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A Cafe in Belgium…

Saturday, January 14th, 2012 | deepchild live and dj sets, reflections | No Comments

Sitting in a café in Belgium.

Behind me, 2 young American ladies discussing luxury cruises and their latest haute couture purchases, perfumes, designer aromas in plastic bottles which look like crystals, snowflakes, sunsets. They have a voracious appetite for “Ralf Lauren”, and others who’s names I’ve seen on reality-tv shows and advertising billboards at Times Square - rock-star names of 50 foot people with excellent tan-lines. “I had to sell my $200 jeans for ten bucks” says one. They have a fervour, a passion, a hunger for these things – it’s incredible to hear.

Snoop Dogg plays on the radio. “Beautiful. I just want you to know, you’re my favorite girl…”

The coffee here, strong enough, mozzarella salad comprised of all the prerequisites. Thin women in heels walk on the cobbled streets outside, and parking-police who look part of a less-famous hiphop crew, checking in on Minis, BMWs, Alfa Romeros, electrified European cars the size of bumper-cars.

Here, the girls kiss on one side of the cheek only. This is strange.

Men with green-scarves and eye-glass frames which make them look intelligent, but slightly less disabled than my own thick, black appendages and refractory plastic wedges. If you look in the corner of mine the world becomes a skewed rainbow.

The gig at The Wood last night was unusual. Over 100 people more than expected, most of them fresh-faced, self-aware, intent on finding a mate.

An old woman manned the men’s toilets – 50c for a piss, and a constant cubicle-deadlock as boys jostled to pee, get high, fight over women and each other in the the narrow porcelain thoroughfare. It’s amazing how many people don’t want to pay an old woman 50cents to pee at 3am.

I can’t help but think that she deserves all she gets, and more, from this loveless task.

At one point, she shakes a couple out who have loitered over the ceramic for at least 10 minutes. Indignant young boys, who should know so much better. They curse at her, hackles raised. This makes me so upset to see.

I feel like shaking them, telling them to leave this holy place, turning over tables or weeping. Fucksake – don’t you recognise dignity? Such a strange state of affairs.

I battle through a few hours of playing…requests from several punters to play ‘more sexy’ or ‘more deep’. Lord, Ive become so very ‘techno’. My tastes so unknown to many of these kids – Carl Craig, Moodymann, Octave One, Skudge, Robert Hood, Basic Channel, Redshape…names so well known in Berlin, but foreign, perhaps, in these parts. It’s difficult to please everyone….

…and yet, a few sacred moments. Innevitably slightly older people asking me to play ‘deepchild’, telling me they’d been waiting a long time to hear me play. It’s important to remember these moments – small investments in foreign lands….disparate friends, reborn and yet not yet met. Shit goes deep.

Finally, before 6am, the promoter pays. Swallowed, for some time, by an ex-girlfriends cloying embrace and insistent demands for attention. She won’t leave his side, let him be. He is lost. We wait. Finally, paid.

Outside in the moonlight, and I’m struck by how beautiful the sky is. Stars, moon, endless haunted night. It feels strange to be comforted by feeling so small and insignificant in this odd universe. Oddly, though, it’s the antidote to so much fear for me. The sky – she demands nothing, and doesn’t see, to find it necessary to comment, to judge, to stay the same. It’s getting light now.

Back at the hotel, resembling a Stanley Kubric film – “The White Hotel”. This obsession with white, purity, sterility. In its own way, there’s a comfort here in the hotel-room – so neutral, impersonal.

Toni, my booker sleeps next to me. I’m aware that my left ear feels like it’s submerged under water – and everything I hear through it sounds like it’s played through an old, broken radio…distorted, crackling, out-of-phase. I guess is this how hearing slips away. I’ve not felt this ever before – and only in my left ear. Toni says exactly the same…

As soon as I lie down, the hot, familiar waves, start to move through my body, my chest. My hands feel numb. The waves rise and fall. I start to sweat. I try to focus on my breathe. I decide to count my pulse. Over 120 bmp, lying down as the sun-rises. This is so very strange.

Finally, by 9am, I manage to forget myself and the world for a moment. 2pm, late-checkout, and we leave, behind us a trail of white plastic, white rooms, white linoleu, and a hotel Matre D who doesn’t aknowledge us when we say farewell. We have to laugh about it.

—

Still at the café. The women talk on about brands and acquisition – I know this because my semi-functioning right-ear seems to work well enough, unscarred. They change the topic to organic-restaurants where the story of every potato you eat during your degustation meal is explained by the chef.

Toni and I fidget like deaf rabbits, trying to get online. 2 hours until we need to be at the airport….more Coca Cola for him, more coffee for me.

It’s incredible to think of the 100s – perhaps now thousands of gigs I’ve performed in my career. So diverse, and always so much wonder and learning, and forgetting, exorcism and transition.

I’m glad the moon still shines, for as long as it desired. Today I miss Berlin, and in 4 hours the same moon will welcome me back home.