FEE REEGA

HOY a las 22.00 horas en el teatro de Villaviciosa:

• 30 Sep 2012

European Tour V - The end, for now.

I have this song that I wrote in Hamburg a couple of years ago that talks about how I lost my coat there when I thought I had worn it all the time. This time the same thing happened to me with a pair of shoes, in fact one of two pairs of shoes that I have, so I´m not sure if I actually lost them while I was wearing them or while I was wearing the other pair. What I know for sure is that the last photographic trace that I have tells me that I must have worn them at the Mobile Blues Club concert. 

Everything went up and down that night so it´s no surprise I lost something. We arrived at the venue and the people there thought there were two spanish guys coming to play Reggae which was pretty confusing. I always wonder whether people can´t read or whether they think that I can´t write, so they come to the conclusion that I must be some guy doing Reggae music. For free. 

However, the venue is lovely - when I played there last it was winter and freezing cold and my hands were stiff and I sat by the oven all night. But this time it was cozy and we got a pretty good sound and Pablo played a great show. 

Me at Mobile Blues Club. Photo: Pablo G. Diaz

At the same time half Hamburg was trying to find a place to sleep for us but in the end we found one ourselves and were able to stay for two nights in Sophie´s winter garden balcony room. We were just lying there like in an afterlife cloud of warmth and ate Sushi and watched a whole season of Fawlty Towers; we needed that. 

Possibly I left my shoes there…

With a beautiful-weekend-ticket from Deutsche Bahn we went to Kiel in order to spend a beautiful weekend there and have a concert next to the sea. When we arrived in Kiel, our ticket hand´t been stamped by a controller yet so we were able to sell it again for 15 Euros and two schnaps to a group of guys. great. 

We met Guy (Mute Swimmer), Stephen (The Great Park) and Eva at the train station and got picked up by Willy´s super truck that took us to Stein, to the baltic sea. The bar was a ship on the ground and the stage was a surf shop. I went for the hawaiian widow style that night and must have looked pretty funny because everyone was laughing extra loud at my jokes, they were rather screaming from laughing. I didn´t know I was THAT funny. May be I looked really ridiculous, what do you think?

Backstage in Kiel, photo: Stephen Burch

Ah, it was great fun, sitting on beach chairs watching Mute Swimmer play and then playing myself and then watch The Great Park play and then watch Pablo Und Destruktion play. And then leave. We meant to spend the night there and have Willy´s famous breakfast, with Mozart, the fat cat sitting at the table chewing cheese, but it was still early, so we took the train back to Hamburg and stayed at Eva´s place. Possibly I left my shoes there…

The Great Park 

And then we just had three days off, private time in Hamburg, none of your business, not very spectacular either. Or was it? You´ll never know. 

Breakfast in Hamburg, Schanzenviertel

But I´ll tell you about our little trip to Hannover. My mother warned me: Nichts ist doofer als Hannover (nothing is more stupid than Hannover). But she´s wrong and she knows it, we´ve all been to more stupid towns. It´s actually pretty nice in Hannover, they have some good venues there and a river and even all the rubbish looking shops and hairdressers are named after great writers, I was impressed. Goethe Call Shop, Kafka´s Friseursalon, Eichendorff Grill etc..

Ceven had prepared a big wonderful outdoor gig, with an open air stage and a bar and it promised to be wonderful - until it started raining cats and dogs all night and the whole place was underwater and impossible to do a dry concert there. I think the whole day was a marathon Ceven of finding a new venue for our gig and it turned out to be most difficult with such short notice. In the end we played at “…und der böse Wolf”, a really nice bar, but it´s not usually a venue for music, so people were´t used to that and we only had a very small amp and two beer crates to stand on and didn´t really get the attention of everyone. Pablo played two songs, with the sound feeding back all the time and me trying to turn it up up up and upper but it didn´t get anywhere and so I tried my luck with motorbike songs as I had noticed a motorcycley atmosphere. I sold one CD to a gentleman who might have only bought it because his daughter´s second name is Fee, too. We all tried our best…

A big thank you goes to Ralf who we stayed with and who hosts most bands that ever come to Hannover and I found dozens of friends in his guestbook and he remembered most of them. Pablo and him had some good conversations about politics while I was falling asleep o his couch and then woke up exhausted asking myself where I am: “Hamburg? Hannovi?”

It was lovely to stay at his apartment, watch TV together and talk about the old days. 

Me at Laika. Photo from the video by Romain Rossi, watch it here

And then we went to Berlin which had not only the reason to play a concert there but also to pick up all the crap that I had left in a storage place there two years ago and to transport it down to Balingen straight to my grandfather´s garage. But we did do a concert at Laika and we did have a lot of fun there and I did get a little sentimental about my friends there but then had to leave pretty early to get at least some sleep. I will just leave out as much as possible the episode of getting up at 6, getting the hired truck, driving it to the depressing storage place in Marzahn, spending two hours getting the stuff from the 8th floor down in a murderous elevator and then driving down South and arriving there at 2 am the next morning. I will just leave that out because I just would like to forget about it and because I´m quite happy to have that behind me. 

Thanks to everyone who followed us on this blog or came to one of the concerts or let us stay at their house and eat at their table.good bye.

And now we´ll have a break. 

I just signed up for a month´s job at an ice cream shop. 

• 24 Jul 2012