Boiling hot.

Its not what you expect of Berlin but its been this way since we arrived almost three weeks ago. So what? ... it all adds to the long sleeping, long night outings, long sunset 70´s haze thingamijig. Today is Tuesday...thats saying something. Havent seen Oli and Pete much in the last few days. They went to the lake yesterday. Today I fixed my bike. it took me a long time. I woke up with no money, walked to where i´d left it last thursday after the gig outside dodgee Kaffe Burger. No one had stolen it. Then I walked it to the place i got the last tyre replaced. I really was feeling pretty dodge so when the fella there said he was too busy to do it today i decided to do it myself. Of course changing a bike tyre shouldnt be so hard but my melted head wasnt making sense of much. The greese was instantly attracted to me. This part was good for me i think. the tyre eventually twirled around with out a noise and full of lovely air. Sometime mid bike mission i decided it was good that it was takign so long. Like a rocket ship back to olden days. Theres something in that. Slow down, see more, care less about unimportant stuff.

The reason for the melted head? Last saturday was our last official gig of the tour. we went out afterwards for about a week i think. i dont know. All i know is it ended up listening to Roman Flugel at Watergate with a whole bunch of people who were obviously melting too. good on them.

 

this particular gig was at a place called ZMF or Zur Möbil Fabrik. Which felt like a horrid dungeon where snake kings made love to their harem of under age hippo children. when the lights finally came on and it was full of people it transfromed into a circus of funked out volk. Was is das? Ich bin behindert. Ichlich. Ya, bitte. 

Some real drunk DJs from Vienna were playing before us. They were playing nice stuff. dirty, friendly dangerous music that got folk deep and in it. We played on the ground again. Im starting to like it. we got into our chromes and fell about like rotten sailors. It felt right.

So it was supposed to be our last gig but we have been asked to play one more this weekend at 103. Its a booming sound set up there and is home to lots of great artists so hope it works out. It is this saturday the same day as Love Parade. What a city.

send me money...i´m out.

 

 

Germany just beat the Argentinians!
Woopa!

We watched the game amongst Mitte dudes. Thats Berlin for Paddington.
Now we back at Escholoraque watching Italy and Ukraine and waiting for our food to cook on the barbeque. We partied out to be honest. It takes a lot of juice to stay on top of the endless events, exhibitions, gatherings, gigs and all night hang outs that are constantly on offer in Berlin.

Backtrak- We arrived last Saturday today is Friday. We had played a gig at Club Trailer Trash in London the night before and had arrived home to our friends Tammys in Bethnal Green in a right shitty mess, dreading getting ourselves to Berlin. Turned out that Pete ended up missing the flight anyway and missed our first gig. Didnt matter as I did a sterling job of wacking the crash cymbal at important moments to intensely dramatic effectfor me and Oli. The last time I saw Pete before leaving London he was walking off with two big bags of hot chips headed for a rooftop. At the time I was sitting in the gutter talking to a friend dipping our fingers in recently purchased bag of Wiz Fiz when the cops (undercover) rolled passed, checked us out and reversed back to have a closer look. I should be a cop I reckon.

Despite pretty bad sound, naughty trannies stealing my make up (sorry Tammy) and leaving my bag of mics and leads at the venue the party at Trailer Trash was fun all up.
We landed in Berlin and went straight to sound check at Escholoraque- the venue of our first gig. Was stoked to find it was a bar we had DJd at last year and Maud, the bar tender we had made friends with when we played was working there still. Nice.

Everything cruisy. Didnt even bother getting into costume. We almost played acoustically but wimped out.

Met some great folk at the gig and sorted renting out a room above as a studio. Been sleeping there and waking up to Workmen outside drilling and banging and pounding us out of sleep.

Last night went to exhibition of Icelandic artists ice sculpture and party thingo. Weird food experiments and loads of nice grog made time pass while the ice melted. A few drinks, desert (brought by lovely frauleins in black jumpsuits) a coffee and a couple of joints later I was dared to get up and bust something on the mic so I did. The Icelandic electro outfit was blipping along and I slid some grimy vocals under their blanket. Lots of fun. They took the mic off me when I was just getting started and asked me my MC name. Ha. A few drinks later I got back up there. Couldnt help myself. They kicked me off again.

A bit bleary eyed now. Let me just tell you about the other night.
We were hyped to be playing with one band that had really done it for us recently called Ratatat from New York. We were up first on the bill. We were told go on at 10.30 so we got ready. Pete wasnt around- he was still at dinner with some girls hed met. Ran, the organiser was stressing out telling us we had to go on so we got him to take out a fluffy toy and introduce it as Theatre Of Disco. Pete was bound to turn up very soon so we would be on in a bit. We walked on and Pete turned up just in the nick of time. I handed him my new Chrome firemans helmet and we got down to it.

We have a new look. I left my costumes in London so I had to start from scratch. Lets just say its chromey.

On stage I had some stairs to run up and down, some hesitant German crowd to win over and a hefty band rider to drink. Got some photos of Mike from Ratatat in my costume but Pete lost his phone that night so that will have to live in our memories. Classic dude, Mike. We love Ratatat, did we mention that? They rocked. After the gig they joined us for some football dancing with the fluffy toy on the dancefloor. Wicked fun. Next door to a bar called West Germany which was like being inside a big kitchen- lots of tiled floor going on and techno dudes wobbling about. Oli trained any one who was interested in the art of kicking. Evan (Ratatat) managed to break a plastic chair with no training at all and Oli and Mike almost brought a wall down by kicking it at the same time. Of course we got asked to leave that area. So ----lets get a kebab.

I got invited to Tuscany yesterday. Im mulling it over in my tiny little mind.
Pete is sitting on the couch next to me. Ukraine dont look like beating Italy.
I feel a deep pang for the Ukraine players. Guess its always good to remember that old chunk of wisdom Its not whether you win or lose.

theatreofdisco.com/pages/disco.html

oh my,

what has happened to us?ever since we left tokyo we're different. we dont care as much. we dont do stupid american accents as much. its all gone to shit. i guess you could blame jetlag. we had it quite bad. you know - sleeping pills and booze and wake up at heathrow with legs akimbo and driblle on your collar. did i eat dinner? why didnt they wake me?

so there lots ot say about our last few days in japan. it was fit for publishing. maybe not penguin but somewhere. vice maybe...naaah.

on our last saturday we played at a No Tokyo party- one of the beaut little hipster do's that are (apparently) so rare in tokyo. run by the glorious Sarah Potplant and her partner in crime James. The venue for this one was a small club with awesome live set up and a blue curtain across the fron t of the stage. fun bags! later on at the start of our set i ended up keeping oli and pete hidden until they actually were kicking me thru the curtain. boom ! it was their most flamboyant entrance yet.

bullshit fight between pete and i left me feeling ratshit. a few stiff drinks smoothed me out. wig on (new), skirt on (new) boots on, sexy
 retardos backstage with us drinking smuggled booze. and where are all those bottles coming from?

the gig rocked. punk rock gig really- no stage so on the ground right in thefaces of all the rocking beauties that turned up. chek our myspace comments bit for photos. sexy lovely folk. the triple nipples (performance trio who went on with us at club yellow) busted it straight away right amongst us. thats the girls in coloured T.O.D. tops in photos. sweaty backstage chill out. more bottles of champagne. wow, i thought someones highrooling- moet and dom perignon...geese. later on manager came backstage and was pointing to the empty bottles of boooze with a shaky hand and stuttering. wo. someone had opened a whole bunch of em. they were now scattered around our backstage area.

leaving wasnt easy. they wanted us to cough up over 2000 oz dollars. some negotiating madness and gaijin power allowed to finally walk out of there. on to red bar for more shenanigans. then to karaoke for sarah, juria, james, myself, trent and kyo. good songs. big head aches, free slurpies. yeah. then the room exploded in pink smoke. fire alarms started blaring. we ran out. but our stuff was inside the room. i dived in and rescued what i could and headed for the fire escape.security gaurds everywhere. i pointed saying something he wouldnt have understood. "bbbeeiasdfubasdv"

of course iknew what had happened. trent had let off fire extinguisher. ding dong. but as i stood on the corner in the rain, unable to be identified as one of the baddies (as i had taken off the wig and jumper i was wearing) i was an innocent gringo waiting for a bus.

unfortunately kyo never came out (who i was waiting for) and when the security gaurd finally realised who i was he invited me in for a cup of tea. i think thats what he said. i joined him and my  friends for a littel bit of interogation until the police came. naaah. i left before then.  after all i had a plane to catch.

apparently sarah and james spent five hours with the police. the topics covered included their favourite restaurants before they were driven home. how lovely.

peter and i have been staying on ebony's lounge room floor.
tonight was oli and ebonys special night together we went to kyo and guys. kyo and i went and bought vodka and champagne. we watched daivd blaine on guys computer- footage of him holdong his breath for 7 minutes in a giant glass bowl of water. sent uor hearts racin to watch his body jerk at the point of will breaking. my question was who fronted the cash for that public art- the answer was he sold that footage to abc.

petes making our beds now. tomorrow i will pack them away. oli and eb are in bed.
i bought a cheap mpc today. tomorrow is friday. there is a cockroach crawling.

today peter asked a local where is ginza (suburb) but instead said " where is the sliver difference?"

tomorrow i tri write a song with in it

goodnight sweethearts

j

just trashed a karaoke joint
too pissed to write much

oli is brushing hi teeth
ben, hotel california and crazy for you were hilights
we ad to kick the table over at one point because it was too emaotional and the room was small
ebony washning up because mice will eat everything

pete missed his flight todasy. went to doctor to act sick and get new flight but doc was in surgery/theatre
its ok pete can stay and play
sat we bust a nut at no tokyo party

gig sorted at Club Trailer Trash in London

oli stumles up stair

me fall on grou

SAGOI! that means "wow".

just downed a mixed Suntori Freeze Grape - the UDL of Tokyo- to get me in the mood to remember the weekend that has just passed.

It was a doozy.
Sound check had us all gooey with love for Japanese efficiency. Sure, Yellow is a big club with a long history of cool DJs and live stuff but it was clockwork. oooey gooey. Plus our good friend Chris Gadsby turned up during which made it all the more fun.
Dinner at Izekaya with Fumi, his assistant (our translator) Hireki, Murray (Rekindle- another Aussie DJing on the night) and Chris.
Raced back home to get showered and sorted. zoom zoom zoom. pick up girls- Oli and Guys, not strangers zoom zoom back to club. Shit! 12:30 and it is fucking packed to the rafters. Geeeze the door folk had no idea what i was saying. "artist" finally got em going and suddenly i had what seemed like a personal assistant dragging me throught the crowd of happy club goers to the DJ booth. The place was so packed I couldnt even recognise where i was or where we were playing. lights, bouncing kids, bangin twisted jiggy music coming out the speakers made communicating with her even more tricky. "I just wanna put my stuff backstage" up the stairs to some other part of the club then another part. sagoi. eventually got my barings and landed backstage. sssss.

drink. elbow to elbow. bum to bum. try not to think of the wide brown land. good tokyo resident friends jo and guy join me by the bar. eventually find our crew including chris who has gone on a special mission to meet his dude for our benefit. yay, chris is found. downstairs we go. Super famous blonde-permed Japanese pop merchant DJ Ozma came on the main stage where we were to play. Ok not everyone was there to see us. AAAAA people were going bonkers for him and his team of uber keen dancers. The music was like a sort of gentle happy-hardcore combined with rhythmic vocals and choreography that looks like funky aerobics. Yes! We loved it. It was like being in a Bollywood movie. we were in happy hysterics - it was group hysteria without the...hysteria i guess. when ozma and the dancers waved their hankies in the air so did they right on que. took me a sec to realise they knew the moves. one of the ozma dancers doing electric boogaloo japanese styley with all the others around him being the electricity i think. wild cheesy sincere dancing makes us smile so big. we were jumpin for joy - inside and out.

eventually the novelty wore off a little and we needed some air. chris, pete, oli and i scooted outside to find a quiet bar. we found one. it had a nice spacious bathroom with clean marble surfaces - perfect. we paid our tab and hurried down to set up. gear plugged, dress on get out there all nice feeling and proceed into the land of nasty, twisted music of love and stupidity. a super positive crowd, bangin sound - so much bass that it was impossible for us not to be plunged deep into the vibration. boing.

no kickin no one in the guts this was love in all its dirty sequin glory.

ok 3rd song on come the Triple Nipples. We loved the DJ Ozma Dancers but our dancer were killer. The Triple Nipples are a wicked female performance trio from Tokyo. They specialise in cow themed, milk spurting dance routines that leave a smile ringing in your head and a bananas thought splatted across your face. we'd been put in contact by a mutuall friend and had met them a few nights earlier to say hi and plan our coming together on stage. Any lack of verbal understanding was blasted out of the question by there uncanny to pick up what we were about and how they fit into the show. It was seemless and anarchic. Unfortunately management wasnt into them spirting everyone but it didnt matter - it just made the conceptual spirt even bigger and more beautiful when it came. They were a pleasure to play with. thank you Yuka, Qrea and Nabe we love you.

ok gigs over. lets!
boogy oogy. more fun. more nice elbows and bums then away we go. gladly a good size troup of us headed home to ebonys house for more. train ride yielded sleeping business men and women and surpised locals. ahhhh frollick the last 20 steps thru the beautiful cemetry near eb's house. mental as anything friend of jo kept us amused with random outbursts of blurting and beeping and fallign over. her name is azusa and we were sad to see her go but it was 12middday and she had to go to work at her email sex job. i made her promise to send me one without exclamations.

one by one the soldiers fell until it was the core. hard. chris, always dependable went to get more. go to guy and kyo's so we could be roudy. call from guy screaming he'd lost chris. ha! according to guy, on their return, chris was the worst bike rider in the world and according to chris it was the worst experience he'd ever had. i believed chris. guy had fallen off his bike. hey.

kyo cooked a curry. chris and i went bare foot to the bear vending machine. scared the national panasonic lady asking for change. scared the little kids playing hopscotch. but didnt mean to. me in white hood with 'DIE' written on the back and the biggest tracksuit pants in history. went back to get something from eb's couldnt resist jumping on a sleeping Yuka to say hi and stuff came out of my nose and fell on her face. woops, proabably scared her too.

jo got a haircut. guy got a scar on his face. everyone eventuyally fell asleep and dreamt of elbow/bums.

keep ears and eyes peeled. the Disconvention Centre is recruiting stuff.

"remember who you are"

james
and oli
and peter

So there was a gig at Home nightlcub Sydney last week. We were supposed to be supporting Princess Super Star but she couldnt find her lucky knickers and so had to stay curled up in the fetal position in her luxury New Yoik pad. Boohoo. Not for us we still had a pearler of a time. Anyway i guess i didnt write about it because my head has been firmly lodged up my bum trying to get stuff done before heading over seas on our little tour.

right now i am sitting in a a little tatami hut in Tokyo which means.....I am overseas and the tour has begun. Let's all call it Tour Schmour for now. We know that everyone likes to name their tour. we thinks thats fun but stupid to limit it to just one name. any suggestions can be messaged to us here. good ones will get a look in bad ones will make us laugh so they are all welcome.

oli has lived and worked here for some time in the past so he got us where we were going pretty quick. we checked in frollicked through the grave yard towards ...i dont know. ate food talked about food - fugu- thats something i want to try. i havent been able to vomit since i was six and am looking for inspirational candidates.

i am in my undies- that means its hot.

when i go for number 2s my knees pop the door open. both oli and i both have new hats. mine has a zip. his is a giant viser.

peter- my brother (actual) arrives tomorrow. oh i forgot to mention he is our drummer now. he sometimes wears a haj when we play- for fun, and a pokemon backpak.

my surgical scissors were taken from me at customs.

hazey as all hell

tokyo is bonkers and calm

tomorrow is big gig at Yello. aparrently big japanes pop star doing surprise performance. yippp.

i go for walk now.

keep your eyes peeled on our website www.theatreofdisco.com -----the Disconvention Centre will soon be hosting some public games we cannot do on myspace.
ooga

J>TOD

Thursday 13th

Deep As Fuck, Phoenix Bar, Oxford Street, Sydney

So, Raf, who runs the night promised me a little stage that lights up like the street in Billy Jean. I didnt expect much. We arrived and started setting up after calling Raf and finding out his car had overheated and he would be late. Feedback problems solved, gear tested, red silk material installed all around club to make it feel like an underground jousting tournament. Face painter arrived- the idea was anyone who didnt come dressed up would have to undergo compulsory face painting. it was meant to be a punishment but people seemed to want it from very early on. bad butterfly eyes, sparkles, moustaches. mmmm.

everything sorted. we left to go have a feed and a quiet drink. Don Don sushi and eel don. blank- cant remember. return to club which was very full by now. 

a quick application of face and body in the cool room. an hour later oli and i would return there and capture the steam off body phenomenon on oli's mobile camera. wait for cue. false alarm. poke head out and scare punters sshshh. take two. make way thru throngs. pinch friends bum. land on LIGHT UP STAGE! pete and oli perched on tiny platform behind me.You Who Me opens. a packed joint of beaming atmos brings smile to me face. lights up my dress. who is inside the stage making the lights come on? a tiny team of ...michael jacksons. trust you(s) michael.

our crew and new bust out with wild positive feeling. the place full of the good stuff.  pete (drums) jumped on the stage, all in white, did a twirling dance with 'haj' on head. 'icey balls' takes us and them deep into western voodoo. there is no way out so we all agreee telepathically to go much deeper. mmmm. the lights catch tiny images and burn them into my head- a thigh, a moustache, a tiny michael running upside down on the ceiling. all bouncing, all screaming fun. collapsed (again) after 'Glove'. pete and oli helped me off with my gear. an emotional 'bazooka' put air back in me lungs. mmmm.

classic rap merchant and Theatre Of Disco guest from the past Brass (Celcius- http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendid=26899741) was at hand. Oli suggested he join us for Donnie Disco. He was well and truly kersplashed, i'd say, on a mix of wine, vodka, coke and a mystery ingredient (all in one drink apparently) but still managed to bust it with us for one song- in our record-breaking most loving rap battle on earth. Tiny stage left no room for Krumping. mmmmkrumping.

Bang. ending. turn around to find that friend Nash (who i kicked off stage earlier) had been hiding behind me on stage next to pete for at least two songs. give her a sweaty hug. grab guitar and slip through audience like a greased calf into cool room.

party bangs on. and we follow.

DQP/JB/JV