a dEUS tour diary

Brussels-Dublin (CRL-DUB): 880km
Dublin-Glasgow (DUB-PIK): 315km
Glasgow-Brussels (PIK-CRL): 888km
Total distance: 2083km (5.14% the circumference of planet Earth)

A nice little trip, all in all.

dEUS - The Real Sugar - The Ambassador, Dublin, 04.11.2005

Started pretty badly actually. On Thursday, I realised, loooong after working hours, that I’d forgotten my keys at the office. As I couldn’t get into the building after 22.00, that meant I had to sleep away from my place and couldn’t get packed. So on Friday, I had to go to work very early, so that I could grab my keys on the desk, rush to my place at lunchtime to charge my MD, iPod, mobile phone and camera, drop socks, undies, t-shirts and a Discworld novel into my travel bag, drive back to work, pretend I wasn’t somewhere else entirely, then drive to Charleroi Airport, swear at the traffic congestion, find out I was way too early for the plane anyway, land in Dublin, rush to get the airport coach to the city centre, swear at the heavy roadworks, be delighted at the driver’s helpfulness, get slightly mad at it when he was showing it to other people at stops before mine, finally get dropped a few metres from the hostel, check in, greet the two Hungarian guys in the 6-bed dorm (they couldn’t speak a single word of English and listened to very crappy dance music), unpack, lock my valuables, call Jenna to tell her I was on my way, walk to the Ambassador, leave my jacket at the cloakroom (apparently everybody on the guestlist was Belgian) - we’re getting started.

The Ambassador’s like an old, round theatre. Oddly enough for a theatre, the ground there is flat, and there are no fixed chairs, so it was a standing concert. Found out I couldn’t take any photo, as I’d left the charged battery pack in my jacket, and there was half a kilometer of queue for the cloakroom already. Jenna was expecting me at the bottom of the erh, 3 stairsteps down into the concert room. Got introduced to her whole little gang, we were standing just a few metres from the stage, to the left. A few minutes waiting, and then Red Organ Serpent Sound came on stage.

Red. Organ. Serpent. Sound. Some name. Mark or Phil (Fred & Funkyphil from the dEUS forum, respectively) had sent me their single over msn, called In Search of Orgasmuz, and really, that’s one hell of a poppy punky funky bomb. Starts with silly synths, then onto a giant scream of «We looooove each other, that’s why we’re here» and it’s so cool I’d been playing it all day at work before leaving to Dub. So, well, perhaps I was expecting too much. Five guys in ridiculous outfits invaded the stage, the singer wearing a red hood that completely covered his face, a red tank top, tiiiight trousers, one huge boxing glove, a Slash-like hat and sunglasses. I found them funny, but wondered who the hell had taken those guys out of the fridge they’d been frozen in for eternity back in 1976.

Then came the guys. The band played pretty well, but you could definitely notice that Tom wasn’t completely at ease with his voice, he had a worried look at times. Talking of his look - I absolutely love how angry he can look when singing Roses.

Now, the trouble with seeing the same band over and over is that you lose sight of the general impression, and you can get quite picky. Everybody there said that the gig was massive. To me, it was erh, great, cause that’s my favourite band playing and those songs do «something» to me, but I kept being annoyed by the sound balance, cause I was hearing too much of Stéphane’s toms, too much of Tom’s voice, too much of Klaas’s violins, and not much of the rest. People ask me how I don’t get bored by seeing them over and over, but it’s a different experience than “just” going to a concert. You just watch the concert from other points of view. At times, I find myself finding that the band are in a really good mood and technically near perfect, but I see that the audience’s response isn’t great, and I start being afraid that the band are going to sense it and play shorter. I’m turning into an anxious mother.

Mmh, I suspect the above paragraph is just gibberish to say that I don’t remember much of the Dublin gig. Glasgow erased it all. After the gig, I met Funkyphil (n°1 poster on the dEUS forum, if you’re a casual visitor and not part of the obsessed dEUSSIANS), who’s a really, really nice guy. Along with his friends and Jenna’s gang, we were taken into erh… quite a dull pub actually, some way off the Temple Bar district, where I learnt to hate the smoking ban, because I might be a non smoker, but I chew gum quite a lot, and there was no ashtray for me to throw my old gums. Then we moved to a club called The Village, which wasn’t really my thing, a bit too posh to me, and the DJ really didn’t deserve to be called as such. Plus, I was tired and wanted to have a chance of getting up early enough to see a little bit of Dublin. Which I did: I spent 3/4h at the local Habitat store. Sometimes I might act a bit too gay.

Ooooh, almost forgot: when Jenna introduced me to her friends, she said «This is Jaaaan Eeeeves, he’s following the band around», to which her friend Stephen said «Oh, that’s funny, cause this afternoon I was checking some guy’s blog, and apparently he’s here tonight as well», to which Jenna said «Yeah, that’s JY’s blog», and then Stephen looked at me unbelievingly, like I was some alien, shook my hand, and said «Really?? Is that your site? I’m so proud of meeting you man, that’s great», and then I felt very, very embarrassed. Although some might see this as an ego trip on my part, it’s not. I’m no one, just a lucky fan, probably a bit more obsessed than most of you, which is why I started those websites about dEUS and Magnus, being able to get somehow close to the band is an honour, but I’m just messing around with some HTML and Photoshop and if you’re a fan of me then it’s all a bit disproportionate, no?

Setlist:
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 (mp3)
08 W.C.S.
09 If You Don’t Get What You Want
10 Theme From Turnpike
11 Sun Ra
12 Nothing Really Ends
13 Roses
14 Serpentine
15 Bad Timing
—
16 Little Arithmetics
17 What We Talk About (When We Talk About Love)
18 Suds & Soda

Tags: Netherlands

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