A modern artists depiction of the "Graoully", saying "RRRR".

Sometime in the first century A.D a young, scrappy christian called Clement arrived in heathen Gaul, on orders from Saint Peter to knock some Christ into the locals. Upon his travels he found a Roman struggle-town on the banks of the Mosselle that was being terrorised by a monstrous winged reptile that lived in the local amphitheatre from which it would occasionally stir to eat babies and fill the air with poisonous fumes.

Clement faces off against the Graoully, while the locals totally freak out.
"For fucks sake, dont piss that thing off!" Screams the woman at foreground left.

Well, Clement beat the mortal puss out of that dragon and banished it into the void beyond the world. The townsfolk declared themselves "stoked!", swiftly converting to Christianity and making Clement their first Bishop.

But today the town of Metz in northern France faces different problems, like being slandered on the internet by a self-important bass player from Collingwood. Where's your fancy Bishop now, losers?

Centre Pompidou Metz. Not your average sticky-carpet joint.

Anyway, we had been booked by the Musiques Volantes festival to open a three band bill at the futuristic Pompidou Centre, in return for a tidy purse, meals and accommodation.
We parked at a loading dock around the back of the building and were met with snacks and good manners by the wonderfully freindly production staff just as the headline act, "Plectrum"*, was starting their soundcheck.

Having been told all about their fine pedigree and famous singer/guitarist P**** K**** I was eager to watch them and form my own opinions about their sound.

File photo of the unhappy Mr K**** , desperately trying to tweak some life into it.

When I wandered into the hall K**** was in the middle of some sort of rigidly controlled hissy fit, pleading ominously for "More loops in my monitor....Alot more. ....Alot....Alot! More! No, more...alot more!"
He was rubbing his temples and screwing up his face, like a man trying to conduct a symphony played by 8 year-olds. He would bark little demands into the microphone and then run around the stage like a six-foot chicken in a whirlwind of hilarious micro-managing.
He would bound over to the other guitarists amp, move it an inch to the left, feverishly tweak the knobs for a few seconds, then leap over to the bass amp to move it an inch backwards and fuss over its' settings, then back to his microphone to whine and cajole the house engineer some more. The guitarist and bass-player just watched him in dolefull silence as he moved their shit around and changed their settings. I was stunned.

When they actually started playing a song he would stop the band after every few bars and lecture the guitarist on the correct hand posture for an F chord, or how to hold his pick, or how to suck eggs ect.
Again, I was stunned.

It´s available in pedal form? Man, I can´t wait to let him know!

This circus of obsessive-compulsive behavior went on for what seemed like years. By the end of it I thought Mr K**** was going to cry, right there on stage. The sweet, sweet icing on the cake came after they had finished, when he paced up and down one side of the stage for two whole minutes, leaning his guitar against the railing, then picking it back up and moving it a few feet, then picking it back up and pacing some more.

I was completely enthralled. What the fuck was he doing? What was this strange pantomime, and where would it end?
It ended when he gingerly leaned his guitar against the railing, as if it was made of spring ice, waited a few tense seconds with his hand hovering in space, and then turned to the other guitarist who was loitering a few paces behind him. "Put your guitar here" he ordered  "The temperature's good".

Well, I have to say I was completely awed by this display of obsessive/compulsive, micro-managed lunacy.
I mean, I probably wouldn´t laugh at Django Reinhardt if he pulled that stunt with his 15,000 euro, 85 year-old classical...but...
Hats off.

Bitter old creep wanders around on stage, waiting for some guy he calls "The Baaron" to finish his bucket-bong and get checking.

Anyway, we finally got on stage and checked our shit. The house engineer got us the best stage-sound of the entire tour, in about 12 minutes, and then we headed upstairs to the caffeteria to stuff our faces and mix with the Pompidou staff.

The gig itself was okay. We played well and the mix was splendid, but the crowd had obviously come for the Plectrum sound and did not seem overtly inspired by our tunes. That´s fine.
Well, they got Plectrum alright. A full hour of crawling, overblown slop that made me feel like I had smoked bannana skins all day on an empty stomach. Fantastic stuff.

Plectrum lay their turgid "jams" on the rapt audience. I'll be down the back gobbling fistfulls of Iboprufen and moaning along with the chord changes.

Not much more to say about this one. Got drunk, failed to score any drugs or pussy (I mean, this is the Pompidou after-all), went to our neat, attractive little hotel where I picked a fight with the hair-dryer and then fell unconscious on the bathroom floor in a thin puddle of drool and flat Carlsberg.
Pretty much the usual.

Thankyou indeed to the festival folk and the Pompidou production staff who were about as proffessional and hospitable as could be....and to the cook. She knocked up some killer vittles, fo sho.

Next post we will cross over the border into Switzerland, in search of Nazi gold and fine chocolate. In the meantime, take it easy on NYE, right? Right.


* Names changed to protect the innocent.

It´s been a banner year for the humble young do-goods at Civil Civic HQ. Slobbering, effusive praise from dark corners of the internet, not one but two blockbuster European tours, a confusing single out on "Too Pure" (a fine, gentlemanly imprint) and a feeling around the office of impending DOMINATION OF ALL LIFE ON EARTH!

The small hoard of individuals who have contributed to this atmosphere of triumphant hubris are too many too mention individually, but to use a wretchedly tired cliche, "you know who you are"!

If you´ve booked us, or written nice things about us, or bought one of our fine musical releases, or paid to see one of our shows, or any of that stuff, we salute you and confirm that when our Thousand Year Kingdom is established on Earth, you will have a good seat at the table. It´s a lock.

Here´s to you, you fine human specimens. We will do our damndest to deserve your efforts in ´11. 

BANZAI!!!

.
Yesterday I received an irate email from my good freind Baaron Von Cuddles III, acusing me of a wide variety of transgressions, ranging from character assassination and poor spelling to securities fraud and supplying alcohol to a minor.

Von Cuddles busted me selling these things to primary schoolers a few months back and has not forgiven me.

 His main beef, as regards this blog, was that my representation of him as a two dimensional  sociopath is not only highly selective and lacking in context, but also getting pretty boring. Personally I find his poor grasp of social norms and vile temper hilarious, so I've never really felt the need to present his lighter, more humane side to my massive global readership.

But he does have a point.

The Baaron is nothing if not a complex man-of-the-arts, and his sporadic outbursts of weird violence, paranoia and glee-full poor taste are certainly the exceptions rather than the norm of his behavior. Most of the time he is just an articulate, well-mannered young axe-slinger who is very serious about his work and eager to make the Civil Civic experience an uplifting one for all comers. No shit, mate.

Anyhoo, with this in mind I'm going to keep this post (relating the general events surrounding our gig in Colmar) fairly brief and to the point.
The day begins in our battery-hen style suicide-hotel on the outskirts of Lyon. After four hours of troubled sleep I rose, sobbed uncontrollably in the shower for 20 minutes, took a couple of whacks of gin to get the blood moving and hurled myself like a bag of filthy laundry into our Ford Galaxy, which Von Cuddles had already packed and primed for the days journey.

I was feeling a little tense, and on the way out of town I tried to crawl out of the passenger window of the moving vehicle and the Baaron was forced to drag me back inside by the hair while keeping the Galaxy running in a straight line at 140kph.
"What the hell is wrong with you?" He demanded. "Did you see something shiny on the side of the road again?"
"Just a panic attack." I assured him. "You threw my pills out of the starboard porthole last night, remember?"
"Right." He said, nodding and smiling. "Don't worry, we'll get you better pills. Ones that will make you strong!"
That sounded fine, but in the end all I needed was another snort of gin, after which I slept like a baby all the way to Colmar.

I have learned recently that the centre of Colmar is actually as pretty as a little brass button. It just goes to show the sorts of things that pass you by when you´re on a shoestring tour.

We arrived at dusk and the GPS deposited us in a huge open-air car-park on the outskirts of town, with a shopping centre on one side and what appeared to be some sort of steak-house/discotheque on the other. You guessed it, the steak-house was The Venue.
It was a big place, with highly specced sound and lights and a high, broad stage. None of that impressed me as much as the snack buffet lined up on the bar...

..or the picture of the late Ronnie James Dio above the lighting desk. The Van Halen logo was an added plus and made me feel very comfortable, like the whole venue had been torn from the back of my 6th grade maths book.

The night was part of a regional music festival, and the promoter was a sly character called Pierre, who  for some reason had taken a liking to our racket via the interweb and booked a couple of shows for us. We got aquainted with Pierre and his cohorts over the course of soundcheck and dinner and discovered he was a senior member of a small terrorist network dedicated to independance for Brittany and was wanted by both the French Federal Police and Interpol. Who woulda thunk it?

If you see this man, do not approach or attempt to aprehend him. He´s okay really, and his girlfreind makes a killer quiche!

After din-dins we took advantage of the large, comfortable back-stage area for a little CC nap-time. It's important to be well rested before a show. No-one likes a grumpy, tired band now, do they? No.

Little Baarony Waarony has his nappy naps.

Fortunately we were playing first-up on a large bill, so our duties were over early in the night. A smattering of French bumpkins from Colmar and surrounding villages dribbled steadily into the venue and were completely unmoved by our noise. From the posters on the wall outside and the graffiti in the toilets I got the impression that this town was ruled by fanatic psychobillies, and that isn't really our bag. But there were, inevitably, a couple of young kooks who dug it, so we sold them some vinyl and the Baaron smuggled them some beers out from back-stage to offset their costs. Now THAT is customer service.

Obligatory sound-check shot. We played to more people than this, but not that many.

For me the hi-light of the evening came from the second act. I once toured Australia as guitar-tech/driver/support-act to the great Bob Log III, so the rash of copycat trash-blues one-man-bands that have plagued the earth in recent times do not impress me, at-all.
But I was enthralled by the flat-out awesomeness of Urban Junior. He's an amiable Swiss-French nut who does a clever, beefy variation of the BL3 schtick with massive energy, skill and ugliness. He tore shit right up, and I instantly decided that if I ever get married I will spare no expense to fly that fucker out so he can headline at the reception. Well played, sir, well played.

Urban Junior gives the kids what-for!

 Anyway, by the time he'd finished up I was slobberingly drunk and whining at the Baaron about getting the fuck out of there. I wanted my bed-time, and fortunately so did Von Cuddles, so we unobtrusively man-handled our crap out of a side-door and loaded up the Galaxy.

All in all, not a night of triumph for the CCs', but as I've said before, the road is long and winding, and we were just keeping our powder dry, innit.

Shout-outs to Pierre and Hiero Promotions and to Urban Steve. Keep up the good work.

An artists impression of satisfied patrons leaving the venue. 

Getting into the centre of Lyon at peak-hour is a wretched, bamboozling experience. Like trying to unravel an enourmous lump of twine covered in motor-oil.
The maze of overpasses, underpasses and tight, curling offramps completely un-manned our TomTom GPS unit and drove the Baaron into a spitting apoplexy of road-rage. By the time we pulled up at the address we had been given for the venue he had beaten his palms bloody on the dashboard and his eyes were filled with blood and darting around like gnats.

Be afraid.

The last straw came when we realised the street address provided to us didn´t exist. We were on the bank of the river undernieth a bridge, with nothing but the water on one side of the street and a string of "bussiness traveller" hotels on the other. The Baaron looked stunned for a moment and then started walking off into the night in disgust.

It was then that I noticed the big, rusty cargo boat moored next to us. I suddenly realised that it had the word "sonic" stencilled in huge black letters on the hull.
Ye gods. The venue was a motherfucking boat.

I´m on a boat, motherfucker, don´t you ever forget.

Proceeding below decks we encountered....well...a small venue. Apart from dead giveaways like... y´know...the port-holes and shit, it was more or less indistinguishable from any other 100 capacity noise-hole I had ever been in. The staff (or "crew") greeted us with fine French lazy courtesy, complete with booze and snacks and calm humor, and the business of soundcheck proceeded.

Obligatory "Portrait of a Baaron and his Box".

In a humiliating side-episode, my self-esteem suffered badly when the only toilet on the boat proved to be completely blocked, forcing me to shit in a plastic bag and then wander three blocks down the street in search of a bin to put it in. There´s nothing like walking down a busy metropolitan street with a bag of your own shit to put your life in perspective.

After soundcheck we dined splendidly with the crew and support band in the tiny galley and traded salty, sea-faring jokes until the first patrons started to filter in and the night began to find it´s "sea-legs". 

Our name, up in lights, above a port-hole, next to a mounted fish-head. Just like in those dreams I used to have in high-school, except without the women in clown masks laughing at my penis.

While the support duo were noodling through their prog-swill (which sounded like a mating of  Tortoise and Rick Wakeman. Yes, that bad) I was on deck with the Baaron, smoking cigarettes and heckling him about his inability to grow a beard. This is a sensative subject for the Baaron, and he was becoming more and more agitated when suddenly a gorgeous young woman appeared next to us and held out an envelope with "Civil Civic" scrawled on it in blue crayon.

"Hi guys," she chirped while handing me the envelope. "It´s a message from Amande*."
Thinking nothing of it, I opened the envelope and found two updated day sheets, detailing itinerary changes for upcoming shows. But the Baarons´mind predictably ran off in a paranoid direction.
"Sooooo," he drawled menacingly, "you´re here to fucking spy on us, right?".
The girl chuckled politely at the "joke", wished us a good gig and turned to walk away, but the Baarons´hand flashed out like a striking cobra and took a savage pinch-hold on the flesh over her ribs.
She shreiked and twisted herself free, backing away a few paces and clenching her fists in fury and disbelief.
"What the fuck is wrong with you?!" She screamed.
"People get wierd under the microscope, bitch." the Baaron hissed, and took a step towards her.


But this exchange had not gone unoticed on the crowded deck, and suddenly we were surrounded by angry French hipsters, spitting curses and throwing lighted cigarettes at our faces.
Things looked grim, but I reached into my mental bomb-diffusing kit and pulled out the hammer.

"Tourettes!" I yelled. "Tourettes!"
The Baaron cottoned on fast.
"Pussy, pussy, cock, pussy, fuck, shit, cunt FUUUUCK!" He bellowed, twitching and slapping himself in the face. He was raising hideous red welts on his own cheeks and the fury of the on-lookers quickly turned to morbid fascination. They backed away and stared while the Baaron convulsed and screamed obscenities and harmed himself with complete abandon.
"Good," I thought "this´ll get it out of his system."

And it did. The Baaron was pliant and reasonable, right through our triumphant, mind-blowing set until the end of the night when we "put to shore" and drove to our miserable suicide hotel for a few hours of black slumber.

On the whole, it was a successfull evening. We sold a bunch of singles and t-shirts to curious land-lubbers who seemed to appreciate our racket and we escaped unharmed from the real possibilty of a savage Franco-Hipster stomping. Dang, we are GOOD at our job! Say what you like about the CCs´, but never say we are not proffesionals.

So tune in next time for more salty yarns, as Civil Civic point their prows at the horizon and set a course for Funtastic Good Times.
Aaaarrr.

*Amande Dagod is our charming but sly European booking agent. She´s an employee of the Julie Tippex corporation, a giant entertainment conglomerate with dark global designs and rumored ties to human trafficking and the small-arms trade in central Africa.


***BUSHWEEK - Australian colloquialism. An unreasonable demand or behavior.

"Stop givin´ bits of me birthday cake to yer fuckin´dog, Nathan. Whadaya think this is, bushweek?"

.

On a freezing, wet Monday afternoon we pulled up in a dismal side street in Lilles' inner suburbs and sat like anaemic bridge-trolls amongst the garbage in our Ford Galaxy, eating miniature Mars bars and insulting each-others intelligence with moronic humor and humiliating sexual anecdotes.

This is standard time-killing procedure when we arrive at a venue too early to load in, and time has seldom been killed in a more senseless, degraded way by anyone, anywhere. Even compulsive masturbation and binge-eating are more noble responses to boredom.

Anyway, the grey hours of the day trickled by until finally the door of the venue opened and we lugged our crap inside to survey the scene. The first thing I  saw on trudging through the door was what appeared to be the mummified corpse of a clinically depressed young woman screwed to the wall above our heads.

Covered in painfull, oozing boils and really, really bummed. That's how this poor chick went out.

The band room itself was an awesome example of bare-bones, bargain-basement goodness. 

The smelly, scallop roofed dungeon as it appeared at first glance. Me likey.

The depressed corpse on the wall and the stark, unvarnished nature of the venue-proper really cheered me up. Here was a place I understood, that reflected my value system, so far removed from the huge, corporate, brushed-aluminium fridge we had played in the night before. 

Though the brusque Dutch efficiency of the Eindhoven staff was certainly warranted, given the mega-plex nature of the venue, we were now in motherfucking France, amongst the French! 

I have many flattering pre-conceptions about the French race...and true to my dearest hopes, the posse at this joint were a loose bunch of chain-smoking, shoulder-shrugging, joke-cracking lifestyle experts who instantly treated us like valued recruits in some sort of undeclared slacker war against The Great Uptight. 

Awesome.

After the ritual nightmare of soundcheck, with all the tantrums and death-threats and wall-punching I've come to accept from Baaron Von Cuddles, the promoter (a fine young human named Dorothy) ushered us upstairs into a nicely outfitted kitchen/dinning room and fed the living bejeesus out of us.

Dorothy slaves over our dinner while we enjoy fine local beer and make fun of her heavily accented English.

Dining in communal style with the venue staff and worthy local support act "The Kitchen Tool Set".

The late Chubby Checker knew a thing or two about eating big and rocking out, and I believe it was he who coined the phrase "Full gut, good gig". Priceless wisdom.

So with belts notched down a hole or two we returned downstairs to do the bizzzzzz.

The Kitchen Tool Set fuzz-prog the crap out of the gathering locals.

We let the box bathe in silent, solitary glory for a full 15 minutes before we ripped into our shit, just to get people focused. It drove the crowd nuts. They were screaming threats at us and shaking their fists before we'd even played a note.

When you arrive at a groovy but downbeat venue on a scummy side-street in a town you've never played before, to perform a headline show on a rainy, freezing Monday night, generally speaking your expectations tend to be pretty low. So when nearly a hundred soggy French misfits pile in, booze heavily and then dance and howl like gin-soaked mental patients there's only one way to respond. Play like retarded wolverines and grin and spit and bite peoples hands as they try to rip the hair out of your head and scream at you for "un autre morceau, tu baises fuckers!"

The Baaron, captured going green at the gills, in black and white. Courtesy of janicks.blogspot.com/ .

Our terrifying momentum was derailed about half-way through the set when, after a powerfull rendition of "Run Overdrive", Aaron wandered listlessly to the back of the stage, leaned over his nasty little amplifier and started throwing up the mountain of vegetarian lasagna he had shovelled into himself about an hour earlier.

The crowd seemed completely unperturbed by this disgusting spectacle and simply waited with folded arms for the noise action to resume. I tried to tell some bawdy jokes in pidgin French, but several people in the front row irritably told me to shut-up, so I just fidgeted and smiled lamely until the Baaron had finished regurgitating.

During the lull in the set while Aaron was vomiting on the floor behind his amp I took time out for this post-modern moment. Being photographed by a crowd-member while photographing the crowd-members.

Once back into the swing of it, we kicked the balls off those unemployed Frogs with the raw power of our rockness and got one of the lustiest encores of the whole tour as our just reward. It was a fine experience, so naturally we spent the rest of the night hobnobbing with the local gentry, trying to sell them t-shirts, and becoming droolingly, spasticly drunk. It hurt like hell the next morning, but sometimes you just have to get hideously hammered with the hosts. It's simple good manners.

Aaron drunkenly explains the inner mysteries of the box to a curious Lilleian gear nerd.

Dorothy grinning goofily and smoking unfiltered Cravens, like the hopeless soak she is.

CC. Bad-will Embassadors to the Royal Court of Wrong.

Yep, it was a grande ole night at the opera, my friends. Even the Baaron seemed satisfied and cheerful and failed to put a single member of the crowd in a choke-hold, or accuse the whole venue of Nazi sympathies or any one of the many disruptive, anti-social stunts he would usually pull on such an evening.

But this was early days, innit. The road is long and winding, and the Baaron is evil at heart.

Stay tuned.

*BUSHWEEK - Australian colloquialism. An unreasonable demand or behavior.

"Get ya fuckin feet off the fuckin couch, Nathan. Whadaya think this is, bushweek?"

Just a quick update on Civilian life for the illumination of interested parties.

The "continental breakfast" phase of the tour is now over, and we are once again ensconced in The Baarons filthy rat-hole on Kingsland Road. Sitting amongst the empty bean cans and soiled underwear, it's almost as if the whole rotten thing never happened, like a passing night-terror.

"What is it darling, what's wrong?"

"I *sob* dreamt I was the *sob* bass player in Civil Civic!!! We toured Europe in a *sob* Ford Galaxy. It was HORRIBLE!!!!"

But this doesn't mean I can now come down with glandular fever and watch old Steve Martin movies in peace. Fuck no.

We have a short but nasty set of U.K shows to plough through before that happy day comes. So it's going to be a while yet before I have both the time and the minimum of required energy to walk you through the hideous swamp of fear and humiliation that was the Civil Civic Autumnal Assault on Europa.

But needless to say, four weeks of tightly packed touring have yielded many a sorry tale, and in-spite of good taste or discretion or any sense of common decency, these tales will be told.

You will laugh (at our expense).
You will cry (with disgust and frustration).
You will probably throw up at some point.

That's right, land-lubbers, there's a blizzard of salty yarns to be spun, chock to the gills full-O.....

SEX!!!

VILOENCE!!!

TERROR!!!

CREEPY, BOOZY, HOMO-EROTIC NAZISM!!!

AND GOOD OLE-TIMEY ROCK'N'ROLL!!!*

(*complete with Norweigan zombie beardos!)

So once again I appeal to the saintly patience of anyone who gives a shit. Once it gets going, this tour-blog is going to run for far longer than any of you will be able to stomach. For real.

In the meantime BRUSH PROPERLY!!! Don't just scrub away briefly and think the plaque is gone. You're living in a fools paradise. Wake the fuck up.