Element of Crime Blog

So. We had the day off, here in München, and very nice it was. It takes about a day to bring the machine to a stop and clean it out. The problem then is getting it started again in time for tonight’s show, but I’m sure we will get it going somehow.

An entertainment we have these days is to make bootleg recordings of our concerts. If I want to record the show in München, for example, I will go into the audience with my handheld recorder and make a recording. The quality is really very good. But there is a problem. There is no bass in these recordings. Why not? I discovered after some research that it has something to do with me being in the audience and not on the stage. I’m still trying to come to a full understanding of this phenomenon. There was one really good recording made by me Jakob, and Sven, which sounded like an excellent drum solo with some violin. Extraordinary.

Ricci doesn’t have these kind of problems because he has a different setup from the rest of us. He travels in a cryogenic flightcase. His case contains all possible facilities including a swimming pool and a gallop for his horse. Before the show we wheel him out, apply the 20KV electrodes, zap him into life, and play the show, unter Strom, so to speak. The power runs down after a while, which is why all the ballads are at the end of the show. The rest of us travel in a ’94 Opel Astra and a long wheelbase Twingo.

Anyway, if Ricci wants to make a recording, he gets his case to do it. If you find yourself during the concert standing next to a cryogenic flightcase, now you know it is Ricci making a bootleg recording. If you hear a very long drum solo, that means the rest of us are making our own bootleg recordings.

No blogging today, I’ve got some other stuff to deal with. Tomorrow we have a day off, so I’ll be back with you the day after tomorrow. Cheerio.

Felix Austria. I am always happy to be here. The gloomy depressive atmosphere and charming people strike a friendly chord in my own gloomy depressive heart. If only I had some of that charm I could be Felix myself, but I fear it is not to be.

I have suffered from depression since I was a kid, on and off. Sometimes just as a barely audible background noise, and sometimes the full blown can’t get out of bed for two weeks, dreaming of death, variety. If you have something like that in your life, I send sympathy.

We rode overnight from Bern in our bus, sleeping well after drinking the Swiss whisky (Swotch) we were given in Zuri. In the morning I used my trusty Tascam to record this interesting whispered conversation between a Mars Bar and a Milky Way. I will try tp post a link to it, which my Blog captain, Mr Regener, tells me is possible.

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I’ve just done something I did not mean to do. On grounds of privacy, I had hoped to complete this series of blogs without mentioning anything at all about the personnel involved in this journey. No names, no gossip, nothing at all about the music group E—— O- C—- , but it must now be clear that there is someone here called Mr Regener. OK, that was it. No more, nothing nix nada.

Actually I have nothing more to say. Tomorrow maybe. Innsbruck always brings out the extrovert in me.

Now we are in Bern, the capital city of Swatch, or whatever this place is called. Or maybe Swatch is the national whisky of Swissland. Anyway, it’s all good.

Here’s the thing about Bern: Bern has a station and on the station is a clock and once a day the clock reads 12 noon. Albert Einstein was here, taking a train that was heading out of Bern. On his way out of Bern he passed Element of Crime, coming in. Albert understood that if he was outgoing and we were incoming then the light from the clock would reach us sooner than it would reach him. (What light?) Therefore we would get to lunch before him. This is in fact exactly what happened, which explains why Einstein is the greatest scientist of all time. Got it? It’s called The Theory of Relativity. Einstein liked to make his stuff easy to understand, with strong clear metaphors, which also explains why he gets better press than the Quantum Physicists, who had crap marketing advisers, although there’s more money in their stuff.

Once I took a train out of Bern, heading to Geneva, at the other end. I had a first class ticket because I wasn’t able to understand the guy in the ticket office, so I just said ‘yes’ when he asked me something I didn’t understand. Anyway. I was hoping to watch the station clock as it got smaller or later or the light came from it or whatever the theory would say about it. The first problem was that you can’t actually see the station clock from the train to Geneva. Probably Basel then. The other thing was the first class was full of all these smooth dudes from the International Olympic Committee. (Speakin of Smooth Dudes, I met Herb Alpert once. He’s the KIng of Smooth). These IOC people all had gold Rolexes and weren’t at all interested in the station clock thing. I was the only science tourist that day in that train, except maybe for the fellow looking at tickets (he checked mine very carefully) who was walking from the front of the train towards the back. In order to get to lunch sooner, I guess.

Tomorrow we go to Linz, which was where one the 20th Century’s leading politicians went to school.

If you are wondering why I don’t write backstage stuff about Element of Crime, the answer is that I might, in a while, but right now I don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings.

Yesterday the first concert of the tour took place in Zurich, and tonight, by popular demand, we play here again. What a success!! We played all of the 24 songs without falling over, or bursting into uncontrollable laughter, or, especially in my case, sneezing.

And then to bed. In a Swiss hotel which gave me the dubious pleasure of THE MOST UNCOMFORTABLE BED I HAVE EVER TRIED TO SLEEP IN. I can’t bear to write more about this now. Perhaps later.

I have been in Rock and Roll for pretty much all of my adult life. I have been all over the world with it, up and down the hill twice, and it takes a lot to surprise me, I’m sorry to say. However…yesterday I took a walk through what someone described as ‘The Banking District’ of Zurich. I was shocked by the amount of money on show, the Maseratis, the Patek Philippes, the gold-plated brioches.

I felt sorry for these two fur coated ladies being helped out of the Bentley by the chauffeur and a doorman outside Sprüngli. Their wealth took a long time to accumulate, to secure, to insure. And now the world is creaking and cracking, the bank regulators are on the march, the Americans want the numbers of the unnumbered accounts. But you can rest easy ladies. The Amis and the regulators don’t really want that. They are just talking for the benefit of the rest of us. C U @ Sprüngli next week, girls.

The next edition of this blog will come fron Bern. It will deal with Einstein, the station clock and the model trains, or something like that.

The last time I came this way, blogwise, was about four years ago. Element of Crime travelled then through the same snow, at the same time of year, in a bus driven by Driver Franklin and his beautiful wife Dani. At that time they were dressed as an emperor and his queen, in silk and satin, and we the band and crew lounged in our pyjamas around the bus’s many internet terminals, smoking hookahs and sipping Grand Marnier. We were on our way to Austria.

This time things are different. Franklin and Dani are dressed in oil-stained combat fatigues, circa Gulf War 92, and the charming three wheeled charabanc has been replaced by an armour plated 18 wheeled battlebus. The band and crew sit on hard benches running down each side of the bus, hands on knees, staring at the feet of the person opposite. There is no conversation, but some hold photographs of their wives and children.

‘Why, Franklin’, asks someone, ‘why must it be like this, when before life was so beatiful, and we were so young and full of hope?’

Franklin is chewing on the butt of an old cigar. ‘Because, my friend, the last time we drove south at the start of a tour, we were heading to Austria. This time we are going to…Switzerland.’

Someone at the back of the bus started to cry, but only for a moment. Manliness comes before fear at such moments. Micha, the soundman, makes a bold joke: ‘The Swiss have different plugs on their electrical equipment. None of our things will work.’ This doesn’t get get as many laughs as it would on a good day. ‘They have different money from us. We’ll be helpless at the Raststätte’, offers someone else. The mood is becoming lighter by the moment. It seems as if sharing this difficult moment makes it easier to deal with, as the psychotherapists had promised in the pre-tour counselling sessions.

Zurich is our destination, and later in the evening we must perform a full length concert of Element of Crime hits, old and new. How we manage this will be revealed in tomorrow’s edition of this thrillablog. Till then, wish us luck…

Hier entsteht in Kürze ein neuer Blog zur Tour!