Confused (to shift the focus)

Age is a band that is totally significant and special for me and it reminds me of a lot of different things, starting in the summer of 1999 and up to 2003 when I was in Berlin.

(In the summer of 1999) While I was on the train going across town from my hostel near Warsauer Strasse to a sorta ex-squatted art venue called Tacheles I was intriguedly (is that a word?) looking at the guy opposite me reading a zine, who was wearing a Muff Potter shirt and had a Spitboy tattoo on his leg. We kept exchanging glances but I felt too shy to talk and that was without the whole language barrier inhibition thing.

That night I met up with my one internet punk contact in Berlin, Thomas, out the front of the Converge show at Tommy Weisbecker Haus. He said I couldn’t stay at his place cos it was tiny and he had someone else staying, but he’d arranged for me to stay with some friends of his and said he’d introduce me to...to the guy from the subway! Whose name was Phillipe!!!

The next couple of weeks involved staying at Phillipe’s house with a constant soundtrack of Ivich, Jasemine, Vanilla, Age, Muff Potter, all that dreamy euro emo stuff. And that slightly-famous-in-an-underground-way anarchist pop band from Luxembourg that Phillipe’s other houseguest was the "manager" for, but I cannot ever remember their name.

I always meant to get an Age record, but never actually did, apart from having some songs on a tape (with other bands like Headache and Zorn) from my pal Donat in Berlin.

Cut to early 2003 in Brisbane when my friend Sanne's boyfriend in Germany sent a mixtape with Age on it, so I finally got to hear them again. A couple of months later, I was leaving to go to Europe and I made a mixtape for my travels that included my favourite Age song of all time “Confused (to shift the focus)” as well as “Wolf” and maybe one other song of theirs, and a bunch of Billy Bragg and Hot Water Music and Le Tigre and Epoxies and Rumbleseat and whatever.

Skip to July 2003, me and Sophie hitching just before nightfall on the edge of Dresden holding a sign to get to the Czech Republic. We'd gotten dropped off there by a nice guy who had just finished working on a film-set, he was one of those great “down for the count” kinda people and I was totally enjoying talking to him and felt a little sad when we had to get out of the car.

But on the upside, he assured us he was dropping us at an amazing hitching spot. As cars whizzed by and nightfall started approaching, I started to have some doubts though, and was getting panicked visions of sleeping in the nearby bushes or an abandoned haunted church or something.

Finally a car stopped and as we ran up to it, I noticed there was a "Dance Tonight, Revolution Tomorrow” sticker on the back window. It was two guys, Tristan and Ramon, who said hi and checked where we were going and then we fell into separate conversations cos it was kinda hard to hear from the backseat, and well also sometimes it's just a little awkward when you get into a stranger's car, not to mention the language barrier.

Then Tristan asked if there we had any music we wanted to play, so I passed over what I’d just been listening to in my walkman and the track-listings. He put on the music and then read the track-listings and said incredulously “you know Age?!?!?!?!” In complete disbelief. Because the guy driving the car was the bassplayer in Age.

They were laughing because they said that me and Sophie didn’t look like punks (I think we were looking particularly clean-cut and normal to help our hitching efforts nicely along), so they didn’t expect us to be on a similar page at all.

In fact, they thought we were going to a rave because we had said we were going to a festival, which amused us no end. It turned out we were all going to the same emo/hardcore/punk/straightedge/indie fest starting in Plzen (yep, I bet you know the one).

Holy shit, I almost can’t comprehend the random individual situations across hemispheres and years that lead to this particular moment. Of all the cars that could stop by the side of the road, it was that one. With those people! Who asked me that question at that moment and we discovered that connection. Makes me smile at how sometimes life can be like that, and it reminds me that there are secret beautiful coincidental worlds still hidden within this mundane boring routine one.



http://www.myspace.com/ageuberalles