The Scouse experience
Thursday, May 27th, 2010Back from Liverpool. Three wonderful nights, two wonderful days.
Our plane landed at around 10pm. Carrying a Lebanese passport, I of course had to wait an hour at the border because my “tourist visa does not allow me to perform without a special sponsor number from the festival organisers.” Fine, Mr Policeman, then why don’t you send one of your guys to follow me during my stay to make sure I don’t perform? I mean if the problem isn’t in me entering your precious country, but in me performing in it, why are you still keeping me here?
No clue. All I know is that while I was waiting in that ugly empty space of the John Lennon International Airport (how ironic is that?), I made a promise to myself to definitely quit making music – as a professional – in case I was not going to be allowed to get in and perform.
An hour later, my band mates Vincent and David finally saw me coming to meet them.
The taxi ride was weird. we drove for about 20 minutes in what looked like a ghost village. Not a single person on the street, not a single light in any house. For a second, we really started to wonder if we hadn’t taken the wrong flight to some lost village in Switzerland. Oh no wait, the Swiss wouldn’t have let me in anyway, so that’s a good sign.
The hotel we were booked at was a 7-quid taxi ride from the city center, which explains the village feel of the area. We dropped our stuff and quickly went downtown to Kazimier to meet my friend Peter Guy from http://www.getintothis.co.uk. The members of the band on stage were fully dressed in traditional very colorful African dresses, despite them being blonds with blue eyes. I don’t remember any of the songs so that’s not a good sign, though I remember they were extremely tight musicians. After that, God took the stage in the shape of one-man show Max Tundra. The guy was playing tens of instruments at the same time over a midi base running at 300 bpm, and that’s without mentioning the outfit, the moves. For a clearer idea about what that looked like, follow this link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QXT7Qfae31Q&feature=related
Peter had to go back home to work and we ended up cruising around Liverpool’s city center, bar hopping, being taken to dodgy RnB clubs, Scouse veggie burger places, before ending up at Bumper, which will be our after hour meeting point for three straight nights.
We woke up the next day and I kind of felt bad about having drank as much and having stayed out this late just one night before my performance. But whatever, we had plenty of time, ran through the set one last time with David – while Vincent was finishing off his daily 14 hours of sleep, – then went downtown to meet our friend and agent Carol Watfa from Panther Music Agency who took great care of us. Nice walk around the city, noodles, sound check.
I wasn’t impressed by any of the bands performing with us that night. Good bands of course – otherwise they wouldn’t have made it to the festival anyway, but nothing too out-of-this-world. At least not to my taste.
I personally felt a bit out of place because of the setting: we were booked in Hannah’s Bar, and Slutterhouse had never performed in a bar before, nor is it what you’d consider a “bar band.” But 90% of Liverpool Sound City’s venues were bars anyway and we had to go along with that. The show went great though, Carol handled our sound perfectly, the boys did a great job, and we were only greeted with positive reviews when we were done. Some useful contacts were also made with music industry professionals who had come just to see us and offer to work together.
Needless to say, I don’t really remember the end of the night, apart from the fact that we ended up at Bumper again, and made a new friend, Garey Snider from GSpider. Back to the hotel early morning, I only got a couple of hours to sleep as I had to take an early train to Birmingham where I was meeting my record label’s director for lunch.
Back to Liverpool for a memorable Friday night with the band and Carol. Throughout the night got to hang out in many different places and ran into old friends like Peter Guy, the official Sound City photographer Mark McNulty, and our dear Becky Ayres; new friends like Garey, Pamela, David, Rylan, Laura, Jess, and many others; and got to watch many great bands including my festival favorites: Fly With Vampires from Liverpool. We then moved to different clubs and I remember starting to complain because I wanted a club that played Lady Gaga rather than Bloc Party, and we eventually ended up at Bumper, once again.
Our flight was very early in the morning so we partied until dawn, went to the hotel to grab our things and headed to the airport with one thing in mind: sleep; but there was a 10-12 year olds football team on the same flight.
Rainy Paris today as I sat down to write this short review about our Liverpool journey. We absolutely loved the city and its extremely friendly and funny people, and can’t wait to go back sometime soon.
Rabih
