30 Nights Of Bushweek - Milano

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.