Christmas Day – walking around to three North London parties in a row.

One delicious afternoon dinner in Crouch End at the home of Miriam Miller, with Charley S and Matthew R. Lots of wine.

One teatime dinner chez Claudia Andrei in Upper Holloway, while watching Doctor Who. More wine.

And earlier,  one gathering at the duck pond in Waterlow Park with Ms Silke. She brings yet more mulled wine in a flask, I bring the Professional Duck Food in a tupperware tub.

On Christmas Eve I’d gone idly online to check whether it was better for ducks to eat brown or white bread. Turns out that throwing them bread isn’t actually good for ducks at all. That it’s not nutritious enough, and that if the ducks leave it to sink into the pond bed, it rots and clogs up the water. So there goes the bread idea for good.

Thankfully, the pet food shop in Junction Road, the one opposite what will no longer be Woolworths, has a professional duck food product in stock – and the shop’s open on Christmas Eve. No idea what’s in the food, as the bag has no ingredients list whatsoever, but it’s convincing-looking little dry spherical nuggets in a bag with a picture of a duck on the front. That’s good enough for me.

The product is called Wild Things by Spike’s World. They appear to be a hedgehog food firm who have branched out into the duck sector:

http://www.spikesite.co.uk/product.asp?pID=6&dID=1

The idea is that apart from providing a decent amount of nutrition, the food also floats on the water. So if the ducks aren’t hungry at the time, they’ll just come back and eat it later. No pond pollution, plus happier and better fed ducks.

It makes for a more smug and self-righteous duck-feeding experience on Christmas Day. Hey, park walkers! Get me! I’ve got proper duck food. Probably.

Here’s this year’s DE Christmas card image. Photo taken in April 2008 by Phoebe Allen. Digital snow added in December by Daniel Clift.

***

Here’s this year’s DE In Front Of A Christmas Tree In London shot, by Heather Malone. Taken outside the Natural History Museum, Christmas Eve 2008, at about 10pm.

***

And here’s one I took today, while mooching along Parkland Walk to get to a Christmas Dinner in Crouch End. It’s the scary hidden sculpture of a spriggan (an unkind creature from Cornish folklore), by the artist Marilyn Collins. Seems even more magical (or more scary) on Christmas Day:

Christmas Eve 2008 – to the Royal Albert Hall for a concert of Christmas carols, at the invitation of Heather M. We meet for drinks beforehand in a cosy pub around the corner. As I sit down with our glasses of wine, she presents me with a present – one of her burlesque stockings with satsumas and chocolate coins inside.

The man at the next table leans over with his pint. ‘Your Christmas stocking, I take it?’

And we start chatting.

‘We’re off to sing carols in a minute,’ Heather says.

‘So are we. We’re the choir.’

I’m rather taken aback by this. The man seems utterly without ego, showiness or preciousness in the slightest. Just the sort of pint-drinking bloke in a jumper you’d expect to see at a pub table next to you. What I suppose I’m saying is that he doesn’t look like a professional classical musician.

‘Oh really?” says one’s conscience. ‘And what SHOULD a professional classical musician look like, eh? Are you sure you’re not confusing formal stage wear with personality? You just haven’t thought it through.’

No excuse in my case for this petty preconception, either. In my Bristol Old Vic days I use to socialise with theatre musicians – the ones in the ‘pit’ – all the time. They were as down to earth as non-showbusiness employees of any kind, bar merchant bankers. Like most jobs, classical players have to get on with large amounts of strangers for large amounts of time. Any loftiness, egotism or snobbery would mark them out as bad at their job, and so cost them work.

In fact, it’s artists in the rock and pop world who are more likely to be stand-offish and precious and full of themselves. They may dress down on stage, but are much more likely to be buttoned-up as people. It’s not really their fault, though. The trappings of the genre encourage a brat mentality, and all too often talent is equated with ego.

It works the other way too – there’s too many naturally gifted singers and songwriters neglecting a career that could have been, purely because they don’t want to be thought of as vain. “Musical success? Me? Oh, I couldn’t. I just like singing in the shower.’

I’m told artists on the contemporary folk scene are more like classical players in this regard, with even the biggest names steeped in disarming modesty when approached off stage. ‘I’m just doing my best to play the music’ is the default attitude with folk and classical musicians. Better that than ‘I’m in a rock band – aren’t you lucky to be in the same room as me?’

***

The Royal Albert Hall carols show features the Mozart Festival Orchestra, complete with harpsichord-playing conductor and the full ensemble decked in 18th century period dress: wigs, breeches, stockings, the works. Period detail means the female musicians in the orchestra have to drag up in male costume, while the lady soprano gets a billowing frock.

Along with the carols, they do excerpts from Vivaldi’s Gloria, Handel’s Messiah and Samson, and Zadoc the Priest. ‘Zadoc’ always makes me think of its brilliant use in ‘The Madness Of King George’, where the piece’s dramatic choral entrance – written for the anointing of a coronation – is matched to the moment the King is strapped to a chair and gagged.

A carol concert is not a carol service, though, and it takes a fair amount of cajoling from the conductor to get the packed Albert Hall audience to join in with the singing. My only trouble is following the tunes to the two less familiar carols on the sheet: ‘It Came Upon The Midnight Clear’, which I only slightly know, and ‘Unto Us Is Born A Son’, which I’ve never heard in my life until tonight.

I’m reminded how much I love the Sussex Carol. The one that goes ‘On Christmas night  / all Christians sing / de dum de dum / de dum de dum.’ That one. There’s also a couple of readings by an actor, who I recognise as the husband from the TV series ‘Tipping The Velvet’. A role memorable for the line ‘You need a man for that, I think you’ll find.’ He reads the end of ‘A Christmas Carol’, and the nativity section from the Bible.

Afterwards we go for hot chocolate at the Natural History Museum’s ice rink, and watch the fetching young stewards in charge (one looks like that boy from the TV series ‘Merlin’, the other that boy from the movie ‘Twilight’), who, in the moments when they’re not helping novice skaters to stay upright, casually show off their pirouettes.

As I write, Radio 4 is broadcasting a profile of Bruce Forsyth by Paul Morley.

So I turn on my cute new portable DAB radio – a Pure One Mini – bought as a Christmas treat to self. It’s the winner of What Hi Fi magazine’s Best DAB Radio for Under £50 This Year. I don’t read the magazine, I just believe the sticker on the box.

The radio crackles into life. Or rather it doesn’t, because it’s digital audio. The sound just sort of enters the room politely. And you get a scrolling text display telling you what station it is and what song or programme you’re listening to.

Not that the text display is needed in this case. The first thing I hear is this:

‘…. he is that cocksure missing link between Salvador Dali and Tommy Handley…’

Only one person on earth would describe Bruce Forsyth like that.

Morley Christmas, everyone!

Further to the last entry, I suppose it’s something of an achievement to be singled out for having funny hair in Camden Town. That perennially youthful hub of North London where the current fashion is for young men to wear their hair in a kind of spilt paint-pot effect. It’s as if their hair has not so much been styled as thrown onto their heads from a great height.

I do like the trend for young men wearing scarves at all times, though. Often indoors. A couple of days ago I saw a fashionable looking boy on the Archway Road with his Ugg-ed up girlfriend. Not just a tangle of scarves and skinny jeans, but sunglasses on his head too. In mid December.

It’s never a bad thing for young men to have to feminize themselves to fit in. Though I’m obviously biased. Make-up is often a leap too far, though. One feels sorry for the ‘brickies in drag’ of the 70s glam rock era, or the 60s hippies who really wanted to be lads, or those backing musicians in 80s New Romantics bands who were not at one with their eyeshadow. Scarves are more do-able.

The fashion also favours the boyish side of androgyny (and again, I’m biased). A scarf hides an Adam’s Apple, or corrects Nature’s omission of one.

***

Where was I? (All over the place, today, Mr E. Still, carry on.)

Yes, the last Fosca gig at Islington. It was fine, no one died (Oh do stop that!). Maybe not as many people as one might hope. Alex S says the heavy rain of the 13th definitely made some people stay at home. He quotes Frank Skinner:

‘You can spend your life trying to be popular, but at the end of the day, the size of the crowd at your funeral will be largely dictated by the weather.’

It’s so true. And it was a funeral, after all. Some kind comments afterwards: great sound, great performance, shame we’re splitting up. That it would be even more of a shame if I never took to the stage again. Well, we’ll see.

Matt Haynes says our one-off line-up and going out with a one-off vinyl single in 2008 reminded him of the equally perverse last Field Mice gig in 1991 or so. There, the band aired brand new songs which hadn’t been released then and never were released afterwards (and remain unreleased even now, I think…). Here’s to perversity.

I’m just glad we managed one last London gig at all. That’ll do, Fosca, that’ll do.

I stand around afterwards with a box of the new single and last album, in case anyone wants to buy them. And as it happens, they do. To my absolute surprise I attract a small queue. I sell all the copies I’ve brought. Including, by accident, my own copies. Oops. And I sign some, too. I’m getting good at signing things in noisy places (or if I’m feeling a bit deaf), asking people to quickly write their name on a bit of scrap paper nearby, then confidently spelling their name correctly on their book or record.

Boy H had to go back to the US (and snow) the same evening. Pretty much for good. What with him and Fosca I had to deal with two big goodbyes in one night. I plumped for my usual tactic. I got a bit drunk.

So: single again. Alone, but not lonely. All kinds of invites from friends who are also spending the festive break in London – dinner there, drinks here, a concert of carols if I fancy it. Too lucky to grumble.

Recent outings? Well, there was the Last Fosca Show on Sat 13th. Islington Bar Academy, as part of the club night Feeling Gloomy. Line up is myself, Rachel, Charley, Tom and Kate. Three guitars, which means I can concentrate more on my singing, such as it is. Excellent professional sound, as it’s a modern purpose-built venue. No style in the shopping centre location, perhaps, but sometimes a hitch-free sound is preferable to a battered PA in a more historic venue.

Downstairs at about 7pm is some kind of under-18s hip hop event. There’s lots of audibly excited dressed-up teenage girls in a queue snaking around the other side of the building. I’d like to say they point or shout out things when I have to squeeze past them on the stairs to get to the soundcheck, but in fact they just go quiet and pull their friends out of the way to let me pass. So I feel rightly shamed by my own paranoia and preconceptions.

In fact, I’ve found this happening a lot lately – having to walk past loud teens on street corners I brace myself for cat calls or worse, only to find they just go quiet, look at their shoes, and politely wait for me to pass. I wonder what has changed – me, or teenagers.

The only Dickon-baiting incident of late has been on my journey to the night shift job on a Saturday evening. It’s arguably the most jarring aspect of the job, soberly commuting to work while surrounded by much less sober people on their Saturday night out. But I’m suited at being the odd one out, after all.

At about 9.15pm at Camden Town tube one recent Saturday, I pass two small party girls who must be about 19, and who have clearly started drinking early. They’re shrieking and falling about with their friends as I walk past them from the corridor onto the platform, hoping not to catch their eye but still curious to see who is making all the noise. And of course the moment I glance at them is the moment one of them sees me.

I try to act ‘invisible’ (hah!), keeping my head down and walking right to the other end of the platform to sit down on the farthest possible seat on the farthest possible bench. But without looking back, I know they’re following me. Here we go again.

I dive into my bag and pull out that ubiquitous cloak of invisibility – the i-Pod. The ‘I’m Not Really Here, Don’t Touch Me’ Pod. Some people use their music players as a social shield. A kind of cowardly retreat and ‘f— off’ statement to one’s fellow man at the same time, particularly if the volume is loud enough. Music as an alibi.

Never worked for me, though. I’m sitting on the far bench, eyes to the floor, iPod in place (though I’m not listening to anything). And I know the two drunken teen girls have sat down next to me. They’ve even left their larger party of friends to come over to me. What DO they want? They’re smiling at me and elbowing each other. I’m the shared joke.

There’s no escape. I take out the iPod earphones and sigh. And I surprise myself with what I say.

‘What do you want with me?’

Said with a smile, mind. A slightly worrying smile.

Never done this before. It’s come from somewhere. Maybe just pure tiredness after all the years of strangers Coming Over to me to helpfully tell me what I look like, or who I look like, when all I want to do is get to where I’m going without incident. Maybe it’s actual anger about feeling At The Mercy Of Others. The notion that I’m a funny little walk-on part of other people’s evening’s entertainment, rather than the other way around. Which I don’t mind, actually.

But there are times when I’m feeling fragile, when I’m trying to psych myself up for going to work, and the thought of having to play the Funny Blond Man On The Tube Platform We Saw Tonight for the 756th time isn’t always something I feel up to doing. Is that bad of me?

‘What do you want with me?’

It surprises me more than they can know, but it does the trick, and they find themselves wrong-footed from the off, alcohol or not. They blurt out a few questions about why I look the way I do, and where I’m going, but the power balance of the encounter is now in question. And they go back to their friends.

Yet I feel a little guilty about daring to question them back, for the sinister utteration, because it’s out of character for me. I never like to ruin anyone’s fun. Even if it’s at my expense. It’s just that sometimes even lifelong figures of street ridicule need a sick note.

Two further abiding tidbits from the Victorian Boxing Event.

One is discussing with Diva Hollywood where this whole New Cabaret and New Burlesque scene sprang from, given there was nothing like it in the 1990s. After grunge, there were all those 60s Mod clubs and Britpop bands. Oh, and Romos. Then Radiohead put out ‘OK Computer’ in 1997, giving birth to Coldplay, and suddenly art had to mean dressing down and moaning about it with choirboy reverb. Which is why I love the reformed Take That records – Gary Barlow and chums taking the listenable bits of Coldplay but adding costume changes and Vegas dance routines.

One theory is the release of the movie Moulin Rouge earlier in the decade. It may not have been everyone’s cup of tea (or rather, hollow cane of absinthe), but it certainly had a reaching out effect. They say that everyone who saw the Sex Pistols on tour in 1976 went home and started a punk band. Likewise, I like to think those who were knocked out by all those eye-popping sequences with Ewan McGregor and Nicole Kidman came away and devised acts or turns of their own.

I love the notion of ‘pass it on’ art. Inspiring people to join in, not to follow a fashion, but to use a genre or format to bring out something of themselves. That’s what a ‘scene’ should always mean.

After the boxing show, I meet the escapologist in the backstage area, and am impressed that his Victorian moustache is real. He tells me how escapology has always been a viciously competitive field, with acts forever suspicious of their rivals in case they steal their ideas, or even sabotage their props. He imparts a shocking rumour that Houdini once put acid in the tank of a lady escapologist.

I say it’s a shame performers in a niche field can’t be more supportive of each other. That escapologists should unite, as they have nothing to lose but their chains.

(Except of course, I only think of this after I’ve gone home).

Last Weds -  I attend a Victorian boxing event at the Bethnal Green Working Men’s Club. I’m there as the guest of Heather M, aka Crimson Skye. She and her fellow burlesque performer Diva Hollywood are there  to strut around the ring in naughty ensembles, holding up cards to announce the next round. This means they have to sit right at the side of the boxing ring for quick access, and as H’s guest I get to sit with them. So I have an actual ringside seat.

The audience, hosts and live acts are all decked out in Victorian costume: lots of refugees from Dickens adaptations in bowlers, top hats, braces, ladies in big music hall frilly dresses with those miniature hats on the side of their heads. Men in impressively groomed moustaches both real (specially grown?) and stuck on. There’s an escapologist in chains who also does a spot of bullet catching, and Whitechapel sing-a-longs with song sheets (‘Roll Out The Barrel’, ‘Down By The Old Bull & Bush’ and so on). A pianist plays versions of the ‘Rocky’ theme in a tinkly, vamping music hall style.

I don’t know anyone in the audience, but by the looks and sounds of things it’s a curious mix. Some are middle or even upper class, out for a dressed up jolly wheeze (it’s a charity event – there’s £100 tickets in a VIP area). The lady at the table next to me has a cut glass Celia Johnson accent. She tells me she’d never have managed to get into her vintage corset if if weren’t for her ‘assistant’. Others are East End locals with a sense of heritage, always ready with historical facts about this Spitalfields building or that Bethnal Green pub. There’s even a few pensioners, who know all the words to the music hall singalongs, of course, and who join in sincerely rather through any prism of kitsch.

I’m reminded of Louis Armstrong’s version of ‘Cabaret’: a singer from the 1930s, recording a 1960s pastiche of a 1930s style. Likewise Sinatra’s ‘New York New York’ – a late 70s pastiche of a Sinatra-type 40s style. How levels of pastiche can be cancelled out when reflected through their own subject.

Another aspect of this Victorian dress-up evening where levels of knowingness can have no place is the actual boxing. Although the combatants are volunteers, many of whom have no boxing experience whatsoever, they’ve been given a small amount of professional training. Each man has to wear those very non-Victorian modern helmets to protect his head, and arrives with two proper boxing coaches at his side, wearing very 2008 gym tracksuits. Meanwhile the referee – who slightly resembles Ralph Fiennes, much to Ms H’s delight – meets the occasion halfway in a plain white dinner shirt and black suit trousers. As the evening goes on, his shirt becomes flecked with blood.

There’s five bouts during the evening, all of which are incredibly exciting on a very visceral and non-ironic level, particularly from my close-up view. I make myself useful by judging the best moment for my burlesque lady friends to enter the ring and hold up their ‘Round 2’ placards. ‘Not yet – wait for them to sit down… I’ll hand you your placard when you’re in… Take your time – the guy with the bell isn’t going to start the next round till you’re off…At least, I think so…’

And I always love the things people in the audience shout on these occasions, often thinking of a phrase which sounds good, then just repeating it:

‘Go for a body shot! Go for a body shot! Oh…. great body shot! He really knows his body shots.’

Or better still:

‘Hit him!’

At half time, plates of pie and mash are served by hostesses in Moulin Rouge grab. So the night has something of a unique aroma: blood, sweat and pies.

I was going to write about the Fosca gig in Berlin. Really, I was. I kept sitting down to write, listing everything that I did on the trip, looking over notes. But then I found I couldn’t gear myself up to properly compose the thing.

And I think I now know why. An awful amount of travel writing bores me rigid. It’s the prose equivalent of holiday snaps. Big deal, you went abroad. Interesting for you, less so for your readers. How did the gig in Berlin go? It was fine. No one died.

No, I feel like a brattish child sulking at having to write ‘What I Did On My Holidays’ on the first day back at school. ‘We went abroad and it was good’. Find your angle, dear child, find your angle!

Trouble is, when you play a gig or act in a show, you often only tend to recall the flaws, the mistakes, and what went wrong. ‘Ah, yes, that was the gig where my guitar’s B string snapped on the fourth song. I was playing it, then it snapped. So I had to put a new one on. I’ve got a ton of stories like that: stick around!’

***

But of course, now I’ve started writing this at about 2pm on December 21st, with the sun of the Shortest Day already fading at the window, and interesting details are coming to me, and they remind me of further details, and so on.

That’s always been my trouble with writing. Being able to start. And then being able to stop, because writing calls down writing. I’ll have to split the results of this session into easily digestible morsels, or risk getting emails again. ‘You don’t write often enough! And when you do, you write too much!’

***

So: the venue was a clean, cosy and brightly-lit bar in the former East Berlin. It seemed to have once been a tiny theatre – pre-War, I’d say. But the stage was built for vocal lectures rather than amplified bands: no DI boxes, meaning the keyboards and laptop and mikes had to be plugged straight into the mixer directly to our side.

Apparently the neighbours had threatened to call the police if we got too loud, so our guitar amps had to be turned down to the absolute minimum. During the gig, Charley told me she could hear my electric guitar’s unamplified sound – the scratchy, tinny sound of the plectrum against the strings – far louder than the amp it was plugged into. That’s pretty quiet.

Despite this, the venue owner got on stage halfway through our set and asked us to be even quieter, or the police definitely WOULD be called. I decided against making on-mike jokes involving the word ‘Stasi’. Or indeed referencing ‘The Lives Of Others’ – the recent movie about unkind people in East Berlin listening in on their neighbours. But it did mean I went into a whispered rendition of the Fosca song immediately after this warning, complete with ‘Shh!’ noises and a finger to my lips, to the amusement of the audience.

***

Other Berlin memories:

– One of Charley’s Berlin friends apparently saying I looked too good to not be on a stage – and that I should play James Bond.

– Suddenly seeing a huge poster of my face as I open the door to the venue toilets (an advert for the gig, using the cover of the single).

– The man on reception at the hotel literally throwing sweets at us as we check out, in a jokingly grumpy way. ‘Here you go! Have your flipping souvenirs of Berlin, now get lost!’ They were little packets of Gummi bears. Which always makes me think of Hedwig And The Angry Inch.

– Seeing traditional German Christmas markets everywhere I look, reminding me how they’re getting more popular in British cities these days, along with ice rinks. The Lufthansa meal on the flight back includes a chocolate Santa.

– The kiosks on Berlin tube station platforms selling novels which seem second hand, alongside softcore porn mags, which I’m hoping are not second hand.

– As ever, the difference in pedestrian crossings. The red and green flashing man in Berlin traffic lights is slightly rotund and wears a hat. Apparently he’s an actual character with a backstory. Presumably involving a lot of standing about, then walking, then standing about again.

Quick news: the Fosca single is on iTunes now. Those without turntables can go forth and download.

Here’s two Fosca videos from the Bar Academy gig on Sat 13th:

Idiot Savant

I’ve Agreed To Something I Shouldn’t Have

===

Quick other news: Nambucca has burnt down! The nice indie bar and gig venue on Holloway Road in which I saw the New Royal Family and a bevy of other bands the other week. No casualties, thankfully. But if that’s the end of the venue, then it’s a real shame – it was pretty much the only bar on the entire street I felt I could go into without darts pausing in mid-flight. I once walked into there to hear a Fosca song being played by the DJ. I never quite know how to react on the (obviously rare) occasions when that happens – where to look, what expression. I generally wince, hearing only the flaws. Usually my voice.

===

Messages:

I say, did you realise that your blog gets a name check in the current edition of the Chartered Institute of Librarian and Information Professional’s Gazette, as an example of an elegant design? Your fame spreads ever further!

That’s marvellous. I should point out the site design is all Neil Scott’s work, with photos by Claudia Andrei. I didn’t seek him out – Mr S found me and rescued me from LiveJournal World, where I wasn’t really best placed. I think I’m better suited to a stand-alone format. Because I tend to stand (or sit) alone with most things. It isn’t necessarily a compliment, but it works for me.

Similarly, some people are better suited to the stage than the audience pit, not because of any vocation to perform, but because they just feel more normal up there. And safer.

====

I need to set down memories of the three recent Fosca gigs before it gets any later.

Hamburg. Fri Dec 5th 2008.
First time in Germany proper, as one can hardly count my previous visit – changing planes in Frankfurt on the way to Japan. First time to try out my GSCE German. Except in the two decades since I passed that exam with an ‘A’ grade, virtually all the knowledge has deserted me through sheer lack of use. Shaming. Still, I have a solution: at this point I happen to be dating a Young American (and he is Bowie-esque too), who can speak it fluently. To NOT bring Boy H along on this short trip seems the height of sarcasm, frankly.

He’s not in the band, so I do the decent thing and pay for his flight myself rather than impose the cost on the record label, who already have the unenviable task of promoting a band who’ve announced they’re splitting up. These two gigs with labelmates Friday Bridge – who are very much a going concern -  are presented as ‘showcases’ for the label, therefore, rather than Fosca gigs per se. Which is fine with me.

From London City Airport (and Lufthansa’s erroneously named ‘Quick’ self-service check-in machines), via a perfectly pleasant flight (free top-ups of in-flight wine), to Hamburg. Our hotel is a hybrid affair: it’s really a large youth hostel with a hotel part stuck on. Lots of backpack-wielding young people in the lobby. A silly lift arrangement involving putting your room’s card key into a slot by the lift buttons, in order to reach the right floor. Why, in God’s name? Isn’t the premise of a locked door on your hotel room enough? Are students in Hamburg so completely unable to resist the urge to play Knock Down Ginger that a card-key system has to be built into the lifts?

A: Hello, travelling student!
B: Hello, other travelling student!
A: Do you know what? I rather wager a game of Knock Down Ginger in the hotel section of this hostel will prove personally satiating at this juncture.
B: You mean, where we run along the corridors, knocking on all the doors, then run away giggling?
A: Why, the very same. Your thoughts are aligned with mine to an almost golden level of symbiosis.
B: Mmm. But isn’t Knock Down Ginger something only small children in Britain aged 12 and under tend to do? Not hulking students aged 19 and 20 whose arms entirely fill their sleeves?
A: Now look here, Susan. I’ll have you know I have taken pains to research this thoroughly, and I think you’ll find that right now it’s the best possible use of our time and energy, all things considered. It will also be Fun.
B: Oh. Fun. Well… If you insist, Clarence. (mumbles) I love you.
A: What was that?
B: Sorry, I mean: Yeahhh! Let’s go for it! Wicked! Etc!

We spend a long afternoon in the city, the air chilly but clear. We’re given a tour by the gig’s promoter and DJ, Jens, taking in the huge blackened Gothic spire of the St Nikolai Memorial. It was built by a Victorian Brit (Gilbert Scott) only to be razed by the Allies during the umpteen firestorms and bombings of the city in WW2. Incredibly, there’s still a lot of pre-war buildings intact, not least the 1920s architecture of the Chilehaus, with its sharp ship-like prow cutting into the sky. I look up at it and am reminded of early 80s OMD sleeves.

We also do the Spiegel building, with its bright orange 70s kitsch cafe, where Charley once was photographed in one of her earlier bands. We blush at the peep show attractions along the Reeperbahn, Hamburg’s Naughtiest Street. And we see all the Beatles bits, naturally. The Star Club. The Kaiserkeller. The alley on the front of Lennon’s ‘Rock and Roll’ sleeve. The bridge where the Fab Five posed in their shades and quiffs. ‘This bridge used to come in black and white.’ And the brand new Beatles-Platz square, with its thick glass silhouettes of the band holding their instruments. Stuart Sutcliffe is placed slightly away from the main four. The drummer figure is named Pete Best on one side, then Ringo Starr on the other, like a two-headed drumming Janus.

The gig takes place in a tiny bar, where the stage is about five feet away from the front doors. You go in, and the band’s right in front of you. But at least it’s a venue where all the equipment and mixer channels and speakers work, and the engineer knows how to use them. So we play a pretty slick and untroubled set, by our standards.

That’s really all you need. Things not broken. A radical concept for far too many places I’ve gigged in over the years.

Having done my usual trick of failing to get to sleep the night before a morning flight, I spend an awful amount of dozing off in the moments when I’m not standing up or walking, such as in cafes or in Jens’s flat, which becomes our dressing room. Thank goodness for being looked after by the label and the German promoters, who return and retrieve my nice red scarf when I leave it behind at places, not once but twice.

Next: Berlin.