Dark underbelly

Since my last post a few things have happened to reshape my opinion of Tallinn.
Yesterday one of my colleagues had their camera stolen from the table beside her. This is perhaps not unusual in a major European city and during previous tours other members of our company have been victims of street crime.
But within 10 minutes of this event another member of our company was threatened in a popular fast food restaurant and on our return to the relative safety of the hotel we witnessed a fight in the bar.
After this high density seam of upset most people decided to go to bed where they could watch violent movies from the safety of bed.
The upshot of all this is that I dare not go and visit what I hoped would be the highlight of my stay in Estonia. Who knows what unspeakable act of criminality might befall me if ventured into the marzipan museum.
We are off to the last bastion of Euro-liberalism that is Holland where, hopefully, things will improve.

as good as it gets

It turns out that the hotel we are staying in has one of the hippest live music venues in the city of Tallin and the hippest band in the whole of Estonia were playing there tonight.
This was of particular interest to me as I spent a long time living in London (arguably the hippest city in the world) trying to make it as the hippest band in town.
Tallin is a city of 400 000 people compared to the ten million who inhabit ldn which goes some way towards explaining the crazy mixture in the band I watched tonight.
First I just have to say a word about listening to pop music in a foreign language. Its very revealing of the musical elements in each song, as you don't have the faintest idea what they are singing about. As a result I spent a large part of the gig trying to work out what chords the guitarists were playing and analysing the the general musical content of the show. The result? The band were super tight, well rehearsed, all playing the hippest instruments; but shackled to very predictable chord sequences and melodies. The overall effect was like an all male version of Roxette; with a rock-lite europop vibe overlayed on a super-incongruous personel selection.
The photos at the top of this post only begin to tell the story. The bass player and drummer looked respectively like the son and grandson of Roy Orbison with identikit sunglasses and an air of studied indifference to the material they were churning out, while the lead singer looked like a slightly younger version of Martin Jarvis and had the infuriating habit of strumming his Telecaster halfway up the neck as if he was trying to shake hands with himself in an orgy of self-congratulation. Oh and there was a keyboard player.
Completing the lineup was a young guitarist who had an almost cliched Nordic death metal get up with a full complement of tattoos, blistering fret-wank technique and eyes so close together it looked like he had spent years focussing on the end of his nose.
Strangely enough the overall effect was ace and I along with the rest of the crowd were transported by the synergy of band and audience to a little pocket of pop nirvana. Most of the fans (they all seemed to know the words) were young women and we danced with abandon untill the end of the when the band abruptly disappeared without staging an encore. Cooooell.

misunderstanding

I feel I must just relate an incident that happened last week while we were in the lovely northern spa town of Newcastle.
A colleague of mine asked the tired old rhetorical question,

"What's the worst that could happen?" To which I replied, "Ebola"........

Now I am not sure whether she did not hear me clearly or whether she had not heard of this deadly virus but after a pause for thought of a few seconds she said,

"What, like a hat?"

Now, I was temporarily stunned by this but soon realised the inadvertent genius of this idea.....Ebola hat!

Now for those who do not know their Ebola from their bowler check this out......

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ebola

Now imagine all the destructive flesh eating power of this killer disease harnessed into a simple piece of headwear!

There is an upside to all this; it would be a great way of ridding the world of rubbish Charlie Chaplain impersonators.

Tallin, lunchtime today

Anyway, it turns out that Estonia was a part of the Soviet Union (which I sort of knew) but also long before that in the 18th century it was also invaded by the Swedes (presumably before they dedicated their time to inventing saunas and porn movies). My source for all this info is the production manager for the local promoters of the show I am in and he says that in Estonia they refer to the period of Swedish occupation as the "the good old days".
To my mind that phrase "the good old days" implies that someone is still around to talk about it. Maybe the cold keeps people fresh for longer.

This is real touring

I am curently in the middle of a tour of Europe providing the live musical elements of a well known theatre show and, having spent the last weeks travelling around the UK, we are now about to do our first show in the the small but fascinating Baltic state of Estonia.
The title of this post echos the rather sage words uttered by a senior member of the company to a young Australin who, before now, has never left the bosom of his tropical paradise homeland.
It is very cold here, maybe not in the Arctic wasteland sense of the word but by my standards minus 15 celsius is way beyond chilly.
I am going to finish this post now because I have to do a sound check but I will return with more details and historical perspectives on Estonia.
While setting up this blog I have been listening to Tago Mago by Can. I bought it off I tunes while drunk last night. One of my better drunk decisions.