Another gig, another blog

Berlin. To mark the almost end of our tour. I can't even remember where we were the last time I wrote this blog but it has been an experience to remember.

Last night we played in a fantastic club in Bishopsweirda called East Club with two other bands that were touring Europe. Both at similar levels to us which was very interesting. One was a ska-rock-reggae band from Uruguay who were really very good and a psychedelic rock outfit from Australia called Black Cab. It was billed as an international night at East Club and it really was. An international night that is.

The walls of the club - let me rephrase that - the walls of Bishopsweirda are plastered with a very noticible poster of a guy who looks a bit like Jamie Callum (the jazz singer) except that he is naked and his cock is hanging out. On the poster it says "Rebel der libertas" which we think means "Rebel without a cock-ring". This poster is EVERYWHERE!


Again we were treated to a superb backstage area that was two floors of lounges, pool, internet access and incredible food and drinks. I played a game of pool with 2 of the Australians plus one German road manager and we tried for 40 minutes to come up with a set of rules that fitted all of the countries. Out of pure frustration and fits of laughter we eventually decided to play straight German pub rules which is a crazy mayhem of off-the-wall rules that don't make any sense. That was really fun. Nobody quite knows who won.

It was a great evening, and we completely won the crowd over. All the bands had a good show and it only started to get pear-shaped after Nathan had a bit too much to drink, and (sour that the Australians had beaten out South Africa in the World Cup Cricket) decided to tell the Australian band that he thought they were shit. He marched up to the lead singer, and struggling to find the polite words stated clearly and boldy "your band has no substance!" The room filled with a deathly silence. The rest of us in Cassette thought it was time to do some damage control here. But before we could even get a word in, Nathan was letting the Australians know that in addition to having "no depth", he thought that it was RIDICULOUS that it was compulsory to vote in their country. Eventually, before a fight ensued, we threw Nath in the car and drove to our backpackers, trying to convince him all the way that he should have kept this trap shut. Obviously to no avail.

And today, after driving through a hail storm, we arrived at our last European destination before our last gig in London on Tuesday! The club was amazing, the food was amazing, the people were great! The club was called Kulturwerk and aside from all the advertising they had done for us, we had also made a poster that we had written in German that they had distributed. The poster said the following

"Am 17.ten Mai 2007 wurde weltweit die Herstellung aller Musikkassetten auf
brutale Art und Weise gestoppt. Somit wurden Musikkassetten, mit nur noch
12000 lebenden Exemplaren auf unserem Planeten, in der Liste, der vom
Aussterben bedrohten Arten, aufgenommen.
Fuenf Revolutionaere der suedafrikanischen Band "Cassette" reisen um die
Welt um diesem Massensterben ein Ende zu bereiten.

Unser Aufruf:

Helft Ihnen. Kommt und seht es selbst."

Well enjoy that little bit of German humour.

We had a superb gig and it was the first time that we had a female sound engineer. The people really loved it and we sold out of CD's tonight!!!

It was also an emotional day with our tour basically coming to an end. It has been a tremendous success for us. The response has been completely unexpected and phenomenal. We have made incredible connections and new friends all over the world. But we have also done something that we are really proud of. It is one thing to push and hype and budget and try and get a tour like this together. It's another to be in your little cramped tour bus (THANK YOU CUERVO and 1TIME) on the road for 4 long weeks and playing every single night in all these cities! What an experience!

Our album, Welcome Back To Earth, will be released all over Europe in August and we can't wait to be back for the big tour then!!!! Finally, London on Tuesday and we are geniunely looking forward to that even though we are going to be driving for the next 2 days solid to get there.

Please keep checking back here for the next week or so because we have some big news that I would like to get confirmed before i blurt it out here on this blog. If you are not already on the Cassette mailing list, please just send a mail to me, jon@playcassette.com and I'll stick you in....

Almost home guys....

Cologne

Driving into Cologne, i was mildly hysterical. Partly due to many more hours in a confined space (the car) together with lots of people (the band). And partly because I thought I was being extremely funny when i thought I would buy some cologne from Cologne as a present for friends back in South Africa. Hahahahahahahahahah! hehehehehehe. What a comic genius I am.

I laughed all the way in. On arriving at the Station backpackers, Jane opened one of the "tourist guide leaflets" that they had at the reception desk. On the first page it said the word 'Cologne.' The heading for this word was "Lamest gifts you can buy while in Cologne." I stopped laughing.

At our one gig someone was ecstatically telling me something in German. I didn't know what on earth he was on about so I called Claudia. Apparently, he was saying that i was a "Stage Pig". Claudia said that it was a good thing to be called that but i smashed a full bottle of beer over his head anyway and kicked him a few times.

Well this tour has been STUPENDOUS for us. The night before last we played in Weimar. What a great little town and absolutely beautiful. The club we played in was one of the only clubs in the area and is a complete student town. And they allow in under 18s until 11. So for the first 30 minutes of our set we had these 17 year old German school girls going moggy and dancing like crazy to everything we did! Everyone in the club was watching them instead of us but it was great! They bought one CD between the 25 of them and even that was ok because they danced like there was no tomorrow. When they left we had to get back to the serious business of entertaining the normal folk. We had super duper response and was another solid gig for the gig bag. See picture...


In Cologne (or spelt Koln if you are German, which I am not) we found pictures of us in a whole bunch of magazines, with articles in German. I was going to put in a quote from one of them to be funny because no one would understand. But then i thought maybe someone would understand and the articles are saying how crap we are. We were also interviewed by a top radio station here in Germany and the DJ was already a fan of Cassette (even wearing a homemade Cassette t-shirt). WE had a great interview with them!

We also did a really really smoker of a gig. There weren't hundreds of people but the people that were there were instant fans. We sold CD's to almost everyone in the room! Lots of people don't speak English which has been unexpected for us. They do, however, understand the word "jagermeister" which got a big cheer when i mentioned it between songs. After the gig, everyone was determined to buy us Jagermeister. And they did. It just goes to show. Determination goes a long way.



Another interesting thing (which we had corrected by Cologne) is that the language barrier presents other problems. No one in Germany has ever heard of Robert Mugabe so I have been doing a mini history lesson before we play "Get In The Ring." To try and get people to understand the context of the song. But a few people have come up to me saying strange things after the gigs about that song. I didn't really understand. Until Claudia explained to me that it sounds like we are a bunch of racists when we condemn a black leader in Africa because they dont understand the politics of it. She told me that i had to say that he has been bad for both the white and the black people of Zimbabwe, which is what i did in Cologne. Then the cheers after that song were back to normal!



Today was a day off (thankfully). We went strolling around Cologne. We went around the corner from a Mc Donalds and there was this giant cathedral up to the sky (go here to see the video of this .... http://www.youtube.com/profile_videos?user=playcassette). It was the most impressive thing I have ever seen. I climbed up the 533 stairs to the very very very top of it and it was truly magnificent even though I was sweating like a Stage Pig.




Below is our poster in up in Berlin for our gig on Sunday.


Nathan has taken a train to Austria for the day but ill tell you more about that tomorrow.
Love ya!

Berlin is something else. At the moment we are almost on the border of East and West Germany. Tomorrow morning we are going to take some photo's at Checkpoint Charlie for a small black and white poster campaign we are doing for our other Berlin gig on Sunday. I spent hours in the record shops here today. There is so much music and each record store (and i really mean "record store" - the music shops are 20% CD's and the rest is vinyl) has it's own personality. It's a very special place this. It's where Bowie lost his mind.

So much has happened in the last few days including our kicking Amsterdam gig, then our not-so-kicking Den Haag pub gig where Andrew's suitcase fell out the back of the trailer and was lost on the freeway. Following this was our all-night drive to Berlin where we arrived this morning (Monday), slept till 2pm and then wandered the streets before playing a gig at a dark and dingy dungeon of a goth club called Thule Club right next door to a sex shop. The gig was not very well advertised, and therefore not very well attended except for a handful of journalists. Luckily we were totally on form so now we have got a little bit of momentum for our 2nd Berlin gig on Sunday.

I can't even remember most of what has happened there has been so much going on in the last few days so i thought i would try a bit of a photography tour for a change... All photos taken on our sponsored Sony Ericsson phones. Thanks guys!



This is a rare photo. We spent our day off in Amsterdam roaming the streets. What a truly incredible city! We really loved it there and can't wait to go back in September. So as Jane and i walked out of a rock photography store, a bird shat right on her head. I didn't catch the moment but this is about 40 seconds later...



This means your dog can shit in Holland.



This is our manager, Leon, doing the "Cassette" hand sign that he made up. He keeps encouraging us to do it as much as possible as he is convinced it is going to catch on. We are looking at our contracts quite carefully at the moment...



Now poor old Andrew. If it's not one thing going wrong it's another. If something bad isn't happening to him, you can guarantee his band mates will be kicking the shit out of him just for fun. It's hard for him. When we arrived at Den Haag for a gig, we discovered that his bag had actually fallen out the trailer. This photo is the trailer once we had discovered the bag was missing...i have circled the empty spot...



This is Andrew at Den Haag police station reporting his loss. This took about an hour due to a communication problem called English.



Now amazingly - now be careful you don't have heart failure if you are from Africa when you hear this - this afternoon we got an email from one of the police stations in Holland to say that his bag had been handed in ... in tact with everything in it. He was so happy he ran outside to phone his wife, Maria. This is that happy moment.



Now this needs some explaining!! After eating at an incredible restaurant actually called Man Kok I had to be the flippin' comedian and go outside to take some hilariously immature photos like this one.



However, Angela happened to catch this photo of me taking the previous photo! Not good if found on the internet without this explanation!



Here in Berlin we are staying at the offices at the back of an indie music shop called Volpo. This is Jane. And you have to go through the purple doors on the left to find us. It's a really great part of the city with loads of shops and graffiti and Germans.



The goth club that Leon booked us into for tonight. He really didn't want to be photographed in front of it.



Everywhere we go we have these really cool backstage areas which is something you never find in South Africa. It is so nice to have one. Here is the one in Amsterdam. We will be putting up some video stuff about this on youtube this week.



My head on the streets of Zierekzee.



Finally, Jane makes a recording studio in the back of the van using her Korg, my laptop, Garageband, a pair of headphones and 6 penlight batteries. All of this in a space the size of a small space.

Going to bed now, really exhausted. Love ya! Driving off to Weimar tomorrow which is about 2 hours away.

Eish. Eish. Eish.

So you will see from the pictures that the wheels have finally come off ... and I'm not talking about our Cassette Cuervo/1Time sponsored van - I'm talking about the Cassette members.

Alright but we will come back to that just now. First some catching up. Sorry about general quietness but Internet access has not been as easy as one would think.

So rewinding a day or two. We played at a really amazing small and legendary club called Cafe De Libertas in Leuwen, Belgium on Thursday. We had a nice gig and it felt really personal. Even though the club was packed to the rafters, the stage is small and everyone stands very close us. We also played two sets which is something we haven't done for a while. A chilled down set and then a rock sock set. The Belgians are a very interesting group ... they don't dance, they sit and listen very intently and are very responsive. The place started to get a bit rowdy during Mondays and from then on I think on it got better and better. The overall feedback was that we did good! There were some very important people in the audience and we hope that we impressed them - but we will apparently know our fate in the next 2 weeks.

The owner of the club (he has been the owner for 26 years) is this madly cool and brilliant guy called Ricky! He treated us to some fast-food delicacies from the area and wouldn't stop giving us beer until our arses were leaking it. Stella Artois is made in Leuwen so when we discovered that, it was all over for us. I was the only sober one though and I had to drive for the first time on the right hand side of the road in the night. I thought I was doing ok but because it was my first time, the backseat driving that was going on was like a flippin kindergarten porn party. We have this digital satellite GPS computer system that tells us where to go but it speaks out loud in Deutsch. Yes. So we only know half of what it's telling us to do. It also gets very angry when we don't take the turns it tells us to.

And that was Belgium. We got to Zierekzee, Holland, at 5:30am and slept most of the day. And then last night we played there in a place called Cafe De Vlinder.

Now let me tell you about Zierekzee. Think 'The Truman Show." Everyone smiles and greets you, everyone rides bikes, everything is 2 minutes walk. The people who live there are born there, live there until they get old enough to move up the road to the Old Age home where they live forever more. So it's a very happy and peaceful town. That is, of course, until Cassette arrived last night.

The evening started off well with a short photo shoot with our completely insane and legendary madman friend, Pascal. The guy is a certified loon. He buys everyone anything all the time and drives a jag (the one we are in the pictures above). He incites craziness and there is not enough space on the world wide web to tell you even some of the stories about this guy. Anyway we played a killer gig and the audience went wild for us. Of course Pascal stage dived into the unsuspecting audience and that was great.

We have also been entered into the Guinness Book Of Records for the first and only gig ever, where the drummer of a band actually drew money from an ATM whlie doing a one-handed drum solo. This we did live onstage and took about 15 minutes to get right with a riotous audience cheering him. Why the fuck there is an ATM on the stage is beyond me. But that's Zierekzee for you. Apparently we were lucky that people didn't come on to the stage to draw money during our gig.

But this is ony the start of the story. We were staying at our fantastic and fabulous friends Tanya and Brian who were only 4 minutes walking distance down the road so this was an excuse to lose it. We were told by the venue that drinks are free for the band ... at the beginning of the evening. They got very angry though because most bands drink a maximum of 70 Euros worth of drinks so that is what they expect. The closed our tab at 175 Euros and we had to pay in the difference from our door money.

Andrew got fully changed into one fans clothing (pictured above). Pascal got naked in a room full of people and stuck his cock onto Marc's head (thankfully not pictured above). I spilled red wine all over my suit (not fun) and also on Tanya and Brians 20 year old carpet thoroughly ruining both. Nathan and Leon decided to have a business chat (while thoroughly trashed) and everyone got into a big fight and Leon quit. Jane took one look at the chaos and went to bed! Clever girl.

We love eachother again today though. Sitting in fantastic Amsterdam right now. Great stage. Great venue. Life is good.

Well if there is one thing that makes Belgium a really spectacular place - it's that they have the same plugs as us in South Africa which makes life a kak load easier. And not only the thing with the plugs, its a great country.

So we have been a little quiet as access to the internet has been difficult to find. We jumped onto a ferry at the last possible moment - when we arrived there we were told that we had 4 minutes to get our passports checked and get onto the ferry! An exciting ferry ride later we landed in Belgium. And proceded to drive on the wrong side of the road. That was the moment I've been waiting for. To see how it all works. But nobody flinched and suddenly we were driving on the right hand side. Im a nerd and i thought it was cool.

Then we drove through Belgium and into Holland where we stayed the night at a friend of Leon called Brian. All the houses look like plastic Fischer Price toys and everyone is very friendly and ride bikes everywhere. Brian has this crazy cool music collection of European bands that obviously noone has ever heard of but are big over here. This was really scary hearing these UNBELIEVABLE bands that are huge in Holland. There is a serious music scene here and we are just small eggs in a large basket (of eggs). We stayed up till 4AM drinking Dutch beer and listening to these crazy bands and watching the cat spin around on top of the record player for hours. This never stopped being funny. And i mean ever. In fact just thinking about ... hehehe.

We just arrived in Leuwen, Belgium. Im sitting at the table on the street pictured above in a really hip part of town. This place is just so damn cool. It's a student town and it feels exactly like what the centre of the hip music scene should feel like. Really looking forward to playing tonight. It's quite an important gig for us because the organizer of Pukkelpop (one of the giant European festivals) is coming to see us tonight to consider for this years festival.

A man is playing acoustic guitar in my face right now. He is an old man and i think he wants money. I am ignoring him and now he is singing (this is a technique I perfected in Joburg). Actually he's really sweet and we just gave him 2 Euros. ... Holy shit. Thats R20! Hold on, got to get it back. Jane says no.

As i was saying, Leuwen. Tonight we drive back Zierekzee, which is a tiny quaint Island village further North. It's dead clean. Everyone smiles. There are signs telling you to pick up your dog shit and even little packets are put into boxes to assist you with this. A megagiant slab of chocolate costs 1 Euro and you can buy golf clubs in the Supermarket in the cereal isle. The bakeries smell delicious but they only sell pork and ham and they have no fucking idea what I am saying. But we just figured out that Afrikaans and Dutch are basically the same. So things are easier now. I wish I'd figured this out earlier. This morning i asked what i could put on my bread roll? The woman shrugged and Jane thought she meant "anything your little heart desires" but she really meant "Can't understand a flippin word Im afraid". So after listing all the delicious things i wanted I eventually got a plane roll.

By the way we just had our world tour t-shirts made and they rock!

Well our one day off in the UK was not spent lazing round drinking beer and playing Playstation. No sireee!

It was spent drinking beer, playing Playstation and shooting our new music video for our single, Sometimes, which is looking damn cool! It was the idea of a mad person in England called Scott and his mad production company called Jabula Productions. He pitched this idea over an email a while back but noone really took it that seriously. Well it turned out to be very serious and Scott, even though is a complete loon, is a hell of a guy and made us a damn cool video. It should be finished by the end of the week and we will be courriering it back to SA so we can get it onto TV asap! There has also been a request from a UK television MTV-type station (but not MTV) so we will be submitting this video in the hope of getting a little airtime over here.

It is in a similar vain to our Tracy video but much much better. If you can figure out how we made it, we will be very surprised! So keep your banana's open.

So before i left SA, i had designed and manufactured authentic looking giant letters from the Queen of England! This was spectacularly done by super duper friend of Cassette, Lisa Walters. These letters were then written and addressed to Jo Whiley, celebrity music journalist in Britain and a radio DJ from Radio One. Here is an extract from on of the letters...

"So there I was, chilling in the Jacuzzi in my Tahiti beach flat with Nelson Mandela recently, and talking about music. Being a lover of hip-hop myself I never really listen to that “Rock And Roll” business. However Nelson started to speak on and on and on and on about this rock band in South Africa called Cassette." etc etc... you can see where this is going.

We are trying to drum up some interest to the media in the UK inviting them to our last gig at the end of the tour in London, at the Cobden Club, Nottinghill (29 May). So the first letter from the Queen has been hand delivered to BBC One. Keep your fingers crossed ... um .... unless she goes to our site, reads this and then the joke is over and i have ruined everything. Of course that is highly likely.

Today was spent unsuccesfully trying to find a new suit because there is no way my suit is going to last this whole tour. I didn't find anything so really, you have wasted your time reading this paragraph.

Nathan bought our trailer today which is great news - it's going to make the rest of our journey a lot more comfortable! Tomorrow we go to Europe. And we go on a ferry. Very exciting. Keep posted. Also keep checking in on our video diary stuff.... http://www.youtube.com/profile_videos?user=playcassette

Take care.

Eish. Have you seen these? They are called Highland Cows - they are the coolest mammal you are ever likely to meet. We asked one of them where they get their rock n roll hair cuts but we couldnt understand their accents so gave up.

Back from a long trip to Scotland.
So we packed up into our brand new van (sponsored by Cuervo and 1Time and partly the Fresh Drive Show on 5FM - thank you guys very VERY much) and shlepped across the country to the land of the Scots. What a mad beautiful city. We arrived a little late there (its about 800km) and had to immediately set up and get playing as soon as possible.

The venue wasn't full enough to warrant an 8 hour trip and we were playing in quite an obscure venue called the Octopus Diamond, so we went out to the streets to encourage people to come in for free and waived the cover charge. That seemed to have worked and we had a great little crowd. There were a bunch of Kiwi's in the audience who went OFF!!! I mean really off! They thought we were the greatest band since Sliced Bread! They kept getting on the stage to have photos taken with the band WHILE WE WERE PLAYING! All quite crazy but in the end we had a great response and sold a bunch of CD's too so we were happy.

Jane and I were exhausted and went to bed. Nathan went off to his mate's house and Andrew and Marc went out and got themselves PICKLED! This was obvious by the fact that we were all sleeping in the same room in the Highland Cow BnB (coincidentally) and at about 3:30am Andrew got up to take a piss. In the room. Next to where we were sleeping. On the floor. Instead of using the toilet in the next room. When asked "WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING?" - we got the very calm slurred reply ... "im taking a piss."

The next day was spent chillin in Scotland and it's a really beautiful and amazing city. The ruins and castles and churches are mind blowing, the place is steeped in incredible History and monuments and galleries. Obviously we ignored all of this and found a really cool £1 store which rocked my world. You can buy anything for £1! So i bought a huge box of Jaffa Cakes and a DVD on how to do magic tricks each for £1! Brilliant!

That evening we did an amazing photo shoot in and around Scotland - ill post photos when i get them! It was FREeeeeEEzing but I think we got some amazing shots.

Then yesterday we finally arrived in Heartfordshire for a gig at Doctors Tonic. We arrived there 2 hours late for the soundcheck and noone had phoned to let them know and they were pissed at us. They had already booked a replacement band and said we couldn't play. After much pursuasion, he said we could play only for half an hour at the end and for half the money! We agreed.

3 really great bands played and then we went on and did a short but really punchy set! I think we impressed the pants off of them! People we really suprised by this rock band from Africa! I dont think they could believe there were rock bands in Africa! People got down and gots their rocks off. The owner loved us at the end and invited us back any time!

So now back in London, we are shooting a music video this afternoon. Feeling strong and good. You know it's strange being in another part of the world playing to people who have never heard your music and in most cases, never even heard of the band. Its a good test of our mettle. And we are feeling particularly inspired at the moment because we were feeling nervous about how people would respond to us here with all of the other international bands playing in and around the city at the same times as us. You really have to put up a good fight! We were wondering if we were good enough to be here. But judging from the reactions so far, it's looking good. As one really huge English football-loving Guinness drinking drunkard said on his way out of our gig "That was'nt soooo bad"

Love ya!
jon