a dEUS tour diary

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

If there’s one thing I am skilled at, it’s promises. I make them all the time. The more unrealistic they are, the more likely I am to make them. A regular one since 1999 has been “I’ll do a big update of W.W.W.C.S. (3Rd dRAFT) very soon!”

Erh. We’ve all seen that. Pocket Revolution will be in (some) Belgian stores this Friday, and all over Europe on Monday (officially). And my good old dEUS site is years behind. I had an excuse last year - I worked with Arthur on deus.be, that kept me busy a little. But even so, that’s no reason there should be errors everywhere on W.W.W.C.S., dead links aplenty, pages that are so old you have to shake off the dust everytime you open them…

So perhaps I won’t update hotellounge.com anymore. Perhaps I’ll just place a big “ARCHIVE MODE” sign all over it. Hey, that’s a promise I can probably fulfill! But here’s one thing I am going to do. I am going to travel across Europe to see this band I love. I’m 25, becoming a little more serious about life (a little), and I might not have the chance to do this any other time later.

This little blog sucks as far as design is concerned - no point in trying to make something pretty in just one day, when I could have built a fantastic, definitive, interactive dEUS site over the years.

But this little blog is gonna move. If I really do this (16 dEUS dates all over Europe, possibly more), that’s an experience I wanna share. Feel the love

Jyves.

PS: this could just be another promise.