2012 - Land Of Opportunity

Well, The Last Year is well and truly underway and here at CC HQ we are in the grip of feverish, white-knuckled excitement and raw enthusiasm for the doomed months ahead.

Our booking-agent/life-coach/sorority-figure Almond The God has started a campaign of full bore harassment and personal abuse aimed at concert promoters Europe-wide and we're expecting that to bear some pretty plump and dripping fruit. So if you are a European concert promoter and you don't mind a bit of "agro", get in touch with her at amande@julietippex.com and make an offer. A fucking big offer, with lots of perks and some subtle hints about chicks and drugs and after-parties in converted bank-vaults filled with water-foul and ottomans and bouncers in gold lame suits. Baby.

Our ruthless, throat-slitting representative. Drop her a line.

Moving right along....

The transitional period over Christmas and the New Year was packed full of so much strange and disturbing action that I hesitate to blog the worst of it. But full disclosure is, after-all, one of my many middle names, so let's revue the catalogue of humiliation.

Shortly before Christmas the well known guitar wrangler and obnoxious misfit Baaron Von Cuddles III was forced to flee England after CCTV footage came to light that clearly showed him burning, looting and fighting his way through east-London, painfully alone and a full month after the end of the summer riots.

A lone, masked Cuddles strides purposefully through his own carnage.

A hastily formed "Baaron Squad", deployed atDalston junction in response to growing community alarm.

His frenzied efforts to retain legal counsel came to nothing, with even notorious ambulance-chasers refusing to return his panicky, high-pitched phone-calls.
So there was nothing else to do. He scrawled a crazed goodbye note for his fiancé and caught a cab straight to Heathrow airport where he boarded the first available flight to Sydney.

We haven't had alot of contact from him, but last report had him picking strawberries near Perth and playing in a Waylon Jennings covers band on the weekends. He's banging some shrewish, middle-aged real-estate agent and is back on the bong in a serious way, but he seemed upbeat and focused in our last telephone conversation. It'll be nice to have him back when the heat dies off.

Back in Barcelona my own personal life turned into a fireball of rage, humiliation and torment when it became clear that the light of my life, disgraced aristocratic French super-model the Lady Alexandra Cecile Bouche, had been having simultaneous affairs with 16 of the top 20 Spanish tech-house deejays as well as two members of the Catalan parliament and a dentist called Ron.

So I set fire to her fucking couch, laughed while the flames licked the ceiling of her shitty uptown appartment, stole all her underwear and went into weepy, boozy, lights-off seclusion, only emerging briefly on New Years Day to shake my fist at the sky and curse the cruel and pitiless God who had sent my immortal soul down to this wretched Earth to suffer in the body of a bald, confused bass-player.

But just when I'd managed to scrape up enough sleeping pills to get the dirty job done once and for all, I received an urgent email from Germany that demanded immediate action.

It read.....

Dear Fuck-knuckle,

Danny has contracted Type C Pendelsons disease from a rare Adverts 10" sent to him by one of his "pen-friends". He's out of the picture, so get your stupid arse on a plane.
The gig is on thursday 5th and don't even think about trying to weasel out of it.
You owe us bigtime, scumbag.
Bigtime.

Sincerely,
Cevapcici Allin.
Rex Report Deejays.

Ye Godz! Was it true? Danny Rex out of action with one of the least photogenic tropical skin diseases known to science? Little me to fill his size 19 shoes at the first Rex Report party for oh-twelve?? Really??? Fuck off!

Check the playlist...and check the merch on that guy.

Danny and Cevapcici are of course the infamous Rex Report Deejays, possibly the most dangerous and encyclopaedically learned power-pop deejay team in Western Europe. No fucking around.

Cevapcici in more innocent times, riffing for The Go Faster Nuns.

They operate out of a fine hole-in-the-ground called Morph Club in the sickeningly picturesque town of Bamberg (Upper Franconia, Deutschland) and they are known for running a tight ship.

Bamberg is a fine tourist destination, especially if you are a dribbling, stumbling beer-drunk like me. It has a reputation (inside Germany, motherfucker) for having some of the best breweries in the Reich, and having personally investigated this reputation for excellence I have no problem backing it up. They know what the fuck they are doing when it comes to the liquid gold, brother. For real.

Vivaaaaaa, box Vegas!! The Box performs a solo set, Morph Club, Nov '11.

Back in the mists of November 2011 CC had performed a musical concert at the Morph Club, Bamberg, and that terrible night was such a swamp of shocking personal conduct and anti-social button-pushing on my part that I thought I would never be rid of the shame of it.

But here was an opportunity to redeem myself! Sub for Danny Rex at the first Rex Report party for 2012 and regain my goode standing in the fine towne of Kapowberg!

Sold!!

Upon arrival at the Bamberg bahnhof I was met in person by Cavapcici and a steely eyed whip-of-a-man called Andi Mauthbert, the taciturn head of the feared Morph Club security detail, who double as a brutal vigilante squad keeping the scum out of Bamberg's tourist district . 

They put a black bag over my head and hustled me to one of Bambergs' many famous breweries, to eat pork and drink huge mugs of thick, black vollbier that tasted like pork. They removed the bag so I could eat and drink, but when I tried to make small-talk Andi slapped my face hard and told me to shut my "scabby Australian wurst-hole". 

 Andi "The Turk" Mauthbert at a Morph Club security training camp, August '09.

"You're still on probation here, Green." He snarled, rapping his fathers scimitar on the table. "You just concentrate on not pissing us off and everything will be fine. Are you going to eat that crackling?"

Pork, dumplings and porky beer.

My visit even got a brief mention in the local newspaper.

So I let him take the bit of crackling, shifted my attitude onto the back foot and tagged along mute for the rest of the night as we visited a handful of the awesome, woodsy, knee-slapping booze-holes around the Olde Towne of Kablamberg. Once we were all full to the neck with porky black beer they let me start talking again and the whole vibe loosened up a great deal. It was a congenial night and I have no memory of how it ended, but since there was no blood, vomit or semen in my hair when I woke up the next day (in the furnished apartment which the Morph Club rents for visiting "artists") I figured it must have all been pretty harmless fun. Please God.

So I took my shocking, coal-black, five-tonne hang-over for a long, long walk around the gingerbread streets of Kaboooomberg. I felt like a normal tourist, despite my poverty and psychological imbalance, but I must have looked wretchedly sick and desperate, because apart from Bambergs few street-beggars (who pointed and laughed) everyone gave me a wide berth and greasy, crab-wise looks of contempt and disgust.

Here are some randomised snaps of stuff what I saw......

So the hours flew by, dum didle-dee dum, until night came down and it was time to go to fucking work, down in the dark, pathless bowels of Morph Club.

It turned out that (on the QT) Cevapcici had recruited another storied Bamberg spinner, Zeppo Bemsch, to round out the line-up and safeguard the night against any lameness, hackness or just plain badness on my part. Perhaps he'd heard from Jonk "Jonas" Haglund about that set I did in Gothenburg, when I played "Raining Blood" and "Lose My Breath" back to back, over and over and over again until the crowd physically removed me from the booth and threw me out into the snow. Who knows, but Zeppo proved to be another intimidating fountain of 12" knowledge and taste, despite her protests about being "just a bar deejay".

Zeppo and Cevapcici hanging tough.

So since the booth was so chock full of talent I decided that the best thing for me to do was to become slobberingly, sub-humanly drunk and fail miserably to hit on girls, while occasionally stepping back up to spin something uncontroversial, just to keep up my end. 

Bambergers start turning up and digging in.

This proved an excellent plan, and I only wish I could remember how swimmingly well it worked out for all concerned. The important thing was that the world famous Rex Report happened, and although the crowd was obviously edgy and disturbed by Dannys' absence it didn't stop them from drinking like convicts or dancing like assholes, so we all declared the bullet dodged and went to bed happy.

Can you say the same??

Uummmmmm.....

The next afternoon, while I was trying to push chunks of my vomit down the kitchen sink with a chop-stick, I received a text message from Cevapcici saying my debt was paid and that I should "fuck off back to Spain immediately" before I did something to ruin the shaky truce. So I dragged on my reeking, greasy jeans, stuffed my personal effects into a plastic bag and sprinted full-tilt to the train station.

No-one tried to stop me.

All in all, it was an excellent break in the routine of shame and failure that is my life, and I am eternally grateful to all concerned for making it possible. So I'm calling for big, hoarse, wake-up-the-neighbours-and-throw-rotten-plums-at-the-cops style shout-outs for...Armin, Andi, Zeppo, DaCoxi, Gunther and all the other fine Kapowbergers who made me feel so welcome.

Kisses on all your sweet faces.