I went with Patricia and Michal to see Guapo last night in a dirty little club in Strahov. It was a bizarre but brilliant concert. I met Michal at 5 and we took the bus up the hill and ended up (como siempre) in a pub whilst we waited for the doors to the club to open. After two beers, Patricia showed up (in all her Spanish splendour) and we continued with a third beer. We were going to eat something, but since, after all, beer is liquid bread, we didn’t bother. We stumbled to the club and encountered the band’s soundcheck. It was, as most soundchecks are, loud. The bassist made particularly lots of noise. We had another beer. Michal provided the prediction that the opening band (Czech) was going to be horrific, but I held on to a bit of optimism (since the opening band for Porcupine tree, whom I saw one month ago, was brilliant). Michal was right. So we went back to the aforementioned pub for 45 minutes. We drank another beer and were offered a joint from friends of Patricia who apparently lived in the area and inhabited the pub regularly (just as she used to). The walk from the pub back to the club seemed very long and surreal (mostly because of the marijuana). Michal talked at length about the widths of the cracks in the parking lot. We arrived and ordered more beer. Unfortunately, at that moment, I had to urinate very badly, so I was away when the concert started. Sequenced bells and chimes raced everywhere (I began hearing them as I was pissing), and as I re-emerged and found Patricia and Michal, two of the members of the band were creeping through the throng with gongs held above them, screaming and ranting (and banging the gongs). One of them (the keyboardist, at it turned out) was painted blue. After that, it was 1 1/2 hours of relentless Zeuhl (with several more gong sequences). I was surprised that the audience (mostly students, probably, in their early 20s) were so enthusiastic. It was brutal stuff. They played their new CD in its entirety and the first ‘piece’ from their last CD, plus an encore which I hadn’t heard. Afterwards, we took the slow, meandering bus from Strahov to Karlovo Namesti and ended with another beer at ‘U Sudu’ (there were other beers and stuff inbetween that I forgot to mention). I was the least drunk of the three of us as we called it a night, so I walked for 30 minutes back to Holešovice through the warm, humid night.
