GIG REPORT

The Dirty Scene Tour - 22/03/2003 - Club 9 - Koersel: Mise*en*Scene -  The Dirty Scums - The Thirsty Scums

OWN REPORT - 24/03/2003

In the early hours after these gigs I started to drink Duvel, which I continued in the early afternoon of the next day on the carnival festivities of our hometown Tielt. Let's try to see how far my memories on Saturday night still reach.

I expected a lot from this "Club 9", this is in fact a concertclub organizin' concerts on a nearly weekly basis. They always advertise rather big in music magazines as for instance RifRaf, and they have a professional lookin' website. So in fact I was a bit pleased that we were asked in "Club 9". Koersel is about two hours of drivin' from our place and we departed early. There was no need for our own P.A., so there was room in the van for 9 people, room that was occupied by Mise*en*Scene. With 9 people, a crate of Jupiler and some mother nature cigarettes, the van quickly turned into a funbus. Amongst different things we talked about age and it seems that I'm older than the father of bassplayer JC. Are we on the road with some kids or are they on the road with some fuckin' old bastards ?

Two hours later we arrived in Koersel. The place to play was a bit hided behind a block of houses, so we didn't found it immediately. A poster on the door announced a gig of The Ditry Scums (sic). The club itself disposes of quite some infrastructure, there's a big parkin' place surrounded with different buildings amongst which the pub with a small stage and a bigger concertroom behind it, there's also a rehearsal room, a small cinema room, an administrative place and so on. All this they can freely use from the town but they are not subsidised in another way. It was in the pub we would play on this small stage just in front of the bar, that wasn't bad. We began to set up our things but we could only dispose at 8 pm over the P.A. because there was a band rehearsin' with it, we didn't hear the band as the rehearsal room was perfectly isolated. There was good music playin', we heard almost the complete first Sex Pistols album, next to essential bands from the first punkperiod like the Stranglers, Buzzcocks and stuff like that. At 8 pm we could move the small P.A. from the rehearsal room into the pub, there were 2 monitors with it, but there were no matchin' cables. After havin' done a small soundcheck we could eat a bit in the cinema room. At 9 pm we returned in the pub but there was not exactly a lot of people, I estimate they were about 30. In the mean time they had found one cable for a monitor, so we quickly arranged that we could use one. Needless to say that we didn't know a lot of people there but there was this punk who had seen us 10 years ago on a rather big festival (with the fantastic girlband the Ramonas) in Opglabbeek, close to Koersel. We then had a weird interview with some people from an organization called BLOOT.

It was nearly 10 pm when M*e*S started to play. They played and sounded good, but there was no reaxion from the people in the pub. We had our stand open but there was no one who came to look at it, strange people there in Koersel. Organizer Rudi told us that the attendance at gigs was each time unpredictable and also that the younger people didn't know the bands of this evenin'. That's nearly impossible, haha, but not knowin' the bands is in any way no reason to stay home, and not knowin' The Dirty Scums is plain scandalous of course. Just before we started to play, one more visitor entered the pub, some relative of Keez who had come all the way from Deinze (the place where M*e*S lives, by the way) on his motorbike. For the rest, same thing as with the gig of M*e*S: we played a good gig but the people in the bar stayed cool although they did applaud between the songs. After the gig, nearly everybody went home, apparently there are not so many Ramones-lovers in this region. So when we started The Thirsty Scums there were the followin' people in the pub: organizer Rudi, M*e*S, Keez' relative, the Opglabbeek-guy and 5 uninterested people playin' darts. Man, this was really the lowest point of this tour ! We started pretty good, but halfway the set I wasn't on my ease anymore as Keez' bass was apparently not exactly tuned and Zjantie switched to a lower tempo. Anyway, everybody present seemed to love the gig, we even sold 1 CD afterwards.

The pils the club served was Cristal Alken, and compared to Jupiler this is not a first class pils. They didn't have a wide variety of beers either, e.g. there was only 1 dark beer in the house and that was Grimbergen. Keez is in his Gueuze-period which he started the week before and I had a mind for Duvel. So here we are where the story began but there are still some things I remember, haha. We talked for instance about Sabam, the organisation in Belgium that stands for the copyrights of the song-authors, a job in which they sometimes seriously exaggerate as they collect money for bands who are playin' songs that are not copyrighted. There is this idea of the copyleft principle, but it is not legal for the moment and there's a hiatus in it because the songs are not protected. Rudi had this original idea to make it for instance possible to declare your songs on a website which should make them protected against plagiarism but that should then be the only funxion of the site as there would be no payments for the artists, same as the copyleft principe in fact. Anyway, there's still a lot of work for people who want to prove they are legally not obliged to work with Sabam.

I ordered a last Duvel before enterin' the funbus again, we joked that we had a good rehearsal, but then again it had been too far drivin' to accept this as a rehearsal. Sadly this was the lowest point in the tour up till now, but without lowpoints there are no highlights, isn't it ? 

Dirty Pik