Metal Shock Finland (World Assault )

Italian Alternative Rock band BETTY POISON’s Lucia Rehab has issued the following European Tour Report:

Aachen (Germany)
We start off in Germany, in Aachen,  Charles the Great’s ancient Aquisgraine, which is to say “home” to us, who are often here. A good gig, filled with friends, expectations and over-the-counter snacks. The mood grows rapidly alcoholic and before my eyes run the snapshots of the opening concert of a tour that is going to prove absolutely unforgettable.
Roman, the incredibly blonde drummer of Pandora, had his hair laboriously straightened… and I say laboriously because, due to his extremely curly hair, the result was only partially achieved, which proves evident twenty minutes into the gig, when his hair explodes turning him into a tree. On the other hand, after the concert he turns into a socialist and wanders around claiming “equity and equal opportunities in the world”, but also claiming not to want to be “the asshole who makes decisions”, for which reason I should not vote for him as my president.
Meanwhile, Mirko and Nunzio dance some kind of acrobatic rock’n’roll in the middle of the club and Annika, Pandora’s singer, expresses her enthusiasm jumping about like a rabbit. We get back home very late and, since we are starving, we stop in front of a fast food and have a long discussion about what we should order, before realizing that it is closed. We get back to Eupen, our belgian base, twenty minutes away from Aachen, and settle for the remains of a barbecue we had the night before. Then we finish packing. This is the last night we spend here: from tomorrow on and for the next three weeks we are due…. everywhere!

Freiburg (Germany)
Punk punk punk. The White Rabbit once again proves to be the epicenter of the scene we like to attend. We played here before and we remember well. They’re still screaming for Kaminski and won’t take anything slower than a stroke-inducing beatrate. The club is brimful of sweat and pogo, we give all of our most furious tracks to a bloodthirsty audience who eats them like raw meat and they just shout for more in loud and deep voices. We’re covered head to foot in sweat and we keep going. When I try to catch my breath by introducing a song they just yell “More songs! Play music!” and we have to keep them at bay with a fresh burst of angry dbs. A guy from the staff wanders barefoot in the mob: a “fashion” we will observe quite often in Germany. We share the stage with The Sore Losers, makers of a masterly garage punk soon to be exported in South America and authors of the amazing “Too sexy for the führer bunker”. The singer and bass player is wearing just a pair of underpants, halfway down. He shows his ass and he rules, cause this guys really kick ass and what’s more they mind their own business, unlike so many fuckers we met in the italian punk scene who are usually artistically worthless and make a point of being assholes.
At the end of a long night, the guitar player from The sore Losers takes his bike and leaves in a lordly silence. Not far away there’s a guy who’s so drunk who can’t seem to manage to get his coat on. A friend helps him, kind and caring as a mother superior. We walk back to our accommodation and, since I too indulged in a few drinks, I crash into a bench roughing up my knee. In the house we’re staying at I play with a noose that’s dangling from the door of our room. I stick my head through it and it is unnerving to say the least… I have never felt anything like that, not even when I stared down the barrel of a gun. I think about it as I feel that dooming caress around my neck, I feel lightheaded. It may be because of the night or just because of my imagination.
The next morning everything is different, it’s sunny and warm, kids are playing and shouting in the inner courtyard and as we’re having breakfast in the kitchen a lush green tree nearly waves in through the window. It would have been a bad morning to die, or maybe not. Anyway we’re ready to leave for Switzerland.

Olten (Switzerland)
We reach Olten late in the afternoon, the venue is beautiful, peculiar, coquettish, the walls are painted fuchsia, apple green or yellow in the different areas of the club, the owners are hospitable and very kind. This month’s flyers feature a picture of myself – during last year’s gig in Graz – rolling on the floor in a pool of beer and cabling with considerable risks for my life. After the soundcheck, that showed us how Switzerland does not only have its own currency, but its own electric sockets as well, we hit the hotel for a short rest. The living standards are quite high, you easily see luxury cars on the street and prices are proportionate (we pay the equivalent of 24 € for two cheesburgers and chips). The gigs is good, a handsome grunge-looking blond boy tosses in his wheelchair greeting every song with creative movements. We like him. On stage I give him one of my beers and afterwards he joins us backstage together with an aspiring painter and a Thai-Swiss guy who can barely stand on his feet. Mia from Pandora borrows the wheelchair and after a few test-rounds she starts wheeling around the venue. At some point, obviously, she falls over. Nunzio has written “A bad boy is a snuff toy” on his arm, Mirko, Annika and I decide to go back to the hotel, cause it’s so late that it almost seems early, but Roman, who is not exactly sober, gives us the wrong directions and we end up roaming a desolate road that looks something like a motorway interchange. Everybody else stays in the club till the break of dawn, then get back to the hotel, they piss off a bridge, throw up in the room and show up in the morning with wooden faces and go and wet their hair and refresh their thoughts in the restrooms of the fast food restaurant where we’re grabbing a spot of lunch before hitting the road again. We leave Switzerland with pocketfuls of francs that nobody is going to accept for the rest of the tour.

Goeppingen (Germany)
Goeppingen stands out because of the Give Me Noise Festival and because of the Betty+Pandora photoshooting by the amazing Heiko Herrmann. Our “chill out room” on the evening of the gig is a deconsecrated church. Above the kitchen sink there’s the ultimate picture: an image of the Pope surrounded by a ring of pierced condoms, each one with a cross in its middle. Below that, the writing “deo gratias”. The other acts are a grunge band and a wild powernoise band, whose singer performs in a lamé outfit with white-rimmed sunglasses. I enter the stage in a bra, with writings all over my body like “Betty Poison”, “Beauty is Over”, “Give me noise festival” and “The best head I ever got in my life”. I sings a couple of songs with Pandora and then we let Betty’s concert kick off. I’m handed a bottle of Amaro Ramazzotti and i throw it down my throat, over my face and all over myself. The songs run powerfully past and the atmosphere is boiling hot. Mirko is wearing a priest’s outfit and people ask him if he is a molester. The music runs wild and on the last song – due to never clarified technical issues – my guitar stops working. I throw the mic on the ground, I lay beside it and start screaming from there.
Catharsis. After the gig I wander about brandishing the empty Amaro Ramazzotti bottle. I feel fine, it’s a nice wild night, I exchange views with the bass player of the grunge band, I let my sweat dry on me, I chat to a guy who claims to be our fan but not to want an autograph cause he is “not a pussy”. I love every bit of it. The next day we have a photoshooting planned with Heiko on two sets, a barren clearing – where we pose with a ’38 chevrolet in a somewhat military-queer outfit – and a golf course. Mirko kept his priest’s outfit, Roman has a red army’s hat, bare feet and he’s wearing Nunzio’s heart covered guitar belt as a dictator’s band. We’re all in rigorous total black outfits and it’s stifling hot, but we enjoy ourselves like kids, running around in fields as green as green goes, with golf clubs in our hands. In the evening we celebrate with wine and bruschetta at Heiko and his girlfriend Benita’s place. A few more quick sketches: a scratch from Mimi, the couple’s cat, as Annika threw her at me. Sharing a bed with both the Pandora girls and being afraid of mixing up arms and legs in the tangle of bodies and finally Mia screaming in her sleep in the middle of the night as she was answering a far away phone call (“Haloooooooooooooooooooooo? Haloooooooooooooooooooooooo???”).

Lyon (France)
In Lyon Annika dedicates Lady to me and confirms “urbi et orbi” that it is about me. We sleep at Carole and JC’s. Carole organized the gig and JC is her boyfriend and he sings in a trashmetal band. They’re both nice people. We eat pasta with salmon in the middle of the night and we chat about music and concerts. She’s a big fan of Hole, she keeps pictures and vinyls autographed by Miss Love all over the place. She tells us that at Hole’s concert in Paris the audience comprised almost no french people, that foreigners were definitley a majority and that in France people are generally prejudiced (in the usual way) against Courtney Love and that she is pissed off at her friends who share the same prejudice. Annika and Nunzio are respectively scared by the dog and the cat of our hosts, Pogo and Gipsy, so we find creative solutions to avoid incidents… Annika and I, for instance, sleep in Carole’s laboratory (she is a fashion designer), among tailor’s dummies and snips of leather that are meant for very rock’n’roll corsets. It’s getting hotter and hotter and it’s gonna get even worse when we’re back in Italy for the next two gigs of this european tour. We leave in a glowing-hot morning and my feet are encased in the boiling leather of my heavy knee-high boots. JC gives us his band’s cd, that is dedicated to their bass player, recently deceased before his time. We cross the border listening to it, dozing off, writing, talking. And at some point here’s Italy: beautiful mountains, tollgates with highway-robbing fees and bad-mannered employees to collect them.

Italy
In Turin we stay at a friend’s and enjoy a day off. In the evening we go to a club that is hosting a lez-night, I drink poufy stuff like an “Emily Smile” or a Cosmopolitan, that mortify my exuberant virility. There are nearly only lesbians around and they’re nearly all couples. Mirko looks alienated, Roman resolves to walk around the place saying “I’m a lesbian!” and then, suddenly remembering he is also a socialist “I’m a lesbian and a socialist!”. We take two girls home with the promise of vast quantities of alcohol stored at our friend’s place. There’s an unconfirmed bit of news regarding wine and beer bottles safely kept in the pantry. Walking alongside the Po i argue with Annika basically about gender matters, until we reach Piazza Castello, where Annika and Roman suddenly drop everything they’re carrying and run madly to the four fountains getting soaked as if they had jumped into a pool. I must admit that watching them is marvelous, they are so spontaneous and joyful, wild and free, the square is so beautiful and the night so warm and damp… warm, damp and alcohol free, since, as we get home, we find out there’s no trace of beer. We hit the bed and the sky explodes in a terrible, blinding and deafening thunderstorm, it sounds so close, as if it was right beside our beds. Annika jumps on me. She is afraid of thunder.

In Cesenatico Annika pours a beer down my ear on stage. We are glad to meet several dear friends again: Marco, Claudia, Maria Grazia and Mattia, who we finally meet for the first time, having known him online for sometime. The amazing photographer Paolo Zauli joins us and gives Annika a copy of A-live,  the photographic book that documents over ten years of live music. It includes a few beautiful Betty pics, happily set between M. Manson and Hole. We leaf through it ecstatically. Meanwhile Mia falls over a bottle and asks me to check her head: I’m afraid I’m gonna find it bristling with shard of glass as in a “Happy Tree Friends” episode, but luckily she is not harmed. At the same time Annika is giving some kind of metaphysical speech, then she becomes argumentative and then romantic. But I am not sure about the logical consistency of it all. We sleep in Cesena at Jose’s. Jose is Nunzio’s cousin. Night-time pastries, heat and a definitely refreshing sleep. In the bathroom there’s a writing “Remember to clean up, otherwise you’ll live in the filth, get ill and die!”.
In Tolentino I chat to our beautiful audience while on stage, I invite people to vote, because Italy is approaching the June referendum. We kiss each other on the ending and we have fun. People are into us, they scream for an encore, they buy cds and tshirts of both bands and that’s when Emerson comes in (his parents named him after Fittipaldi). He’s the owner-promoter and we learn that it is his custom to go round the venue holding the bands’ cds and inviting people to buy them in order to support the artists. Great. After the gig and after a nice long cht the lovely Caterina and Francesco will escort us to the house we’re sleeping in. There we find the most unnerving talking doll in the world. Chucky is a toy doll compared to it. In the morning Mirko turns it suddenly on as a twisted alarm clock as we shuffle half-dozing about the kitchen. We’re still pretty dumbfounded but not so much as to prevent Roman from throwing it at Mirko in a Joe Di Maggio style. Time to live, we have to head towards Dorfen, near Munich, where we’re on for a punk night that is gonna leave our filthy remains on the lawn of a beautiful house, vandalized by rock’n’roll. But that’s for the next episode, my lovely friends!

Dorfen (Germany)
Everything in Dorfen is muscular, bitter, violent and authentic. We play in a community centre crowded with old-school punks and wild hardcore animals. We share the stage with the Adams Apple, that make themselves up as monsters, cover themselves in gallons of fake blood and scatter the stage with artificial limbs. Sabrina rules, their powerful frontwoman, also liberally sprays the crowd with the same fake blood, which drives the audience wild with excitement. Squeezed in the throng, my face is splashed in the contents of a beer-jug. I feel it trickling in my eyes, mixed with sweat. Betty and Pandora kick ass, at the end of our performance we’re called back on stage by the crowd screaming for more and pogoing furiously over Anna Nicole, Jill the Ripper and The Golden Boy and headbanging over Set It On Fire. By the end of the night the floor of the club is a gooey mess, a slush of fake blood that cause many to slip and fall and spatter themselves in mud. I particularly remember one of them, nearly catatonic, slipping in three steps with a beer in his hands, going down on one knee and automatically stepping up again as the beer starts erupting. Some of us are furiously coupling backstage or at least trying, since bunches of teenagers keep going back and forth and smoking everywhere. Nunzio gets trapped in the restrooms, taken hostage by some girls that won’t let him out and seem to have wicked intentions. He’ll be in a shock for at least two days because of this. The Adams Apple’s bass player is laying on the ground outside the venue and a girl in a miniskirt and fishnet stockings climbs repeatedly on his stomach. I’m told this is a remedy for hiccups. Meanwhile a punk with a black mohawk in black clothes quenches my hunger with some stale croissants and a brezel he dug out of his car.
The house we’re staying in perfectly mirrors this mood a Magnificent exterior: a two-story building, one story almost completely occupied by a beautiful glass-wall, a well trimmed garden, a small tennis net, a Buddha statue. On the inside a bedlam of bodies made up of musicians and various friends. People drinking, smoking, fucking, spilling beer over mattresses, laying randomly down. Much of this is happening on the bed where I’m supposed to sleep. The next day I feel like a war’s survivor and I desperately need a shower that I won’t be able to take, my face, neck, arms and hands are spattered in fake blood, my hair is knotted and soaked with beer, i smell of smoke and sweat. I scare off children and this is not just a metaphor: later on, when we take a lunch break, I try to say hello to a blonde little girl, but she stares at me with huge eyes clutching at her mother. I definitely don’t look good. We head fro Berlin.

Berlin (Germany)
In Berlin we’re in for three wonderful days with our friend Johanna. The house is beautiful and we spind the first night drinking home-made Caipirinha on a roomy terrace, around a table scattered with trembling candles, the same candles that line the whole perimeter of the sill. Johanna grew up in high-profile rock circles and had a chance to make some very interesting acquaintances. When she was three she met Eddie Vedder, she interviewed PJ Harvey, she chatted pleasantly to Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, she travelled to India, Australia and the USA and at the moment she works in Berlin, but she is also an extremely talented pianist and singer. After dinner the “Pandetty” go out and enjoy the city in total freedom and relax, dance in the street with an old tango teacher and make friends with a young and rather well known german actress. We spend the following days loitering in Alexanderplatz, Potsdamer Platz and Berlin in general, i get stuck in the underground, we visit a famous community centre where I’m especially impressed by a strong smell of urine and where someone offers me cocaine and viagra and I’m somewhat offended, since the others were only offered cocaine. We also visit a wonderful park full of sculptures. One of them represents time as an hourglass connected to a flush.
Enlightening. We stop by at a second hand shop where I buy two dresses for the video we’ll shoot when we get back home and Annika buys a set of silver jackets and tshirts that would outshine the best Bowie outfits. On the last night before the gig we indulge in  long session at the sushi bar round the corner and then we enjoy the cool air on the terrace and some extra relax, since from the following day on we’ll be on the move again, driving across Germany and playing every night. In the morning we have breakfast with Johanna in a vintage rock bar and we order plumcakes and scrambled eggs: tonight we’re playing at the White Trash, it’ll be the official presentation of our album abroad. The gig is amazing, the audience is so warm, beautiful to look at and to hear, outside the club a luminous sign announces the release. Other musicians have come to see us: Tracy from Heroine Whores, Ina from Jezebels, Michael from Drunken Hippies and the 100% italian Devis from Milksnake, with whom we’ll play in July. The place is crowded with artists, dyed-blonde hair, large flannel shirts, fishnet stockings, blood red lipstick. A wonderful night that ends with  last request for an encore that we’re not able to meet, since the deadline and the noise limit have both been crossed. We’re as happy as we can be anyway and we discuss with the french dj Emmanuelle, who lives across two continents, whether it is better to move to NY or LA. Meanwhile the Pandora girls are having an argument, enclosed in some sort of private bubble, they hug, then argue, then hammer their fists on the table, then take each other’s face in the hands. There’s a flamboyantly dressed weirdo raving in the restrooms. Mia insists she will sleep in the van and we walk back home at dawn, under a cool and still dark sky. Goodbye Berlin.

Oldenburg (Germany)
Oldemburg will be remembered for the absolute and unmitigated rock’n’roll-rule-book wreckage. I have to take my prednisone and my paracodin because a touch of cold in Dorfen caused my hyperreactive airwais to flare up. My chest burns and my head aches. Luckily the performance is not affected by my condition. Our set goes by as smooth as silk and I can enjoy Pandora and the endless line of gin and tonics and liquors that we keep drinking. Annika is a lion, better: she is a prince, better: she is a king. She sweeps away the mic stand with her guitar, she roars, drinks from a beer bottle without using her hands, she breaks it, rolls on the floor risking to hurt herself with the shards. Mia performs her by now popular dance routine on Latin Beat. She is joined by two guys with the most awful leggings. One of them is wearing a tshirt with the writing “I hate everone” on it. Devastated by my prescription drugs I lay on a couch backstage and perish. I am waken at closing time by a severe waiter, a symbol of the honest working class. “I think you have to go now” he says. Superbritish. They’re turning the chairs upside down over the tables and cleaning up the place. Annika and Roman are outside, sitting on the ground, talking closely to a tramp. The others are sinking in their private heavens and hells. We spend the rest of the night listening to Kurt Veil and drinking vodka, elderberry liquor, Jägermeister and Vurguzz, which is pure alcohol mingled with some kind of japanese oil. We leave at dawn and we reach Alexander’s place. Alexander organized the gig. Nunzio is fuming and throws a bag full of his stuff at the branches of a trees among which birds re chiurruping, he shouts at them to shut up. I try to calm him down reciting to him the Romeo and Juliet bit about the lark, but he doesn’t give a fuck. We take sometime to fall asleep, in the night Pandora are seized by a fit of laughter and logorrhea and, since I’m staying in the same room, I can’t sleep either. At five in the morning Roman falls on me rolling off Mia’s back, as he was giving her a massage. In the morning I am more tired than I was when I got to bed and as I shuffle barefoot and dizzy I smash my toe against a corner, crashing the nail and cutting it open rather badly. I don’t really mind and with my sock full of blood I’m ready to leave for Minden. Meanwhile Sabine, Alexander’s girlfriend, nearly eight months pregnant with a little girl, tells us she’s gonna male a Betty Poison tshirt for her when she’s born. This is marvelous.

Minden (Germany)
In Minden we meet Alice and Marina, two friends of Nunzio’s travelling abroad. they had already been to a Betty and Pandora live show at the Rock’n’Roll club in Milan and after the gig they follow us to Cologne, where the last concert of the tour is due. We settle in Shenk’s gorgeous loft. He is a friend and partner of Pandora’s, best known for having organized a Rage Against the Machine gig. The amazing thing is that he never asks “Would you like a beer?” but “Which beer would you like?”. His fridge is practically a bar and the loft hosts a recording room. The venue we’re playing, the “Cancun”, is right in front of the house, therefore our wonderful tour ends with no stress. We relax listening to music beneath a poster of Mohammed Ali. The next day the heat is sweltering and damp, in the “Cancun” there’s tropical-styled furniture, a fake parrot, some kind of totem, green walls and ferns… the illusion is perfect! We eat spicy food and drink a green liquor made of vodka and fruit. The last gigs ends in massive trickles of sweat, because of the steambath-like temperature. Some say it’s one of the most intense performances in our history… it’s furious, melancholic, joyful, desperate. Some recall Lydia Lunch. We’re enormously flattered obviously. I think Betty performed on this occasion one of the best ever versions of “I’m Still a Slut”. Annika sings with us on “Suburban Victims” and on the ending I drop to the ground and slipthe handle of my guiter between her legs from behind and she jerks it off. At the end of our performance, on the instrumental tail of “Silly Pop Song”, I step off the stage and lay on the cool floor as a boy from Malaga takes over the mic and performs the final shout in my stead, scattering that “blooksucker” in a series of curt commands and hysterical howls. What an amazing intercourse! Meanwhile outside a punk guy in a Pandora tshirt lays across the street, while his friend in a Betty tshirt keeps standing and drinking. Three “polizei” cars approach and he struggles up. As an ambulance arrives to and it is clear that they’re all after a brawl in a nearby street, the guy lays placidly back down on the tar. They tell me that they both came a long way and that they also attended the previous gig in Minden. Odd enough, the severe policemen and the beefy policewomen passing by make no remarks, not even when the two guys start humming anti-police songs. It must have been a bad fight. Anyway I’m the only one to stay home to think and write, as a thunderstorm breaks over Cologne and goes on all night. The others all go to an electro party in some kind of junkyard. They came home at dawn, euphoric, some barechested, some wearing their tshirt on their head, some horny, some giggly. A couple kiss me in my sleep. I open my eyes and recognize Nunzio. I call him Jesus. He answers “but my hair is curly!” and I reply “Jesu’s hair is curly too!”. Roman and Mia step on Mirko as they’re heading to the pantry for something to eat, I don’t even think they realize, but Mirko goes into a rage.Mi apologizes, he doesn’t answer, I suspect he’s planning a carnage. There is also a girl they brought back from the party, but then again, night-time surprise guests have been a constant in the whole tour. She’ll use the bathroom the next day, a quick coffee, a quicker chat and then goodbye.

To us, saying goodbye to one another is much more painful. We run into one another’s veins and we dance across miles and miles and the end of each tour is harder to endure. We gather our stuff and go back to Eupen for the last two days of barbecues, red wine, warriors’ rest and comfortable sex, but we’re already burning to be on the road again, so see you soon!

May rock and wind carry you far…

Tour Report by Lucia Rehab – Photos by Heiko Herrmann

To read our recent interview with BETTY POISON, please go HERE!