a dEUS tour diary

Brussels 1050 - Brussels 1000: 2×2km

Pretty cool to have your favourite band coming to your town. You leave the office, go home to change clothes, go out to dine at a friend’s and then walk 3 minutes to get to the venue. I should have come live here earlier.

I thought the band played very well, but I’m MAD at the lack of enthusiasm from the crowd. Okay, you guys applauded between songs, some of you cheered during them, but pleeeaaaaase, MOVE YOUR LAZY ASSES AND DANCE/SHAKE YOUR HEAD/MOVE YOUR FEET/DO SOMETHING. What a dead-looking bunch of horribly still people. That’s out. God.

So then - today was a no-minidisc, no-camera night (as will be tomorrow and Thursday), as I just wanted to enjoy the show without having to care about self-inflicted blog stuff. Which means I’ll have to recall the setlist from my very broken machine of a memory. Pretty standard set actually, with the obligatory Pocket Revolution for starters (it’s been on that spot ever sicne November 2004), then onto Magdalena (weird position if you ask me), then Cold Sun, Stop/Start, and from that point I can’t tell the order. Got to say though, Cold Sun is one nasty little beast with its live clothes on, one of their best rock songs on the current set. And Stop/Start gets more and more convincing (I thought it was pretty empty/boring/lacking in momentum the first few times I heard them play it).

During Instant Street (and also on another song before that), the crowd cheered madly when Mauro started singing Craig’s verses, which was nice. He had quite a big fan horde in AB, as his singing made people very happy. And I heard people were singing his guitar part during the outro, leading me to believe that those people were at the Lille gig one week ago (where Mauro’s guitar broke and he actually sang that part). Great reaction during Mauro’s Scary Turnpike Screams, too. Mmmmh… did Mauro stole the show? Perhaps.

Apart from that - on a general note, I was a bit disapp’d by the sound tonight. Nice during the quiet parts, very messy when the band rocks - which they do a lot in 2005. Hope things will be a little clearer tomorrow & on Thu.

Back on track then. Assault On Magnus has become my favourite live track on this tour, which isn’t to say the new songs aren’t good, but this wrongly-labelled dEUS song is among their best. I couldn’t grab a setlist tonight, but I believe they (once again) messed around with their plans (I’m not complaining, as this adds some surprise factor) - they played Sun Ra and Serpentine at the end of the main set, while those two songs are usually “first-encore” material. Serpentine - wow, the 2005 version must be one of the best. Klaas does a perfect job at recreating the haunty piano touches of the original, Alan and Mauro sing on it as well, and Mauro’s guitar part at the end is fantastic. Thumbs up.

Onto the first encore: Bad Timing probably got one of the loudest cheers of the night. This is one hell of classic already. And it was perfectly executed, which is very cool, as I was afraid it’d be dropped from the setlist after seeing not-so-convincing renditions one month ago. Then they played 7 Days 7 Weeks (again, superbly executed), followed by the ultimate crowd-pleasing pair, Little Arithmetics and Suds & Soda. I so wish I’d minidisced the show, cause Suds & Soda was one of the coolest versions I’ve heard, jazzy, hip-hoppy, a very vocal Tom who just wouldn’t stop singing whatever he pleased during the instrumental bits. More impro please

Then it was What We Talk About and then it was over. Weird choice for a second encore, and oddly short, but really, that Belgian crowd didn’t deserve more. People please - show your love.

The band in the ABClub after dEUS were called Giants of the Air or something like that - not bad Grandaddy/Cure sort of stuff, good voice, good music, they lack originality, but are decent.

Voilà. A very unordered review, but I just let it flow and I need my bed. I’m getting old.

And I’m lagging behind - there are photos and mp3’s from Lille last week waiting for an update here.

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

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.