But Who am I Fooling, I Like Airline Food

I just loved the latest email update from the Strokes. It was quite fabulous. I dunno, its like getting the news from home. There's mispellings, nicknames and warm sentiments.

So, First Impressions of Earth will be released in Germany (..& Austria & Switzerland) first, swit swoo. (is the title alluding to like, the meteoric rise of the band from the success of their last two albums and now like, they've crash landed back on the "workd", with this new album to show for the experience. ??? !!! ("meteoric rise" surely must be the most cliched music review phrase, EVER, probly.)

Though, I'm not yet sure if i'm buying this one. I was taken aback to learn that the Juicebox single is their first no.1 ever -- for some reason I thought surely they would have had one before now. Ryan wrote:

"THANK YOU to all the fans in the U.S. who have given us our FIRST #1 in... well.... basically anything!"

So their first chart topper is from this strange and unfamiliar sounding troisième sortie..not even Last Night? Dudes. Maybe theyve had European no.1's? I dunno. My very first memory of them is from a few years back. There's not much to it, and it sort of correllates slightly to how im feeling about First Impressions of Earth (though i started liking Juicebox after seeing it liiiive.) So, this one day I came home from school & flipped on MTV. There was a sepia toned video for some song at which i grimaced, switched off the television, turned on my heel and stomped out of the room. Modern Age! Wow. I cant remember how long it was after that that I became a fan. I'm guessing that Last Night got me. Got me good.

I like this paragraph from Wikipedia:

The Modern Age (EP) was released in 2001 and sparked a bidding war among record labels, the largest for a rock and roll band in years. Subsequently, The Strokes became the subject of enormous hype, causing a great divide amongst rock fans, albeit mostly hipsters and independent magazines, as to whether they were the saviors of rock and roll or simply a bunch of rich kids, with cool names, ripping off the Velvet Underground.

I've lost my Room on Fire CD...sometime / somewhere when i was moving house one of those eleventy gajillion times in the last few months -- Portstewart to Portrush; Portrush to Dublin; Dublin to Limerick; Limerick to Sligo; Sligo to Dublin; Dublin to Berlin...which is total pants because I love listening to the music of a band whose gig I've just been to. I was dying to put it on and relive their show at Maria. But, no. It's wierd, I lost the album cover when I moved home from France in '04...now I have nothing.

I have been thinking that I have had a pretty fucking great year. I wish I was one of those people who could keep track of ticket stubs, concert photographs and other mementos. I have such a jumble of music memories, it's a mess! Some pictures & tickets end up blu-tacked to the wall, or glued inside notebooks, others left in piles here and there...Deliberating over my favourite albums from the year, a rush of memories from gigs went through my head instead. I started remembering way back in January for example, the Willy Mason gig in the Sugar Club in Dublin. (where's my ticket stub from that night?!) It was oversold. That venue is small enough, and seated, and the seating is quite spaced out too -- plush red velvet couches & stools. Once those places were taken up people got comfortable on the stairs (tiered seating = lots of stairs) the place was jammed. I was lucky to get a ticket for that one. That's one thing I love about Berlin, sometimes even at the last minute for a show it's always possible to get a ticket. I used to be buying tickets for gigs in Dublin months in advance.

Being broke has meant that I don't have a very up to date stash of new albums humming happily in my boombox. I haven't had any downloading facility for the last few months either; I've been relying on Radio Eins to keep me going while I'm broke & spending my cash on shows instead of CDs. The last three neu albums I bought were from the Cribs, Kanye West and STARS...although, I lost Late Registration in an apartment move -- Prenzlauer Berg to Kreuzberg..got to stop doing that, fuck!) I've missed out on alot of others, though in most cases -- Beck, Devendra Banhard, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, Editors, Brendan Benson, the Go! Team -- at least I got to see the show. I haven't even got Bell X1's new album, Flock. That hurts. I was hugging the radio in the kitchen when their new song came on the other day. Le sigh.