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Ever wondered what happened to the estimated 1.6 billion dollars Richard Pearle made by selling fat young Iraqi orphans on Ebay to wealthy sexual predators and secret psy-warfare laboratories in places like Turkmenistan and Estonia? I have.

I am cursed with an inquiring mind, which over the years has led to getting spanked in front of Primary School assemblies, getting fired from easy jobs and losing many fair-weather friends. I just can't help myself. I have many bees in my bonnet, as the saying goes, but they never make any fucking honey.

Soooo... when we arrived in Zurich my first order of business was a quick visit to the central offices of the Swiss Private Commerce Bank, which is a sleazy, up-sclae institution mainly patronised by arms dealers, diamond merchants, Russian energy barons and other reptilian scum. It is a repository for some of the most gore-stained money on the planet, and word is that even the state of the art ventilation system can't entirely get the stink out of their high-tech head-quarters.

They removed the "all seeing eye" from the top of the building after a rash of bad press and some angry phone-calls from local free-masons.

"It's pretty bad in the summer." A low level staff member once remarked, on condition of anonymity. "Last July we had some really hot, still days and the stench of blood was overpowering. The building became surrounded by stray dogs, howling and pawing at the windows. It was terrible, just terrible."

I had tracked Pearles' pedo-profits here through long hours of intensely dull research and by the time we hit town I felt the need for direct action. But I was extremely fuzzy about what I planned to do when I got there, beyond causing a minor scene.

It didn't matter. The middle-aged, solarium tanned functionary who met me in the lobby was coy at first, then downright hostile as it became clear my homework was in order. So I snatched the expensive toupee off his head and ran outside, where I threw it into a muddy puddle and continued to run at top speed before expensive thugs appeared to put a black bag on my head and turn me over to Richards' people.

I ran all the way back to the grand suburban mansion where we were staying as guests of Janos Szenogrady, a famous Swiss musician and art collector and an old freind of Andys'. His dapper son, Julian, had organised our Zurich show and was also the drummer in the support act, Summit.

The two lived by themselves in this giant, rambling gothic pile which looked and felt like something out of an old episode of Scooby Doo. There were leering portraits with eyes that followed you around the room and huge fireplaces dominated by hideous gargoyles and medieval weapons. If crockery had started flying around or pale spectres appeared on the staircase I think I would have been more relieved than surprised.

Anyway, the sepulchral vibe was clearly having an impact on The Baaron, who suggested some sightseeing to deal with the hours before soundcheck.

"Let's get the fuck out of here." He said to me in a hoarse whisper. "The fucking doorknob to my room keeps turning by itself, and I think I heard a woman crying in the attic".

*******

Since both the Baaron and I are big fans of synthesisers, social satire and moral decay our first stop was a visit to Cabaret Voltaire, where we drank thick black coffee spiked with absinthe and got in an argument with a young professional couple about whether or not Hugo Balls´1916 manifesto made our music redundant, thus making the continuation of the tour both uneccesary and un-natural.

Then off for some shopping. The Baaron was hot to add a genuine Swiss mountain goat to his impressive stable of trophy heads, but after checking out a few select emporiums he became angry at the small size and mangy appearance of the specimens on display.

"This is bullshit!" He snarled at one frightened old shoppe-keep. "I could just walk up a mountain with a fucking carrot and a rusty steak-knife and come back with better heads".

In contrast my own shopping mission was entirely successful. My long-held fantasy of owning a 500 euro pair of studded, fox-fur lined, white-tiger skin ugh-boots came to fruition at last.

Thank you Zurich, city of dreams.

Finally we took a stroll through the park by the lake, where we stumbled upon this, the worlds' first solid-state overdrive pedal, made in 1812 by a local crank named Wolfgang Driestuck, whose other inventions included the water-proof grandfather clock, the steam-powered "female comforter" and the wizard bong.

Anyway, to cut to the chase, we ended up having a pretty fun night in Zurich. The show was poorly attended, partially because both Best Coast and The Bloody Beetroots were in town and syphoning off any individual under 40 who gave a shit about, y'know, going to see bands and stuff.

So at least half the audience at our own spectacular concert were strange, spectacled, middle-aged men who all went completely berserk as soon as the music started. They danced like chickens on meth, screaming constantly in German and spilling big glasses of gin all-over the floor.

No-one knew where they came from, but they were enthusiastic, so I took them at face value and tried not to be disappointed at the complete absence of loose, trashy hipster girls and high-powered booking agents in the crowd. The road is, as I've said before, long and winding.

Note the copy of Cosmopolitan, in case of technical issues.

Summit busted out some carefully crafted pop numbers, and it was a rare treat to see Julian (a gifted drummer) bashing out the kick and snare patterns on a cheesy old Roland drum machine. They created a nice, warm atmosphere in the room, which we then destroyed with our abrasive, thuggish noise.

On a side note, I was bitterly disappointed at discovering that we had just missed both the renowned Meh Stuff! Metal Festival, showcasing some of the most uh-huh metal talent on the planet...

...and a rare public appearance by Land Uber, one of my Top 5 acts of 2010.

The venue was generous with beer, despite the slim turn-out, so by the time we got back to the mansion I was in a thoroughly obnoxious state. The Baaron had to wrestle me into a broom-cupboard and lock the door to prevent me from doing back-spins on the giant oak dining table and Andy punched me in the solar-plexus after I started singing "Mull of Kintyre" at top volume while he was trying to enjoy a camomile tea.

I remember none of this, but it sounds right, and why would they lie to me anyway?

We are, after-all, serious men with a serious job to do, and making up weird stories about each-others personal behavior is not part of our brief.

Many thanks to Julian and Janos for their generous hospitality.

As we loaded the Galaxy in preparation for our departure from Milan I went through my morning routine of taking all the pilfered sandwich meat and olives out of the pockets of my duffel coat, putting them in a ziplock bag and throwing it into our bloated food hamper.

I had a nagging hunger that morning, and I remembered that at dinner in Metz I had casually swiped 4 whole fried chicken breasts from the Pompidou staff kitchen. They were still sitting in the bowels of the hamper, wrapped in tin-foil, but I was afraid to touch them. A really bad bout of food poisoning can have knock-on effects that will derail an entire week of touring, and I didn't want that on my conscience.

The hamper was less your wholesome wicker number filled with goodness, more a kind of big, plastic half-way house for trans-fats down on their luck.

The hamper was constantly overflowing with cans of soft-drink, stale sweet-breads, miniature Mars bars, potato chips and many bottles of beer. One thing we had learned on our last tour was that hunger and thirst can strike anywhere, at any time, so we saw each free snack platter and complementary buffet breakfast as an opportunity to keep costs down and insure ourselves against deprivation.

 Hi. My name is Ben and this is my good friend and colleague, Baaron Von Cuddles III. Is this zebra carcass yours?

This scavenger mentality is common amongst people "on the road", and is usually the unspoken prerogative of the headline band. If you are going to fuck with that unwritten law and heist, say, a big cheese platter from the back-stage fridge, you have to do it while the headliners are on-stage. But make sure you're not around when they finish, because once they realise what you've done there will be very ugly vibes backstage, and possibly violence. I myself have gone stone-crazy bazonkers with black rage every time we have been the victim of even minor support-act piracy, despite the fact that I am a repeat offender on the other side of the coin.

*******

 Would you remain in the car after someone fed this huge sandwich directly into their gullet, in one piece, like a fucking pelican?
 

Baaron Von Cuddles' eating habits are worth mentioning here, if only because they are another facet of his overall super-humanity.

For days he will eat nothing but a few nuts and seeds, like a parrot, always shrugging and saying he's "not that hungry" when a meal gets laid out. But every so often he will sit down at the dinner table and inhale about 10 kilograms of pasta or rice salad in under 10 minutes. It is a hideous spectacle.

The first time Andy saw this happen, at dinner in Lucern, he was so sickened and disturbed by watching such a massive volume of food disappear inside The Baarons skeletal body that he fled outside and threw-up in the snow. After that he took to eating by himself, which suited us fine.

 

My own habits were far more predictable. I saw every free meal as a once-in-a-lifetime golden opportunity, and ate like a stray dog locked overnight in an abattoir. I would also stash left-overs in my bass-case and swipe things from the plates of venue staffers while they were in the toilet. The net result of all this was that as the tour went on The Baaron looked exactly the same as when we left England while I was blowing up like a balloon. 

 Computer simulation of bass-player weight gain over 3 weeks.

Furthermore, because Cuddles was doing all the driving, I was free to sit in the passenger seat and drink massive quantities of beer during each days drive. Within an hour of setting forth I would be obnoxiously drunk, singing and farting in the car and writing long piss-poems in the snow at every fuel stop.

This too had an expanding effect on my waist-line and I was rapidly becoming a social embarrassment and a PR liability. Everyone knows that guys in Indie bands are supposed to be pale, anaemic spectres, like Von Cuddles. But now people I'd never met before were making "when are you expecting?" jokes and only creepy, nerdy boys would talk to me after the shows.

*******

It made me reflect on the Goode Olde Days, back in Australia, when my friends in successful bands would return from Europe with wild tales about being fed like prize-winning pigs, for free, by the venues. I would screw up my face and tell those sleazy liars to fuck off with their crazy tour-yarns.

 For me, the concept of venue catering lived in the same universe of flimsy horse-shit as original sin, the cheque that's "in the mail" and the Loch Ness monster.

It was totally inconceivable. You could play for ten years in all manner of venues "down under" and never even be offered a dish-rag to suck on behind the monitor desk, let alone a fine home-cooked meal, with salad and dessert!

Stitching the Melbourne to Brisbane run together with shows in places like Albury, Wollongong and Coffs Harbor was a kind of brutal, crash diet. You'd usually get a ten dollar per-diem, with which you were expected to do whatever was necessary to keep your body up and running. But that tenner would disappear at the first fuel stop, on a pack of Peter Styvesent reds and a can of Coke and after that it was all about will-power, shutting out the deep, volcanic gurgles rising up from your knotted stomach.

The very idea that I would one day gain 8 kilograms in the first 20 days of a tour was complete nonsense, a fish-tale dreamt up by the same giddy water-heads who think that if you have a song on the radio you must be rich. 

But there you have it. If the venues had thrown in free packs of Camel lights and chewing gum I wouldn't have spent a single cent on the whole tour, except on that 2 euro beanie I bought in Gothenburg to stop my scalp freezing and peelingoff my skull like old wallpaper.

To summarise, having a full tour-tummy is not really an issue on "the continent", unless you set out to make it one, for personal reasons.

I wish I had.

Full and frank disclosure is the keystone of this groundbreaking blog, as my legion of 6 dedicated readers will surely testify. There is no tale too humiliating or painful to The Baaron that I would not record it, for posterity, in all it's festering details.

But fate struck me a savage blow over the weekend, when my secretary, Mariana - who has faithfully ghost-written all my posts based on scrawled notes and boozy dictation - handed me her resignation.

As you can see, as well as being a gifted writer and a wizard with personal finance, Mariana is a circus trained contortionist and can also play tenor-sax like a fucking tiger!

She said it was the atmosphere in the office that had been getting to her. She told me I was a sad, bitter old tick and that she could feel her youth and vitality being sucked away every minute that she spent in my company.

So she has gone back to the accounting job at the Baghdad, where we first met a year ago at my old freind Ramon Guiterez Callabres Gonzagas´ bucks-night (which made the morning papers, for all the wrong reasons).


So nowI'm left to try and replicate her mean, snobbish style on my own, with my left arm encased in plaster and my eyes swollen and bloodshot from crying.

The famous Sala Bagdad, just off Avenuda Paralell, near the Apolo. A fine establishment, but their tax returns are a mess.

Well, enough of that bullshit. I just wanted to provide some background on why in this post I'll be whipping out a snappy, capsule account of our gig in Milan, rather than the usual long, reeking essay of shame.

The gig in Milan was our last support slot for the 65 Days Of Static Boys, who had also hosted us in Eindhoven and Lucern. For The Baaron and myself it was our ninth consecutive day of driving and playing, so both of us were exhibiting clear signs of mental and physical erosion. 

The Tunnel. Look at the size of that fucking ball!

The venue was a converted railway tunnel right in the metro-centre of Milan, run by a  ginger-haired giant who managed to radiate calm authority while at the same time looking like an alcoholic lumber-jack. The venues most outstanding feature, in my eyes, was it´s disco-ball, which was among the largest and, umm, sparkle-iest I´ve seen.


But the part of Milan it was located in struck me as a bleak maze made of dog-shit and concrete populated by sleazy young Arab thugs and elderly winos. So between sound-check and stage-time I crawled into the back of the Galaxy and slept, rather than wander through the rain with Andy and The Baaron to find a kebab stand.

Sort of like this, only with a whole lot more dogshit and sequined Dolce Y Gabbana ski vests.

The show itself was unremarkable, for us. The crowd was clearly just marking time until the 65s´hour-long romatic crescendo kicked off. They seemed to view us with the kind of interest you would pay to a bad car crash, or a dying horse. 
My clearest memory of the night is sitting in mournful drunkenness beside the mixing desk and watching a hoard of Italians in puffy, wet-look parkas buying thousands of euros worth of 65 DOS merchandising.

I have no memory at-all of the scuffle with 65s' tour manager as we were loading out, but I'm told that I grabbed him by the throat after he made some off-hand comments about my personal appearance. Apparently everyone was confused by my behaviour except The Baaron, who knew how I felt about that smug, weasely scumbag. 

Anyway, no-one was hurt, and I was so obviously out of my mind with fatigue and booze that the whole thing got written off as a routine outbreak of tour-angst.

 A picture that says a thousand words. Bloated, angry bass player chain-smokes and wonders where it all went wrong while lean, alert guitarist bones up on Tolkien.

I should probably go into some detail about the bad scenes at our hotel, where The Baaron almost got us beaten and ejected by in-house heavies for cooking two-minute noodles on a fire he built in the bathroom sink. 


But honestly, this is the best I can do until I get a new secretary.

I'm almost completely helpless. I just can't think straight, my huge piles of reciepts are in total disarray and the cast on my arm doesn't come off for another 3 weeks.

Anyone interested in applying for Marianas´ position should contact me via the Civil Civic Facebook page. I´ll be starting interviews on Tueday morning.

*******

Our day began with time to kill, so the three of us settled into a few hours of lazy tourism in what has to be one of the most absurdly pretty/obscenely wealthy towns on the planet, Lucern, Schwiez Reich.
Who knows what dark wealth paved the streets here. Nazi plunder, blood diamonds, Arab dictators, Belgian King Leoplold II's gore drenched rubber profits. They've all played their part, no doubt.

Kooky old Leo became fantastically wealthy by turning the entire Congo delta into an open air labour camp run by psychotic goons who chopped babies up for fun. So he remains admired as a no-nonsense businessman by many key patrons of the modern Swiss banking industry.

 

But I'll get into all that soon enough, when I tell you about my attempt to track down Richard Pearles' secret accounts in Zurich. For now, let's just look at some pretty pictures.

Waking up in the morning in a strange apartment with a throbbing skull is a whhooole different thing when this is what you see out the window.

 Lake Lucern. Dirty, ugly and depressing.

It was against this picturesque backdrop that we tooled away the luncheon hours, following Andy around on his quest to buy "a nice scarf". The brutally expensive but understated menswear stores that litter the streets of most Swiss towns are like catnip for Inglis. He will happily spend all day frowning at displays of argyle socks, if time allows.

It's funnier if you imagine him saying it with a Scottish accent.

Well, why not? At this time his meal-ticket (revered London venue The Luminaire) was being squeezed out of existence by dark forces beyond his control. So under the circumstances I was surprised that he could concentrate on anything at-all.

Meanwhile I was feeling increasingly uncomfortable being out in public. Every single person on the street was sickeningly healthy and rich, while I was dirty, tired and broke. My fragile self-esteem was cracking up fast and even The Baaron was getting tired of feeling, in context, like some sort of foreign hobo.

So we hitched our wagon and drove off into the postcard Swiss countryside, listening to Andy yarn about the foxy little sales-girl who gave him "the look" while he was modelling a nice pure-wool tartan number, and the wretched, degrading things he would have done to her if he'd gotten her alone.

*******

We were on our way to a mega-venue on the outskirts of Aarau, called Kiff (which is Deutsche slang for smoking bannana peel). Perhaps I can cut down the blather quotient in this post by listing some of Kiffs' outstanding qualities in point form. To whit...

• Generous, tasty catering on-site.
• Big, meaty sound-system and alert, skilled tech-staff.
• Seemingly unlimited free booze.
• Big, comfy back-stage with adjacent bunk room for overnight stays.
• Chunky home-stereo speakers bolted to the roof in the backstage toilet so you can hear what's cooking on the main stage. 

 

 Any venue makes it possible for the "I just want to take a long shit and read the paper" crowd to listen to the band in comfort goes straight to the top of my list.

 Any venue where this guy asks you if you'd like a bottle of Highland Park in addition to 6 crates of boutique beer is just, y'know, off the fucking chart.

But the thing that really made our night was the punters. We were forced to abort our first song half way through, due to off-stage technical issues. But instead of the awkward, shuffling silence that I expected from the crowd while the bugs got ironed out they hooted and jeered and wolf-whistled like whiskey-drunks at a cockroach-fight. That set the tone, and thenceforth they grooved spastically to our beats and sent up a barrage of appreciative noise after every song that almost made me weep.
 

 Von Cuddles was complaining that his guitar "feels, like, really heavy tonight" and spent most of the show folded in half, like a big pair of barbecue tongs.

...as you can see here I shot him up with an anti-inflammatory  mid-show and he managed to straighten up a bit.

 Ooooohhhh, you boxy, boxy, little box, you. Gimme a kiss.

Hello. My name is Ben and I'm 9 years old. I play electric bass guitar in a pop group! It's exciting and lots of fun but sometimes it's too loud and I get a headache.

It was a fine experience, blasting our klang at these noisy, goofy, fun-loving volk, and we left the stage as giddy as kittens. So naturally we then both proceeded to become slobbering, staggering drunk.
I have no clear memories of the rest of the night, but at some point Inglis went to sleep on a couch in the back-stage area while The Baaron and I eventually weaved into the bunk room and passed out.

*******

I woke up around 11am the next morning, and while I was dragging my putrid jeans on I noticed that a there was a third person in the room whom I didn't recognise. In one of the spare beds, sleeping peacefully, was a crushingly pretty young woman.

She looked so pale, so innocent and vunerable, lying on her back with her breath whistling softly in the heavy silence and her fine, blonde hair splayed like a halo across the pillow. I was mesmerised. Who was she? Was she already there when we went to bed? Did one of us, y'know, "make out" with her? 

Before I knew what I was doing I was kneeling beside her bed and my face was about 3 inches away from hers. 

 Artists rendering of what was going on in my misty, mushy brain.

But I was startled out of my reverie by the The Baaron hissing urgently at me from his bed.

"Get the fuck away from her, Green. Are you still drunk?"

I straightened up and took a step back.

"Mind your own business, Cuddles." I hissed back. "I was just checking her eye-flutter patterns, to see if she was dreaming. Is this your doing?"

He shook his head and yawned, laying his head back down on the pillow.

"Just leave her alone." He muttered. "Don't make trouble".

But I was fascinated by this precious, waif-ish creature that had stolen into our room in the chilly dawn hours to rest with us, and despite myself I moved back in for another close inspection. She was so beautiful, so fine, and she smelled of shampoo and jasmine.

At that very instant the girls eyes snapped open and she jerked upright like a puppet being yanked on a string. She ripped out a blood-freezing shriek and her fist shot out like a tiny cannon-ball, hitting my cheek square-on. I stumbled backwards, tripping over The Baarons clothes-bag and landing hard on my tail-bone. 

Then suddenly, with sickening speed, The Baaron leaped out of bed like a giant ape and kicked me hard in the kidneys before I could stand up.

 "It was fucking terrifying, man. This really pale, skinny guitarist just fucking materialized and started tearing me apart!"

"Pervert! Child-toucher!!" He screamed and tried to kick me again, but I rolled up onto my feet and scuttled out of reach. Meanwhile the girl fled, out through the back-stage room and down the stairs towards the exit. She'd been fully clothed under the covers, but her sneakers and her hand-bag were still sitting on the floor next to the bed.

Von Cuddles picked up one of the sneakers and bounced it off my forehead.

"Great, Green!" He snarled. "Now we're fucked. She's going straight to the cops"

"Bullshit!" I snapped "I was just looking. There's no law against that."

"How the fuck do you know?" He yelled, flapping his hands and spraying spittle. "Look at what happened to Julian Assange! This isn't Collingwood! For christs' sake, chewing gum is illegal in Singapore, and you can be locked up forever in the Emirates, just for owning a dog!!"

He slumped back onto his cot and covered his face with his freakishly large hands.
"When they come for us I'll have to tell them the truth about you. Your history!" He moaned. "I can't sit back and watch my life get flushed down the toilet, just because you can't respect other peoples personal space."

I would have argued with him, but at that point Andy wandered into the room, looking sharp and refreshed and ready for breakfast.
"Hoo was tha' birrd?" He asked cheerily. "Shee loooked laike a goode piece!"

*******

Well, we never found out who that girl was. We left her stuff where she'd abandoned it and piled into our Ford Galaxy with all the left-over snacks and beer we could find.
Sound-check in Milan was at 6pm, and we didn't want to hurry through the alps.

*******

Seriously huge props to the Kiff staff and patrons. Additional live photography courtesy of Gar Photos.

I remember a short, boozy conversation I had with the cruel and devious Andy Inglis shortly after he had agreed to become our "Encourager" (a term he coined himself, because the word "Manager" raises painful boils on his neck).

He told me about a side-gig he had going, lecturing at a performing arts college on the subject of the Music Industry. I believe the unit he taught was actually called Music Industry Studies, or something equally nauseating.

"My god." I mumbled, shaking my head. "That's fucking awful. What do you tell those poor kids?".

He shrugged and refused to make eye contact.

"I tell them the truth." He said.

I was shocked. What sort of institution would employ a known misanthrope like Inglis to take a room full of dense but ambitious 18 year-olds and systematically shit all-over their most cherished dreams?

"How do they take it?" I asked after an uncomfortable pause.

He just screwed up his face and started fiddling with his cuff-links. He didn't answer the question.

This is a slightly sideways lead into the topic I actually want to discuss today, the dreaded Cinderella Syndrome.

There is a certain kind of limited schizophrenia that will grow like a tumor in the brain of any sensitive person who tours on the particular limbo-level where we (CC) are currently operating. It is dictated by circumstance, and is therefore fairly predictable in it's movements, but not it's effects. 

  

Some people can jockey it like a cheap carnival ride, because in the end it is just as temporary and meaningless and if you're lucky it won't even cost you any money. But fools will be swung high and low by it's long arm.

Try it out.

There will be nights when that rotten pumpkin you've been driving around in will turn into a golden carriage without you even noticing. Looking like an animated pile of cold shit in tight jeans, you will wander up to reception at a ritzy hotel that you could never afford to stay in on your own resources and the clinically sexy young woman behind the desk will smile as she hands over your room key, and you will suddenly be gripped by the idea that she wants you.

Yes. It's so clear to me now. I have beaten the system. These people know in their hearts that I am loaded and famous and more talented than Da Vinci. There is no other way to explain why I'm here at-all, stinking and ashing in the potplants and making the other guests uncomfortable.

Fluffy white towels, artfully recessed lighting, movies on demand, miniature Glennfidichs, washing your putrid socks in a designer sink and admiring your blackheads in gigantic, spotless mirrors. 

"I thought you said soundcheck was at seven-thirty. 
Well okay, let me finish this."

Then it's off to the big, slick venue where they feed and water you like a trophy-winning racehorse  and where an alert, black-clad tech with a Mini-Maglite will suddenly appear, ready for anything, if you so much as frown during soundcheck. You wander around the big stage like some sort of electrified aristocrat, looking for a spot where the sound isn't quite right, but you don't find one! 

"Uh, Frank, can I get a little bit more ME in the sidefill?"

Then more fine booze, a boutique meal backstage, random people telling you how infectious your latest single is and then it's back on-stage to strut around and revel in your own magnificent noise. The seething masses of arch-hipsters howl and weep and tear at their well curated outfits and throw big rocks of MDMA and old iPhones at you.

Aaaaahhhh...The POWER!

The glow can easily last another 24 hours, until you turn up at some greasy little brick box on a filthy side-street in an ugly University town to play first-on to a gaggle of talentless nose-piercings for 30 euros and a spot on the promoters rancid living-room floor.

The sound-system is pure shit, the house engineer resents your very existence and the borderline-retarded drummer from the "headline act" steals your six-pack of domestic beer right in front of your eyes. 

 Remember that community center gig in Krakow, where that creepy middle-aged covers band pushed us around and took our sandwiches? And that junkie midget kicked me in the balls and you got food poisoning and while you were vomiting in the carpark the cops picked you up because they thought you were a dangerous foreign drunk and I had to spend the entire fuel budget for the tour getting you out of jail? Well, they've invited us back.

A handful of stale potato chips, a brief line-check to allow the house engineer to make absolutely sure you sound like wet turd and then rip into it. Half an hour of criminally wasted effort trying to win over the twelve teen-age beer-drunks that are standing like statues of pure contempt at the back of the room. 

 

But they hate you for wasting their time with your silly racket, for using up valuable oxygen before the local boys can take over and play their badly disguised My Chemical Romance covers while their whorish, emaciated girlfreinds gyrate in front of the speakers and their mongoloid, tribal-tattooed buddies nod along seriously to the beat. Oh God, the horror.

But it's not over yet. You are stuck there, until these walking bags of premature senility are finished and a hair-gelled afterbirth deejays chill-house for 3 hours. It is a grinding eternity before the bar closes and the lights go on and your 30 euros gets doled out like kidney-stones by the surly bar-manager, who somehow makes you feel like you are stealing from him.

Then you peel the rain-sodden parking tickets off the windshield and drive to some tiny, reeking apartment where you must be vocally grateful for the luxury of curling up on the greasy carpet to cry yourself to sleep while a three-legged dog snarls at you from a dark corner and the promoter sits next to your head playing Call Of Duty and sucking bongs until 8am. 

 "Just make a space, guys. I'm gonna stay up for a while."

Strong minds have been shattered by far less stark reversals of fortune, and remember that this one has happened in less than 48 hours!

So it takes a peculiar kind of mental flexibility and a queasy vacuum in the soul to not only cope with this sort of existential whiplash but actually get a quirky boot out of it.

Well, I possess those qualities, and so does my shredding colleague, Baaron Von Cuddles. That's why small samples of our DNA are on file at a private facility in Denmark, and are being diligently combed for the mutant gene that will one day deliver a marketable drug which will be hugely popular among bankers and traders when the freak tides of finance suck their multi-billion dollar sand-castles away into nothing overnight.

Cruel Fate will be left punching at thin air and it's victims will just giggle and roll their eyes and move on to other things. Then we will be the billionaires, me and The Baaron, and we will pay to play un-promoted Monday night support slots at suburban youth centers in Tashkent, just for kicks.

In the meantime, please stay tuned to this fine, righteous blog as we continue to feature "30 Nights Of Bushweek", the only live-music journal on the interweb that brings the diseased chickens of the Cinderella Syndrome home to roost in your tender brain.

You're welcome.

"Your everyday Nervous Breakdown is nothing compared to the hopeless Craziness of a man who woke up as a Prince and goes to bed as a Toad....if you don't go insane from suddenly having to see everything in the world from a point only two inches high, your brain will surely be churned into cream by having to crawl, head-first, with your eyes open, down a muddy hole in the ground just to have a place to sleep."

Hunter Stockton Thompson, Doctor of Divinity

 1937 - 2005.