WATER EVERYWHERE

I have to give Steffen Fuchs, my favourite Berliner and adopted member of the Joyce family for some ten years, credit for this one. While visiting us here in Basel over New Year, Steffen, a passionate fisherman, expressed his appreciation of the Johnny Cash biopic “Walk The Line”, only criticizing the fact that June Carter Cash’s prowess as an angler hadn’t been emphasized enough in the film. To his knowledge, the accomplished singer and song-writer had also been a stellar sportswoman who could out-fish both her husband and her son.
This little-known fact, confirmed in John Carter Cash’s book “Anchored In Love” got us thinking that perhaps the film (and the song it was named after) should in fact have been called “Cast The Line” instead of “Walk The Line”. We then developed the possibility of niche journalism as a growth market for the otherwise shrinking field of print journalism. For example, one could start by judging films only on the basis of their aquatic content, but that’s a dangerous road to go down, as that would man rating Kevin Costner’s disastrous “Waterworld” much higher than David Lynch’s rambling yet powerful “Dune” epic. Furthermore, any film with Laurence Fishburne would inevitably get a five-star rating and Jacques Cousteau would be a superstar far outstripping the likes of Arnold Schwarzenegger. Taking this line of argument on to music, Fishbone would be the sharpest band on the planet (which they in fact were around 1992), but Stock, Aitken & Waterman would go down in history as the greatest record producers of all time. Considering that the British trio was responsible for 80s pop horrors by Kylie Minogue, Rick Astley and Samantha Fox, I’m not sure that fishy music criticism is such a good thing. Sorry, Steffen.

I FOUGHT THE LAW

Happy New Year to you all. My posts got even less frequent towards the end of 2009, but as usual I have decent reasons for going incommunicado. i.e. an over-ambitious workload, an undiagnosed iron deficiency and quite a few interesting encounters with Joss Stone, H.I.M. and Massive Attack which I’ll come back to at a later time. The most pleasant reason for radio silence was Gretel’s new CD “Chop Chop” and the preparations involved in getting the album to press and back again. The band had its launch party at the “Hirscheneck” music club here in Basel where we supported unwavering Swiss punk veterans The Bucks.

The gig had a potentially very rock’n’roll epilogue: While saying good-bye to The bucks outside the club at around three in the morning, a passing Black Maria grazed my shoulder with its right wing mirror; I thought nothing of this pain-free encounter until the van emitted three irate-looking police officers wanting to know who had beaten against the side of their vehicle. I owned up to having been in contact with their wing mirror albeit not by my own design but was nonetheless asked to provide some ID. While taking down my details I was asked about my professional occupation, and I knew exactly what effect this piece of information would have. Sure enough, the blood drained from the officers’ faces when I also gave them a full list of the publications I write for. They were obviously dreading headlines along the lines of “Basel police ram handicapped journalist” and departed in an apologetic hurry.

Although I was sure that the encounter wouldn’t have any consequences for me, I was a little unsettled to receive a letter from the Basel police a few days later. In it, the police woman who had headed the team apologised for the encounter and asked me to get in touch should I have sustained any injuries from the encounter with her van. So I now tip my hat to the Basel police for doing such a careful and also caring bit of damage limitation - even though their good work has severely dampened my rock’n’roll credential.