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

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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.

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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.

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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.

Tags: fosca in Hamburg, fosca videos, Nambucca is the New Hawley Arms, Neil Scott's excellent site design