Apologies for relentlessly spamming you with Kamerakino related posts but if any of you are Nottingham based and are around this friday I would strongly advise you to get down to Liars Club at Chameleon for a shit hot triple bill of unparalleled awesomeness!
PONYTAIL!
KAMERAKINO!
GENTLE FRIENDLY!
..and there's only only room for 80 of you in there.
Kamerakino play their debut London and indeed, UK show this thursday at the Macbeth in Hoxton (some of you saw us play there a couple of months back).
You can get a copy of the new album "Munich Me Mata" NOW! on spectacular full colour vinyl from Rough Trade.
My advice to you is to go out and buy it today, listen to it nonstop, go see them on Thursday and Friday and Saturday and finally at Barden's Boudour on Sunday night.
Defo one of my favourite venues in London, it's underneath a Turkish Restaurant on Kingland Road, toilets are a bit grotty but it's great wee space.
Is it just me or is anyone else massively superstitious about magpies, like when you see one (one for sorrow) you have to salute them to deflect the bad luck that it's projecting onto you.
And 2 magpies is good luck, so you don't have to salute there or call out "Hello Mr Magpie" and have strangers turn to you and say,
"Sorry?"
and you have to say,
"Sorry, I was talking to that magpie there."
Adele from Sons and Daughters says you don't have to salute or call out if you're looking at them from behind glass, like through a window or a windscreen, so I took her word for it and that's saved me a bit of time and trouble.
I picked this superstition up from a guy that used to kip on my sofa, he won't let you walk on the other side of a lamppost or telegraph pole either without saying "bread and butter" afterwards.
Arrived in Tallinn this afternoon and collected off the plane, in a minibus and thrown straight into a surreal press conference, which are weird at the best of times without the sleep deprivation.
We met the organiser of Ollesummer, the festival we are to play tomorrow evening, who was a little frustrated at the journalists beer related questioning.
"Do you like Beer?"
"What do you think of Estonian beer?"
"What is Scottish beer like?" (we mentioned Tennents, one of them actually wrote it down)
and my favourite " Word has it that you requested only Vodka on your rider, don't you realise this is a beer festival?"
So I can't tell if Ollesummer is a beer festival or an arts festival, I think they'd rather I said it's an arts festival, so just so you know, it's DEFINITELY an arts festival but you can probably buy beer there but it's DEFINITELY not a beer festival, OK?
I'm easy-osey. I like both.
I love Northern Europe.
Iceland, Shetland, Scotland, Norway.
Tallinn has the best qualities of all those cities. Nice fresh climate, rainy, smells good. We all wandered down to the Old Town, very nearly getting right royally fleeced on the cobbles a couple of times. It's like a Medieval theme park down there, the shop assistants are all in costume and the streets smell of cinnamon and musk one minute and suckling pig the next.
We're going out to medieval themed restaurant later. I hope it's like the place where Jim Carey takes Matthew Broderick in Cable guy, with jousting and no cutlery and everything. That would be cool.
Just arrived.
In a hotel with air conditioning next to the motorway, miles away from the city centre, everyone in our party is exhausted, we have yet to adapt to touring and I'm reticent about heading into town on my own, so I'll aquaint myself with Serbian popular culture by tanning the minibar and logging on.
I needn't even have left the house!
Outside I can see a lot of nice Soviet era boxy automobiles piling down the highway, so I guess I'd be missing that if I was still in Glasgow.
Here's "Kalashnikov" by Goran Bregovich, a lively bit of oom-pah about a machine gun, overseen by a Tony Wilson lookalike in a cream linen suit.
Following on from my post on the myspace blog about the Corby Trouser press, here's some Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band recorded for the Colour me Pop TV show in the early 70s. The Bonzo's had a song called "Trouser Press" which, to my knowledge features the only recorded trouser press solo in the history of popular music.
Incidentally their vocalist, the late Vivian Stanshill was the onetime
owner of the Thekla in Bristol, a boat which now houses a music venue
and a restaurant moored on the River Avon ( I think) in Bristol, where
we played 2 nights ago. We..ahem.."rocked" it that night.