a dEUS tour diary

Brussels 1040 - Brussels 1000 - Brussels 1050: 3km and a taxi home.

You’re getting ripped off, dear visitors - no media tonight either. I’m on a selfish «I just wanna dance to those fat tunes» ride.

Call me stupid, but when I get home and my ears are riiiingiiiing I always think that’s the sign of a great gig. It means: a) it was loud; b) it was good enough to make me wanna stay where it was TOO loud; c) I’m half deaf, I’ll never work as a professional interpreter and that degree from 2003 is lost on me.

So then, what can I say I didn’t say yesterday? First, obvious: the crowd. This time, there was an audience, and this time, it wasn’t merely listening. People reacted a lot, and not only during Suds & Soda - Instant Street (song #4) got people jumping already, Turnpike From Hell got people screaming and shouting and being really, really happy at Man-Turned-God (or Archdevil) Pawlowski. I should stop mentioning him or that’s gonna rub Tom’s ego in the wrong direction. Not that he reads this, mind you.

The sound was waaaay clearer than yesterday, it was amazing how you could make out every single nuance, especially from Klaas’s stupendous and always underestimated work. His violin strokes, his violin pizzicatos, his keyboards, finally on this tour he’s being given the sonic space he’s always deserved. And not a single moment where you thought «hey, I can’t hear this or that instrument properly» - that was the AB’s soundsystem at its finest.

The setlist worked much better than yesterday - as usual, I can’t remember the proper order, started pretty standard, ie Pocket, Magdalena, Cold Sun, Stop/Start, Instant Street, and then apparently that’s where I lose track. But I can’t really keep a clear mind when they shoot Fell Off The Floor, Turnpike, WCS , If You Don’t and Assault On Magnus into my ears. They ended the main set with Roses then Nothing Really Ends (found it a bit messy, but I just need to find something to criticize) then Sun Ra then Serpentine then Little Arithmetics (great song for a final), and came back for a first encore which included Bad Timing, 7 Days, What We Talk About, which worked much better today at that slot than yesterday as last song of the night, and a rawer but shorter Suds & Soda, before coming back for Magic Hour as a «goodnight, sleep well» sort of second encore. So, all songs they played yesterday, plus one.

All in all, they might have played a little less perfectly than yesterday, but the show was so much better thanks to the crowd’s response - a feeling that’s shared by the band, as Mauro told me later tonight. The aftershow was a mainly female band called Chacda, I saw them supporting Feist earlier this year and wasn’t convinced, and that hasn’t changed. The singer is an Avril Lavigne kind of alternative/skater girl and that’s totally okay, but she sings uninspired sad rock/pop that left me yearning for another beer.

Then I got down to recover my jacket and mobile and found that Arthur (of dEUS.be fame, for those of you who found this blog by accident) had tried to call me right before the show - the man badly needed directions in Brussels, he comes from Eindhoven and it’s true that the Belgian capital is one hell of a wrong place when it comes to traffic signs. Safely got into AB, though. I couldn’t meet him, but I’m sure he loved the gig as much as I did.

Caught Tom as he headed from the backstage into the bar, asked me if I wanted to go to *secret place* where the after party was being held, I wasn’t even aware of it but my friend Anne-Sophie and I headed to the club and played it cool (like hey you know, we’re not those groupies who’d do anything for a bit of attention [erh erh….]). The whole band was there, that’s where I got to chat with Mauro for two minutes while we were trying to attract the barman’s attention, and as usual, I couldn’t think of anything remotely interesting to say. Damn that «fandom disconnects brain» thing. The DJ was playing some cool retro electro tunes, to which Tom was dancing like a mix between erh…. Joe Cocker and a duck, I’d say, Klaas was dancing as well, and that’s funny, hadn’t seen him dancing before, and he does the exact same moves he does on stage. There’s a funky robot inside that man. Alan was with his girlfriend, kissing cutely now and then, but the last I saw of him was Stéphane and him dancing very hotly together (but only the gay man in me saw that as hot stuff and not as the obvious joking fun it was). And then erh… had to go home, back to bed and my 9-to-5 routine (I’m not complaining).

Good night!

Setlis (thx to zero79)t:
01 Pocket Revolution
02 Magdalena
03 Cold Sun of Circumstance
04 Instant Street
05 Fell Off The Floor, Man
06 Stop-Start Nature
07 The Real Sugar
08 WCS
09 If You Don’t Get What You Want
10 Theme From Turnpike
11 Roses
12 Assault On Magnus
13 Nothing Really Ends
14 Sun Ra
15 Little Arithmetics
—
16 Bad Timing
17 7 days, 7 weeks
18 Serpentine
19 What We Talk About
20 Suds & Soda
—
21 The Magic Hour

Tags: Netherlands

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 13th, 2005 at 02:27 and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.