When I woke up in my own bedroom after six long weeks on the CC Special a wave of relief washed over me that was so profound and physical that it literally paralysed my brain for about four hours and left me slow-witted and forgetful for days.

But after a week or so of pottering around my apartment in a bath-robe normality had well and truly reasserted itself, and along with it a vague, cloying sense of disappointment and longing for the various manic kicks and satisfactions of the road.

Suddenly I felt like a water-headed teenager from some dust-farm berg, so desperate for new horizons that one summer he goes wild on sugary red wine and runs away with the circus.

He finds a whole new world. Life on the road, big cities, elephants, bi-sexual acrobats and fearless lion-tamers with 3-gram-a-day coke habits. He mucks out the horse-floats and runs the shooting gallery and sneers at the seemingly endless parade of goggle-eyed rubes packing the big-top with their fat children, all ripe to have their pockets picked by the Russian cigar-smoking midget who reads him bed-time stories and tells him he has found his true home.

But after a few months he starts to miss his parents, his bed, his buck-toothed, illiterate girl-friend. You know, the little things. He pauses while scooping up mounds of gently steaming elephant poop and leans for a moment on his shovel, staring whistfully into the blank blue sky. His thoughts drift back in time and space to home. Home. Home.
 

Then, one night the Ringmaster and his amiable three-breasted wife invite the kid out to a bar for a few stiff drinks and some friendly talk about his bright future with the troupe, and the last thing he remembers is that strange, charismatic old man leering at him over a glass of black rum.

Then he wakes up, dumped like a bag of garbage right back on his parents doorstep at five in the morning on a teusday- no wallet, no shoes - in the middle of a blinding hail-storm.

Next day he is sitting back in school with his slack-jawed, hay-seed class mates who now treat him like some sort of freakish cross between a convicted rapist, a mythical beast and a failed entrepeneur. He reflects on the totality of his personal journey into the unknown and he realises it was all a kind of technicolor bullshit. 

The angst and itchy adventurism that launched him into the world was just as much of a trojan horse as the weepy nostalgia and insecurity that made him long for home. That big wooden horse was full of lazyness and fear. None of it made any sense or served any purpose at-all.

There is a point to all this drivel, by the way. I'm just working out what it is.
Wait......it's coming.....

Well, I suppose this is all just a bloated, wide angled way of repeating that old saw "You Can't Go Home Again". The routine sense of displacement and the constant, grating anticipation of a return to normality that sets in towards the middle of a long tour are things that you can learn to miss, no matter how perverse it may seem at the time.

It's not so strange, really. Some people chop their own legs off because of a nagging sense that the legs just don't belong to them. Is it wisdom to hinder these people? Can we really tell them they are wrong?

I suppose we can, but who wants to take responsibility for keeping a close eye on a loved one who really, really, really wants to chop off their own legs? The Reverse-Phantom-Limb crowd make everybody nervous, and why not? They are wierdo royalty. They fly a flag of wierd that makes necrophilia look like a gimmick, a cheap attention grabber. When the forces of wierd turn on each-other and make wierd war for strange supremacy, my money is going on the cats who want to dismember themselves, but have difficulty explaining why.

Oh Christ, what the fuck am I babbling about now? Have all these anti-inflamatories shrivelled my brain down to a little grey nut? Did the bowel churning drones of the MRI machine fry my reason? It may be so, but that's another story.

Fuck it, this is a quasi-humorous, mostly depressing rock'n'roll blog, not a scientific journal. I'll make sense when there's sense to be made and not a moment sooner. Everyone go back to your meals. Nothing to see here.

*******

We had no choice. About an hour into the drive Von Cuddles started showing clear signs of fatigue. Slow reflexes, impaired judgement, uncontrollable giggling ect. 

He hadn't slept a wink at Janos' haunted mansion in Zurich because of what he described as "a sub-human wailing noise" that at times seemed to be coming from outside his window, at others from beneath his bed. Then in Munich he´d stayed up until 5am drinking reisling with the Soft Nerds and passed out in his filthy clothes on the kitchen floor.

The poor fucker was spent, his reserves of creepy, inhuman stamina finally drained. He pulled the Galaxy over at a frozen rest-stop and slumped into the back-seat like a laundry bag full of broken tent-poles.

The cruel and devious Andy Inglis (pronounced Ingles) took the wheel.

Andys' behavior while driving was nerve-shreddingly erratic.
Pointless bursts of acceleration, swerving at invisible obstacles and wandering like a bumble-bee between lanes, all the while fiddling with the mirrors, the stereo, his cuff-links...anything he could get a free hand on. 

The man has as much calm, focused assurance behind the wheel as a weasel on cheap speed, so I just kept reaching back into the hamper for fresh beers so that when the crunch came I would be nice and relaxed for impact.

But the only really dicey moment came late in the drive when we were passing the scene of an accident on the highway. Andy had just started slowing down when an ambulance...a fucking ambulance...lurched onto the road from behind a parked fire engine no more than 15 meters in front of us.

Here´s a team of top-dollar actors re-creating our pant-shitting terror. Isn´t the Baaron cute?

Andy instantly mashed the brake pedal to the floor and the Galaxy lurched and slid and swerved to a halt about 3 feet from the now stationary ambulance. That was when, through a fog of adrenaline, I saw the ambulance driver staring at us. It was a fucking kid, a teenage Czech hillbilly with eyes like cigarette burns in a boiled turkey.

Yep, that kid from Deliverance could sure pick a tune, but would you let him drive you to hospital?

He continued to stare dumbly at us as we passed him, howling abuse and threats and beating the dashboard with our fists. We were all incoherent with rage at this filthy little hay-seed and even more at whatever mind-boggling rural bureaucracy put his drooling arse in the drivers seat of a fucking ambulance!!!

Welcome to the Czech Republic.

Once we hit Prague we drove straight to our hotel. The Baaron and I dealt with reception while Andy drove in circles looking for a parking spot. The Barbie doll behind the desk seemed to be gunning to be the sleaziest receptionist in the entire global hospitality industry.
"Hello boooyyyys." She said with heeeavy emphasis. "Are you the Rat-a-tat?"

A profound question, mademoiselle. Let's retire to my quarters with a bottle of something sweet and get to the bottom of this "Are you the Rat-a-tat" business.

Oooh, ooooh, did I forget to mention our gig was a support for Ratatat? At a massive converted meat factory that housed two concert stages, an art gallery and a community centre? Maybe I did.

But that wasn't why The Baaron was sweating and fidgeting while our room-keys were being doled out. Doctor Yasmine T. Lanbert, his brilliant but trouble prone lawyer fiancé, had flown into Prague that afternoon and was already upstairs in their room, getting hammered on miniature Johnny Walkers and watching ancient Soviet porn on the tube.

Two weeks of bottled up lust was raging like a tornado through Von Cuddles' whip-like frame, and I assume the receptionists' crude, cleavage splaying come-ons were not helping. So once he had that key in his big, sweaty palm he rocketed into the elevator like a burning rat and we didn't see him again until we saddled up for sound-check.

*******

Welcome to The Meet Factory.

Well, I'll spare you the usual blather about the routine confrontations, humiliations and barely averted violent episodes that seem to constitute every soundcheck we've ever had. Suffice it to say that we did, in fact, make it onto the stage and that this gig went straight into the "Top 5 Shows of the Tour" list and stayed there. 

The crowd didn't pull any of the cautious, reserved bullshit that young, fashionable people tend to throw at unknown support acts. They were curious. They wanted to hear what we had up our sleeves and they wanted it to be fun. In other words, they were Czechtastic and we got on like a house on fire.

Baaron Von Cuddles tweaks it for Satan as the crowd screams in ecstacy.

Who could blame them for their curiosity when the Meet Factory flyer described us thus...

"You  gentlemen have created. If  you want to convince our ears, stops on Thursday 18 November to MeetFactory  where reckon receive its Czech premiere. They will be younger number two in Europe Civil  Civic naturalized Australians with post-rock fusion guitar!"

That kind of copy can get even the most jaded scenester out of the house.

Now, I am an angry old man and find todays pop music both frightening and confusing, so I'd never listened to Ratatat before. But I'd seen them used as a point of reference in several articles about us. So I was eager to see them do their thing and make my own comparisons. I already knew they had their Stare-At-Laptop-Ignore-Existence-Of-Support-Band chops honed, but what about the tunes, bru, the jams!?!

Well, they hit the stage to hysterical applause and screaming and weeping from the crowd and ripped into their Dungeons & Dragons infused IDM with great verve. It sounded like an epic battle between Goldfrapp and Manowar, and if I'd had a broadsword at my side (or a big fluffy owl on my head) I would have brandished it aloft during every soaring, harmonised guitar solo. 

Their disturbing, druggy bird-fetish visuals were pretty cool too. Nice work.

Just for the record, I really don't think we have that much in common with them, musically. 
I just can't see anyone storming a castle to one of our "joints".

We are more of a bumper cars/awkward kissing sort of act. 

In summary, it was a good night at the meat factory and did wonders for team morale. The only grumbling came from Inglis, who had fiendish sexual plans for the venue production manager (a tall, elegant, yet strangely vacant young Czechitta) but was brutally "cock-blocked" during the crucial chat-at-the-bar by one of the Ratatat boys. 

And the angels wept.

Non stop fun-times on the Civil Civic express!

 

I'll be keeping this one pretty snappy, folks. I've found a new secretary, but she doesn't start until next week, so I'm still typing with one finger and relying on a mouldy old Roget thesaurus to avoid using the words "awesome" and "shit" to describe every single thing in the world.

But who cares? Let's talk about Munich.

Some gigs just look flat-out wrong on paper.
The Venue?
A community centre/restaurant. (Warning lights begin to flash).
The Accommodation?
Support bands' drummers' house. (Oxygen masks drop from the ceiling).
The Fee?
A...ummm...door deal. (Cabin fills with smoke, engines on fire, people screaming and clawing at each-other).

This is a rough but effective illustration of how I saw the night unfolding.

But it´s in the book, so you go there and you do it. Shut-up.

We dropped Inglis at his hotel and drove to the venue through the wealthy gigantism of Munchen. This is a rich town, an overstuffed seat of old money. Miles of grand public buildings and a big, sleek BMW in every parking space. The trees are already strung with fairy-lights and a berserk, uniquely German Christmas fever is to rip through this grand, brownstone town.

Roasted mushrooms and apfel gluhwein and riding the ferris-wheel at the Weihnacthsmarkt in the bitter cold with your girlfreind while a big, fat ecstasy pill dissolves slowly in your stomach and your parents and relatives scoff bockwerst and check out the carollers, somewhere down there in the awesome, cheesy maelstrom.
Just get through it, man. NYE is going to be fucking mental! Claude Von Stroke and Switch and that acid that Heinrichs' bringing down from Hamburg and .....

ICH BIN SOOOO GEIL!!!!

Shit, what the fuck am I saying now? Forget that last bit. Let's move on.

Sooooo, we arrived at the venue (called Glockenwerkstatt) and had to wait for a while before we could load our shit in, because there was a childrens kapouera class finishing up in the small, box-like room where the gig was being held.

A childrens kapouera class. That is correct.

I rolled my eyes and muttered something poisonous, but the Baaron poked his finger into my chest and demanded better behavior.
"Ne-ga-tive creep!" he hissed. "Why can't you just pretend to be a good-natured, enthusiastic guy, at least in public. If you start laying your doomsday bullshit on these people I swear I will smite thee. Let's get a drink."

*******
The Baaron was right again. This place was actually a little Munchenische treasure chest.
Our drink tickets got us big bottles of rich, brown dunkelweissbier and our food tickets got us some of the best cooking we'd tasted in weeks. The small but powerfull sound system was run by one of the freindliest, most competent guys imaginable, the venue provided a brand new SWR bass amp for me to use and the support band (Soft Nerd) were a bunch of flat-out sweethearts.

 Soft Nerd, keeping the streets safe for....ummmm....something..I forget.

After soundcheck I hid from the Baaron in the toilets and trimmed my nails. Andy went to do some sightseeing and ended up getting locked inside a deserted cathedral for two hours, and Von Cuddles went upstairs to work on his complex scheme to bring all the peoples of the Earth under his rule by 2015.

He explained to me once how the band fitted into the larger strategy, but I was drunk. I just remember him pacing up and down in that hotel room, whacking his thighs and shaking his fists and yelling things like "A golden age lies before us, Green. Do you want a seat at the table? Do you want in?"

Thus the maiden of evening slowly made way for mother night, and our thoughts turned to assaulting a bunch of innocent people with a hideous, screeching racket and making them pay us for doing it.

A small but vocal clutch of Munchener misfits turned up and went stone bazonkers during Soft Nerds' bouncy, poptastic performance. Even the guys danced. Andy was released from his sacred prison by a confused Catholic priest, The Baaron fell in love with a tiny Argentinian girl who was hovering around the merch desk and a pair of young women in outrageous, post-hipster outfits had a full-tilt, friendship-ending screaming match in the middle of our set. It was a hoooot!

But it kept getting better.
The drummer from Soft Nerd (Meikel) got us a secure parking spot near his house, which turned out to be a beautiful, old rambling attic apartment with a cosy bedroom set aside for us. We sat up drinking heavily and cracking wise with the Soft Nerd posse for many hours, The Baaron pontificating on modular synthesis and me sliding gracefully into a drooling stupor. It was like having a crew, ready-mixed.

 My bicycle-nerdness went into turbo-mode when it was revealed that Meikels grandfather was a champion artisanal cyclist back in the thirties.

It was too short. I could have settled into this vibe for a month. Gigs at Glockenwerkstatt with the Nerds every night, fine food, weissbier, lights in the trees and strange girls shrieking blue-murder at each-other in German. Sometimes people and situations cut straight through the stinking fog of cynicism and hatred that I weave about myself and pierce my very heart.

This was one of those times.

Thank-you, Soft Nerd posse, Glockenwerkstatt and Learn To Swim Shows.