously run together. Again I was trying to just relax and enjoy the rock and roll lifestyle, but the night before and the week before and the summer before had just taken too much out of me. I was beginning to realise that this existence that I had been craving my whole life, was in my grasp, but maybe I wasn’t up to in mentally or physically. I like to go mad, but I need my down time. I can’t get as demented as I want. This romantic vision I have always been so drawn to; Bukowski, Hunter Thompson, all that, I am simply not up to it. I’m up to a lot. I wasn’t beating myself up. In truth, I am more rock and roll than I ever thought I’d be. Armed with that feeling, I soldiered on, I could do it. I was excited about the gig. One last hurrah and then it was home to a bit of sanity.

The gig was actually deadly. Everybody was dancing. The old man Gary had been talking to outside of his hut was cutting a rug the likes of which I’d never seen. Tommy had his shapes to tightness ratio set a bit far into shapes, but he was pulling it off with style. Pierre was laughing his ass off. We tried to finish the set, but the crowd was having none of it. Another encore, this one not as momentous, but an encore none the less. We’d done it, we’d pulled it off, the tour was over, all we had to do was get home, but first we had to drink.

Once again The Impregnators were amazing. Uli hadn’t been able to come to the gig, so they only had one guitar, but they sounded great. Adam played a blistering set, faltering only when he fell off his drum stool between songs. He looked a bit winded, but played a blinder.

Unfortunately, within an hour, my ability to drink warm lager disappeared. It was weird. I just couldn’t get it into me. My throat would close up as I tried to swallow and my stomach was having none of it. . The headline band weren’t great either. They played for hours and while they were good at what they did. What they did wasn’t great. I wasn’t having a terrible time; the night was just a lot of work for me. I just wanted a bit of a time out. If I could have been teleported to my own couch and had twenty minutes of lying there with my feet up and my eyes closed while entertaining the wife with the details of my adventures before being teleported back to the punkyard that time forgot, I would have been a new man and ready to make the night my own. I stuck it out for a while, but there was no one really to talk to. I’d seen plenty of the Impregnators and was growing a bit weary of talking a bit more slowly and clearly so people could understand me.

I planned on sleeping in the van, but didn’t want to wake anyone up so I decided I could fit into the driver’s seat and sleep there. The stereo in the venue was at full volume all night and we were right next to the big window Gary and I had been sitting at earlier. Unfortunately, my makeshift bed was 5 and a half feet long, while I’m just under 6 and half feet long. To compound the problem, the amount of space between the gear stick and the back of the seat was less then the width of my hips if I lay on my back or the arse/stomach combination if I tried laying on my side. I’d say I got about an hour of the most uncomfortable sleep I have ever had. Tossing and turning as one part of my body got too sore and I had to change positions. It was all a bit miserable, but I wasn’t pissed off, I just wanted to be home and I could see that in my sights.

The morning came eventually. Lovely sunny day, no sleep, no driver, no Gary. To top it all off, we were miles and miles and even countries away from Utrecht. Mikey, our driver had gone missing during the night. It took hours to find him, he could have been in any cabin in the camp and there was no easy way of searching them. I just sat on a couch and relaxed in the sun. Eventually Mikey showed up and someone gave us directions to the party that Gary had gone to at 6 in the morning.

Gaz had gone to the other wagon-plaz. The other Thunderdome as it were to keep with the Mad Max theme. This one was much nicer and right in the middle of town. It had a big gazebo in the middle of the camp and lovely gardens and plants around a few of the wagons. It looked a bit more settled and looked after. I wish we had played this one so we could have seen a bit of Hamburg. Gaz was sitting out in the sun, drinking and screaming about everything. He knew everybody's name and was having a brilliant time. They were sitting around a table in the garden between two lovely wagons. I choked down a beer and headed through the woods on the other side of which I was told housed one of the world’s best falafel joints. I had to eat something. Hamburg is known for this particular dish and I was lucky to have sampled it considering that food was never a priority for anyone on the tour besides me. It was thankfully a half an hour without the madness that had been surrounding me 24/7 for the past week and a half.

We jumped in the van and headed to Bremen to drop off Pierre, he was helping his girlfriend move into a new gaff or something. He was kind of the adult in the group. Not that he was anymore together than the rest of us except that he was. He's been doing this year in, year out for yonks. I only saw him mad out of it at the gig in the Vera and the rest of the time he kind of kept everything together. So it was just the lads in the van. I climbed up onto the top of the amps in the back and tried to get a bit of sleep. Although I didn't enjoy the drive at the time, I look back on it very fondly. Everybody was very giddy and laughter filled the van all the way. The whole van sang along to every song on the stereo, replacing all of the words with "tankie" after Tank our useless roadie. I just laid back on the mattress and let it all the madness wash over me….well except for the few sudden stops we had to make, then I just laid back on the floor and let the amps and drum kit wash over me.

M U D H O N E Y ! ! ! !

Recently we had the honour of supporting Mudhoney in Dublin's own Button Factory.

At the dawn of the 90’s when I hung up my skateboard and grabbed a couple of drum sticks, the Pacific Northwest was a hotbed of high energy, guitar driven punk rock. NoMeansNo, DOA, Poison Idea, The Melvins, The Supersuckers, Nirvana, Tad, Soundgarden, and Mudhoney, but to name the bigger names. They were just the tip of the iceberg and an indication of what else was going on in the area and the era. There were a few in those days that really floored me. That inspired me and all of my fellow budding musicians to push ourselves and each other and to kick as much ass as we possibly could on any stage available.

Mudhoney were one of the first to really strike a chord with me. Their shows were blistering. Chaotic and dissonant, yet melodic and tight. They played up and down the west coast and stopped in all of the little spots, college towns, hick towns, etc. that their contemporaries ignored. I saw them countless times, in countless venues and they never ever disappointed. They were the everyman band. We could all relate to them. They dressed like us, they acted like we dreamed of acting and they wrote songs we wished we had written. Their recorded output over the years has become less and less memorable and their place on my turntable has diminished, but I have very fond memories of that period when they were kings. I was still pretty excited to meet the lads and to share a stage with a band that had at times seemed larger than life, well mine anyway.

We were on first and it was an early gig. I think we were all worried that we would be on too early. The Button Factory is a lovely venue, but it’s big and if there is no one there, it feels like there is no one there. It’s also big enough that you need a critical mass to push people towards the front, otherwise you are playing to the people in the bar, which is on the wrong side of the empty black void in front of you. The other worry was Tommy. There is a recession on and if he stops working even for a minute, he’ll be standing outside the dole office begging for his cash. He’s one of the lucky few to still be on the clock somewhere, but his days are too long and as a result, his nights I would guess, are often not long enough. Tommy ended up literally walking out of work, in the door of the Button Factory, saying hello to the rest of the band, strapping his bass on and launching in to the first song. Fair play to him.

I really enjoyed the gig. The sound was good and we were all on form. None of us was locked or wrecked or pissed off. We could hear each other and we sounded good. The drum set was in the middle of the stage which forced Gaz onto one side and the lads on to the other. It was a weird dynamic to have Gaz physically separated from the other two. I really enjoyed the gig. We even had a decent crowd. By the time we finished the third or fourth song, there was a very healthy murmur in the venue and plenty of applause between songs. By the time we finished the gig, the place was full, the place had been rocked and it was time to have a few drinks.

There is a fine line between idolatry and admiration. I don’t go for idolatry or this grotesque cult of celebrity that seems to have invaded every corner of that little box that all of the furniture in our sitting rooms is pointed at. There are people that I would like to meet. People that are celebrities to me and probably to many of my friends. But I’d like to meet them because of the effects that they have had on me as a musician. The ones that inspire me to get off and stay off my hole. Some of those people just happened to be sitting back stage when we got down there.

I don’t meet Americans very often and I don’t talk to that many yanks on the internuts or the phone. It was nice to meet Mark Arm and Steve Turner for the reasons I have outlined above, but even more it was great to finally get to talk to some Americans. Actually not just any Americans, American musicians from the Pacific Northwest. It was great to be able to mention bands and venues and parts of towns that no one I know now would know. It was great to be able to talk about how crap a place to live Portland Oregon was in the 80’s and how uncool that whole corner of America was up until the 90’s for Seattle and the turn of the century for Portland. Mark reminded me of just how hostile local rednecks were of punk/punks and how outcast it felt to be into loud, noisy and obscure music at the time. We both had short stints in college radio, which at in the 80’s and 90’s was instrumental in supporting and shaping what was to become labelled ‘alternative music’ in those halcyon days before it stopped being alternative. It was good to touch base with the Northwest and it’s always good for me to remind myself that I am not Irish. I didn’t grow up here, I know of Bartley Dunnes and The Chinaman and the Top Hat, but I was never in any of those places. I was in the Satyricon, the X-Ray Café and John Henry’s. I was in America.

Mudhoney were great. They started off a bit slow, i.e. they played tunes off their latest and not greatest album. Dan Peters, the drummer looked a little bored and the argument could be made that it’s not really Mudhoney without Matt Lukin. His replacement isn’t half the showman that Lukin was, nor half the mentaller by the look of it. But once they started belting out the hits, the gig really took off. Mark Arm still has that unmistakeable howl, Steve Turner still has that unmistakeable fuzzbox and Dan Peters is still unmistakeably handy on the auld kit. They sounded great and they put so much into the gig, especially the stuff off the first two albums. It wasn’t the white hot heat of the gigs back in the day. There were a few times back then that I thought that the place might literally explode. I couldn’t figure out where the energy was going to go because the room and us in it couldn’t handle it all. This gig was great though. They played great and they played the songs I wanted to hear. They gave it a shedload of wellie and they put on a great show.

After the gig, it was a short natter with the lads again, down to the Czech Inn for a few quick scoops and home for a snooze on the couch. It had been a long day, a long week, and with two kids, a job, about 10 moutpiece sites, the general skit of being a dude about town and all of the other things I got going on, a long year.

Not much funny in this blog entry. If you want something funny- I once saw Gaz’s nuts reflected on the glasses of a lady in the front row of a Moutpiece gig. The lady was my mother.

DUTCH TOUR DIARY PART 4 :THE VERA- GRONINGEN

So we continue with the Dutch Pre-Conzo Tour Diary. If you can say that you have played in the Vera, you can say a lot. It's a mecca of sorts. Feel free to download the whole gig from Ed's DIY Irish Hardcore Punk Archive here.


It was a few hours drive back to Groningen and we wanted to be early for the soundcheck. This was the gig we couldn’t mess up. This was the gig that would really determine whether we were invited back to Holland for another tour. Of course this didn’t stop Gary from drinking all day in the van. He drank all day everyday of the tour. He’d wake up in every morning and drink four beers before breakfast. By the time we reached Groningen, he was half past sloppy and on his way to stroppy. He was speaking like a wasp had stung his tongue and I honestly thought that at any minute I might have to reach into his mouth and dislodge it from his wind pipe. When he went to sleep upstairs, I was well relieved. We needed right on rock star Gaz for the evening and that required a little down time.
The Vera was an absolutely stunning venue. It had all the old posters on the wall from by-gone gigs. It was like the Satyricon back in Portland. EVERYBODY had played there. It was like a who’s who of the rock and punk of my youth. This was a music mecca. Upstairs there was a lovely café room with red leather couches and long wooden tables. There was also a bar that probably just served coffee- it was that civilised. Downstairs was the venue. It was quite big. It definitely would accommodate at least 1000 people. When we arrived, the stage wasn’t even built. The sound check would be late, but that didn’t really matter. We were there, we were well behaved. It was all going pretty smoothly considering that Gaz was gee-eyed, Adam was a bit bleary and fairly leary and Nobby was always on the verge of being forceably ejected from wherever he was offending everyone within ear shot from.
We were being treated like royalty. The backstage room, the first of the tour, was plush. It had a TV, towels, couches, a big table, and a fridge full of beer, mineral water, and juices. The place even had its own (flushing) toilet. We were told to hang out in there and they’d call us when dinner was ready. We all just hung out and watched Dutch music TV, which was absolutely horrific.
The dinner they served us was absolutely gorgeous. It was Indonesian food and I honestly can’t remember such a lovely meal. Food out of the way, Gaz sobered up, it was time for the sound check, which was a long process involving all of the instruments on their own and then all together and then everything again to do the monitors. That done, we retreated to the backstage room. Gaz got himself sorted while the place started filling up. It was just the two bands, so we both had to play well.
We went out for the Impregnators set. The sound was amazing. The lads looked good up there and sounded even better. We were out there giving it socks, supporting our new best friends. They sounded a bit too good. Gaz started to get really nervous. He couldn’t watch anymore so we all headed backstage to massage Gaz’s sometimes fragile ego. He’d been hyped up in the paper and on the radio as being an absolute sex god and a genius on the guitar. He had to have his rock star ego on for this gig, any doubts in his own mind would effect the show. The lads came backstage grinning from ear to ear. They’d had a great time. This was their first big gig in their home town and it obviously meant a lot to them. Once again the gauntlet had been thrown down and we had to answer the call.
The beginning of the set was hard work. The levels on stage were all over the place. There was something wrong with my monitor and they were trying to fix it while we were playing. That meant that the guitar was coming and going every few seconds, creating a rhythm completely unrelated to the songs. We pressed on and they got it sorted out. What had started as a few whistles and claps, mostly from Robbie, Conor, and Mickey, between the first few songs, was building into a roar between songs. The set was really smokin’. I had a towel and bottles of water, so for the first time on tour, I didn’t feel like I was going to puke or pass out while I was playing. The way I push from my stomach to get the sound out while I’m singing means that I’m never more than a step away from chucking my biscuits. Tommy was throwing loads of shapes, dancing around the stage and doing this running backwards thing on his tip toes. He was spot on and didn’t miss a note all night. Songs were coming fast and furious. Gaz was living up to his billing with between song attitude and shit hot mid-song guitar pyrotechnics. We finished the set to thunderous applause. People were right up to the front of the stage and were clamouring for more. They were so vehement that we had to do a quick encore. We did two more songs and that was it. We were fucked.
We got to the backstage room and you could still hear the crowd. The applause hadn’t dropped at all and now they were pounding the stage with their bottles of beer. ‘What did you do to them?’ asked one of the Impregnators. ‘You have to go back out.’ It occurred to me that this may never happen again. So I talked Gaz into going back on, Tommy was already ready. Walking back up those back stairs onto the stage was something I’ve been waiting for my whole life. I’ve played a lot of gigs in my life and gotten a bit of recognition, but it was never like this. The crowd erupted when we came back out. We only had two more songs in our songbook. We’d played a longer than usual set and had already done one encore. But this was like the lap of victory. We were rock stars if even for just the last hour. The whole trip was worth it for this gig, for the second encore. You would have needed a chisel to get the smile off of my face.
The buzz backstage after the gig was great. Everybody was charged. The Impregnators were stoked that they’d pulled off a good gig at the big venue in their home town and we were ecstatic at the response we’d gotten. I wandered around the venue gathering complements as I moved, but I didn’t really know anybody. There was no one to talk to. Robbie was a bit too drunk to pin down for a conversation. Everybody I knew was backstage. This must be how rock stars feel. I always wondered why they never come out after gigs. The local characters are usually backstage and you can end up feeling very alone when you realise that your part in the crowd’s evening is done and you will have to entertain yourself. Especially when your ears are ringing and they are speaking broken English to you while you are replaying the gig in your head over and over again. .
We were all ushered into a deadly basement bar to continue in the revelry. It was an amazing space. A few windows at sidewalk level, low ceilings, pillars with mosaic designs, candlelight and once again stunning music. We were pouring the beers into ourselves. It was the only time all tour I saw Pierre proper drunk. He gets very drunk, but is usually quite subdued. His new band was his baby and so was this tour. This gig made it all worth it for all of us and was obviously a source of pride for him. He kept announcing that now it was time to drink. We must have clinked our bottles together a couple dozen times. I really felt like I was letting loose for the first time on the tour. The whole night had a magical quality. The bar was great. Gone was the slight intimidation I’d been feeling the whole tour. I love going into a bar and feeling like I own the place because I’m in the band. I didn’t really get that feeling in the squats. Everything was so foreign. There was so much that I didn’t know. I know concert halls, I know pubs, I know how they work and what they want. Squats I didn’t really understand before we got there. I didn’t understand how they worked, what they were trying to achieve, how it all functioned. I felt like this was my bar, my night. I don’t know why we had to leave. There were rooms for us in the venue. But we got a taxi back to Pierre’s. I knew that there was no need for me to drink anymore so I headed straight for the mattress in the sitting room and fell asleep. The lads stayed up for another hour absolutely screaming drunk, but I was done. I was a success, a rock star.

Dutch Tour Diary Part 3: Rockin in the Rokin

Amsterdam has always been one of those elusive cities for me. When I was a teenager it seemed other-worldly. It took me years to even realise there was actually anything to see or do in Amsterdam besides the obvious. If you’d told me then that my first trip there would be for a gig, I would have never believed it. I never thought I’d actually go there in the first place. It seemed like such a long ways to go to smoke a little dope and there was a time in my life that Europe didn’t seem to hold a lot for me. It’s almost a pity to go there, or to any new town really, on tour for your first trip because you don’t actually see much of the town. I saw a bit of Alkmaar and a bit over a few days in Groningen, but as for Amsterdam and later Hamburg, I saw almost nothing outside of the venues we played in.

We arrived in Amsterdam at dusk and from what I could see from the back of the van, it’s a lovely town. A bit big and foreboding compared to Utrecht and Groningen, but a bit more grand and important as well. The squat was right in the middle of town, on a big busy thoroughfare. It was quite built up and not much of what I had imagined, but compared to the desolation of the surroundings in the Utrecht squat, it was quite happening. The bar was a long skinny room with very high ceilings that lowered halfway down, where the floor went down a few steps. The venue was in the next room and was a mid-sized room with low ceilings. Great for sound and that slightly claustrophobic feel always gives gigs a bit of atmosphere. The squat was enormous. It was probably 5 stories tall with high ceilings on every floor. A multitude of doors led to halls and rooms and who knows where.

The urinal was again a sink barely hidden off a kind of library room with a toilet with no visible means of flushing. Tommy later informed me that there was a bucket that you fill and then pour into the toilet, miraculously flushing it. A bit of work and a bit embarrassing. I tried my hand at the procedure and as I tried to the leave the cubicle things took a turn. Two women had entered the bathroom and were grappling with each other in an attempt to do the ‘squat and hover’ wee manoeuvre above the urine splattered sink which was a good three feet off the ground. When I tried to leave I was met by a door to the face and lot of screaming and abuse, in Dutch I think, from the two very gregarious participants in the aforementioned fiascapade. I momentarily shrunk back to my shy suburban American roots and stayed quiet and docile in the increasingly warm cubicle. Thankfully the women were able to cantilever each other into position and relieve their obviously aching bladders before my brain melted along with my increasingly fragile psyche.

The building had been squatted by eastern Europeans, Poles and Czechs I think. Not a Dutch person in the house. They fixed us a lovely dinner with loads of bread and two kinds of salad. They had their shit together. The poster on the wall listed us as Mouth Piss, which is understandable when you hear Pier pronounce our name. We were listed as being from IRA, which we also found quite amusing. I wanted to go exploring, but it was already getting late. The gig was going to kick off shortly.

Donners arrived as I was about to leave and any plans to check out the town quickly got scrubbed. Donners was a bit manic. He was talking a bit fast and seemed a bit excited, asking all sorts of questions as to what was going on and where was this and where was that. I couldn’t really leave him right away, he didn’t know anybody else there except Tommy and Gary and Gaz was asleep. By the time I got ready to go again, Conor, Mickie, and Fiona showed up.

It was nice to see the Irish contingent. It was nice to have a few new people to talk to and it was great to have people I didn’t have to struggle to understand. All the people we met on tour were sound, but it gets so tiring to always be straining to understand what everyone is saying. Conor was in full party mode. He was jumping right into conversations and generally spreading a bit of Irish cheer around the place. It took Donners hours to get over how cheap the beer was. 50 cent for shit, 1 Euro for Grolsh. Standard squat prices.

The Impregnators played another smoking set. They’re solid. Dirk had been at another pub drinking liquor, so tensions were a bit high, but they pulled it off in storming fashion. I think it was the tension that made them so good. They were either gonna play a great show or kick ten shades of shite out of each other. Either way, the release would be something to witness.

We played the first truly great set of the tour. Everybody was on. We were hitting songs back to back, no gaps. The sound in the room was amazing and we were really well received. The crowd was going nuts.

We’d seen the other band skulking around the place all evening. It was quite warm, but they were all wearing big hoodies and long pants. They started off well, played a few songs and then descended into a wash of feedback. While this was going on, they all stripped off their clothes revealing very nice women’s dresses. The drummer stuck a sink plunger onto the top of his head and put on a pair of nerd glasses. The singer whipped out a trombone and they started to really smoke. They were amazing. The trombone was so loud it didn’t even need to be mic’ed. Gaz and I were cheering away having a great time. We watched them for about a half hour and then headed back to the bar for more beer and conversation.

An hour later in donned on us that they were still playing. Then they did a DJ set, mixing popular tunes with screeching and feedback. Unlistenable! A half hour later, they were all back on their instruments, playing a cover’s set. Conor had fallen asleep on a table in the middle of the room and everyone else had disappeared. I begged Gary to go to sleep, it was 5 in the morning and we had the biggest gig of the tour the next day. He promised me he’d get some sleep and I went off to bed. When I left him he was talking to anyone who’d listen.

I woke up a few hours later hoping to see Gary sleeping next to me on the free mattress. Aw Shit, I thought, he’s off at some other party and isn’t going to sleep all night. I tried to get back to sleep and not worry, nothing I could really do. I’m not his ma. A while later I woke up again, this time I could hear his unmistakable snore from the other side of the room. The one that sounds like a wild boar having sex with a drunken lawnmower. Thank God, he was asleep; everything was going to be alright for Groningen.

When we woke up the next morning the house was already buzzing. It didn’t have the somewhat austere feeling we’d had in Alkmaar, like we were just a bit too much for the place. Gary hadn’t been up all night either so maybe we actually hadn’t been too much for the place. I wanted to see a bit of Amsterdam and get something to eat. The food in the squat was looking a little old and I still had an almost unreasonable fear of food poisoning.

Tommy, Gaz and I set out for a bit of a wander in the warm sun of a stunning morning. The canals in Amsterdam are quite big, the streets quite wide, and the people quite numerous. It was a lovely walk, but it lacked the romanticism of Utrecht. It was a bit too manic, a bit too much of a big city. It was easy to get lost, but not in the relaxing kind of devil may care way we’d been experiencing. It was all a bit daunting especially with our shattered brains. We ended up getting kebabs for breakfast simply because we couldn’t find anything else and ate them along the canal on a busy road.

Dutch Tour Diary Part 2: Alkmaar

I've been meaning to put the next installment of the Dutch Tour Diary up here, but couldn't decide if it was wacky or entertaining enough. It was a great couple of days, but no one got chased around with an axe or anything. But today I was surfing around a few images and came across these. Unfortunately, the squat we played, has had to make way for one of the most God awful looking buildings I have ever seen. A sad day for me today and I'm sure a number of very sad days for all involved. It truly was a great place, full of great people and a real kick in the bollix for the straights.



The drive to Alkmaar was fairly uneventful. We got lost a few times. The Dutch have to be the worst people on earth for giving directions. We asked a few times in Utrecht with JW and the directions we received were less than useless. Road signs were no better and the map seemed to be for a country that looked a lot like Holland, but had a completely different set of roads. The weather was still warm and it was a cracking day by the time we pulled into town. Alkmaar is a lovely little safe, middle-class town. The canals there seemed more like a series of rivers with grassy banks on both sides. The squat was an enormous building clad in red brick with it window sills painted red, blue and yellow. There was a courtyard with a few tables, a couple of mad looking totem poles and loads of trees. It was a great gaff, set on a road with loads of trees and a real laidback feel to the whole area. We had to load the gear in through a basement window which was a bit tricky, but the bar was amazing. It looked like a proper New York rock and roll bar and the venue was even more rockin. A long thin room with weird back lighting and a low stage with a small drum riser. When I thought of playing in squats before, I’d assumed that we’d be playing in someone’s burntout kitchen or sitting room. This place was cooler than most of the bars we’ve played in in Dublin and cooler than just about every place I’d ever played in The States.
Everything loaded in, we grabbed seats in the garden. The people from the squat brought us out a crate of beer and invited us to dig in. We sat out there until the sun went down, chatting and drinking. This felt like a real holiday. Lounging around, no hurry to do anything.
We were playing the late gig of the evening. There was a gig across town starting at 9 and after they finished, everyone was heading over to us for our gig. We decided to go across and check out the venue and see who was making us food. The walk was a long one. The lads considered a walk of 45 minutes a short one. I learned very quickly that the Dutch had a different scale upon to which judge distances by. As an American, I would consider most of the walks we did to be reasonably long drives and in my experience more than one bus.
The Parkoff was an even cooler venue than the one we were playing. A proper venue in the middle of a big park and right on the water. There were advertisements all over the doors and behind the bar for our gig and no sign of who was playing the early gig. The only people in the place were in the said nameless bands. No one was cooking us dinner there anyways.
We were hardly gonna turn around and walk the 45 minutes back straight away so we sat on the canal and had a few beers. You feel so tough when there are 10 of you and you’re drinking beer in the bushes, especially when all of you are punks. Well almost all. I have been in punk bands for years and years and I don’t think anyone would ever refer to me as a punk. The town seemed so nice. Boats idled by, occasionally receiving verbal abuse from Nobby. There was one kid who must have passed us 4 times at full speed. It was Saturday night and he was just doing laps for something to do.
Then it was back to the bar in The Raad, where we were playing. Dirk sorted out a bit of food. It was just bag after bag of fried everything, I couldn’t even tell what half of it had started out as, and loads of chips. It did the job. Everybody was at the other gig and it finally dawned on us that we had been given a bar. There were crates and crates of beer behind the counter, which we were allowed to drink for free. We even had a sound system! We all had to laugh. Where else in the world would someone give a bar to a gang like us. No one showed back up until about half one, by which time we were all pretty merry. The place filled up nicely and it was funny to see our new sitting room full of people we didn’t know.
The Impregnators were once again rocking. They played an amazing set. The crowd seemed to enjoy it and I know we did. By the time we went on it was 3 in the morning. Tommy was throwing shapes the likes of which had never been seen before, anywhere, by anybody. He fell back against the wall and played a song and a half leaning the very top of his head against the wall as he stared straight at the ceiling. I’d say he was stuck. It didn’t help our tightness, but all the shapes that we threw went a long ways to endear us to the crowd. We started to lose a few songs, but brought them together and I honestly don’t think the crowd was any wiser to any of our mistakes. Judging by their reaction, we hadn’t hit a bum note all night. They danced, they cheered, they fell over.
According to everybody at the gig, we had played a stormer. One guy told me he’d been playing music for 15 years and he was embarrassed after seeing us. Flabbergasted was the word he used I think. A pretty big one considering he spoke 5 different languages....and was completley locked. He talked my ear off for ages and when I tried to sneak away from his conversation, he became terribly offended. The crowd was a bit weird. I got the feeling it could all go wrong at any moment. That like your man, if anyone put a foot wrong, horrible offence would be taken. I don’t know what made me fell like that, one guy was going around insisting he be allowed to feel everybody’s nipples and then giving a critique, some very positive, others dithering.
The night went on for ages. Two metallers took over the decks right after we finished playing. 3 hours later they were still standing at the mixing desk waving their hands in the air complete with the slayer sign/devil horns. I find metallers very entertaining it must be said. They remind me of home and my background as a suburban teenager. I don’t know when it was that I went to sleep, it was getting bright anyways, the metallers were still rockin’. I know that everyone came up to the sleeping room at some point. I managed to sleep through it for the most part.
Gaz woke me up early. He was looking a bit twisted. Still wearing the suit he’d flown over in a few days before. He managed to talk Adam into giving him his prized bottle of Buckfast, a rare delicacy on these shores, and unbelievably enough, Gaz managed to get a few laughs out of him even as the Dutch lads repeatedly warned us that Adam got horrendously violent if woken up. Everybody was in pretty good form drifting in and out of sleep and generally being entertained by Gary.
It took ages to load the van up because everybody was in one sort of jocker or another. Tank is a lovely guy. The visible deterrent as we dubbed him. He’s nearly 7 feet tall, seems to only own leather trousers, has a spiky punky mullet and wears sunglasses unless he's in a windowless room with a burnt out bulb. But he’s not much of a roadie. He doesn’t pack a particularly good van and usually picks drinking over loading out. So I did most of the loading, as well as organising myself a bit of food. The drive back to Groningen was the same as all of the other drives of the trip. No hills, no scenery, just pastures and wind farms. Turbines everywhere. It all looks vaguely futuristic in a retro kind of way. The way we thought the rural future would look like when we were kids.
Loading the gear out back at Dirk’s place, I saw one of the funniest things I’ve seen in a long time. Tommy was a bit worse for the wear and feeling the effects of the first few days of our holiday. He was taking Dirk’s vintage bass head into the lock-up when he got a bit tripped up. Consciously sacrificing his body for the sake of the amp, he floated around the room, seemingly in slow motion like a giant airplane slowly crash landing. Even without the use of his legs, he managed to flip his body over and take the entirety of the blows with his head and body. I knew it must have been painful, but I couldn’t help but laugh to myself for the rest of the trip everytime I thought of it. With the gear stashed, we headed to the pub.

GGI THIS WEEKEND!!!!!

Looking for something to post about the GGI, found this on the Internuts in Dutch and stuck it into Google Translator with hilarious results.

EasyJet had a hard time the last weekend of May 25 when some punk rockers from the city with a weekend return ticket from Dublin to pocket a stopover in London made the skies unsafe with an endless thirst for Irish whiskey and Guinness.
Fleas And lice, Makiladoras and PCP, three prominent hardcore bands from the city were invited to play at the GGI (Groningen, Glasgow, Ireland) Festival in Wexford, Ireland. A two day punk festival organized by the former guitarist of Brawl, one of the best Irish punk bands of the 90s. The band does not exist anymore, however, the punk spirit still. It was a fantastic weekend where cheap cider and dark beer flowed generously and even the sun shone abundantly in predominantly wet Ireland. Around 500 visitors had their tents set up and the atmosphere was great.
Besides a reunion with old friends was also a wonderful opportunity to see which bands Scotland, Ireland and of course Groningen now has. Fat searing engine hardcore punk and trendy to drunken songs and skapunk. All styles were well represented in the self-fashioned tent with dry straw on the floor after two days celebration looked like a cowshed which was rushed through a stampei.
Highlights included a memorable performance of lice Fleas And with singer Robbie unstable, dangerous bumps on bare feet with a musical duel waged singer Esther, the elements, the Irish Blood Or Whiskey-shot answer to the Pogues, the tent where the bellowing crowd almost out of joint snapped, the Glasgow-based Los Destructos (Solid rock'n roll with a nod to Motorhead) and the Dublin based Malt Piece, a band under the inspiring leadership of singer / guitarist Safe Gary, on the second day the festival was chased by a horde of horny guys just like peeking under his dress. He is also a sexbom on boxes.

Next year, hopefully the sequel to the now legendary festival in Groningen, tonight you get a preview of Malt Piece babe magnet and Gary Safe. He lived 5 years in New York where he played guitar to include Joneskrusher, MDC and Electric Frankenstein, before returning to Dublin in 2002 and it started up with Malt Piece Brawl bassist Tommy Trousers. Besides energetic as its coat is a great punk outfit Malt Piece, where the rugged guitar riffs fly your ears like hail from the barrel of a gun. The vocals and scorching snerend chalk on a blackboard and bangs the drums as if coming from Portland drummer "The Yank" on the heels by a horde of madmen. The songs are tightly packed tightly constricted as a belt and dirty as a vat of excrement. The pace is similar to a Dead Kennedys album, the music contributed to The Misfits and The Dickies with a thick finger moving in the westcoast punkpap like The Dwarves, Zeke and Poison Idea.

So, is there anyone out there wants a bit of That Irish in theme?


The GGI is on this weekend. We are playing on the Sunday afternoon at about 14.00. Gonna be deadly craic all round. Check the link below for more info and directions to the venue. See yas there if you're up for the rock.

http://www.myspace.com/ggifestival2010

DUTCH TOUR DIARY: PART 1 OF MANY

Nobby and the Impregnators

I started to get a bit excited when I met up with Tommy and Gaz at the bus stop. I’d been busy all morning try to sort out money (I’d just gotten married a week earlier), feeding myself (its apparently not punk rock to eat), and trying to pick which t-shirts to bring (I was heading to places much more punk than me). We got the bus out to the airport and checked in. I must have been a bit nervous because I actually buzzed in the metal detector, ending a streak that went back years. Gaz had a few tins in the terminal and scoffed a few of his home-made sandwiches. We’d had to talk them into letting us take Gary's guitar as carry on, so I didn’t feel like pissing everyone off by drinking in the terminal. And as for the sandwiches, there was no way I was going to start the trip with raw onions and the stink of eggs. The smell going in was bad enough. Gary luckily schmoozed his way onto the plane with his guitar. There was no way he could check it through, the case was in bits. It was held together with shoelaces. Even the shoelaces were tied together with shoelaces.

Rotterdam is a tiny airport, I think it only has two gates and one luggage carousel, so when our luggage didn’t show up, we knew it wasn’t going to. We had no idea what to do. We had no idea where we were staying, the women didn’t speak as good English as I had assumed every Dutch person did, and they were using a computer older than me. The monitor wasn’t even in colour for god’s sake. We had to identify our cases off a poster on the wall. Of course the closest looking case to Tommy’s bass case was an assault rifle case, which with all of the broken English led to even more broken English. I had plenty of confidence. The gear couldn’t just go missing, but Tommy was a bit more stressed. The fact that they couldn’t or wouldn’t call Dublin airport only made matters worse. Nothing we could do, but get on with things.

It took us ages to find a pub. We caught a bus to town, ended up in the financial district and couldn’t figure out where the coffee shops would be hidden. We finally decided to just sit down and have a few beers, calm the nerves and set the bags down. Thank fuck they lost the luggage, we would have been miserable carrying all that gear around. We found a few seats outside, the weather was nice and we all wanted to just do a bit of people watching. Gary grabbed the most expensive beers of the entire tour, 3 Euro a piece for bottle of Tuborg Gold Label. They were gorgeous and ice cold. The bar was actually pretty wild inside. An old man bar, full of very drunk old men at 5 on a Thursday, including a man in a wheelchair who seemed to relish his ability to make sure that it was nearly impossible to get to the jacks.

UTRECHT

The train to Utrecht was nice. No one talked much, we just kind of stared out the window at the darkening landscape. Irrigation canals every 50 yards for mile after mile after mile. Utrecht Central Station is enormous. It takes up a large part of the central business district. It’s a giant mall. It didn’t look European, it looked American and even worse, it looked suburban American. I was unimpressed to say the least.

Time for grub and somewhere not-so-neon to eat it. I’d been hearing about the ‘Pebo’ from the lads for ages and there it was. It’s a wall of old fashioned sandwich machines. You put in a Euro, open a hatch and food comes out. Unfortunately, it’s all written in Dutch so I had no idea what I was getting. I got something that looked like a burger and thank god I was absolutely famished. I looked at the cavity that my bite had made in it and it looked like a cocktail of worms and maggots. As I moved the ‘burger’ around to get a better view of what exactly was going on, the street lights made the intestines of my purchase seem to move. My first, second and third reaction was to gag, but I have eaten some funky shit in my life and was able to think rationally in time. As it was hotter than the inside of the sun, I knew it couldn’t be alive. I did have to question who was in charge the day they decided to put chow mien noodles in a burger. It was slightly gross, but I’d paid for it and I was going to eat it. I can’t remember the last time I’ve paid for food and not eaten it. I am a value junky of sorts.

Food out of the way, address in hand, general direction decided and we were off. Once outside of the train station/American shopping mall, Utrecht is a stunningly beautiful city. Canals criss-cross the town and as it was still basically summer, there were open air café’s everywhere. There are maps all over, but they don’t include all the streets and there are no street signs anyways, so they are useless. We followed a street which the map informed us wouldn’t fork; it did and then did again. Finally, after an absolutely stunning walk, I figured it all out and led us right to JW’s gaff. It was on a big square and there were old couples taking dance classes in the middle of it. Very continental and very civilised.

The squat was an enormous 4 story building at the end of it with a 3 story mural of a backbone painted on it. The place was even bigger on the inside. There must have been 30 bikes on ground floor. All sorts. Some had motorcycle tires on em, there were a few choppers, a bunch of the typical Dutch bikes that look like something my Granny would have ridden in the 50’s, and even a couple of those huge ones you always see in postcards of Amsterdam with the giant box on the front you could fit 3 or 4 people into. James’s room was 2 stories up, quite a walk at the time and an absolute hike in the morning to rock a piss. The room was lovely, a couch in one room and a bed in another. New carpets and not a speck of dirt. It didn’t fit the mental picture I’d had of ‘squats’. James is a nice guy, but he could talk for Ireland. We were dying to go to the pub. Finally, he got the picture and suggested that we go to the pub he worked at. Thank fuck!

The pub was a true rock and roll establishment. The clientele was 20's to mid-thirty-somethings, the décor was good, the sounds were great. In Ireland it is almost unheard of to hear good sounds in a pub unless you’ve paid a cover charge. It didn’t take us long to make our table look like a bar table straight out of Dublin. Within an hour or two the three of us had filled it with a crate of empty bottles. The bartender was impressed. We moved to the back room where the music was really pumping. It was a much bigger room with ceilings twice as tall and disco lights a go go. This was the point that I started dancing. Dancing my hole off. Dancing like there was something physically and possibly psychologically wrong with me. I think Gaz was dancing too. Tommy was trading a perfectly good shirt to some guy for a Suicidal Tendencies shirt. (He ended up trading all of his shirts, for a drawer full of crap he wouldn’t want to be seen in in a room on his own.) The bar must have closed because the next thing I knew we were out in the street. Half the reason I drink is for the walk home and this walk didn’t disappoint. It was all narrow lanes and gorgeous buildings back to JW’s. I collapsed against a wall as Gaz and Tommy ordered what looked to be the best Gyros ever assembled. I was holding on for dear life. Then it was back up to JW’s, onto a mattress and out. Day one complete.

Tommy had to go back to Rotterdam to pick up the missing luggage. We all offered to go, but it would be a bit of a waste of money. Tommy volunteered and as much as I knew it was unfair that he had to do it, I wasn’t going to fight him for it. Me, Gaz, and JW spent the afternoon hanging out in Utrecht. Along the canals there were two levels. One at street level with all of the shops and one below that. Along the lower level, on the banks of the canal are walkways about 20 feet wide and lined with houses. Amazing houses at that. It must be the most romantic place on earth to live. The sounds of boats sputtering by, drowning out any noise of the city. We sat along one of these banks on a log that an artist had started to carve into the shape of a naked woman. Boats full of people gently moved along the canals and people often hailed us in Dutch and made comments we couldn’t even begin to understand. Between trips to the jacks and refills on the beer, we wiled away a very warm and sunny afternoon.

We met back up with Tommy and started to get our shit together. This was a tour after all and we were expected to play gigs as well. The squat we were scheduled to play in was well out in the suburbs and we’d have to take a bus there. That turned out to be harder than it sounded. If it hadn’t been for a fellow passenger who actually got off the bus with us and showed us where we were going, we would have never found it.

Gone was the romanticism of Utrecht centre. Out here overpasses ruled the landscape. The cobbled streets were replaced by roads with two lanes in each direction. The squat was obviously an 80’s style office building much like the ones I used to skate around in Oregon. The whole complex was surrounded by a 15 foot tall fence and barbed wire. There were probably a half dozen vans in various states of disrepair littered around the grounds and a few dogs trotting back and forth. This was more of what I thought of when I thought of the word squat. End of the world type stuff. After a few minutes of waiting outside, trying to get someone who knew how to work the electronic gate, someone touched two bare wires together and we were in. The place was cool. Not nice, cool in a post-apocalypse kind of way. There was a big bar on one side of the downstairs room that looked to have been built using firewood and fag ash. We were handed beers immediately, shown the room we were to play in and then ushered upstairs to meet the lads from the Impregnators.

I checked out the kitchen and was then offered food. I am a middle class kid. I’ve worked in restaurants. I’ve passed food safety courses in any number of different towns. Any one of these experiences would have been enough to stop me from eating anything out of that kitchen. If you can’t tell what colour the counter top started as, get take away. This would be a recurring theme throughout the tour and would ensure that I didn’t eat any food that had been sitting out longer than I had or drink any water from a glass handed to me. Most urinals I encountered were actually sinks, so I relied on beer and smoothies for my liquid intake.

First impressions of bands you’ve never seen play are always funny. You spend all your time trying to figure out who does what and don’t actually listen to anyone’s name. Then by the time the band goes on, the guy you thought was the lead singer, is the roadie, the guy you thought was the roadie is the lead guitarist (and already doesn’t like you as a result) and the singer turns out some guy that has been in a different pub all night. The Impregnators all seemed nice enough. A bit excited and loud. It was good to see Pier. A familiar face anyways although I’d never really gotten a chance to talk to him much. I couldn’t make heads or tails of the rest of them. It would be at least a day before I would know anyone else’s name.

I spent the next few hours doing that pacing around you do to avoid talking to anyone for more than a few minutes. I was a bit intimidated, I’ll admit. There is something to be said for being in a band with more than 3 people in it. It gives you more people to talk to for one. The Impregnators were going to do their sound check so we headed down to check it out, might as well see what were in for for the next week and a half. Adam’s drum set had a 26” bass drum, just like John Bonham! Serious gear. It was old and beat up, but you could feel it in your chest from 50 yards when he kicked it. Travelling around Europe with a 26 is like a dream come true. The sound check was impressive. Adam is a hell of a drummer. Loud and confident. He owns the drums. Nobby paced around the place like a boxer psyching himself up for a fight. As soon as the music kicked in he started jumping and running around the empty room. This wasn’t just a sound check, it was a declaration of intent. And it was not lost on us. Tommy, Gaz and I were well impressed. I loved the tour with Fleas and Lice, but I never accepted the music wholeheartedly. At the end of the day, screamy Hardcore is a lot of screaming. The Impregnators were a proper rock band. Together we would be a slammin bill. The sound check put me more at ease. Now I knew where they were coming from and I liked it.

The place started to fill up. We yapped and drank through the opening band. Free beer for the band, sweet. You never get that in Ireland unless you robbed it from the offie and snuck it in. The Impregnators gig was stunning. We were pumped. The beer was going down very easily. It was even easier to lose track of how many we’d had. They finished and we were ready to go. The gauntlet had been thrown down and we were ready to respond. As I grabbed my gear from our sleeping room, I could hear another band tuning up. Some of the residents of the squat wanted to play a few songs and as much as we didn’t like it, there wasn’t much we could do about it without looking like rock stars. They were shite and put a dent in the crowd. Even worse, they gave us all another half hour of drinking we probably didn’t need. By the time we went on, we were well lubricated. Gaz and I kept it tight, Tommy threw the shapes. It was tough.

The crowd loved the gig. The sound was good, it was late and everybody was drunk. The gig was a success, but we’d have to do better next time. The evening went roaring on. I am not sure about what happened next. I know the drinking went on till the sun came up. I wrapped myself tightly in my sleeping bag to try to insulate myself from the filth in the sleeping room and went to sleep.

I woke up to the sound of Gary singing to people in the car park. I don’t know how long I’d been listening, but when I woke up, I knew I’d been hearing him for a long time. His voice still sounded strong, so I couldn’t complain. Tommy was asleep beside me and hadn’t done nearly as good of a job of insulating himself from the filth. I’m sure the dirt wasn’t going to hurt anybody, but all the lads back home joking about scabies weighed on my mind. It took me about 20 minutes to find someone who could let me out of the electronic gates. I did a bit of exploring with that funny hangover head that is really more just still being drunk. I knew it was time to start rounding up the troops and the gear by the time I got back. Gary was still singing, the same song even. Tommy was unwakeable, Adam was missing, he’d left with a lady apparently.

This was my first chance to see the van. The tour posters were plastered on the back windows and inside and featured plenty of tough fonts and skulls. I nearly had to kick Tommy awake, but he eventually got up. We packed up and were sitting around waiting for Adam to return from a mystery girl’s house when Adam calmly walked out of the squat and asked what we were waiting for. The 10 of us piled in and we were off to the next squat, the next gig, the next session.