Paris: The City of Love

Left: the crowd immediately after my set at Elysee Montmartre, technically Moule had started DJing at this point but I'd ended like 30 seconds before and they're totally holding their hands up because I'm taking the picture

Okay France, you're back on my good side, although I could still use some antibiotics. After some disappointing gigs (and, honestly, disappointing performances on my part) in Toulouse and Bordeaux Wednesday and Thursday, we got into Paris at around 4pm Friday and I went right to the dressing room to rework my set. I made some new versions of a couple things on my laptop and got a few new ideas on how to structure things. Zebra's band started to arrive along with the guest singers and five storm troopers (!!) for the Star Wars intro. It was an early event, 6:30-10:30 (with another event starting at midnight so the times were totally set); doors opened at 6:30 and when I headed up to the stage at 6:45 the place was already about 2/3 full. I started off pretty slow with some classics and stuff, and people were into it but just hanging around really, i mean I would be at 7pm too. It was basically full by around 7:15 or so, and I started to speed it up, then went over to the microphone and said "Je sais que c'est un peu tot, mais nous pouvons nous amuser, oui?" (I know it's a little early, but we can have fun, right?" The crowd erupted into cheers, and the volume level of the cheers took me back a little bit. This place is as big as the Fillmore, bigger perhaps, and from what I understood they oversold it, and I think at the peak attendance was in the 1600 range. So just a little cheer is pretty loud. Things went really well and I got a big cheer for the Wiseguys/Grease combo I hadn't really even planned on playing, and then at the end during the big Dr. Who On Holiday finale, I went up to the front of the stage to hand out some of the CDs I made to give away, and this roar comes up from the crowd that's kind of terrifying. People bush to the front like I'm handing out, I dunno, euros or something. I throw some CDs out but can't really reach people so I say "fuck it" and jump across the gap onto the hands of the crowd, just about falling back into the security pit at first but finally making it over for a quick crowd surf, before running back up on stage and taking that picure. Paris, you're awesome.

Moule went on and proceeded to do another great set, but my part wasn't over: I was reprising my role as Party Ben Kenobi in a battle with Emperor Zebra at the beginning of Zebra's set, and I was supposed to do the thing we did at Bootie in October where I interrupted MC and French radio personality Laurent Lavige, with a whole dramatic thing of "i sense a great disturbance in the force," all of which I had to memorize in French and try to deliver with my horribly stuffed up nose. Thankfully I know Mr. Lavige from doing an interview with him back in 2005 so he was very helpful with making it all go off without a hitch, and I know there's about 200 videos of this around so when I find some I'll link them here.

Actually hold on lemme look on YouTube.

Okay nothing yet, but I know there are videos out there so, really, just wait til you see this.

Zebra's show was really outstanding, a true achievement, but more about that later as I have to run and grab a train to Tourcoing.