Sparking Off

I will return you to tales of 30-year old angst very shortly, but first a quick diversion into a different past/present interface. When I was nine years old and sitting wide-eyed in front of Top of the Pops one evening, being gently blown away by a weird man who sat behind a keyboard looking like Hitler while his pretty, falsetto-voiced younger brother strutted around him like a baby cockerel, I never had the presence of mind to think "I'll be going to see them live in forty years' time." How could I have ignored the signs?

There has never been anyone quite like Sparks, though their influences are legion (take a bow, Pet Shop Boys, Associates (R.I.P Billy) and others I'm too pushed for time to remember right now.). Why should they ever think of retirement when they still have Ron's weirdly arch lyrics and ever-evolving melodies, and Russell still has that amazing voice? There has been no significant loss of energy or curiosity in either brother, and while Ron's look is now more age-appropruiate and slightly 'Howard Hughes before the onset of psychosis' as opposed to 'early 20th Century Austrian fascist dictator with ennui', Russell still skips neatly round the stage like a bantamweight boxer, as light as air while never once straining over those amazing high notes.

Seeing them last week in  Brighton was an evening of pure joy, especially as a) I'd bought the tickets back in April so managed to get second row seats and b) it was just the two of them, the keyboard and the voice, taking an energetic, perfectly nuanced stroll through the rich pastures of their immense back-catalogue. For two individuals who don't engage hugely with their audience (they are incredibly private - you won't find out much about the personal life of either one, which takes some doing), they managed to be hugely engaging, and the audience was on its feet applauding wildly by the end - I've never felt more love in the slightly anonymous Brighton Dome, and what's  more it felt like something bigger and warmer than just nostalgia for when we were all nine years old. I honestly don't think we all expected them to be quite that good.

My favourite moment of the night was when they did 'Sherlock Holmes', my most-loved song from the Angst in my Pants album. The strangest, most affecting love song I've ever heard, delivered beautifully by a 63-year old man with bizarre hair and wearing what looked like one of Bryan Ferry's old hunting outfits that had shrunk in the wash. Unforgettable, beautiful, brilliant Sparks.

New Gold Nightmare (81,82,83,84)

I think I may have been avoiding writing this blog entry because, frankly, I won't come out of it very well. But I feel a strange obligation to complete the Story of M, possibly in the vain hope that it may just help some confused first-year student somewhere, struggling to straddle the great divide between adolescent and adult brands of romantic idiocy (not such a great divide, as it turns out.). So, on the strict understanding that I won't be judged as a shallow self-obsessed airhead (despite the fact that I so clearly was one, thinking I was Cosmo when I was really still My Guy), let me take a deep breath and proceed.

It is October 1982 and I am a full week in to student life. The following extracts are from my diary, unedited  (apologies for poor punctuation and lack of paragraphs. I was young and in a hurry.).

October 12. "I've got a routine that suits me - I make sure I'm up first in the house so there's enough hot water for me to have a bath and wash my hair every morning. I'm not going over to breakfast bleary-eyed and smelling of bed the way a couple of the other girls do (poor Debs Baraclough has been cursed with a room mate who has the worst B.O in the world.).... They feed us enormous amounts of food and some of the boys get really over-excited about the cooked breakfasts, like they'd never seen a sausage before. The maths boys all play cards while they're eating and there are a bunch of wankers from S***** House who all went to minor public schools, so think they're Anthony Andrews, sitting there eating  Weetabix with a bloody cravat on. One of them's quite nice looking but they're awful. There are a lot of Northerners (you can tell the boys by their gigantic collars and flares) and they seem to be led by this bearded one who won't talk to anyone with a London accent "on principle".  He's called Julian which isn't exactly a solid working-class name so I suspect he's really a wanker anyway. A few people have made a great show of getting off with one another in the first week and start the day by snogging on the bus, which is just pathetic....

I've actually begun working now and it's a great feeling to get my brain into gear again. The course is brilliant and the lecturers are really relaxed and friendly, and seem very committed. I bought my four volumes of Marx from the Union bookshop, and the Politics and Ideas tutor came up behind me at the till and said "the best thing you can say about those is that they're cheap". I said we should discuss that in the next seminar and he laughed.  My academic tutor is really nice and from Glasgow, he's about 25 but he knows Simple Minds which was a bit of a surprise. His name's B***. I didn't ask him if he was going to see Bauhus in a couple of weeks (I can't WAIT). Maybe he is. Ha ha.

My mood changes about once ever half-hour; on the one hand I'm Ms Enthusiastic Student, yeah, like I'm really into this Uni thing, and then within minutes I'm reflecting that I'm stuck here with a bunch of overgrown school kids who think water fights are funny and exciting. That's unfair of me of course because they're not ALL like that (they can't be, can they). I've just been used to such a different life. Though I do think back to London as though it were years ago and remember dreadful nights at the Padded Cell getting insulted by Pineapple Head* and listening to Barry Banal** shrieking about his new Scottish dancing shoes, and I'm quite glad to be away from it all for a while. Though I miss M every day. He wrote me a lovely letter*** last week (I was amazed and so pleased) and I'm going home to see him at the weekend. I probably shouldn't be doing it this early in the term but I don't care....

                   *                                                    *                                                *

Oh my word this is worse than I thought. One single diary entry and I am cringing with embarrassment, and yet I have to complete this. I'm clearly going to have to do it in small segments. I can't take very much of it and I'm fairly sure nobody else could either. Do bear in mind that I'm not the same person now,  I'm really not.... not quite.


* Obnoxious early-80s New Romantic clubber. Probably fat and bald by now. I hope so.
** Poor Barry, he was quite sweet but...
*** I've still got all his letters, tied up with blue ribbon, in a shoebox. You can't do that with emails.  

©Kolly Kibber 2012. Don't nick my stuff. Write your own.

University Challenged

In town earlier this week I was stopped by an anxious-looking young woman of about eighteen, who was desperately trying to work out which bus of the hundreds of bus stops near the seafront would enable her to catch the service back to the University. "I only got here on Saturday, you see," she said a little tremulously, "and I just can't work out where anything is." As I was going that way anyhow and she looked so genuinely lost, I escorted her to her stop and chatted with her for a few minutes before her bus arrived to scoop her back to the safety of her little single room at the student halls ("it's a really nice room but the walls are SO thin.."). "I'm going home next weekend," she told me, "I'm really missing my boyfriend and I can't wait to see him." I told her light-heartedly that she'd be referring to the campus as 'home' by Christmas, and she looked at me as though she didn't believe me.

 Of course this chance encounter set me on track for an afternoon of pointless reminiscing, as it was exactly thirty years ago that I embarked on three years of student life, crammed into the back of my brother-in-law's car with my record collection, beanbag, portable black-and-white TV and three binbags full of Kensington Market's finest clothing (including three brand new oversized mohair jumpers in hot pink, electric blue and of course black, of which I was extremely proud.). My mother cried most of the way up the M11 and all the way back (we'd only lost my father a few months earlier, so the double-loss of her last child, me, was an especially heavy blow for her) and I scowled and sulked because I'd had to say a Celia Johnson-like goodbye to my adored boyfriend at 3AM that morning (though I didn't go as far as intending to throw myself under a train. I just got ungracious and grumpy with my family instead.).

I had managed to fall wildly in love for the first time in my life with Shakespearian timing, a mere two months before I was due to leave. M and I had prowled shyly around one another for a good two months prior to that, if one can 'prowl shyly', me thinking he was far too beautiful to notice me and he apparently thinking much the same. When he finally revealed to a mutual friend how much he liked me, adding "you can tell her if you want.." (the message was delivered within minutes), I literally dropped my drink, and something rather like the ballroom scene from West Side Story followed (except that we were in a dark Rockabilly Club and I think Pigbag was playing in the background.). From that night on it was sunshine and bliss all the way, a heady blur of alcoves in dark London clubs, night buses and snogging in Green Park, all intensified with the exquisite inbuilt tragedy of my imminent departure at the end of the summer, of which we didn't speak.

Oh, and crowned by the fact that neither of our mothers approved. To enhance the Montague/Capulet parallels of the story, little Irish Catholic me chose a lovely Jewish boy to fall in love with, albeit one with a superb quiff who sported a full set of Johnson's threads. After meeting him - and oh, he was so immaculately polite - my mother began to make dark noises about "dat actor with the big nose... Dustin Something his name is..", which had me screaming accusations of antisemitism in her face and flouncing out in the door-slamming, time-honoured teenage tradition. His own mother, when I rang for him, would pass the phone over with the same three-word announcement of "it's the shikse", and of course having just discovered blonde hair I was indeed the predatory shikse of her nightmares. Quite recently, a very longstanding male friend who knew us both at the time, described us as 'The Bridget Loves Bernie Couple 1982' (which won't mean anything to you if you're under 40.).  Anyway, it made for perfect poetry, M and me against the narrow prejudices of world and against the heartless tick of the clock.  On that Sunday in October, driving away from London, I felt as tragic as I believed was humanly possible.

Hence my judgement of University life in that first week was heavily skewed to the negative, and I have my diaries to confirm it. Let me read to you. "They (my family) left (awful, crying) and I put on Scritti Politti and listened to 'The Sweetest Girl' like I'd promised,* unpacked and then didn't know what to do. I've got a single room in an old house with lovely gardens thank god - some poor girls are sharing! There was a fat girl in the corridor trying to heave a huge boarding school trunk into her room, and the name on it says 'Debs Barraclough', have I landed in an Enid Blyton book? Either way I bet we won't be listening to Scritti Politti together. She looks like Rosemary Leach but is only 18 and so posh! At dinner I couldn't get anything down and fumbled with my slice of melon, my hands were shaking too much to eat it...there was a lot of fuss down the end of the table when it got sent back uneaten. "Who hasn't eaten their melon". I wanted to tell them all to stick the melon up their arses, then some stupid bloke in a cravat started asking if there was a local hunt nearby he could join - what a cretin! Everyone looks very straight, lots of terrible haircuts and ugly blokes, only a couple of people look interesting. They stare at my hair! They should have seen me a year ago, they'd never have coped. I think I'm going to hate everyone."

And witness me trying to make sense of my first few days. "To show goodwill and not look like a stuck-up Londoner (!!) I agreed to go along to the Fresher's Disco with the girls from the house... dear god, it was like going back in time to something I've never wanted to go back in time to, namely the Campion** Discos of my youth". (I was nineteen when I wrote this, so youth was obviously far behind me.) "A hideous cattlemarket full of over-excited sixth formers thrilled to be out of school uniform and finally allowed to buy real beer (though it is amazingly cheap compared to the London clubs - 50p a pint!!!!). I was duly seized upon by a hearty lad from Halifax who was pleasant enough but uninspiring company, and befriended by a nauseating little tit from Wales on the walk home, who started a spurious political argument about 'feminism', presumably because we're students now and that's what students do, and whose final desperate gambit was to demand to come back to my room with me so he could "see my posters"(never heard it called that before.). I may have been a little bit cruel to him. But he was a cretin. I cannot get M off my mind and the fact that I cannot be with him is driving me to distraction. "

I imagine that the young woman I spoke to earlier in the week may just have gone through something similar, recording her anguish carefully in a hard-backed notebook so she can look back on it thirty years later and laugh at herself. I'd love to know what she might be writing in it by Christmas. I certainly wouldn't have predicted what I ended up writing. But that's the wonderful thing about the voyage of chaos, excitement and self-discovery that University should be. You really can't predict how it will all end up. Or you can, but you'll probably be proved wrong, as I was....

More follows....possibly.

* Feel free to barf.

**Campion Disco. A horrible 1970s mid-teen ritual in which female pupils from certain Convent schools are permitted to fraternise with male pupils from the neighbouring Jesuit schools, culminating in a bit of badly co-ordinated groin-grinding to 'Three Times A Lady' (if you're one of the popular girls. I wasn't. I  only ever danced with my best friend.). The grounds outside are patrolled by nuns and priests with torches, probably getting off on it though we didn't know that then. 

©Kolley Kibber 2012

Big Cringe

Here's a parable about why you should never behave impulsively just because you're having a good time. Read and learn. My cheeks have only just stopped glowing red.

On Tuesday evening I attended a very agreeable gig, which I've documented in tiresome detail on another post. Among the audience was a bloke about my age, who I've been seeing at gigs ever since I moved here over twenty  years ago. He caught my eye in the first place all those years ago because I recognised him from my old University; a fairly quiet, shy, bookish lad who hung round the fringes of the trendy sub-set I was part of, always visible in his oversized, off-the-shoulder black mohair jumper and pipecleaner legs, topped off with a mop of Neil Arthur hair that was quite the acceptable look at the time. He was known to be 'a nice bloke but really shy', and I never spoke to him beyond the occasional nod at parties or gigs. When I saw him down here it was a real surprise, and in due continuation of the established form between us, we restricted our exchanges to looks of mutual recognition and cautious silent friendliness. Having marked him down as a bit of a shy loner, I always felt reluctance to invade his space with a 'hello', especially as a shy person myself - I mean, what would I say after that?

He was always at gigs on his own, and only certain gigs - the more obscure, cosmic kind, say Moebius and Roedelius, Neu! or Damo Suzuki. I wasn't surprised to see him at Wooden Shjips, and even less so to see him at Moon Duo over the summer, his thatch of hair now clipped as befits a middle-aged man, frowning slightly as he always seems to do while watching a band. But when he turned up at the Flaming Stars the other night, I was surprised, very very surprised. Not his sort of thing at all, you see.  And as the night was going so well and everyone was having such a lovely time, it all seemed to portend well for me to march over and finally speak to him. Which, with no preparation at all, I did.

"Sorry to bother you," I said, landing suddenly in his line of vision and making him jump, "but I've been seeing you at gigs for over twenty years..." He nodded and peered a bit oddly.
 "And before that we both went to Middling University, didn't we?" I said confidently.
He peered a bit more oddly. "Not only did I not go to University in Middling," he said, "I've never set foot in the place. Which is I suppose a bit odd as I come from Near- Middling." (a town twenty miles away from my alma mater). "So wherever you know me from, it isn't there. I must have a doppelganger."
My face was turning crimson as twenty years of mistaken identity and all those hesitant half-smiles I'd been delivering and receiving flashed horribly through my memory. "I am so sorry," I said, wanting to run the length of the country to get away from my twenty-year mistake. "I just thought...I mean you go to a lot of the ones I go to, and...you were at Wooden Shjips..." gabbling now, all filters gone...
"I've never seen Wooden Shjips either, I'm afraid. I must have a tripleganger..." he said, by way of a final blow.
"I'm so sorry, " I said again, dying.
 "Yes, I hear they're quite good live," he replied, totally missing the point. "Anyway, see you..."he turned and headed for the exit, no doubt relieved to be getting away from The Nutter.

See me? Oh no. Not if I see him first, he won't. Twenty years of avoidance now follows.

My Pet Band

By the time you've notched up thirty years of dogged gig-going (like what I have), you will almost certainly have ended up with your own Pet Band; the one you keep going back to despite or because of the fact that commercial success continues to elude them, the one who produced at least one perfect, era-defining album and provided you with opportunities to attend obscure gigs in small sweaty venues you'd never otherwise have known of let alone visited (Club 4AD in Diksmuide, anyone?), and the one you watch getting ever so slightly more grizzled and frayed as youthful edginess gives way to wry middle-aged cynicism, knowing that it's actually your own reflection you're seeing in their ageing faces (well maybe I don't look quite as grizzled as this lot, not yet.)

 My Pet Band are called The Flaming Stars, and will almost certainly be unknown to you. They're a North London garage combo, a sort of louche dirty suave flat-pack Rat Pack, doggedly championed by John Peel from the mid-90s onward after forming from the detritus of several other bands to produce their first, peerless single "Bring Me The Rest of Alfredo Garcia." I remember the first time I heard this song on Peelie's show, standing in the kitchen of our old flat scrabbling for a pen so I could write the name of this amazing band down and buy everything of theirs I could lay my hands on (which involved a complex detective mission in those innocent pre-internet days.). When I found out they were coming to Brighton shortly afterwards to play a gig at the late lamented Free Butt it was the start of a long, sweaty noisy love affair which goes on to this day, even though they only seem to get together and play every few years or so now. An occasional assignation with your own past can, of course, be quite pleasant.

 So when last night they came back to Brighton after a gap of fourteen years, to headline appropriately for John Peel Night, I rounded up as many chums as I could coax out to the Green Door Store on a wet windy Tuesday night (eleven, which isn't bad going given that five had never seen them before.). We didn't quite double the door numbers but we certainly helped them along a bit, and after a slightly hesitant start the band kicked in like it was the Old Days and a fine old sexy gig was born. Joe Whitney remains the best drummer I've ever seen, there was some furious thrashing from guitarist Mark Hosking, singer Max Décharné's nicotine drawl remains as languid as ever, and there were even a couple of smiles from the legendarily unsmiley bassist Mr Dempsey. Some of the wedding-reception dancing down the front was a bit distracting, but the band actually looked like they were enjoying themselves and safely behind the dancers I had a whale of a time. Good also to see so many decent quiffs in the audience; my view is that for a chap, if you've got to forty and managed to keep most of your hair it's really the only look worth adopting - trust me, every woman loves a Dirty Rocker. This one certainly does. Anyway, it may be years before I see this lot again but they'll always be my Pet Band and I'll always have a marshmallow spot in my heart for them. Here's a taste for you, and if you have a Pet Band of your own, remember to get along and support them whenever you can.
These things are important.

...of Freud and Falco...(3 - People)

It's really not a good idea to generalise about the native population of an entire capital city, is it? (Apart from Paris, where I think you can confidently say you will find a higher concentration of startlingly snotty people than anywhere else in the world. That said I've also met some very nice Parisians. Three, I think.). So what can I possibly tell you about the Viennese? Well, 'they' (and I use the term to mean 'a conspicuous number') seem to be doing very nicely for themselves. Austria is one of the 12 richest countries in the world, fact fans, and it shows.

As in Munich, the signs of prosperity are everywhere in Vienna - plenty of very new, very expensive German cars on the roads, lots of healthy-looking, robust elderly people out socialising and spending their money (not cooped up indoors counting their coppers for the Care Home Fund, yellowed from lack of vitamin D and too many fags like in the UK), and - always a source of great amusement for me - the visible presence of comfortable-looking nuclear families in their late thirties/early forties, out for a Saturday stroll with their two small sons Moritz and Andreas, who are dressed as miniature copies of their father in cords, sweater and soft-collared shirts, their hair neatly parted and clipped in a faithful but terrifying twin facsimile. These kids look like they're off for a snifter at the golf club before a game of bridge despite being no more than six and eight years old, and there seem to be hundreds of them, trotting obediently and silently in their parents' wake while the adults select a suitably smart restaurant for a spot of lunch or fuss over the family Labrador (my god, do the Viennese love their dogs. Watch where your feet may end up.). I've only ever seen this strange child-ageing phenomenon in German cities and now in Vienna, and I don't understand it. Maybe a kind Viennese reader will stop by and explain?

As far as the natives I met went, everyone apart from the dreadful (but very funny) maitre d' at Glassis was helpful, friendly and pleasant - though you sometimes have to wait a while to get a smile (which I'm more than used to doing, living in a country where people actively often actively glorify in their negativity.). There was also a notable absence of darker skins, which for a capital city surprised me, and made me wonder how rare it must be to see black or Asian faces in the outlying districts if there are so conspicuously few in the capital itself. Tourists - like me - were abundant and predominantly American, with a fairly high number of Japanese wrestling tinily with the huge meaty gravy-drenched platters of food - as far away from delicate sashimi as you could get (though sushi and sashimi joints are everywhere if all that meat gets too overwhelming.). The streets are clean, well-lit and quiet, and it all feels very safe, even taking short cuts through the parks at night time.

My favourite encounter took place in Loos American Bar, a tiny, perfect, frozen-in-time landmark to Vienna's gloriously louche heyday as a European hub of sensual pleasure. Swinging by for an early evening cocktail we bagged the last free table, adjacent to an American man of about forty. He was sitting with his father who he resembled strongly in every way but demeanour, Son maintained a broad but slightly strained smile while Dad glowered angrily at his Sidecar as though he'd discovered a small scab floating in it. Seated on the other side of Dad was a smart woman in her sixties - a good fifteen years younger than him - who was obviously his wife, but equally obviously not Son's mother. They seemed frozen in an odd tableau, Son beaming mutely at the unengaged scowling Dad, with Wife sucking anxiously on her straw in the background while watching them both. I began to count silently to myself, knowing that Son would engage me in conversation well before I reached 'ten'. I got to seven.

"The Daquiris are remarkable here" said Son, taking my cocktail menu from me gently but firmly and turning to the appropriate page. "I can really recommend the Chocodaquiri."I thanked him and went back to flicking though the other pages, though - dammit - I'd been thinking of ordering a Daquiri anyway. "You from the Uk?" he continued. "I was in London a few weeks back. Business, not the Olympics, in case you were wondering. Have to say, it was a big surprise that you guys managed to pull it off. I mean, who'd ever have guessed? The transport was fine, the venue was fine, the crowds were, well fine - even your opening ceremony went fine! Who'd ever have guessed you could do it?" he mused, shaking his head incredulously and chewing thoughtfully on his olive. I wanted to ask him if he worked for Mitt Romney, but thought better of it, wondering as I did so why I was being so bloody polite.

"And the Paralympics went brilliantly as well," I said, thinking that this might be news to him. It was. He shook his head. "I don't think so," he said. "Nobody ever watches the Paralympics." This was too much. "Actually every event was sold out, and they pulled in record TV figures, " I told him. "The events got full press coverage too. It was great, a real boost for the athletes." He looked like he really, really didn't believe me but had graciously decided to let it go.

"My father and stepmother were just in Paris," Son volunteered, gesturing over to the glaring parent and his timid spouse. "Yeah, and I'd have headed back home with the rest of the group six days ago, if I hadn't had to head over here instead and see him," boomed Dad. "His son gave a shriek of hyena-pitched laughter that sounded like a sob. Dad fixed him with his sub-zero stare, while his wife fished desperately in the bottom of her glass for a stray maraschino cherry. "When do you fly back to the States?" I asked Dad. "Tuesday," he said, injecting the word with no small amount of rapturous longing. "Must be great to have family living in such a beautiful city," I ventured. "Pah," replied Dad, at which point his wife stood up suddenly and announced her need for the bathroom.

"Anyway, where are you folks staying?" asked Son, breaking away from Dad's death-ray eyes. I named the hotel. "Oh yeah, I stayed there," said Son confidently. "That's a Best Western, right?" I told him politely that it's actually a small independent hotel. "AND it's a Best Western," he added, poking out his lower lip like a petulant four-year old.

What IS the etiquette in a situation like this, gentle reader? I know perfectly well that the hotel I'm staying in is a small independent hotel because I found it, booked it, checked into it and am staying in it, and so far the Best Western logo has been satisfyingly absent from all transactions. How far should I be prepared to go to state my case? In the end I did the classic British Fudge, mumbling that if it's a Best Western I certainly wasn't aware of it and am rather surprised to hear it. I could hear my accent getting more English with every word I uttered; by the end of the sentence I sounded like Joan Plowright. But no matter, things were moving on to my left.

"HEEEEEY, Dad, you're looking like you're ready for another!" exclaimed Son, watching Dad sulkily twist his empty glass. Son turned to me. "There's no telling where he'll end up if he has another on of these babies, but hey..."
 "I had enough," said Dad, darkly and loudly. "When Marilla gets back from the bathroom, I'm heading back to the hotel." The air seemed to drain out of Son, along with any remaining will to persuade his father to enjoy himself. "Sure, Dad," he agreed. Dad already had one arm in the sleeve of his jacket as Marilla rejoined the unhappy pair. They were out the door within a minute, Dad's parting shot to us over his shoulder as he followed his defeated son a loudly whispered "Well! Three more days.." We had another cocktail each, and talked about the trio.

Back out on the streets of Vienna a busking festival was in full swing. We slyly photographed a group of quizzical-looking policemen watching a enthusiastic crusty playing a plastic didgeridoo to a terrible backing track (give them their due, they lasted longer than we did), then passed a terrifying, silent clown who was traumatising a small child by trying to place a balloon animal around the kid's neck while the kid clung desperately to his mother's leg. The child's screams were clearly disturbing the clown, who looked almost as scared of the nipper as the nipper was of him, but he'd decided on a course of action to pacify him and he was damn well going to see it through. I felt like giving Mum one of my cards and advising her to send the kid to me in ten years, when the full phobia embedded by this trauma will emerge, but it's a bit of long way to send him and I hear there are already one or two therapists practicing in Vienna.

In the end we spent half an hour watching a jolly round American man juggle a couple of chainsaws while balancing on a twelve-foot high unicycle, in the beautiful grounds of St Stephen's Cathedral. There's nothing kids across the world love more than the spectacle of a fellow human being putting themselves in severe and unnecessary danger of a spectacularly gory accident, and there were quite a few five Euro notes in the jongleur's hat at the end of his performance, quite deservedly. The man thanked the applauding crowd in a blend of English and German so fractured it was positively pulverised, as we took a slow measured walk towards the Cathedral steps pretending to be Ultravox in the closing frames of the 'Vienna' video.

It was after midnight by the time we headed back to our hotel through the Palace Park at Schonbrunn. The park was quiet though there were plenty of people around; teenagers snuggling up on the benches, groups of clubbers heading out for the night in their finery, well-dressed diners emerging from the Palm House Restaurant. On on of the lawns, picked out by the moonlight, an elderly couple were waltzing silently to a tune only they could hear, guiding one another lightly and gently through the turns and twists of the dance, like they looked to have been doing for fifty years or more. Late summer in Vienna.

...of waltzes and Waldheim...(2 - Culture)

There are things you simply have to do when you visit Vienna, and I didn't do any of them. You must take a ride around the city in a horse and trap (there are hundreds to choose from, most of them driven by unhappy-looking men in bowler hats, and pulled by poor nags that stamp neurotically and repetitively at the cobbles beneath their hooves, while waiting for their next heavy load of strudel-stuffed customers. No thanks.). You must go to the opera (shrieking reminders of the ghastly three years when the house next door was occupied by a professional soprano who practiced her scales for up to six hours a day just might provoke a Manchurian Candidate response in me, so not worth the risk, or the money.). You must go to the Spanish Riding School (not comfortable with training animals to pose and trot unnaturally for entertainment, thanks, though I did get great fun from putting a wig on my dog years ago.). Oh, and you must eat cake at least once an hour (as mentioned in the previous post, my sweet tooth departed long since, but hey don't let me stop you. Tuck in.).

Instead, I did what I always do when I visit a new city; I walked the length and breadth of it by day and night, stopping to try new food whenever possible, I watched people like a hawk and came to unjustified and unprovable conclusions about them and their internal lives, and I went to as many galleries as I could bear. Vienna is relatively small as cities go, but is packed with such variety and riches that I left with a third of it barely explored, and a further third of it not seen at all. You can't rush a place like this. There are a hundred museums alone,  and not all of them in the Museum Quarter though this area makes a good place to start. First on my list and highly recommended as a building alone is Mumok, the Museum of Modern Art, which houses all the off-the-wall art wackiness you could possibly need, stuffed to the rafters with the likes of Klee, Rauschenberg, Warhol, Picasso, Duchamp, and (inevitably) a huge helping of shocking and confrontational/juvenile and childish (depending on your own personality) masterpieces by the Viennese Actionists, who seemed to be rebelling against most elements of Austria's past using anything they could lay their hands on (including each other's bodily fluids, genitals, leftovers from supper etc - you probably get the idea.). I spent almost three hours wandering around enjoying myself, and cast sly glances at the home-grown visitors sporting sharp geometric black outfits and expensively treated geometric hair as they peered coolly at the artwork. So many looked like extras from a European language film about the highly-repressed collective neuroses of the over-cultured affluent Mittel-european intelligentsia. So don't go there if you hate this sort of thing, that's my advice. I had a great time though.

The main feature at several of the other large museums at the moment (and for the rest of 2012) is the work of Gustav Klimt, those dreamlike, erotic, pagan, neo-Byzantine images of ecstatic women cradling severed heads, or lovers embracing awkwardly under a golden cloak (just me I imagine, but I always thought the Kiss looks like he's got her in a head lock. Don't read too much into my interpretation.). The main exhibition is sited at the beautiful Belvedere palace, which is worth a visit in its own right, a stunning baroque iced cake of a mansion built specifically as an proud statement of obscene wealth by Prince Eugene in the early 1700s. It was busy on the day I went, but not packed and there was plenty of time and space to get a long look at the paintings, which pack far more of a punch in real life than I was expecting. I'd always been a bit dismissive of Klimt as an 'early 20s artist', which is my snotty way of saying I saw his work as the sort of thing you send postcards of to friends when you're about 23 and keen to demonstrate that you are now mature enough to admit to a taste for beauty and romantic pan-European imagery (but you're way above all that heavy, over-literal Pre-Rapaelite nonsense like 'Flaming June' with her great big thighs and coarse hair.). Seen in real life, the canvasses are stunning, mesmerising things that you want to take time over and appreciate slowly, to notice every tiny curlicue and detail and fleck of light. I took the Belvedere exhibition very slowly, and later on lingered in the beautiful Secession building over the crazy Beethoven Frieze, noting how much the redhead who is supposed to portray 'lasciviousness' reminds me of Farah Fawcett in the famous 'red swimsuit with nipples' pinup from the Seventies. Someone had obviously been taking notes about the enduring power of certain depictions of female pulchritude.

Less endearing but equally interesting was the vast collection of Klimt's pencil drawings and sketches in the Vien Museum at Karlsplatz (not to mention his actual death mask and post-mortem sketches by his enfant terrible chum Egon Schiele.). One huge wall is given to a spread - in all senses of the word - of 'intimate studies' of his female models, a sort of pen and paper equivalent of a giant 'see everything' jazz mag.  When you read more, and discover that sex with Herr Klimt was one of the 'privileges' of getting to model for him ( and he was known for being fairly forceful in his conquests, which were legion), and consider the fact that several of his subjects were young girls of fifteen or so, a whole other raft of questions emerges about his attitude towards women. Of course the art eclipses it all... doesn't it? I'm not so sure. But in any case his work deserves to be viewed thoughtfully, and not just through the dazzling veil of his delicately applied gold leaf. There are far darker layers beneath. And take it from me, you won't want to see The Kiss again for a while once you leave Vienna as it is emblazoned absolutely everywhere in the city, from umbrellas to teacups to duvet covers. You can overdose on anything, but there's far more to this commemorative Klimt beanfeast than that one canvas so if you're passing through you'd be daft to ignore the show.

Outside of the official galleries Vienna is one great show in itself, a city whose eighteenth-century redevelopment was born of a blatant effort to rival and beat Haussman's 'new' Paris. It's hard to judge who won overall. The best I can offer is that Paris, through it's pale stone and open, light boulevards, retained a femininity in its aesthetic whereas the centre of Vienna is indubitably, robustly, stockily, masculine. This led to a well-documented 'action and reaction' sequence in the progress of its architecture, with the beautiful, delicate Art Nouveau blocks which emerged by the Nachtsmarkt in the late nineteenth centrury, in turn succeeded in turn by the clean lines of the  Secessionists, Deco and Modernism after that. This all means that just walking around the city and looking up every so often (or down, as I did at one point to see a small brass tribute inlaid in the pavement, to several residents of the district I was in who were taken off to the camps by the Nazis.) is an education in itself. There are nooks and crannies everywhere that will lure you off your chosen route - just let yourself be lured.

If it's shopping you're after, too, the place is teeming with small, independent retailers offering to reset your avarice levels to 'critical'. Freihaus and Spittelberg are the best to explore on foot; take your time and restrain yourself if you can. My big regret was that there was no time to get to the railway arches along the Gurtel, which is apparently the cosmic centre of Euopean electronica, and packed with live venues, clubs and bars. But there's got to be something to go back for, has there not?

Anyway, I've gone on far too long as usual. No wonder I couldn't get on with Twitter. After this, Vienna Part 3 - The People. May or may not contain Midge Ure.