There’s a really funny joke that goes around in music geek circles: Q: What do you do when a soundcard for a Korg M1 fails and you have to restore your settings via a sysex dump? A: You walk for 20 minutes to a music shop run by a middle-aged couple in matching t-shirts and buy a Mac-compatible midi interface for 45 Euros. Actually, it’s not a particularly funny joke, indeed, barely a joke at all, in fact, not a joke. But it’s what happened. If anyone would like to take this incident and develop it for 6-part sitcom format, I’d be happy to play the role of the hapless keyboard player.

We were onstage at the preposterously early time of 8pm; by 7.15pm there were 3 people in the auditorium. I counted them on three fingers of one hand. Clearly your Dutch have a dissimilarity to their English cousins, who turn up at a venue at 8.30pm, when the band they’ve come to see isn’t on until 10.15pm, and proceed to get monumentally hammered. The Dutch all flood in at 7.45pm, having spent their early evening engaged in other hobbies and pursuits, watch the band at 8pm, and from 9pm proceed to get monumentally hammered. A subtle difference, but an important one.

Anyway, we played to a good-sized crowd of about 250 in the smaller room at the Paradiso, while people queued down the street to get in and watch Laurent Garnier play some records in the big room. If audience size was directly proportional to the amount of effort put in to doing a show, we’d have been playing in the 52,000 capacity Amsterdam Arena, and Garnier would have back at the Paradiso in the cupboard under the stairs. The gig was excellent; I couldn’t stop grinning. Everyone in this band is such a sweetheart. Detractors on the Scritti Politti Yahoo! group I think have been spoiled by years of hearing pristine studio creations on CD, and have forgotten that live music is played by fallible human beings who are, essentially, striving for the unattainable.

Today I will go to a brown bar, a green park and a blue movie. I’m joking about the movie.