Note: I didn’t do a podcast version of this, but there is a podcast review of the gig here on Music Explorers (then known as Jeffrey Music) that I recorded with my brother Our Gordon.
I’m on the silly train carrying passengers from Madrid’s Terminal 4 to the Satellite. I hate it. It’s laborious and time-consuming, and even more annoying for Arrivals when you wearily stumble off a flight, thinking it’s all over and you’re almost home, only to be hit with this extra step: it is my secret hell. I stand near the exit doors as it jerks around, shuttling us through the tunnel, a two-kilometre ride from the main terminal to a bunch of extra gates. After what feels like a long time (it isn’t really), it pulls to a stop and the doors swoosh open.
“This is S gates,” someone says, and someone else says, “ah ok, we want M gates.”
It’s the only stop, S and M are just different floors of the same building, so I decide to stick my nose in: “It’s the only stop, you have to get off,” I explain, “to get to M you go up via the escalator and turn right.”
For the first time I notice this satellite terminal is basically called S&M – which, given the train to get here, is an apt name.
We exit the train and I zip up the escalator and navigate the zigzags the architect didn’t know were needed, so didn’t design a process for. Transport infrastructure all over the world is full of similar zigzag afterthoughts plonked scruffily on to the neat design of the original space.
I take the lift up to S gates, and dash through the Duty Free Shop. I have made my peace with being forced to walk the twisty path that weaves us through the booze, fags and perfume, but I believe that whoever came up with this idea deserves to be nominated for the Thomas Midgley Jr. Prize1 for, in pursuit of their own short-term gain, made the world worse for everyone else.
Midgley famously came up with the idea of tetraethyllead and invented Chlorofluorocarbons, thus managing not only to (knowingly) poison millions of people with leaded petrol, but also create a massive hole in the ozone layer with CFCs!
Oh well, at least they made money, that’s the main thing.
Despite this, it’s a lovely day, and the clear blue skies mean I can see the view east to the table-top plateau across the River Jarama, and west to the beautiful snow-capped Guadarrama Mountains. This range is now a national park, its size acting as a barrier to the worst weather that sweeps across the plains from the north. It also means Madrid has good mountain water (that snow will end up in a reservoir), meaning it is not only feasible to build a big city here, but they can also brew Spain’s famous Mahou beer.
It’s a jam-packed British Airways flight and I have a middle seat. I try to stay in my lane throughout, keeping elbows and knees in check. My seat row neighbours don’t want to talk, so I mostly read my book (the excellent Madhouse at the End of the Earth by Julian Scanton), and wait impatiently for us to land.
I am travelling to London to see dEUS on their Worst Case v In a Bar tour.
dEUS first crashed into my narrow little world around 1994 when I heard Suds’n’Soda on MTV while I was on holiday in France. We were staying in a mouse-ridden gite near Châteaudun, a place that was not what we expected because we expected a chateau on the Loire, but it wasn’t that; it was a cottage several miles from a different river – the Loir – without an E.
Anyway, Suds’n’Soda was not what I expected either. I had never heard music like it before – it was high-energy indie art rock, sort of a bit grungy in that it had crashing guitars and a noisy chorus, but not like it in any other way – I mean, there was violin and someone shouting “Friday! Friday!” for crying out loud! What was this? Tom Waits meets the Pixies? I had no idea, but I was fascinated.
I got back to England and bought In a Bar, Under the Sea, their second album that had just been released on Island Records and thought it was the best thing I had ever heard. I couldn’t understand how this bunch of cool Belgian arty rockers had managed to create something so weird, so fun, so eclectic that sat exactly atop my musical taste – a taste I didn’t even know I had.
I rushed back into town to buy their debut album Worst Case Scenario and I adored that too! This was incredible … I had discovered something new and fascinating, cool and contemporary, I could actually become part of this band’s journey!
Then it ended.
Well, nothing really ends, as they would later sing, the band didn’t end end, but the magical nucleus of early dEUS fell apart. Bands are unstable entities, they are tacit agreements between creative personalities, and whatever differences are minimized in the early days grow larger in time, and people react differently to success and what it demands of you.
That first line-up was centred around Tom Barman (vocals and guitar) and Stef Kamil Carlens (vocals and bass) – everyone in the band contributed, especially Rudy Trouvé (guitar), but it was Tom and Stef who between them created the playful eccentric spark across those first two albums.
Rudy left after Worst Case Scenario, replaced by Scotsman Craig Ward who had been playing in Trouvé’s Kiss My Jazz band, then Stef decided dEUS were too loud, they toured too much, and anyway he wanted to focus more on his own thing and that was that … sort of … this new dEUS with Craig Ward (guitar and vocals) and Danny Mommens (bass) continued (with original members Klaas Janzoons (violin and keyboards) and Jules de Borgher (drums)) and produced their best-selling opus The Ideal Crash … and … as good as that was, as competent and as polished as it sounded … it wasn’t the same – it didn’t have the playfulness, the eclectic eccentricity or the woody atmosphere of those first two … it was very good indie rock music with some sublime moments … but the spark that made dEUS special was muted.
Nothing really ends, but things do change.
Further line-up changes happened during the follow-up album (the rather insipid Pocket Revolution –Stéphane Misseghers joined on drums, the excellent Alan Gevaert on bass and Evil Superstars frontman Mauro Pawlowski on guitar) and the sound changed again, and after three more albums of varying quality and interestingness, Pawlowski left, then returned (when his replacement, Bruno de Groote, was forced to leave for health problems) and then left again, this time to be replaced by Simen Folstad Nilsen.
Oh well … let’s be thankful to dEUS that they are still with us in any form, and that they are actively releasing decent material and playing live … and touring those first two albums! … for someone like me who was enraptured with the band in those crazy early days, who was there from the start(ish), being able to relive that time with the band in concert was an opportunity I couldn’t miss … hence me travelling all the way from Madrid to London, and even putting up with a Travelodge!
We get there early, catching the Underground to Shepherd’s Bush and walking across to the Empire where already a small queue had formed – one side for the balcony, one for the stalls … but hang on, what’s that queue in the middle? I ask Security and he explains it’s a priority queue for those with O2 Priority, something only available to their customers … oh … this sounds a bit too much like the Santander pre-sales that dominate concerts in Spain; unless you’re a customer of that bank, you’re pretty much snookered.
Not very rock’n’roll.
Oh well … I’m with my brother and his wife, and she is a customer of O2 and after some online jiggery-pokery she manages to get priority status for their tickets, and they move from sixth in the main queue to second in the slightly-further-away posh queue, while I remain with the riff-raff.
We get in, and they bag spots on the front row and I squeeze in, roughly in front of the gap between where Tom and Simen will stand. They always stand in the same place and always (apart from Stéphane on drums) stand in a line across the front.
The set starts with the understated Jigsaw You, a short track that works beautifully on the album in that it doesn’t try to be a normally structured song, instead sureptitiously adding atmosphere and variety quietly in the corner. It’s a clever choice for the opening track, especially as they pair it with Via, so not leaving it hanging on its own. Via is a more normal song that builds up the pace and volume a little, but still keeps things mildly low key. Like so many tracks on these two albums, they’re not necessarily stand outs on their own, but they become part of something much greater when knitted together – Jigsaw You plus Via, neither in the my lengthy “favourites” column, work well together to kick us off.
Morticia Chair, which very much is in my favourites column, is next – a Rudy Trouvé-led track on the album, the spoken-word vocal is now covered by Klaas, and it’s great to see him take on a bigger role in the band. All three tracks so far are live debuts for me, but the next – the wonderful W.C.S. (First Draft) – is not, having heard it on recent tours. It was a favourite back when I first got the album in the 1990s, and it remains so today.
I can see how this post might get (even more) tiresome if I simply bang on about how wonderful everything is in great detail, so I shall skip forward through the enjoyable Let’s Get Lost, Secret Hell, Right as Rain and Mute, pause briefly to acknowledge how Shake Your Hip – a nothing inconsequential thirty seconds on the album – is transformed into rock’n’roll magnificence, before the enjoyably bonkers Great American Nude and last(ish) from that first album, the sublime Hotellounge (Be the death of me).
My top-ranked dEUS album is In a Bar, Under the Sea, their brilliant second effort, and this dominates the second-half of the show, starting with Theme from Turnpike, an oddball banger on the album but even better live with the extended riff and shouty vocals. I’ll move on … another favourite Guilty Pleasures sees the trademark vocals pinging between the whole band as if in conversation, then the lovely Serpentine, the gorgeous Gimme the Heat, the utterly crackers A Shocking Lack Thereof, the simple singalong loveliness of Little Arithmetics followed by another top favourite: Fell Off The Floor, Man.
Then we’re back to the first album for breakthough single Suds’n’Soda, one I don’t listen to much these days due to overplay, but loved this live version with the extended band introductions, and then it’s over … except it isn’t, because there is an encore: the lovely Disappointed in the Sun and lastly Roses.
At the end of the gig, the band did a selfie – so copyright to them for the photo below (I was trying to get out the shot, ended up right in the middle) …
We hung around at the front for a bit, chatting with other fans, some grabbing set lists and two from Italy getting plectrums from Simen’s roadie. The people behind said “Worth coming from Vanouver for” and I nodded, it was worth coming from Madrid for too, but I now needed to find a way to cope with the fact that it was a unique moment in time, and I couldn’t just rewind and rewatch.
I didn’t want to just up and leave because that would mean accepting it had ended, and I wasn’t ready for that. This hadn’t just been another cluster of moments that I got to live through like any other … like emptying the dishwasher or getting the train into town … it had been something else, something emotional and extraordinary, something that couldn’t just end, willy-nilly, and then be gone for ever … it couldn’t … I was in the denial phase of grief and had to be dragged away from the now empty theatre. We sauntered up to the merch stall to gasp at the prices of the t-shirts and hang around a bit longer, dragging out the inevitable exit … although we didn’t know it then, we later found out the band had come out to sign merchandise but we’d missed them because we’d been jibbering and dithering at the front of the stage, although that’s probably for the best because my clunky attempts at starstruck humour haven’t worked brilliantly in the past …
We wandered out and into the chilly night, got the Underground and wandered back to our Travelodge. The bar was still open and so we sat with a pint and began disecting the gig in detail. We might not be able to rewind and watch it again, but we could still wallow in its wonderfulness with a lengthy conversation about it.
Plus … might they play Madrid? Perhaps if I stream them continually on Spotify they’ll spot the bump in income and book a gig just before their festival date in Lisbon … worth a try!
Footnote
- There used to be a Thomas Midgley Award for chemistry in the automotive sector, but this appears to be defunct. The Thoman Midgley Jr Prize I mentioned above is not a real thing, I made it up to recognise those who, for personal gain, make the world worse for everyone else – a combination of Prisoner’s Dilemma and the Tragedy of the Commons. Sort of. ↩︎
MrJohn 