A Curse on Thieving Pikey Bastards.


Truth be told, after 8 days I was quite looking forward to leaving Scandinavia. While it’s beautiful and the people are as friendly as people are anywhere I was tired of switching currency every day and of the high prices; it was time for a change.

Our last show was in Aarhus, Denmark’s second city, so we were told. I’d never been before – normally we don’t get further than Copenhagen or the Roskilde Festival. We arrived early, walked around town for a bit (it’s pleasant enough, a river banked by small café’s and restaurants in the town centre, a big redbrick copper roofed Danish church type thing – all the usual) and the venue was clean, warm and seemingy well-run. Before I set foot in there and before we’d loaded our gear onto the stage the local crew had hung our backdrop – usually the least favourite part of my day. I hate hanging that backdrop, big, unwieldy thing that it is…..it looked like it was going to be a good day.




A river runs through it.




Every city has a red-brick, copper roofed building in the middle - sometimes several.

We set up the gear, washed clothes in the laundry in the room next to the dressing room, and found good WiFi reception in the main dressing room. This meant of course that everyone brought their computers to go online, i-chat, download music, and generally stare at their facebook profiles wondering what obscure book, film or record they could add to make themselves sound more interesting.

After soundcheck, at 7 pm, the venue manager told us it was time to adjourn to the restaurant nearby for dinner. This we did in dribs and drabs and by the time the support band had arrived to eat I was on my way back to the venue to check my Facebook inbox.

When I got to the venue I thought, for one moment, that someone had moved them all. I called Matt back at the restaurant and asked him if he’d put the computers on the bus for safekeeping. He hadn’t. Someone had come into the venue, walked upstairs and taken all six Mac’s sitting from the table in the dressing room.

We were incensed. We accused the support band, we accused the venue, we ran around the neighbourhood looking for the culprits. I must have missed them by minutes. A hippy wandering around in the backstreet told me and Jamie that “three foreigners, 3 middle-eastern men” had come past him with computers, but he was vague about where they’d gone. I grabbed a bicycle and combed the nearby streets looking for them, for anyone, although after a few minutes I began to suspect the hippy more than any spectral arabs. I still do.

We didn’t find them – we found a sheet of paper that had fallen out of someone’s computer case. In the end the haul was 6 laptops, software, one ipod, cash, travelers cheques and Todd the bassist’s passport.

The police wouldn’t come to the venue so I went to them to file a report. The cop taking down the details couldn’t be bothered entering all the information I gave him so he told me to fax it in. If he’d been any less interested he’d have got his cock out and gone home. I know it’s not a murder or a violent crime, but it was US$20,000 worth of computers…..it didn’t look like they were so busy in there. Maybe we were just foreigners?

Back at the venue when I returned the security door was again unlocked. Nice.

The venue manager told me he didn’t believe any of his staff were involved. I pointed out that it would be almost astronomically coincidental if someone just happened into the venue just as we were at dinner to go directly to the main dressing room (without touching the support band’s gear or the guitars on stage or the venue's computers) to take only our computers and to leave again without being seen by anyone. I thought it more likely someone at the venue was involved. Its got to be a pretty short list too, and, I'd say, it starts with him.

The day ended sourly; venue staff getting in the way and being obstinate about it, people leaving the doors propped open like a bunch of fuckwits, and every one of us realizing that someone we were working with that day had stolen our stuff and was laughing at us – it made us suspicious of everyone there, which was a shame. It's no way to go through life and everyone we'd met earlier in the day seemed so hepful and amiable. In the end we were all glad to leave. At this point the senior venue manager hadn't deigned to call me back.

I replaced my computer the following day (but not the contents which has all gone) and insurance claims are already in process. None of us care about the machines as much as the irreplaceabe information and personal photos and documents that were lost. The shadow of identity theft still looms a little but mostly we’re over it. I was surprised at the violent fantasies we all share—there must be some kind of universal victim’s rage that has otherwise calm people wishing violent pain on the perpetrators (my favourite is jumping up and down on slow-cracking ribs – it’s not the worst by a long shot either. So much so that I wouldn't feel comfortable repeating them all here).

I hope whoever has the machines enjoys them, and that the money made from the sale pays for lots of cheap cigarettes, booze and fried food. I hope the thieves’ lives in the arse-end of Aarhus continue in the same vein until they become middle-aged men living on petty thievery. I hope the horizon frustrates like a line never to be crossed and that their lives become stale and tired like their imaginations and caabilities. I don’t believe in an interventionist god or a Catholic after-life accounting but I do believe that character is destiny. Just to exorcise this episode from my mind once and for all (in a couple of years you'll be an anecdote); I hope the bitterness of a wasted life eventually turns from a dark, despairing miasma over everything you do into a few black, pernicious cells that divide and multiply in your colon or your gonads or your spleen. And I hope, when you’re pronounced terminal and your family gather around, you realize what a waste of organs you were and what a tremendous amount of nothing you amounted too. And I hope you see disappointment and shame in your bastard offspring's eyes when they look at you.

This week we’ve been to Amsterdam, Brittany & London and been paid for it. Next week I'll spend an amazing three days in Paris. Then I'll go back to New York and live large. How much did you get for my laptop? Fuck you, you thieving pikey bastards.