A European Summer

Festival Season

Across summer we did lots of European trips. Little pockets of 3 or 4 gigs in 3 or 4 different countries (in 3 or 4 days). Then home for a few days and then away again. Never fully in either place, each foot in a separate country, and always one or two days adjacent to leaving. 

Each place, home and away, ended up slightly see-through. Like a stack of tracing paper; neither place with enough solidity to back it up or make it believable.

Years ago in art class I had the idea of stacking up drawings on sheets of tracing paper. See through canvases, one on top of the other. But tracing paper is not perfectly clear, it’s slightly grey. After a few sheets pile up, all you get is the grey tinge and a general blurring. 

By the end of summer I am left with a stack of tracing paper, a stack of days. And it did blur a bit, I didn’t write down many thoughts.

Although in France in July I had an afternoon by the sea separate from all of that.

Dieppe,France 13.07.24

I’ve gone for a walk and all I can hear is crickets. We are staying in an old house, beautiful and very French. It has a driveway and a tennis court. We just got there but are only there for one night anyway. There is no food and no shops but they left us 3 loaves of brioche. 

I’ve gone for a walk to see the sea. The hill in-front of me is steep and full of wild flowers. I speed up a little, walking forwards in anticipation. It’s always like this, the final hill before the beach, before the view is revealed. 

The peak of the hill looms in front of me, taking up my full field of vision and I can’t see anything overtop apart from sky. I am waiting to reach the highest point when the other side will reveal itself, and I can look down on the grass folding down towards the beach. For now the hill remains a 2 dimensional cut out, blocking any view further. I need to get higher, over the precipice. I walk closer. 

Suddenly it shifts and very quickly I realise I was seeing this wrong. 

I get onto my hands and knees and crawl the last bit. The top the hill I was looking at is just a cliff. That is why it stops, not because its height is hiding a view behind it, but because it actually stops. There is no other side of the hill.

I look down at the beach below from the cliff, my hands twirled tightly around the grass. It looks peaceful and a long way down. 

Back inland, the path continues. I always would’ve spotted it, that it was a cliff, but it’s strange to think I would’ve walked over that. Jacqui did exactly the same thing. She tells me later but we’re not together now. The phone signal is bad. 

Round the corner is a good viewpoint, so I sit down and start reading my book. It is a perfect place, but a bit too hot. I take off my top. I am feeling French. They have topless beaches so sitting there in a bra is fine. 

As soon as I do that, three old people appear directly behind me. I haven’t seen anyone for half an hour. 

I think, I must be confident, so I keep my back very straight and greet them and look forward out to sea as they do. If I look shocked to be just in a bra they will also become shocked by association. It works and they don’t. 

I look at the sea. Tomorrow we will take the ferry home, the final ferry of this week. I am opposed to ferries, but we’ve already done 9 hours of ferries on this trip up in north Norway a few days ago. The water around the islands up there was actually very calm.

Now I watch this French sea move in front of me. It looked flat by the fjords.

I look at the water and breathe at the same time. I can see my chest moving up and down, made obvious because I have no top on. The water seems to sync up with me, rising and falling. And it is an animal now, one big chest rising up and down. That makes it seem better. I’m not sure why breaths are better than waves, but they definitely are.

Those days in Norway could have been months ago. It’s curious that it’s attached to this trip. We had a night in Paris between Norway and Dieppe which broke it off. I’m not adjacent to it any more, so it could be any time in the past. I have just come from Paris, there is no point listing the places I’ve been before that in my mind because where would I stop.

I feel very calm sat on this ridge looking down to the sea, more so than I have in a long time. Maybe it’s the sun on my skin, or not being in a rush of some kind, or being in the countryside. Maybe it’s having some time fully by myself. The whole thing seems to breathe in front of me, the grass swaying and the water lapping. Movement as one.

Switzerland 11.08.24

We are in a hotel in Winterthur. They speak German here. I walk downstairs for breakfast and a woman in a white apron says ‘Morgan’. I turn around but she has already walked away. 

As I’m choosing a cheese, aiming for the least intense option possible, someone else behind me says ‘Morgan’.

I sit down with Rob and a different woman comes over to us. “Morgan”, she says, and I work out then that it’s a shortened “guten morgan” (German good morning).

No schizophrenia or Truman show just yet. 

I try not to turn my head in reply every time I hear it, realising it is a surprisingly subconscious instinct to turn at your own name. 

Rob asks for baked beans which they don’t have and English breakfast tea which they don’t have. They do find some ketchup in the backrooms for him though. One out of three.

As we drive to Zurich airport people start guessing about the heat in Sicily. 

We started this run at a rainy Boomtown on Thursday, and have been consistently upping the temperature since then. 

Germany on Friday, warm enough for short sleeves and swimming, but also cold enough for a bonfire. Switzerland on Saturday, hotter, walking around in a bikini top because a t-shirt would get too sweaty. Doing the gig bare foot. 

I look at Sicily on google maps and see it’s pretty inline with northern Africa. Joe says it will be 39 degrees. It’s quite hard to imagine that heat until you’re in it so I don’t try. 

Sicily (Later in the day 11.08.24)

We land in Palermo, and wait for our hold bags. As we try to leave they point us to a queue of people with suitcases. There is a security scanner for leaving the airport. I have never seen this before, a bag check after you land as you’re trying to get out. They must care what you are bringing into the country here.

We step outside and it feels like standing in a hair dryer. A man in an airconned van drives us two hours to Castelbueno. In the back the others are discussing walk on music for the gig. They start playing The Godfather theme, and the van driver, who doesn’t speak much English starts smiling. He says ‘Mafia music! Mafia music!’ His reaction doesn’t make it much clearer whether it’s a good idea to play it in the gig or not. We did do the Dracula theme in Transylvania after all. The crucial difference though is that vampires are not real. I think about them checking what you are bringing in to the country. We don’t play the mafia music.

Across the day I melt more and more. The instinct to walk into the shade after spending enough time in the sun, only to realise you’re already in the shade and there is not one level down to retreat to.

One of the locals says he heard on the radio this was the hottest day of summer and that makes me feel slightly vindicated. I keep hiding in the church, which is also our greenroom, looking for somewhere cool. 

After the gig it’s nighttime and still as hot. Almost like the nights of 24 hour sunlight we saw in Norway, except now with a difference sense. Feeling not vision. If I had my eyes shut and I felt the air on my skin I would think it was midday.

Jacqui and Chris are stood at the exit to the church.

‘Have you heard this?’ They say. 

I leave the shelter to go listen. They are playing a version of ‘Don’t You Want Me’ where every single line has the lyrics ‘You were working as a waitress in a cocktail bar’. It’s still the normal tune.

Instead of “don’t, don’t you want me.”; “you, you were working.”, and on and on through the whole song. I feel a bit delirious. I look up at the clear black sky, and down at the hundreds of people dancing in their summer dresses on the stone steps of the old town hall. 

“working as a wai-ai-aitress” on and on for eternity.

Home? Not that I remember which time

There is not a clear time when I came home to round this entry off. Every week of summer was the end of the trip, and also the start of the next trip. I am finding it harder to keep all of these as separate closed off events in my head. Stacks of tracing paper, making for an unsymmetrical story. Or just festival season, a more bitty time by nature.

I walk away to watch Viagra Boys. I haven’t seen them live in years, not since we did the support for their UK tour in 2023. The time falls away and I still know all the words. 

“I keep things loose”, I sing along with them. 

~

An Afterthought: Loose people of the Summer

These characters of people, loose people as Viagra Boys would say, floating around from festival to festival, bring me back to Kieron. More an idea than a person, and perhaps summarising them all.

I am in a French festival half listening to a guy chatting to Joe. I’m not sure how we know this leather jacket man, we are all in deckchairs and they sink so low it makes it hard to follow conversation. 

The leather jacket man mentions that he is playing with Kieron. 

Jacqui asks leather jacket if he is Australian. 

He laughs, ‘I must have been spending too much time with Kieron’.

Me and Jacqui look at each other, neither of us understood that.

The chat goes on for a while, I slump into the deckchair. Various people pass the leather jacket man. A few of them suddenly realise as they pass, ‘Oh my god, so you’re here with Kieron!’

‘Who is Kieron?’ Jacqui asks.

No one can hear her and she is blanked.

She tries again.

“Who is Kieron?’, this time directly to the leather jacket man.

‘Haha yeah, who even is Kieron’ chuckles the leather jacket guy. Indescribable. ‘Some fucking guy’ says Chris. 

Clearly now this will remain a known unknown. I am imagining Kieron as some random bloke in a pub, just a normal guy.

Leather jacket leans in and we all lean too to meet him

‘Guys, I really want you to see Kieron.’

What is it ? We ask.

‘A punk rock opera’ says Chris.

Random joke, I think, yet Leather Jacket nods in sincere agreement, ‘yes. A punk rock opera.’

We run down the hill, feeling genuinely quite excited. Leather jacket is wholeheartedly convinced that this is the biggest thing to ever hit Normandy. It is very contagious. 

There are 10 or so people on stage, majority of them in drag makeup. Joe is stood next to me, ‘This isn’t what I expected’ he says looking straight ahead. I realise Joe has no idea who Kieron is either.

Chris reappears excited, ‘He’s gonna take me to meet Kieron backstage. He’s not on right now’. I wonder who all these people are on stage then. 

We all follow Chris like ducks in a line, piling into the white tent behind the stage. 

Chris is brought forward by leather jacket. ‘Kieron, this is Chris from Fat Dog’. Kieron is at the very back of the tent, having large amounts of white face paint applied. A ginger PA-looking woman stands next to me. 

‘Who is Kieron?’ I ask her. She points over to him. 

‘No, I mean I don’t know who he is’, I say as discreetly and quietly as possible, so as not to offend Kieron himself. She just points again. 

We stand there awkwardly. One of the drag queens bustles past us off stage in a flurry. ‘Are you Kieron too’ I ask.

‘Yes’. More confusion. ‘No’, he laughs, ‘I wish I was’.

Finally Kieron speaks from the corner;

‘I think you should all go watch the show.’

We have been kicked out by Kieron. And we do as he wishes. 

Later Leather Jacket tells us Kieron has a show on the 31st of August so he may as well stick around in France till then. It is now the 14th of July. 

Some people never feel the need to go home. Sometimes you perform so long that the idea is more memorable than the real thing. I don’t remember much about who Kieron actually was in the end, but I don’t think that matters. It is all mythology.