a dEUS tour diary

Brussels-London: 2×370km on the Eurostar

This was 12 days ago already, memories aren’t as fresh as they should, but still… Two goodies first: the totally brilliant cover of Assault on Magnus, and the great, noisy Sun Ra.

dEUS - Assault on Magnus - ICA, London, 13.09.2005
dEUS - Sun Ra - ICA, London, 13.09.2005

Took the train in Brussels at 17.01, arrived in London just 1h30 later, got lost on the way to the Generator (cool industrial hostel), had to take a shower and change shirts because once there, I realised my stupid cat had pissed on my laptop backpack, so that the ugly smell I’d noticed before was, well, me. Which means I arrived at the ICA during Cold Sun, having missed Pocket Revolution. That felt a little weird, a bit like popping by to see old friends playing - a delusional impression, as I’m just a crazy fan

ICA: cool venue. It’s located on the Mall, next to Trafalgar Square, in that big Victorian building that connects to the arch in front of the Nelson Column. Not the highly modern building I’d been expecting from an “institute of contemporary arts”. The concert room itself was small, I’d say it could hold 600 people, and despite being sold out, there was plenty of room to stand comfortably. The sound was rather rough, and I think that’s good for a band like dEUS, makes the rock songs even rockier

The concert…. errrrh… bit hard to recall precise memories after two weeks. So I’ll just quote myself from the forum:

«yup. great gig. great atmosphere. LOUD sound. sun ra was indeed the obvious high of the show, best rendition i’ve heard so far! wanted to upload the mp3, but stupid pc at the hostel is so old it doesn’t have usb. pfffft.

other highlights: little arithmetics, which got a wild cheer from the crowd, instant street (ditto - this is the country of pop), and bad timing, which was greatly noisy.

stephen olsdal from placebo was there, i took a stupid fan pic of him and klaas. with flash on. god. how pathetic :)»

The wild cheer stuff then:

And that celebrity pic:

Now, I have to say I was extremely tired from the 3 dEUS gigs I’d seen in Holland the week before, I’d been driving more than 1500km and working in the morning, and going out during the weekend, so I just snapped in London. Felt like going through a haze, and I was acting pretty much like I was drunk and disconnected. So, instead of playing it casually cool with the Placebo guy, or merely leaving him alone, I said hello when he was talking with Klaas and asked if I could take a picture - with the flash on, in a typical amateurish way. You can see that Klaas is saying something to Stephen - that was along the lines of “oh, he’s our webmaster, pretty harmless” or something like that. God.

Ah well - setlist then.

dEUS - ICA, London, 13.09.2005
01 Pocket Revolution
02 Cold Sun of Circumstance
03 Magdalena
04 Little Arithmetics
05 What We Talk About
06 Fell Off The Floor, Man
07 Stop/Start Nature
08 Instant Street
09 If You Don’t Get What You Want
10 The Magic Hour
11 7 Days, 7 Weeks
12 W.C.S.
13 Nightshopping
14 Theme From Turnpike
15 Assault On Magnus (mp3)
—
16 Bad Timing
17 Serpentine
18 The Real Sugar
19 Sun Ra (mp3)
20 Suds & Soda

Brussels-Amsterdam: 2×210km

No MP3 today: the show was a session specially recorded for the TV and the radio, and anyway, my recording sounds very crappy.

Yesterday dEUS played a studio session for VPRO’s 3voor12 at the Desmet Studio’s in Amsterdam. The studio is actually like a small concert venue, with a very nice and cosy bar, and can accomodate 200 people. In order to get in, the lucky winners of the VPRO and dEUS.be competitions had to show a printout of the confirmation mail they’d received - reminded me a bit of check-in at the airport…

The band were supposed to play one hour, from 16:00 to 17:00, but in typical rock’n'roll fashion, they started 20 minutes late. They were introduced by erh… a guy from VPRO I suppose (sorry about my Dutch), who said he was very proud to have dEUS playing, as he’s been a loyal fan since WCS came out. As the venue is very small, we were standing really close to the band, nice to be able to see exactly how they play their instruments. I hadn’t yet paid attention to the fact that Alan plays the guitar at the end of Stop-Start Nature (but erh, you don’t need to be just two meters away to notice that - I got distracted by Klaas’s mad cowbell slamming I suppose.

The crowd’s response was pretty Dutch (sorry guys): interested but just a bit too quiet. I was expecting a bit more wildness from fans who entered a contest to get in… As for the concert itself: the band they played generally well, but it’s obvious that the cameras were making them a little nervous. Tom was very static compared to the second Haarlem gig, which also had to do with the fact that the part of the stage where he was standing wasn’t exactly stable: he compared it to standing on a trampoline… And they had trouble with some songs. Bad Timing still needs a little practice (Alan messed up at the start, and Tom was a bit out of tune at times), as does the new version of If You Don’t, where Mauro & Tom’s guitars sounded a bit out of sync. But apart from that, it was really great, Cold Sun is one hell of a great song played live (they do the quiet outro as well), and What We Talk About is very well received - funny detail: every time, Tom sings “we need a tambourine” and one of the (forgetful) roadies rushes behind the drumkit to play the tambourine.

My friend Alex (founder of the Nameless Webzine, a leading musiczine in Wallonia & Brussels) took a handful of great photos. You can see more on his blog.

After the show, Alan told Arthur and me that there’s a massive subwoofer under the stage, which completely fucked up the monitors’ sound. Especially his, as he plays the bass. Alan - super great guy. Very warm and open, no attitude whatsoever, and absolutely zero taste in shirts, but that can be forgiven.

Setlist:
01 Pocket Revolution
02 Cold Sun of Circumstance
03 What We Talk About
04 Instant Street
05 Fell Off The Floor, Man
06 Stop-Start Nature
07 If You Don’t Get What You Want
08 W.C.S.
09 Magdalena
10 Theme From Turnpike
11 Assault On Magnus
12 Bad Timing

Obviously they didn’t play everything on the setlist - it’s the setlist they’re going to use in London tomorrow. Spoilers!!!

Taina was nice enough to send me some really nice photos from the Thursday gig. This is her blog.

[edited 10.09] And Ruben too! Here’s his blog.

Grigio’s recording of the second Patronaat gig is on Dimeadozen as a torrent (you need to be a member to download it).

dEUS - Patronaat, Haarlem, 08.09.2005

I’ve just found out that my server’s monthly bandwidth allowance of 60Gb means that it can’t be more than 2Gb daily. Which is why the diary was down this evening, as is the whole of hotellounge.com until tomorrow. Bummer. I’ll have to be less generous then. Bummer. Bummer. BUMMER.

[edited 10.9 @ 15:00] Upgraded to 300Gb a month, i.e. 10Gb a day, now if you get hotellounge.com down again I’ll be a very angry man

Chatted a little yesterday with a Dutch bootlegger who uses the same microphone as me but records onto an iRiver mp3 player. He was nice enough to send me his recording of W.C.S., so we could compare which wins, my MD or his mp3 player. Mmmmh… I might just have lost. Listen!

dEUS - W.C.S. (First Draft) - Patronaat, Haarlem, 08.09.2005 (as recorded by Grigio)

Talking of those gadgets… My old MD died last year at the dEUS gig in Luxembourg. This is one of the last things it recorded: [edited] an early [/edited] live outing of Pocket Revolution. Beware - the sound is very hiccuppy

dEUS - Pocket Revolution - den Atelier, Luxembourg, 13.11.2004 (dying minidisc quality)

Obviously I’m not going to all dEUS gigs this autumn. But I’ll be happy to post setlists and pics and reviews and mp3’s for the ones I won’t be attending.

Shove it all to:
j - e - a - n - y - v - e - s (remove all hyphens, this is just a trick to avoid spam) AT hotellounge.com or AT gmail.com (and AT is of course @. Same spam stuff).

nice sign on a haarlem house: it reads “anus for sale” (and no, this isn’t about me. you pig.)

Brussels-Haarlem: 230km x2, 5h on the road
(I’ve written this before)

dEUS - Via - Patronaat, Haarlem, 08.09.2005

Today, the difference was big. There was a crowd. Patronaat was packed, the hall as well as the balcony, people everywhere, that was way cooler than yesterday. Except that the Dutch are tall and my friend Fax (who drove most of the time) isn’t. And that it wasn’t a private try out for a bunch of privileged people, but I prefer to be in the middle of the sweaty pit anyway

And Pocket Revolution was already available today at Patronaat, at € 19.90 for the CD or the double LP (which looks amazing, really does Don Lawrence’s artwork justice).

Among other cool things, Tom said right before Include Me Out that “this is a new song, from our new album which you normally haven’t heard yet, so if you sing along, you’re guilty”. But that’s nothing compared to the utter coolness of ending the main set with Assault on dEUS (that’s Assault on Magnus, but played by dEUS), and then coming back to play an amazingly executed Bad Timing, and then 4 songs whose title starts with an S. Sun Ra was so amazing and really, the ending of the song just begged for Suds & Soda - and Tom shouted to Klaas to get ready for it. Griiiiiin

Then they surprised everyone after The Real Sugar by playing Via, which Tom introduced as an old song they haven’t played for a very long time, even though dEUS did play it in 2002, but who remembers that eh?

Anyway…. 2 hours and 8 minutes. 23 songs. I can’t believe it. This concert left me with the very, very strong impression that this might just be the beginning of their very, very best tour to date. I wanted to take a photo of the big stupid smile on my face, but the battery ran out (stupid: I had a replacement one in my car). Talking of gadgets: I think my iPod is actually burning inside. It’s off the mains, it’s very very hot, it smells of burnt plastic and the screen says it’s charging, even though that’s science fiction. Technology…

Setlist:
01 Pocket Revolution
02 Cold Sun of Circumstance
03 Magdalena
04 Little Arithmetics
05 What We Talk About
06 Instant Street
07 Fell Off The Floor, Man
08 Stop-Start Nature
09 The Magic Hour
10 Include Me Out
11 W.C.S.
12 If You Don’t Get What You Want
13 Nightshopping
14 Theme From Turnpike
15 Assault on dEUS
—
16 Bad Timing
17 Serpentine
18 7 days, 7 weeks
19 Sun Ra
20 Suds &; Soda
—
21 The Real Sugar
22 Via (mp3)
23 Nothing Really Ends

Came back from Haarlem at 3.15, made that post, went to bed a little before 4, lay awake for about one hour, woke up at 8, and today I have this fantastic (erm) training session. I want my bed.

There I’ll go, then: Haarlem tonight, London, Paris, Lille, Bruxelles (3 times), Lisbon (twice), Barcelona, Copenhagen, Dublin, Glasgow, Luxembourg, Vienna, possibly Eindhoven or some other Dutch date, and if I can sneak in at a radio session nearby (that is, less than 250km) I will do that as well.

And it feels like I’m seventeeeeeen again….

Thanks for the comments, this is fun.

Brussels-Haarlem: 230km x2, 5h on the road

[Edited 09.09, 04:20 - added a mp3 and the setlist]

dEUS - Serpentine - Patronaat, Haarlem, 07.09.2005

Patronaat is a brand new venue in Haarlem, a lovely town some 20km west from Amsterdam. Nancy (the only person I could convince of coming along) and I arrived at 19.25 and found that there was nowhere to be seen there… Panic: we could hear 7Days playing, had the band started earlier than I thought? We finally found a doorbell (looks as great as the rest of the venue) and a very friendly girl from the crew told us at the door that the show would kick off at 9. Off to the town centre then.

Men’s room with a view… The brand new toilets are as greatly designed as the rest of the brand new venue. There are no mirrors: the sinks are right in front of the windows. Must be fun to walk by the venue and look at the people checking their hair.

An intimate night for dEUS, their friends and families. Perhaps too intimate, as there was no feeling of being in a crowd, and the place looked empty….. The ‘real’ fans were on the front row, and included three (ex-)dEUS webmasters and their friends
But the sound was amazing, this venue is a winner! Thumbs up for Vincent, the band’s sound engineer, too….

Mauro stole the show at the end of Turnpike. I’ll probably upload that one.

This isn’t the exact setlist. They didn’t play Roses, Suds & Soda, Assault on Magnus, Little Arithmetics or Include me out, probably because the tiny, selected crowd (about 70 guests) wasn’t exactly a big drive for the band

Setlist:
01 Pocket Revolution
02 Instant Street
03 Cold Sun of Circumstance
04 Jigsaw You
05 Magdalena
06 7 days, 7 weeks
07 Stop-Start Nature
08 Fell Off The Floor, Man
09 If You Don’t Get What You Want
10 What We Talk About
11 W.C.S.
12 The Magic Hour
13 Nothing Really Ends
14 Nightshopping
15 Theme From Turnpike
16 Bad Timing (first try - Tom’s guitar amp died)
—
17 Bad Timing
18 Sun Ra
19 Serpentine (mp3)
20 The Real Sugar

Tomorrow: Haarlem. Sold out
On Friday: reviews, more pics, some mp3, and I’ll sleep.
Now: my bed. Some people have a job