THE DEEP POOL --SEPTEMBER 2006 Returning very early in the morning from Munster in Germany to the UK after a short tour, I was surprised to be snarled at by the man at passport control at Stansted airport. ‘Glad you think you're being funny sir, but I wouldn't try to LEAVE the country looking like that if I were you'. I hadn't a clue what he was talking about and said so – ‘sorry mate, I'm not with you at all'. The man wouldn't look at me any further – ‘on yer way' he said in a flat aggressive tone that brooked no shit. On the rush hour ‘Stansted Express' (a shamefully grubby train service that runs into London from the airport – what must first time visitors think of us?) I encountered more sullen but resolutely hostile stares from worn-down commuters. It wasn't until I got home exhausted and took off my shirt to have a shower that I understood what was wrong. I was still wearing the Osama Bin Laden badge that I stuck on myself in Munster – I'd bought a handful of them in a street market – one of them was particularly good – a badge of Johnny Depp with Bin Laden's face replacing his. I'd put it on my shirt at a farewell lunch with my friends, the Scottish painter Allan Black, and Judith and Rolf who run the Augenweide Galerie in that great catholic city. Osama doesn't have the same terrifying resonance in Germany as he does in the UK, so I was hardly making a statement. Allan said he might wear his Bin Laden badge into the school in which he works west of Glasgow – I must call him and see if he did and how it went. I was staying at the enchanting Hotel Scho in Munster – you just couldn't meet a lovelier bunch of people, and on a beautiful Saturday morning I sat drinking expresso in the bar whilst discreetly watching a big party of folk of all ages having some kind of celebration lunch in the next room. A woman tapped a glass to bring the room to attention, then made quite a long speech that had everyone in stitches of laughter –it was so good natured that I was laughing myself, and I didn't know what she was talking about. Then a very old man who I couldn't see made some short remarks which elicited a heartfelt toast, and the ritual eased into an informal winding-up with people getting up to talk to friends at other tables. It made me think of this thing you hear British people say about how the Germans have no sense of humour. If as many people in the UK thought I was as funny as they do in Germany I'd be typing this from a swimming pool next to my low stone farmhouse in Dorset, not far from Madonna's place so I could watch her shaving her legs as she sat on the porch in early morning sunshine. Germany was having a heatwave during my tour: when I got to Frankfurt in early afternoon the temperature was 34 degrees. I was staying at the Hotel Diplomat which appeared to be run by Chinese people supervised by Italians. The Chinaman on reception warned me that the lift was ‘a bit fast, and getting faster'. Well, nothing like getting to your room quickly. He wasn't kidding. I nearly fell to the floor when it ascended and nearly smashed my head on the ceiling when it stopped – I was panting and staring around like Tom Cruise in one of his crap films – by the time I got to my room I was ready to call newspapers and tell them what a stupid bitch Brooke Shields was. I went for a walk having braved the lift once more and saw two gay women bikers get off a Vincent Black Shadow whilst having a raging argument. One of them was wearing a new black leather jacket with a skull and crossbones on the back, except the crossbones had been replaced by crossed syringes which spurted upwards. Her mate had a problem with this jacket and was walking ahead of her saying so. The jacket girl stopped in her tracks, and seemed to making a statement like ‘Fuck you ya prissy cow – I'll express myself however I want – get over yourself'. This really got the other one going and she whirled back, trying to point out the something on the jacket that was really pissing her off. Jacket lady then jumped backwards so that angry lady couldn't touch her jacket. This proved to be the last straw for angry lady who abruptly broke off the encounter and sprinted down the street towards the river Main. This caught jacket lady completely by surprise – she just stood there holding both their crash helmets and calling ‘Gina!' in an ever-more distraught and childlike tone. I myself walked down to the Main, the river that runs through the city, there to eat some bilberries in view of the heat-hazed colossal skyscraper skyline that is downtown Frankfurt. ‘Main' is pronounced ‘mine', so as I sat on my bench I enjoyed singing to myself ‘the fog on the Main is all mine all mine'. Then I went back to my hotel where the Chinaman said in an urgent somewhat scandalised tone – ‘where a YOU been? Mr Stephan, he call and call!' Then he couldn't find Mr Stephan's telephone number on a bit of paper whilst getting more and more hysterical. I said it didn't matter, Mr Stephan (whoever he was) would call back, and walked towards the lift. ‘Where you going NOW!' he wanted to know. ‘To my room in the fast lift' I said. ‘Getting faster!' he warned. I wondered how fast they were going to let the lift get before they sorted it out – maybe when guests became mangled luggage in a pool of puree. Luckily the floor of the lift was made of that weird black rubber with circles in it that is beloved of terrible nightclubs and was so sticky that it half held you down with a loud ‘kkkkiiiiikkkkk' sound when you tried to lift your foot. They used to have this stuff on the floor of the original Marquee club in Wardour Street, London, and it was said that the reason the club was always full was that once you went in there the floor gripped you and you couldn't leave. This certainly seemed to be true of Keith Moon, the original drummer with The Who, who was always there in the same seat, drinking with Tony Stratton ‘Strat' Smith, he being my record company boss while I was on Charisma records. One night it was Strat's birthday and I took him in a bottle of fine west highland malt whisky. Strat accepted it from me with an over-the-top ‘oh THANK you Jackie!' etc which became slightly disconcerting and went on for so long that Keith had clearly become bored. He snatched the bottle from Strat, uncorked it and put it in his ear, from where it dribbled down his side into his cupped palm which he then noisily put to his mouth going ‘MMMMMMM'. In the other room The Knack were playing ‘My Sharona' to a room full of stony faced punks. I'm fascinated by Steve Irwin, the Australian 'crocodile hunter' and his recent death after being stung in the sea by a ray. He always stuck me as having a screw loose, especially when I saw him explaining on television that his baby daughter had been in no danger when he was jumping around with her in front of a pissed-off crocodile (‘may aliens smite me down if she was in danger' etc). If Michael Jackson had said that stuff he would have been considered clinically insane. Also, when I was making my latest studio album in Snowdonia recently, me and co-producer David Wrench took a break from recording to do a spot of desultory telly watching while eating Marks and Spencers Moroccan-style couscous with roasted vegetables. Steve Irwin was on the box with a cook and was explaining how they were going to fry a load of mealy worms (horrible sort of big Ozzie maggots) alive, then put them into spring rolls, then give them to eat to the young research girls who were working on the programme, while the guys who worked on the programme would be eating non-mealy worm spring rolls. This they did, showing the mealy worms in their spring-roll–death-throes, and later the girls tucking in. Irwin kept asking them if they were enjoying their food, whilst dropping increasingly obvious hints that they'd been set up. Eventually the girls twigged and stopped eating, and just sat there transfixed with horror, too polite or fucked-up to spit this shit out, but unable to carry on chewing. Irwin and his appalling geezer mates were nearly dying of laughter and the sequence ended with him showing the girls some more live mealy worms so they could get the full disgusting picture. ‘What the fuck makes them think this is an acceptable thing to put on telly?' I asked David. David, as a vegetarian, couldn't even speak, but just sat very still while Irwin drooled with happiness into the camera. Maybe it's just me – I asked some of the guys in the pub what they thought of this, and one of them said ‘well it does sound quite funny'… Media Mysteries: the Austrian girl, Natasha Kampusch (sorry if name spelling is wrong Natasha), the one who was abducted for eight years, then escaped – when this was first a news item on television and next day in the press, all the outlets said the same thing, how she was found wandering, dazed and confused in a suburb of Vienna. This turned out to be totally wrong – she seized a tiny moment of lapse of concentration on the part of her abductor, then ran like bloody fuck, vaulting over garden fences until she saw a woman in a house with the door open. She ran into this house and convinced the woman to call the police immediately to come to her rescue, which they duly did. At what point in the relaying of such a stunning overall story did this image of her initial escape and discovery get changed, and why? It reminded me of the young Brazilian man who was murdered by being shot repeatedly at point blank range in the head on the underground by British police in London, and how initially witnesses appeared on television to give an account which was wholly wrong in almost every significant detail – why has nobody followed that up and asked those people how and why their version of events was totally untrue? Maybe it doesn't matter – I asked some of the guys in the pub what they thought of this, and one of them said ‘well, it does sound quite funny'…(again). Here's some advice if you ever find yourself at an airport, clearly very tired at the end of a trip and about to change a reasonably large amount of money into another currency – this happens to me at the end of tours. Most Bureau de Change employees are of course completely honest, but some have tricks, like – they start to arrange all your banknotes – very - slowly, so that all the notes are the same way round. There is no reason at all for them to be doing this while you are there – they're just trying to wear you down so you stop looking at them and start looking around. You will do this for two reasons – it's unbearable watching this very – slow process, and it's also embarrassing, as it slowly implies that you don't trust them, otherwise why would you watch them so closely? If they think they've got you on the go, but they're coming to the end of the notes, they sometimes pretend to lose count and start again from scratch, in your best interests of course. If you declare that you know how much you are changing – ‘I make it 4000 euros', they will sometimes make it less (never more) – if you ask them to recount it, they will often say they'll get a colleague to recount it, but they will always tell the colleague how much they say it should be, and the colleague will always agree with them, not you. You have to jump in here and say ‘would you please not tell your colleague how much you think is there?' Then they will both stare at you in a way you won't enjoy. If they start the slow-note-arranging process described earlier, look and see if they have an electronic automatic note counter. More and more counters have these, and they are unfixable – they just stick the notes in it and it tells you what's there, like a hole in the wall machine. On three occasions I've said ‘why don't you use the money counter?' only to be told it's broken…. On the other hand I was once at Dublin airport changing some money. The woman slowly counted it out, then gave it to me in a sort of deep trance. Instinctively I took it without saying anything. She then slowly came out of the trance, recounted the money I had given her, and gave me its Irish equivalent for a second time. I would like to feel bad about this, but I was earning nothing at the time on a tour supporting Roy Harper, and it meant that, instead of sitting in my hotel room in Dublin watching the horse racing at Leopardstown, I could go to a bar called The Flowing Tide near the Abbey Theatre and watch two young Irish actresses rehearsing a stage kiss, then laughing into their glasses of Paddy whiskey. Listening: Julian Dawson – Nothing Like A Dame Rachelle Van Santen– Back To Francois Reading : Andrew O' Hagan – Be Near Me Anna Funder – Stasiland James Meek – The People's Act Of Love Ian Rankin – Let It Bleed jl ---------------------------- |