RUSSIA 2009 TOUR DIARY

Day One:
 
 Wow, finally made it.....an incredibly long flight from Auckland to Singapore, followed
 by 8 hours in the airport and then another 10 hours to Moscow before it was the point of
 no return with regard to immigration control to Major Tom. A hell of a lot of planning and red
 tape's gone into this venture and I was a little nervous that something might go wrong at the
 last minute but after a short fumble at the 25 yard line when it seemed that I had lost my
 boarding pass for the Singapore to Moscow part of the journey (I don't really understand why
 they actually need this) it turned out that I hadn't lost it and it was infact just hiding in me
 back pocket and my passport was stamped and I was allowed through the gate and was even
 given a smile by the woman who processed my entry visa. Passport Control to Major Tom
 take your bags with you and put your helmet on.

 I meet Sasha and Pasha from the russian band "Dairy Hig'h after hanging around the entrance of the
 entry gate for around 10 minutes and in this  time am asked by 4 different taxi drivers if I want a taxi.
 There is a warning that the state of the Russian Federation accepts no responsibility for unlicensed taxi
 drivers and being a foreigner I wouldn't be able to tell the difference so I am glad when they show up
 and we grab the train into town.After such a long flight it is great to finally have some company again
 and I can't really remember much of the train journey as I was mostly talking and not really looking
 out of the window much.From there we catch the Metro and then walk a little way to Sasha and
 Anastasia's apartment where I will be staying. The air is full of a plague of Poplar Tree seeds that
 seem to be everywhere and Sasha tells me that Breshnev experimented with the city by planting
 100s of the things during his period in office. I guess Poplars must have been popular with him.
 If you get Hayfever it is a real pain i the arse but since I don't get this it's no problem for me and
 I marvel at the fairy dust and am also amazed that the crows in Russia seems to have Penguin
 suits as a large part of their upper back feathers are white rather than black.

 We make it to the 13th floor where they live and the view from the balcony looks out on the next
 giant estate that is but a stones throw away. Jimmy Stewart would have an easy time here if he
 wanted to make a remake if Hitchcock's "Rear Window" movie. I dump my bags with glee and say
 hello to Anastasia. It's about 30 degrees, which they tell me is unusual for Moscow and I can't
 believe how bloody hot it feels in comparison with the kiwi winter. We talk about this and that until
 Sasha has to go back to the office for a couple of hours and I chill out a little and reorganise my
 stuff from the way I had stacked it should passport control go through it with a fine toothed comb.
 Elena calls from Wellington while Sasha is back at the office to check that I made it through passport
 control and we talk about what's happening for her on the weekend and extra little details that
 she thinks I should know about Moscow. She also reminds me to contact her friend Alyona who
 has kindly offered to show me around the city a bit. The phone connection is incredibly good and
 it is not really any different from talking on a mobile back in Welington. I wonder how much it must
 be costing her to talk to me and feel a litle guilty about the cost but am glad to hear from her so
 blab on more than I probably should until eventually we say goodbye and she disappaers down
 the telephone line and goes back to the other side of the world.

 Anastasia cooks a great meal and we demolish the bottles of New Zealand wine that I brought at
 duty free in Auckland and have been carrying around like a sack for the last 30 hours. Then we
 watch a bit of russian TV (wierd if you are not russian) and I suddenly run out of gas and decide to hit
 the sack. Yippee I have arrived. They let me in with a grin and I no longer need to worry about
 actually getting into the country. I go to close my eyes in in 5 seconds and  sleep like a rock.

 
Day Two:

 I wake up a little earler than everyone else and sit out on the balcony drinking coffee and filming
 a little bit of the sky line and the estate next door. We are on the 13th floor so the view of the city
 is amazing it stretchs out in every direction for miles and there is a bloody big telecommunications tower
 next to the estete next door which maybe explains why the telephone seems to work so clearly.
 Anastasia whips up an amazing omlet for breakfast with real herbs in it and I drag out Sasha's guitars
 that I will be borrowing for the show and see how my fingers like them. The Martin Acoustic is as
 I expected it to be and is absolutely perfect. I guess I will probably never find another acoustic
 guitar that I love as well as my own 1970's Guild D-40 but this is a good substitute and the fact
 that I haven't had to carry guitars with me is a welcome change from the last 25 years of dragging
 the Guild and the Gibson Flying V around the world with me. This will actually be the first time I have
 just travelled with clothes instead if instruments and apart from strings, capos, a tuner and a hot cake
 my luggage is about as un rock and roll as it has ever been.

 The electric guitar I will be using is a Burns Bison Reissue and is more like a Fendr than a Gibson
 pick-up wise and in the layout of the tail piece design. I restring it with Ernie Ball regular slinkies
 that I brought in Wellington before I left and after stetching the strings enough to get the slack
 out of them it seems that the Bison will be fine and that the neck is about the same size and
 breath as the Flying V so I should be able to use it without having to reprogramme my subconscious
 finger map of where the frets lie andthus be able to play it without really having to look at the
 fret board very much,

 We go for a short walk around the Botanical Gardens which are quite close to the house and wander
 around the greenery. There are big statues and massive roman style buildings that remind one
 instantly of the power or archietecture. There is a big gold fountain with bronze swans in every
 direction and it's nice to see these sort of buildings in amongst the greenery rather than surronded
 by concrete. There are a few policeman around and I have forgotten to talk my passport with me
 but they don't seem to want to control anybody so we pass by without incident and I make a mental
 note to not forget my papers next time. It could mean being arrested and being taken to the police
 station or having to give the officer a little present in cold hard rubbles so that he would perhaps turn
 a blind eye and it is really not worth the rik or the inconvienience so lets hope I don't end up in
 the slammer here for some stupid reason.

 We then head into the Metro to go to a rehearsal studio where Dairy High will play me the songs that
 I am going to help them record. It is in a basement and a little bit hard to find but once we almost
 fall down the staircase getting there it seems to be pretty good and adequate for our needs, Grisha
 the drummer is on time so since Pasha the guitar [layer is late by around 40 minutes we run through
 some songs that I want Dairy High to help me play at the show at the 16 Tons Club on the 23rd of
 June. We go shoppping on the feel of the songs and I try and work out what ones have a natural feel
 for Greisha to play so that they will be easier to recreate on the night. We chose "You Know I Really
 Like Your Style" and "I'm So Glad That You Dropped Out of High School" from the Cakekitchen song
 book and a couple of covers that I won't tell you about yet so that the surprise will nit be runed if
 one of the punters reads this before seeing the show.

 They work out pretty good and Sasha more or less has the bass lines worked out so it should go
 pretty smoothly. Not a bad effort fpr 40 minuts. Pasha shows up so I discard to Burns which sounds
 fine throught the Marshall in the rehearsal studio. They play their new songs and tell me the names
 of them and I listen sitting on the floor and ask the odd question. When Greisha heads out for a
 cigarette I get behind the drums and play a song with them but he comes back fairly quickly so
 I give him the sticks back and return to my place on the floor. Strangely enough the vocals are
 a lot louder behind the drum kit than in any other part of the room. The guy who owns the studio
 knocks on the door and tells us that time is up and there is another band wating so we pack up
 quickly and head back into the 25 degree heat. Pasha suggests we have a beer in the park so we
 stop at a kiosk and get some russian beer and sit in th park. I find a lucky crows feather and the
 guys ask me questions about New Zealand and what it is like to live there and how things actually
 are. I guess it must seem like paradise to them. They also tell me stories about the westernisation
 of Russia and how englsh speaking foreign workers seem to really like it here and are coming into
 Moscow in large numbers. They say stuff like. oh, they can earn good money here and the alcohol
 is cheap and there are 1000's of pretty girls here ( this seems to be true, some of the russian woman
 are indeed beautiful in a way that is not easy to describe but is easily noticeable in comparison with
 other countries that I have lived in or visited). We finish our beers and after a few more horror stories
 about polce corruption  and briding ones way out of a sticky situation it's back into the Metro and
 to Sasha and Anastasia's apartment. I still can't believe how hot it is and my clothes stick to my
 skin. The trains in the Metro seem 5 times louder than any other city I can remember and the ceilings
 are twice as high inside the stations as any other country I can remember. Weird. I want to check out
 some of the stations on the circle line as these are the oldest and were built in the 1930's as a testament
 to how grand the rusian public transport could be. We don't use any of these stations on our journey back
 home but it is one of the things that I will do on my days off. Elena showed me some photos she had
 taken in the older style Metro stations and they look to me like an art gallery rather than a train station.
 This surely is one of the "must do's" that a tourist like myself has to do while in Moscow.

 We munch our way through a fish dinner and I try to call Alyona a few times but can't seem to get her.
 Around half 10 I suddenly feel like I can't stay awake any longer so I hit the sack and am again sleep
 in 5 minutes. I dream about being sneaking out of work early instead of finishing the day and am paranoid
 that my boss will have noticed. For some reason the dream also has some sort of stolen money theme
 about it too and it seems so bloody stupid to still be thniking about work when I am here on the other
 side of the world. I would rather tell you that I dreamt of russian princess's or playing poker with
 Gorbachov and winning but in reality my dreams are still very much tied to New Zealand. Maybe
 I need to drink more? Maybe I should get another job? It seems impossible in New Zealand to pay
 the rent just from playing and recording music but who knows maybe my lucky star will do something
 to change this in some way. Anyway, for the time being it doesn't matter. It has little to do with the
 3 weeks that I am in Russia and this is indeed exciting.

 Day Three:

 Well apart from dreaming about being at work while I was asleep I did still sleep like a rock. We have
 breakfast at around midday and then go for a walk into town. Sasha and Anastasia show me around
 the Red Square and the old part of town. The buildings are old and regal and remind me a little of the
 old part of Munich around Marion Platz. The Kremlin has such high walls that it is almost impossible to
 see very much of it at all from the putside but St Basil's Cathedral is beautiful and old worldly like
 nothing I have ever seen before and I think about the amount of times I have seen photographs of
 this building in books and magazines. It seems about as russian as anyhting could be. We wonder
 around the old part of town near the Red Square and through the cobblestones until eventually we
 are hungry and go to a club to get something to eat. It seems that the clubs are also resturants during the
 day and in a way this makes perfect sense. Moscow is very expensive rent wise so this 2 shots at the
 apple approach to getting money from the punters as well as being good economic sense is also very
 convienient. I order a Salmon Steak Russian Style, an Anthenian salad and a bowlof Bosch soup.

The menu is in englsh as well as russian and the club is in a basement with a predominently green and red colour sceme. The food is fine and reasonably priced at about 350 rubbles and it seems to rain like  hell while we are there but more or less stops as we are leaving. We wander around the back streets a bit  more and marvel at one of the homeless dogs legs in the air scratching his back in the sand of the garden  of an old estate. He seems like he is at orgasm level of enjoyment doing this and doesn't seem to be  interested in us at all. I guess with all that fur on such a hot day it's understandable. Apparently Moscow  has over 100 thpusand homeless dogs and you see them everywhere, sometimes sleeping outside of the  train stations, sometimes inside of the train stations or just on the street. No-one seems to know what  to do about this and some of them look pretty unloved and have big bald patches in their fur. They can  be dangerous when approached so it is a good idea to give them a wide birth and when one sees a dog in  the street it is always a good idea to look around to see if it has an ownwer as there are a hell of a lot of  them who actually don't. Strange but true. It seems that poor Bruno hs been out on his arse in the grass  for such a long time now that the wild dog problem here is probably more or less unstopable.

We make it back to the apartment as the sun is going down and everyone seems a bit tired. Anastasia is the first to retire and Sasha and I stay up until about one in the morning watching random things on youtube. Eventually we gwt square eyd and have to stop. The live Beach Boys stuff from the 1960's is amazing and the Ronetted black and white concert footage is shaking. I hit the sack and close my eyes in five minutes. They say tomorrow it will only be 15 degrees and I keep my fingers crossed. I am still not that used to being in such a hot climate and a little less humidity would go a good way towards not feeling so hot and sticky.

Day Four:

Well, it was a little less hot and I can't say that I wasn't pleased about this. We headed off to the rehearsal studio at around 2 and dragged the guitars and pedal boxes through the Metro again. This time it was a little bit more to carry and it seems incredible to me that a lot of bands do gigs here by using public transport, Since in Moscow the club provides the back line amps and the drum kit it is easily possible but it just seems kind of weird from what a westerner like myself is used to.

This time everyone is running a little late and Sasha and I take a bus from the Metro to try and get back a little bit of lost time. Grisha arrives more or less at the same time as we do but we only get a chance to go through a couple of songs before Pasha arrives. Since the rehearsal is more or less for the Dairy High gig that they are playing at the IKRA tonight it seems most benefical to leave them to it so I put down the Bison and sit on the floor snd listen. They go through the songs that they will play and also bang out a version of Daniel Johnston's Speeding Motorcycle" for good measure.  Then it's time to pack up all the stuff and walk to the club in gang like fashion. We see a cop pull up a couple of woman presumably for a traffic offense and I ask Sasha what they Russian word for wanker is and laughs and tells me what it is.

The venue is strange but somehow impressive. It has embossed gold coated patterned wall paper from balcony to bog hole and Sasha introduces me to Alex who is from the Russian band "Punk TV" and is the guy responsible for organising the St Petersbergs how. He's very friendly and we chat about a few things. I think he kind of has trouble understanding my accent so I try to talk slower than normally. He whips out some slick Cakekitchen postcards that the 16 Tons Club has made from the artwork that Ruth has e-mailed them from Australia. It seems we are being endorsed by the Russian Rolling Stone magazine and I think the postcards look great and ask him for a few to send home to friends. He also says that the 16 Tons like the ad that Sasha and I made for the show and want the mp4 so that they can use it for a television ad to get people to come along.

This seems unbelievable to me but "Wow" what a great idea and we promise to mail it to them as soon as possible. The IKRA provides the first real european coffee I have had since landing here (russians seem more keen on a cup of tea) and the headlining band "Manecure" wrestle with the boomy as hell PA sound that is at such a volume that it rattles the walls while we all try to chat.

They don't get much clarity out of it and when they stop it surprises me that they have settled for such a cock in a sock type sound but then again maybe they don't really realise what it sounds like as the sound that comes through the monitors on stage is a totally different mix from the onethat the public hear out front.

Dairy High get around 20 minutes to try and make it better and although it clears up a bit and the annoying 100 KHZ boom that the kick drum has been spurting more or less disappears the bass is still a little shoe box to small like and the right hand side vocal mike is not very clear.The third band gets even less time to work things out and when Peaches2Bitches finally hit the stage things are pretty blurry and pretty loud. The singers vocal mike centre stage is so blurry for the first song that I wonder if he is singing in english or in russian. By the second song the fog lifts and it is apparent that he is infact singing in english. They try as best they can to do a good show.

When they use the pre-programmed drums and pre-recorded backing stuff the fader level on the desk for it is way too loud and it makes the whole thing sound out of proportion. The mixing desk is in an alcove to the side of the stage so the sound guy is in a similar situation to what it would be like if he was mixing the band from the toilet next door. It doesn't seem that there is much attention to detail with regard to the eq of the room itself. I sneak a quick look at the desk and the kick drum fader is at 100%. It's louder than the snare by at least 10 db.

When Dairy High go on Sasha wisely selects the clear centre stage microphone which is 120% clearer the one he was using to soundcheck and for the first song everything sounds well balanced and surpisingly good considering what Peaches2Bitches sounded like. But then like a wart on the Pope's bum the sound problems return and Pasha's guitar disappears for most of the second song. He keeps trying to turn it up with varying degrees of success but it keeps getting lost every now and again. Since the cause turns out to be a faulty jack connection on the effects box the sound guy is innocent of this problem but they still sound good nevertheless and that as they say is indeed what Rock and Roll is like.

Manecure also have a few sound problems too and since their sound guy pushes up the volume of the whole thing another 200% things rattle the walls even more and that annoying boom on the 10th fret of the bass e string gives an ugly rhino fart grunt every time the guy plays this note. They also suffer a similar fate with the pre-recorded stuff coming out way too loud but at times the sound manages to clear a bit and they put a lot of effort into the show.

The club has another couple of bars in it and I am shocked to find out that a pint of Kronenburg costs over 250 rubbles.At this price the barman doesn't have a lot of customers and I catchhim doing acrobatics, arm to arm over his neck, chucking around empty cocktail shakers for kicks.I manage to talk to Alex a bit more and away from the eq booms it seems that he can now understand my accent a little more easily. We swap notes about the evils of the business and the current state of the recession in relation to how it affects getting people through the door.

Pasha suggests nipping down to the supermarket to buy a 30 rubble beer and a friend of his drives us there because he is leaving and it is on the way. I choose a russian one and we wander down the street talking about this and that and staring into the not quite black yet but more kind of blueish Moscow night sky. When we get back most people have more or less gone and we say goodbye to a few people outside before going back into the club to find Sasha and Anastasia. They are sitting with friends in one of the back stage bars and we talk a little more before the club closes. We are the last to leave and I guess this seems to be usual par for the course worldwide with regards to playing a show.

On the way out I marvel that the wash basins in the toilets are shared by both male and female while the toilets themselves are seperate. I've never seen that in any country before. Strangely enough as we get to the door we can't actually get out because when Pasha opened thre door to go back in the door handle came off in his hand. We have to get the bouncer to find the door handle and he bungs it in the hole and then we can split. A friend of Ananstasia's gives us a welcome ride home in his car and we are invited to a party on Friday by a guy called Chris who teaches english here and works in the same building as Sasha.

When we get back to the apartment we spend half an hour trying to mail the TV add to the club before it somehow manages to work and there is an e-mail from Elena for me to read that updates the state of things in Wellington. There is also one from Patrick who has updated the homepage to include the Moscow show and also managed in a really cool way to link up the ad with the tour section of the homepage by linking it to youtube. Keith McLean and I also spent a bit of time in Auckland before I got on the plane putting 6 live videos into youtube as well. I hope all of this effort catches a few more punters and makes up for the loss of sleep and the ingrown finger prints that it seems to take to keep all of this computer generated stuff happening. It's about 2 oclock in the morning when I finally go to bed and I go to sleep in 20 seconds.

 
Day Five:

Well, today is the last day before we go into the studio and also the first day of my stay in the hotel down the road. Dairy Hight have kindly fessed up the cash to accomadate me in style for the time in the studio and I an excited about what comforts await me and how it will be to actuallt stay in a Russian Hotel.

It is a gigantic 16th floor monstrosity and after the rather unfriendly and never once smiling reception staff dilly dally about and copy my passport and my exit papers and my registed with the local authorities papers they explain that the room I was meant to have is unavailable and that they will give me a better one for the first couple of days at the same price and then transfer me to the one that was originally booked.

OK, no worries, it seems to take a bloody long time but eventually they give me a key and two breakfast tickets and we jump into the lift and head for the 16th floor. The lift is old and 1960's like and like most doors in Moscow seems to lack a good amount of oil. The room has a grand view and is a two room one, one being a bedroom with 2 single beds and the other half has a lounge sweet and a TV, Fridge, writing desk and one of those funny Russian water machines that does hot and cold purified water and looks like it was made in the 1970's.

The surprise is that the bathroom has a massive bath in it. Sasha and I dump my stuff in the bedroom and head off to the post office to send a CD of their last album to an American label with regards to licensing it in the USA. I have written him a letter of introduction and we stand at the counter with a small line of oldish people who are collecting their pensions. It takes a long time to get to the counter and then it turns out to be the wrong counter so we stand in another line to buy the envelope and then eventually manage to get it sent to North Carloina.

I want to buy some stamps for postcards but this is at another counter and when we get there there is no one behind it. It has taken about 20 minutes so far and he is almost running late so he shows me where the suoermarket on the way to the Metro is and we say goodbye. I buy some smoked salmon, yogurt, Tscibo Filter coffee, bread, butter, berry yogurt and milk and head back to the hotel. When I get back to my room I discover that there are no cups in the room so I go back to the supermarket and buy a cup. When I get back to the hotel I realise that there are no knives or spoons so I improvise and butter the sandwich with the bottle opener that lives on top of the fridge and then after washing it turn it round the other way and use it as a spoon to eat the yogurt.

I fall asleep pretty quickly and when I wake up it is around 9 at night. It's still light so I shower and eat soe more salmon and film a bit of mini DVD footage from the 16th floor window. I start getting into this and then when it starts to get dark head outside to do a little bit of filming at night. I try to film the round sputnich type 1970,s flashing dome on top of the hotel balcony but the doorman comes out and shoos me away so I head off down the street. I wander round for a while filming this and that and get a little bit lost. The streets all seem to look the same.

I wander down to the park that we had walked through a few days ago but all of the gates are locked. There seem to be a lot of security people about and also alot of cops stopping people in cars. I get even more lost and don't make it back to the hotel until about 2 oclock. The doorman is drinking beer and chatting to a lady of questionable repute. I go upstairs and since the only clock I have acess to is the one in the hallway of the 16th floor I find it difficult to beleve that it isn't broken because it doesn't feel like two in the morning and it doesn't seem to have been dark that long.

I go to sleep with the curtains open and the night air filtering into the room and m woken up a couple of hours later with glaring sunlight in my eyes. I put on my clothes thinking I might be late and check the clock in the hall. It says 4 oclock. It seems at this time of year that it is only dark for the smallest amount of time. Wow....far out. I go back to my roo and try and get a bit more sleep. We go into the studio tomorrow and I wil need my wits about me. I take another shower before nodding off.

Day Six:

Well, day six starts out surprisingly weird. I go down to brekfast at the hotel but they won't give me any because it seems that I used todays ticket yesterday and they will not accept yesterdays ticket today. This seems unbelievable when the tickets are just little shitty photocopies on blue paper with a date on them but since my russian is limited to "Hello, How are you?'", "Good Thank You", "Yes", "NO", "Cool', 'Perfect","A little" and "Do You Speak English"' I throw th ticket at the rather unsmiling guy who will not let me have breakfast and go back to my room.

I make myself a coffee with the remaining water in the little water machine and then head off for a walk to kill time before going to Sasha and Anastasia's apartment where we have  agreed to meet at eleven. We then drag all of the guitars and other things we need for the studio into the lift and taxi our way to the studio. The gear almost doesn't fit into the taxi but we manage to squeeze it all in and then there is a little bit more delay before we actually find the studio because we aren't sure where the entrance door is. Someone comes down and gets us and then we load everythinh into the lift and head for the 5th floor.

After dragging everything out and in again we are installed and we say hello to the engineer and other studio people and check out the equipment. The drum kit is a DW kit with a bigger than I have ever seen before kick drum and the studio seems to have a passion for the Austrian AKG microphones which I personally aloso really like. They even favour bypassing their Neumann U87 for an AKG vocal microphone. This I am not sure I agree with but we will have to check both of them out.

Greisha arrives and we go through the drum kit together. He has brought the snare they used live with him but the studio has two others and these sound better. I must add at this point that the owner of the studio is infact a drummer so in a way this almost guarantees us a great drum sound and the toms are in perfect tune to the rest of the kit. The choice if snares is between a very sexy slighet smallr than average piccalo snare that is similar in sound to something that Markus from ''The Notwist' would use and a fatter normal size more rock band type snare that is also tuned really well. I personally like the piccalo better and suggest this but after a little while Greisha confesses that he would prefer a slightly deeper sound so we swap for the bigger one and then the enginneer reposistions the more or less already in plce microphones and adds a couple of room microphones that I want added to get a subliminal non reverbed type natural sound that will be blended into the stereo mix to make it sound a little more live.

Sasha uses a kruger amp for the bass which in a seperate room to the drums and we mike it as well as DI it through his much loved Avalon DI. We will use a split signal for the bass with one signal having his pedals added and the other dry and it will give us a better stereo spread and more options of how to do the bass in the final mix. The engineer although not speaking english is very good and very quick and he seems to have a good way of dealing with the band so I relax a little and let him set the levels do his preparation work. The session today will be doing bass and drum tracks with a guide guitar which Pasha will do again later. There is then the question of whether we should use a click track. They debate the pros and cons of this for about half an hour and eventually decide to go with a click track.

The engineer uses a cow bell type sound as a click and we start trying to do the first track. It takes quite a while to get as it seems difficult for Greisha to keep in time with the click and after 20 or so takes and a little bit of stree I listen to what is actually going through his headphones and can understand why it is difficult for him to keep in time with it. The cowbell counts evry beat of a 4/4 time and he is playing the snare on only the 2 and the 4. Hearing all the beats makes it too confusing. I suggest killing the cowbell  and making a loop out of 4 bars of one of the drum tracks he hs played and using that instead. No-one seems to really see this as an option but we eventually try it and he gets a good take in 2 shots.

The rest of the session is spent doing a couple more songs and then our 8 hours are up. Elena's friend from Crimera has said she will meet me after the session and show me the sights so I split and she is waiting for me downstairs. We drive off and she asks me what sort of resturant I would prefer and we weave our way through the traffic that seems even worse than Italy in it's free for all "Eat My Dust" style and it takes a while to find a parking place. There are alot of people about at 8 in the evening in Moscow. The resturnant she takes me to is amazing. There is an old piano player twinkling out melncholy jazz as we open the door and the lighting is subtle and the waiters english easy to understand. The wine list is also spot on and I choose and Australian red (Thank you Kangarro Tom) and order an eggplant dish for an entree and fish for the main.

Elena has given me presents to give Aloyna and I make a jke about delivering the microfilm and tell her that I actually know that Elena is really a spy because she talks in her sleep. I also make another joke about Elena not believing that I won't keep the presents for myself and since I have a movie camera with me make a little home movie with my right hand and hand over the presents with my left. The jewellery that is part of the present was already wrapped when Elena gave it to me so I am just as surprised to see what it is like as Aloyna is. She is delighted and speaks some words of thanks and other things into the camera while I keep filming and it is difficult not to be moved by the sincerity of what she is saying and te way that she delivers the words. I get the feeling that Elena may burst into tears when she sees this and I feel a little bit this way myself. They haven't seen each other for 5 years but by the photos that I have seen of Elena's last visit to Russia Aloyna looks more or less the same.

The food arrives and it is absolutely delicious. We talk about a 1001 different things and I am surprised that Aloyna got Russian citizenship by actually writing to Yeltzin and asking to exchange her Ukranian citizenship for Russian citizenship before the USSR dissolved. I order another glass of red and then we decide to go for a drive. Aloyna generously offers to pay the bill and in polite english fashion I accept and thank her kindly. She leaves the waiter a very generous tip and then we head back to the car.

The next couple of hours are spent driving around the city. It's night time and she explains that since Moscow is in winter for more or less 9 months of the year the locals love to party almost every day for the 3 months that it is summer. She has lived here for 30 years and knows the place like the back of her hand.The benefit of her knowledge and the stories she tells me are truely amazing. One wouldn't get such a grand tour of the city by a tourist bus. I am extremely lucky to see the city in this way. As we leave Red Suare and head for the river she tells me that the Czar actually murdered the guy who built St Basils Catherdral as he didn't want anyone else to have such a beautiful building and he wanted to make sure that he was the only person who had such an incredible church. We scoot along the river and then onto some smaller streets in the richer part of town.

The power of the architecture is stunning and the lighting at night makes it even more beautiful. We pass by a hotel that President Clinton apparently stayed at and the womn in small close fitting dresses standing on the corner of the streets in groups leave no question to ask as to why they are there. I wonder if Bill was a naughty boy while he ws in Moscow and since these Russian woman are 120 times more beautiful than Bills cigar sitting Monica the odds that he may have crossd the border in more wys than one are fairly good. 

Aloyna then takes me to one of the few hils in the city and there are hundreds of people wandering around when we arrive there. The view is amazing and there is a big crowd watching some inprovised street theatre. This eventually dissloves and then a fire dancer starts swinging a lit at both ends batton about. We wander around for a while and then get back in the car and eventually make our way back to another part of the river Moscow. She shows me th sttue of Peter the Great and explains that in a way it is an insult for it to be there as Peter himself wuld have rather such a grand work be in St Petersberg than Moscow. The statue itself is an old clipper ship and Peter himself is portrayed as I giant standing on the deck of the ship. It seems a cross between Salvador Dali and Michalangelo. She also shows me the former KGB buildings and tells me a few unrepeatable horror stories from those times.

It's getting around midnight now and as we drive back to the hotel I am totally amazed at the last coule of hours. Thank you Aloyna, I don't think I will ever forget your kindness for taking the time to show me the sights in this way. It's really the first time I have seen anything much of the centre of the city and I had no idea of the actual size of it or the beauty that it offers when lit up at night. When I finally hit the sack it's almost impossible to go to sleep because I keep thinkng about allof the things that I just saw. We wil try and meet up again before I leave and we pencil in the evening of the 31st as she is really busy from the 20th on. Somehow I finaly manage to go to sleep and if any crows were flying past the window of the 16th floor and looked in I am sure that I must have slept with a pretty big smile on my face.

Moscow is indeed a treat for the eyes at night time and I am a lucky duck for getting a chance to see it i this way. Before I get out of the car Aloyna gives me some presents th give to Elena but I won't let yu know what they are as I don't want to ruin the surprise.

Day Seven:

Today we went via the Metro to the studio. It was rush hour by the time we got inside it and I was amazed when one of the stations was chocked to the gunnels with an amasing array of incredibly beautiful two stories high stained glass windows. The old parts of the Moscow underground are truly unbelievable. Built around the 1930's they are like no other underground train stations I have ever seen and I am amazed by their beauty as much as I am amazed that the locals don't seem to even notice and just hurry by with their eyes to the ground.

Greisha won't be at the studio today so we have to start doing the guitars today. In a way it would have made more sense to do all the drums at once but since this isn't possible we make the most of our options left and set up the guitar amps. We are using a split DI signal with one feed going to a Vox AC 30 and the other feed to a Mesa Boogie Rectifier. The boogie costs about as much as a down payment on a house and is a very sexy alligator skin green vinyl to boot. These amps are so expensive I have never even used one myself. Pasha isn't sure if we should even use it but one gets a much better stereo spread with two amps and it is crazy not to. We also mike both of the amps in stereo and partition them off so that they don't leak into each other too much. If the drums had been finished we could have used the whole room to mike them from way back but since we still need the kit we use the smaller remaining part of the room and after half an hour of fucking about with the sound and the levels of the amps and signal that gets fed into them we have a really good guitar set up.

The arrangement of the guitar parts for these songs is still relatively unresolved and it is a slow process of layering each part verse by verse, chorus by chorus. Pasha wants to do it this way and so we don't have much choice but to follow. It takes a ful 8 hour day to do the parts for the three songs we recorded yesterday and moral falls a little into the ocean at some points when we are going over and over the same thing too many times. Then we have problems with tuning and it seems that the intonation of Pasha's Telecaster is a bit out in relation to the guitar tuner. on various portions of the songs. Sergei produces a scew driver and we proceed to alter the intonation of the A and E strings as we go through the pieces. Eventually everything sounds in tune.

When we finally make it to the end of the day I feel totally brainless and more or less exhausted. After another airless ride past the Van Gogh part of the Metro I make it back to the hotel and go to sleep almost instantly. Reocording studios are like no other place in the world and at times they can be heaven or they can be hell. I can't bellieve that everything took so long today and cross my fingers that tomorrow will be quicker. We still have the other drum and bass tracks to do for the other songs,and then their guitar parts too and then there will be the vocals and a banjo and acoustic guitar part to do. We only have 3 days to get it done in and this means we won't be able to do any mixes of the songs at all if we can't be quicker. Sasha is also pretty worried about this so we talk to the studio owner and he lets us also book Sunday too. We really will need one more day and even then if things don't get faster it probbly won't be enough to do much other than rough mixes of most things.Hmmmmm.

Day Eight:

Well, today went a little faster and that's good. Greisha was on time and him and Sasha managed to do one rhythm track by themselves before Pasha got there. Sasha knew that Pasha would be turning up later so this was OK and we even took the mono rail to the studio to get there a little quicker. As usual I woke up early and had breakfast in the hotel. This time I just walked in there and started piling food on my plate and nobody batted an eyelid. I kept my breakfast ticket as a sovenier and a future reminder should I forget thab there is always a way to get around things of one can step back, think about it readjust and  then have another shot

I make a list of all the things that still need to be done with regards to the show on Tuesday and wonder how easy it will actually be to do some of them. Moscow seems to have it's own way and time for doing things. I try and buy some stamps from the Post Office as I promised quite a few people that I would send them a postcard but afer 15 minutes and trying to talk to 3 different people it doesn't seem that there is anyone who can speak english working here and I don't want to just buy any old stamp as the cards probably won't get there until 2024 if the postage isn't right.

By the end of the day we have ll of the drum and bass parts in place and everyone seems happy with this. There was a slight problem with the feel for one of the songs but we solved it in the same way as we solved a similar problem on the firdt day by making a loop out of one of the aborted takes that was in time with the click track and Greisha played along to this instead and it worked out fine.

After the session we take the mono rail home and I have dinner at Sasha's house with Anastasia as I want to go through the lyrics to the songs with Sasha and make them more englsh language friendly and alter some of the phrasing that is a little wooden in places and could use a bit of variation. We go through this until about one in the morning and by this time it's getting difficult to keep my eyes open. I try and not change the songs too much and am careful to ask what each line is actually meant to mean before I make suggestions regarding language and the meter of the words.

Sasha is grateful and also pretty open about changing th songs in this way. The most difficult thing about non-english bands using english as a writing tool is that they will be judged by native speakers for doing so. When I get back to the hotel I get a few more ideas for things and it is difficult to switch off. We have arranged to go into the studio later i the day tomorrow and will start at around 3 in the afternoon. This will mean we won't finish until 10 in the evening but Sergei has some other things he needs to do before coming in and it's unavoidable. I toy with the idea of going downtown early the next morning but in all truth would probably get lost and not be able to find the studio at all so I decide that it's better to play it safe and try and sleepin a bit more. Today was the first day I didn't feel more or less either still jet lagged or exhausted and it seems that maybe my body has gotten used to being in the sumer time now. Tomorrow will be guitar overdubs again and I keep my fingers crossed that we can keep the session moving along quickly. I guess I must have fallen asleep at about 2 in the morning.

Day Nine:

Well, were back to guitar overdub land today and the chips are down and the cards on the table because we really have to make sure that all of the guitars and hopefully most of the guide vocals are in place or we will be as they say in England, up shit street without a paddle.

Luck is on our side though and Pasha manages to do the guitars a  little quicker this time and although Sergei still whips out the screwdriver every now and again we make good progress and nothing goes to far South of the border to be eaten by gringos.

Speaking of being eaten by gringos, Sasha and I spend about half an hour before we go to the studio running around town trying to buy some audio CDs that I need to continue mixing the Cakekitchen album that I am working on backin New Zealand. It seems like the shaving sticks and the razor blades that I have used for the last 20 years, CDR’s are now unavailable for stand alone CDR recorders and I was hoping to get some here before I go back to New Zealand. There are a few places that list them in their wedsites but like all the things in the internet it doesn’t actually mean that one can actually buy them and after going to the two closest places to the studio and finding them deleted for the moment I buy some blank clear plastic empty cases for the merchandise that I will sel in Moscow and St Petersberg.

We manage to do all of the guitars that Pasha will play in enough time for Sasha and me to do the guide vocals for all of the songs that are on tape so far. When went through the lyrics and arrangements the night before and we decided it really was a good idea to add my voice as a second harmony voice to his. Since I have only heard the songs a few times and in rehearsal the band plays at a volume where the lyrics are pretty buried I need to know exactly how they sit and so we cram ourselves into the rather sweaty unairconditioned vocal booth and put the guide vocals in. It takes about an hour and most of them are second or third takes. I also write a lyric for ‘Dreams of Bali’ as the grouphasn’t been able to come up with any words for this song and after listening to it for a large percentage pf the second day a lyric and arrangement for the words and melody has drifted into my head without me really intending it to.

I do a guide for it in one take and Sasha says that it’s perfect so we then make rough mixes of Sergei’s working mixes as a reference point to the songs before we go into mixing mode. Pasha turns up just as we have finished doing most of this and is armed with wine and beers and something to nibble on and we play him the lyric I have written for the song and he gives it the thumbs up.

We didn’t start until three in the afternoon today and we make it into the Metro at about eleven at night. When we get to the mono rail it turns out that it shuts at eleven so much to my surprise Sasha more or less puts his thumb out and one of the unlicensed taxis appears as if by magic and in no time at all we are speeding along the city streets. The speed limit here is offically 60 kilometres an hour but this guy (like just about anyone else who drives around Moscow) doesn’t give a rats arse about the speed limit and we are pushing 80 for most of our journey home. The driver is leaning into the steering wheel as we turn the corners and we get a little too close to the curb sometimes for comfort. Before we went to the studio the hotel rang me on the internal phone system and transfered me to another room. Through a happy accident my original booking was somehow buggered up and I have been getting a larger room at a small room price but my luck has finally waned and I have to move to a smaller room so I do all this before going to the studio,

The new room is on the 15th floor and is at the opposite end of the hallway from the one I had on the 16th floor. As a room it is actually better. The bed doesn’t have a tailboard for ones feeet so my long gangly legs can hang over the edge more comfortably than the previous bed and the water cooker is newer and faster too. I forgot to mention that some people from the local TV studio came into our recording session today and filmed me talking about the Kiwi and Russian music scene and picked my brain for some words of encouragement to the llocal bands with regards to making some kind of inpact outside of Russia. Much to my surprise the guy who interviews me is a This Kind of Punishment and Cakekitchen fan and he is pretty familar with my stuff and what I have done. He even knows and likes the Nocturnal Projections stuff, which is even more surprising considering that we made those records in the early 1980s.

I do my best to offer a few words of encouragement and suggest te angle of ‘ If it’s possible to get one’s music know worldwide outside of New Zealand then surely it must be possible for bands in Russia’. I also say that most people in the early kiwi scene did the music totally for the love of it and were probably more surprised than anyone else that it actually got a foothold on the international musical rockface and that if one does music for the love of it and trys as hard as one can almost anything is possible.

When the taxi driver finally deposits me back at the hotel I buy a 32 rubble beer form the small hotel kiosk and then put all of the CD covers and discs that I have smuggled into the country into the empty cases we have brought. It’s one less thing to do and there will be 1001 things to do in the next few days. I go to sleep with the mixes running through my head and a big smile on my face. Tomorrow will be the final recording session before we move on to mixing down and we have made great progress. As long as nothing too untoward happens we should be able to do all of the vocals again tomorrow in a proper finished form and we still need to do the acoustic song called ‘Zombie Daugher’ that will be just acoustic guitar, banjo and vocals. Sasha seems to think it might need some form of beat to it so perhaps we will have to make a drum pattern but from the demo he played me I think it’s fine to do it totally without drums and that the album could use an acoustic song inbetween all of the other songs that have drums in them. There should be enough time to go shopping on the song a bit and since it is the only one of their songs that I had heard a demo of before I came to Moscow I am fairly sure of how we can manage to do it in just the right kind of way.

Day Ten:

Wow.....Today was great. Everything fell into place just perfectly. We managed to do all of the vocals and we nailed the Zombie Daughter to the tape machine as well. We started with vocals.Our voices have interesting differences and my distinctive western phrasing and his Russian way of singing English make for a unique combination. I don't think anyone has done this sort of thing quite like this before and the studio is also not used to recording two vocals in the same room at once. We have a few problems with getting the pre amps and the compression at the right level things went pretty smoothly. I sang through my favourite microphone in the whole world, A Neumann U87. I think these things have the most realistic sound of any microphone in the world and this is exactly the same one we used for the vocals for the Sonnenallee movie. It’s an old 1960’s one too, which are better than the newer models and it even has a bloody big dent in the casing but like an old german car still drives one down the road of singing without and flat tires and is more or less rust proof. Sasha uses an AKG mike that the guys in the studio actually prefer to the Neumann. We start with ‘Red Monday’ and I suggest a new variation on the final chorus lyric and melody that I thought of as I was going to sleep last night. Sasha says he think it’s a good idea so we go with it. The second take through is just about perfect but the compression is still not quite right and the balance between our two mikes not quite right yet so we keep singing away and get most of it good except the final chorus which doesn’t quite rise in the floating into the clouds type fashion that our earlier take did but my voice is begining to go fuzzy on this song so we more or less get it and then move onto the ‘Under the River’. We will have another shot at the coda for ‘Red Monday’ at the end of the session as there is no point in trying to do it now. It has gone past the sell by date of the number of times one can do somethingbefore it loses it’s magicality and we won’t get it until we do it again with a fresher approach. At the end of the session the compression will be road tested and the levels ground into stone. It’s OK to doit again later. We manage to get ‘Under the River’ pretty quickly and hop onto the next song , which was originally called ‘Night Surfing’ but I have renamed ‘Jimmy the Shark’ and we manage to do it in a few takes too.

The rest of the vocal session goes without hitch and we finally make it to ‘Dreams of Bali’ which Sasha has never done before because I only wrote the vocal part yesterday but this proves to be no problem for him. When we finally get through the vocals (including redoing the end chorus of "Red Monday) we still have 2 hours left to record ‘Zombie Daugher’. Sasha lays down a guitar and guide vocal after about 5 shots and then does another 3 or 4 before we agree that the first one has the best feel. He has prepared a banjo part for the song but when he tries to but it in it seems to have too many notes in it so I suggest that he plays less and we take about half of it out and leave the third verse with no banjo at all and it sounds about right. We then add the vocals to it which happen pretty quickly and we settle for the second take. Pasha has turned up during this with a couple of friends and has brought along some party supplies and we sample these in a non digital way and play a few of the rough mixes and then it is time to go.

There is a party in the centre of town tonight that I have been invited to so Pasha and I get a ride there in his friends car and after wandering around the streets for about half an hour and a few quick mobile calls we find the lace and head towards the 8th floor. It’s in full swing when we arrive. Chris teaches englsh here and Kate is a business adviser and there is loads of food and drink and everyone is very friendly. Some people are speaking in english and some people in Russian. Some American is mouthing off and saying that if you aint seen New York Stae then you ain’t seen New York but apart from him no-one seems to have an axe to grind and it is great to finally let off a bit of steam after not doing anything else other than being in the studio and doing music for the last five days.

I have a really good time and stay awake partying until the sun comes up. It is starting to get into the midnight lights part of the summer and it doesn’t really get fully dark until midnight now and is light again by 4. Kate tells me about how things have changed here since she moved from Britain to Moscow 5 years ago. In the 1990s a lot of companies set up shop here and made a hellof a lot of money but since the recession started here alot of them have left and now 30% of the people who work for her company have not been able to renew there work permits and things are getting a bit tougher. She’s a bit worried about things but they renewed her work permit so life goes on but they reduced her to a 4 day week which means that she won’t have the mney to go on holiday this year but can at least still keep paying the rent. Moscow is one of the most expensive places to live anywhere in the world. It is also just about the only place where corruption rules and  Kate tells me that one can bribe one’s way out of any situation as long as one knows the right person to deal with. She says that just having the money itself isn’t enough. One has to know whom to give it to and what channels to pump it through or it may be just rubbles down the drain. The combination of what you know and who you know can get you whatever you want here but most likely you will have to pay 20% more than anywhere else in the world to get it. I marvel at the way things have changed here.

When the trains are running again I head to the Metro and make my way back to the Hotel via the red and orange lines. I am surprised how quickly I make it back and although I have been awake all night I don’t feel that tired really. Strangely enough when I try to use the hotelkey the door won’t open and I have to go down 15 floors and back to get it recharged 3 times before it finally works. When I open the door and see the bed I suddenly feel really tired and hit the sack and am sleep in five minutes.

 
Day Eleven:

Well, now we are onto the mixing. We have a couple of days before the show at the 16 Tons Club here in Moscow so I am hoping that we can mix about 3 songs a day and complete the whole thig in 3 days. Sasha and I get to the studio in the afternoon and meet up with Uri who is our mixing engineer and the guy who mixed Evil Lullaby (the song from the split single russian seven inch that I really like)  so hopefullty things will turn out fine.

Uri asks us what sort of drum samples we want to use and is surprised when I tell him that I dont want to use any drum samples at all and much prefer the actual real drum sound and the room microphone sound than a sampled sound. I tell him we dont need any samples and he smiles and says Great, thats just saved us a couple of hours already.

We pick Yeah, I Sure Hate Mondays as the first one up. I changed the title on this one.It will probably be the single or the opening track for the album so it is a good one to work out the basic Modus Operandi for what sort of eqs gates, reverbs and delays we want to use and we spend a good hour or so setting up a very live sounding drum sound and eqing and soloing each of the seperate channels. We opt for a large warm plate reverb and find that Uri and I are pretty much in agreement with what sort of thing we are looking for soundwise.

We settle on a basic sound after an hour or so and then blend the track together in stereo. Then we move onto Sasha's bass. We have split the signal from his predal board so that we have one signal containing the pedal sounds and the other a clean DI. There was also a microphone on the bass amp so we have a lot of options for the colour of the sound.

We eq each seperte feed and then blend and reverb them. We keep asking Sasha what sort of sound he is wanting and between the three of us work out what sounds best. Then we blend all of the feeds together with the stereo drums and move onto the guitar. Pasha isnt here so we equalise and add reverb to the guitars and seperate the double mono feeds from the Vox and the Boogie and also use the stereo room microphone sound that the AKGs picked up. We also have to balance the volumes of the various overdubbed guitars and blend them all together to where to the layman they more or less sound like one guitar. It would be better if he was here but he isn't so we get it sounding pretty good and then blend it with the rest of our stereo signals and then move onto Sashas vocal.

This we add reverb to and equalise and then we go to my vocal. We split them into me on the right and him on the left and his vocal has also bleed into my microphone a bit so thee will be a bit of him on the right as well. We keep my vocal as clean and natural as possible ans I get Uri to solo the two voices and then blend them together in a way where although they still sound like two people singing they are harmonious with each other. We settle on a rough final mix for this song after about 3 hours and although Uri says that to him it doesnt sound quite like a final mix we move onto the next song. We can go back and fine tune the song later and after 3 hours of listening to it non-stop it is better to move onto mixing the next song than listening to the first one anymore.

We save the data and then bring up Night Surfing, which I have also renamed Jimmy the Shark.On the guide vocal for this song there was a spontaneuos part of studio banter where I started howling like a wolf and Sasha joined in and we yelped and screamed during one of Pashas guitar build ups between the chorus and the last verse. We end up doubling this and making a feature out of it. If you listen really closely you can hear Sasha laugh after my first howl but this also kind of fits. We apporoach the song in the same way as Yeah, I Sure Hate Mondays and after about an hour we have a really good mix. Uri blends it all together pretty well and spirts are high and it seems that everyone pretty much agrees that this song is pretty much mixed to finished level.

Then we move onto Dreams of Bali We go through the same process with this one as the other two. It has a load of guitar overdubs in it which need eq, reverb and balancing and panning level wise and by 11 oclock when we have to stop we pretty much have a working mix of the song.

We catch the train home. Its too late to take the mono rail so we have to use the Metro. I dont mind using the Metro too much because it is still a novelty to me to use the Metro here and I agree with the basic opinio that the Moscow Metro is the most beautiful of any in the world. I particularly love Hovoslobodskaya Station the best. It is full of the most beautiful stained glass windows that are two stories tall and each time we use it to change form the brown to the grey Metro lines I am amazed that this is actually a train station. It seems more like a church. I promise myself to risk a 1000 rubble fine and take some film footage of some of the station when it is not in rush hour.

Funnily enough on our way to the studio as we were changing onto the brown line we saw a train carrage full of about 40 polceman who looked like they had been out all night patroling. Some were almost asleep and they looked pretty tired and partyed out. I wonder how much money they earned in  bribes. Saturday night must be another form of pay day for the Moscow police as it is surely the time when people are at their most naughty. Sasha mentions the police dreaming about a better living in Yeah, I Sure Hate Mondays, so it seems strangely appropriate in a cryptic sort of way to see them tired and beat form a hard days night as we headed off for a long days work. I hope I dont have any dealings with them. I always carry at least 1000 rubbles with me just in case. I am told they will probably take 90% of whatever you have so 1000 is not to much to lose but better than nothing to a bent policeman who surely must have better fish to fry than someone like myself. So far everything seems to be going OK. I fall asleep back at the hotel in five minutes.

Day Twelve:

Well, Sasha cant make it to the mixing today because he has to go to work. I take the Metro alone today and make it to the studio five minutes early. Uri is on time and we get going pretty much straight away. Sasha called me at the hotel and said that there seems to be something wrong with the bass to Monday. Somehow in the transfering of the files from the recording to mixing programmes we have lost the bass notes for the 3rd and fourth bars of the introduction to the song. We listen to this and scratch our heads as to why none of us had noticed this yesterday and go back to the mother file, locate the missing bars of music and then re-tranfer the data to the mix programme. We also go through the vocal blend and adjust Sashas reverb adding more to it and taking most of the reverb off my voice. We also re-equalise my voice as we dont have the correct push in the lower register of my vocal parts and I show Uri where the lowest note I sing is and then we equalise my voice in accordance with this.

After about two hours we move onto the next song. We chose Into the Light and go through the same eq, gate, compress, reverb, stereo blend process for the drums bass and then  move onto the guitar. Vocals are next and again we chose reverbs and eqs for Sashas voice, then solo mine and I again show Uri the lowest notes in my vocal parts and we eq them accordingly. Just as we are about finished Greisha turns up and so we play him the track and explain what we have done. He says he likes it and then we move onto Fuck the Neighbours. Uri seems to really like this one. Its kind of like a Ramones song or even a slightly cleaner Swell Maps song. Its also really short and we get a good up and running mix of it fairly quickly and dont polish it up too much. Greisha says it sounds great so we head off into the Metro as we are having an acoustic rehearsal at Sasha and Anastasia's apartment for the show at the 16 Tons Club. I want to do it not in a rehearsal studio because the volume that thet play at and the weak vocal PA will wear out my voice in half an hour.

I forgot to mention yesteday that we went and got the cello before going to the studio. It is one from the Russian Philharmonic Orchestra and we have a little bit of trouble finding the apartment. But we finally work out where it is and although we are a little late they are still waitng for us which is good. Then we cant find the door to get out for a little while but eventually we are back on the street. The street they live on is named after a famous Russian female fighter pilot. I cant remember her name now but I will ask Sasha what it was when I see him next. Before I went to the studio I tuned up the cello and played it for a while. It;s the best one I have ever played in my life and I cant believe the colour of the sound it makes or how delightful it is to lay such a well made instrument. I film a little bit of myself playing it in the hotel room for prosperity. The gig is tomorrow so its great that we already have it. One less thing to worry about.

The rehearsal turns out to be for only an hour or so and we run through the stuff without problems. Sasha also nals down the bass to Im So Glad That You Dropped Out of High School and we decide to leave How in the Hell Do We Get Back Home with just guitar, vocals and drums as the recorded version only has these instruments so it doesnt really need it. We go through a few last minute details and then its back to the hotel. Sasha isnt sure about the mix for Into the Light but we can readjust whatever he doesnt like about it on the next session. I go to sleep pretty quickly when I get back to the hotel. Lets hope the gig goes well. It sure has taken a hell of a lot of effort to get this far.....

Day Thirteen:

We have agreed to meet in the Metro at 3.30 or so. I wake up around 9 in the morning and start doing stuff lke striping the tapes for the video camera so that they wont stick together or drop out when the time for the recording comes. I work out the set lists and write one for each person and three for myself that will be by the piano and the acoustic and electric guitars and pack everything into my hand luggage suitcase and do all of the other things like draw the sound guy a stage plan of where everything will be and whether I want a stereo DI or a mono one in relation to the non-amplifier instruments I willbe using.

I then strap the cello on one shoulder and the Burns Electric Guitar on the other and carry the case and a small bag of fresh clothes to change into and head off to the Metro. It is about 30 degrees and I am instantly sweating within walking for a few minutes. I guess I have to plod for a mile and a half before I get to the station. It would be quicker if I sneaked through the estates near where Anastasia's partment building is but I cant really tell the difference between one building and the other and would probably get lost so I opt for the slightly longer way of around the street as I know how to get there this way.

I meet Sasha where we agreed to meet and he has only had to wait for 10 minutes so thats not too bad. We head up to the street where he has a car waiting and we get a ride to the venue with one of his friends whose name I cant seem to remember now. We get instantly stuck in a traffic jam, which I guess is normal for Moscow and we end up about 20 minutes late for sound check.

Alex from Punk TV who has helped organise the show still isnt there yet but Sasahas mobile confirms tht he is somewhere near in a taxi with the piano. We wait outside for a bit, take our stuff inside and then come back ut and then Alex turns up and Sasha and I hump the rather heavier than I would have thought electric piano into the 16 Tons.

The sound guy is there in a few minutes and he doesnt understand english so we will have to translate everything as I dont know how to talk to him in Russian. I give him the stage plan I have made and a set list indicating each instrument change as it will occur in the set. I put the amps and guitars and cellos on stage and also the vocal microphone stands too to indicate where I want then to be in relation to the instruments

The guitar amp is a valve state one speaker Fender synthetic and sounds a bit boxy and mechanical in comparison with a Twin Reverb or even a Deluxe. But there is no other amp so thee is nothing else to chose from. The drums are already on the stage and Greisha is (as is standard for Moscow) just using his own snare and cymbals and the rest is provided by the club. We get everything up and running fairly quickly and get a fairly good bass and drum sound and a more or less OK guitar sound and run through a couple of numbers as a three piece band and it sounds more or less right although we start off playing way too loud and have to turn down a bit before it sounds about right to me.

We move onto the acoustic guiar which is a straight normal DI sound out of Sashas Martin gutar which I really like. The sound guy wont put a microphone on it as well as he says it will feed back. Its normal practice to do this but the DI sound is OK and I cant be bothered to argue with him so we move onto the next thing which is the foot drum that goes with the acoustic on the 5th and 6th songs in the set.

The sound guy also says that the foot snare isnt possible because it will feed back but I assure him that I have done this before in other clubs and it will be OK. He also doesnt want to try using a mike stand for it but wants to have the mike lying on the floor, But it will pick up far more stage vibration and unwanted noise if we do it this way than if it was on a stand and he eventually reluctantly lets me put it on a stand. It sounds OK and there ae no feed back problems.We get it done in more time than it took to argue about whether we should be doing it  I ask him to put a small hall reverb on it and he does. I check that its OK by playing We See in the Dark and most of Never Had Any Fun.

Before we started the soundcheck proper I have also set up the movie cameras and records the soundcheck from both sides of the stage. The tapes are 60 minutes long.It will be interesting to watch it later. We then move onto the piano. I have never played this kind of Stage Piano before and it is costing us 5000 rubbles to hitre which is 2400 more rubbles than the cello. It seems to be more like a computer than a stage piano and the hammer mechanics are set to gorilla sensitivity for contrast in playing volume but there is no manual and not enough time to experinent with it to get anyhting other than the most basic relatively shit sound from it before we have to cut our losses and move onto the elecric cello. I have put the pick up o it at the hotel and brought my own digital amp with me. It sends up sounding really good and the sound guy takes a bit of extra time o this one as he seems to like it more than the other things. Eventually we get everything done. I guess the tape ran out 20 minuted bfeore we finished and that means by Moscow standards where bands get about 15 minutes to either get it right or get it wrong in we have had a fairly fair run.

The piano sound is still pretty shit and I manage another 5 minutes fiddling with it before I have to stop and then it is past the point of no return. We will have to go with it as it is, The sensitivity is still on gorilla fingers setting but there is no visible way to adjust this and there simply isnt anytime left to try. I wont be able to do Walnut Tree on it or it will sound terrible and I think that the specially prepared version of In View of the Circumstances from the first TKP album that I have never played live before is also to risky to attempt on such a difficult at the moment to use instrument. I make a mental remibder to do the most simple numbers on the piano and hope for the best.

The food then arrives and I think the chef at the 16 Tons gives me the best meal I have ever been given by a rock club. The eggplant entrees are mouthwateringly scrumptious and the whole salmon complete is eye still intact is cooked just exactly perfectly. The locally produced beer is also pretty good and I finish the meal with half an hour to go.

Before the soundcheck had started the guy who did the TV interview turned up with his promised he would give it to me copy of the interview I did in the studio and when I try and get him back stage the security guy gets heavy and forbids it. Sasaha says the easiet way around it is to give him my pass so I do and he gets back stage. I talk a little bit to Alex from Punk TV and relax a litle bit. Show time is for 9 oclock.

I open with The Great Fire from Everythings Going to Work Out Just Fine. The acoustic guitar seems to be not coming through the PA at all but the vocals sound OK. Its difficult to know what to do and I cant stop mid song to check so I go through the song trying to put as much feeling into it as possible. About 30 seconds from the end (and the song is about 5 minutes long) the guitar starts coming through the PA. In comparison to the raw sound in the room that all of the other microphones on stage have picked up a little the sound of the guitar through the PA is middly and boomy and also kind of atrifical sounding but it all comes piling in on the last chorus so more than good luck than good management the song more or less rises at the end and the applause is fairly good so I guess it must be OK out the front even if it sounds like a barrel of monkeys on stage.

I play  I Know You Know on guitar and then move to the piano. I manage an OK version of Ahead of their Time from the first TKP album as it is one of the easist ones to play. I make a couple of little mistakes in it and it sounds pretty shit from the stage but lets hope it sounded OK out the front and I move onto the electric guitar and play You Never Run Out of Luck which seems to have a fairly boxy but moreorless useable guitar sound and then stomp on the hotcake and play Hermann Doubt from A Beard of Bees and then Two Minutes Drowning  from TKP 001.

Then its over to the piano again for a decided to do at the last minute Neil Young cover of Borrowed Tune and then Dont Be Fooed By the Label of World of Sand. During the crazy free for all part of it when I am bashing th shit out of the piano I also start banging my head on the keys as well which was a spur of the moment decesion. I did it a little harder than I probably should have and saw stars slighty as I resumed the song. It will be interesting to see what this actually looks like on camera. I hadnt planned to do it so it shoud be funny to see what it actually looks like doing this on stage.

Then its time to go back to the acoustic and the foot drum which seems to be OK and I get the falsetto OK for the last part of We See in the Dark which can on occasion be a little bit wobbly. Never Had Any Fun is also good. I go back to the electric and play Even As We Sleep and Fahrenheit 451 and then introduce Greisha to the audience and we go through the Joy Division cover with him playing just the floor tom and me singing and playing the electric cello at the same time .It comes ut really well and then Sasha is on the stage and we go throught You Know I Really Like Your Style a cover of the Cracker song Low and Im So Glad That You Dropped Out of High School.

I then do my specialy prepared different lyrics version of the 16 Tons and What Do You Get song  which has lines about there being too many police and 100 thousand homeless dogs biting ones leg and also bravely states that its good that Stalin is dead in his hole because he lost control so now you can Rock and Roll. The last verse ends with the lines so you'll have to yell out We Want More...We Want More.....We Want More.....and then well play some more songs. I thank everyone and jump back stage.

It seems that although the singing reverb was pretty good it had a fairly blurry effect on the spoken parts of the show so  Sasha explains that peole didnt really understand the We Want More piece but are yelling out encore never the less so we jump up and play a Velevet Underground cover in the form of a 8 minute version of What Goes On.I had actually planned to do a solo acoustic number first and then get Greisha up to do another cello, drum and vocal song and an electric guitar and drums one too but somehow this is forgotten in the rush to sort out the encore and we call it gooof fishing snd that is thre end of the show. The twisted tones of eratz PA music fill the room and after a few words to some of the more enthusiastic members of the audience I bring out the merchandising box and sell a fair amount of CDs. Then its time to I pack up the everything and lug the equipment of stage into the band room. We get a taxi home and after a few tired words everyone falls sleep pretty quickly.

Day Fourteen:

Well, it was a blurry set of eyes that headed for the Metro for the final day of mixing. Tomorrow night we go to St Petersberg on the all night sleeping train so I really hope that nothing will go wrong with the last 3 songs and we will finish up with a bit of time to spare. Sasha will be a little late today and I have agreed to meet Uri at 4 oclock.

I go into town at about 10.30 and change Metro stations until I am close to the Red Square. I film some old churchs, just about every angle of St Basils and the Kremlin wall on that side of the square and then head down to the river and film stuff along there. Some of it I even do with a portable tripod that fits in the little red back pack that Elena gave me the day before I left.

I buy some pretty weird food from the Metro kiosks and one of the things tastes so much like it might have once been a homeless dog and just about smells what one would expect a homeless dog to smell like if you got close enough to it hat I throw it away in disgust. I also try and buy an old hand turned russian coffee grinder for only 200 rubbles but even though I have the money in my hand the woman behind the desk doesn't seem to want to part with it so I give up and head off into the Metro towards the studio.

I get there 15 minutes early and Uri is about 20 minutes late. He apologises and then we have a cup of tea and dilly dally about for a little while. I thought the files for Motorcycle Baby were loaded into the computer at the end of the last session but we seem to do this again and after being there more or less for 40 minutes start to look at the data. Sasha turns up in about 20 minutes and Uri has done our standard eq, compression, gate and reverb for the drums and bass and then does the guitar and vocals.

The song is fairly simple and isn't laden with guitar pedal effects so it is fairly easy to get a good mix of quickly and we more or less mix it in 20 minutes. We then go onto 'Under the River' which is the longest track on the album and has a fair amount of things we need to adjust in it. In particular the guitars at the end sound a little club footed in the dynamics department and we fade in the end fast strumming part to make it apper a little more natural and not so stuck on. After a couple of hours it's more or less right and we move onto the acoustic 'Zombie Daughter'. This is without drums and bass and is just acoustic guitar, vocal and a banjo overdub. We eq and fiddle with the guitar and then the vocals which also include harmony vocals as well and then Uri starts working on the banjo sound.

He adds reverb and eq to it but both Sasha and I lke it better when it sounds plunky plunky and up front so after bypassing the eq and listening to it dry we decide that it doesn't really need to be touched up much and leave it pretty much raw. We finish it off and it sounds good and are just about to burn out the final mixes of the day when Pasha arrives with beers and snacks and starts talking about remixing a lot of things.

It's kind of the wrong time to do this and we have just put in an eight hour day but Sasha takes into consideration what Pascha says and I grab a CD of the mixes and head for the Metro. I don't have the patience to go through the songs with a fine tooth comb and change them around at this stage of it so I  leave the guys to it and hope that they decide that it doesn't really need to be changed.

I get pretty lost on the Metro home for some reason and I am really tired. This is the last day of being at the hotel before going to St Petersberg and I go to sleep pretty quickly. I'm starting to feel pretty burned out and I am also begining to really look forward to getting back to New Zealand. 

Day Fifteen:

Today I was a naughty boy and spent most of the day filming my favourite train stations in the Metro. This is actually illegal as the government doesn't want people to film it for some reson but I take 2000 rubbles with me in case I will need to bribe a policeman and spend quite a few sticky hours underground first checking for police and then filming if they are not there.

After a while I really have to go to the toilet. I have been going from station to station on the brown circle line as this has the oldest stations on it and so when I can no longer ignore the bladder bursting call of nature I head up the escalator hoping I can find a toilet pretty quickly. When I get out of the station it's raining lightly and after searching for about 10 minutes and not being able to find one I use a tree for free. The station is surrounded by market stalls selling clothes and electrical goods and food and all sorts of things. I buy a better pair of reading glasses than the ones I brought from a chemist in Wellington before I came here and it only costs me 150 rubbles which is very very cheap.

I also film parts of the Botanical Gardens that I wanted to film but hadn't yet and somehow get incredibly lost and end up walking the equivalent of 5 Metro statioms before I find out where I am and catch the train back to where Sasha and Anastasia live. I get back around 10 at night and am so late for dinner that they have already eaten but Anastasia insists that I eat something and I am hungry and grateful for this but also feel a bit guilty about being so late back.

We drag the Martin and the Burns into the lift as well as Sasha's bass and small travel bags and take a taxi to the train station where we meet up with Oxana who is doing Alex's job as he has to do a show with Punk TV and won't be coming with us to St Petersberg. Volodya from Sasha's other band 'Hot Zex' shows up a few minutes after along with the guy from Aero CCcp records who is also coming with us to St Peterberg. We then drag all the stuff to the departing platform and after they have checked all of our passports we are allowed on the train. We divide the sleeping carriage tickets into two to a four person carriage and I share with the guy from Aero CCcp and an old Russian couple and there young son. It's an old 1950s or 1960's type train and a little bit claustrophobic but I am tired and manage to go to sleep without too much trouble. I am really looking forward to seeing what St Petersberg is like. It all seems very exciting.

Day Sixteen:

We arrive at around midday in St Petersberg. I woke up at about 8 and filmed a few things out of the window of the train. There were many parts of the journey where it was just miles of country side and little tiny villages with a few one storied wooden houses. It seemed very old worldish to me and I even saw 3 totally black crows which I guess proves that the normal kind of european crow is also in Russia as well.

I forgot to mention that I decided to make the St Petersberg show more simple after the technical problems of communicating with the sound guy and the fact that every band I have heard in Moscow at least has had pretty shit sound. I've canceled the electric piano altogther as there is no guarantee that it won't be the same white elephant as the one we payed 5000 rubbles for and the guy from the Russian Philharmonic didn't want me to take the cello to St Petersberg either so the show will be just guitars, vocals and the foot drum. It's also meant to be little less long as I am part of the Festival for 'The New Sound of Russia' and m infact the headlining act and top of the bill.

I talk a little to the guy from Aero CCcp as he is also now awake and the family is fussing about in a rustle your plastic bag of food and wake everybody else up type way. Volodya appears with a cup of teaa in his hand and apparently one can buy one on the train for 14 rubbles so he kindly offers to get me one too and comes back a few minutes later with it. We talk a ittle about St Petersberg and what things are like for Russian bands playing music in Russia. I'm surprised that he thinks that I am opening the show but don't say anything to contradict him regarding this and make a mental note to ask Sasha and Oxana about this when Volodya isn't around. The politics of line ups in festivals can be a pain in the arse sometimes and I have learnt to be careful about how and what one says in regard to people diagreeing about such tings as billing.

We get to St Petersberg at about miiday and after walking to the club, which took about half an hour and unloading our stuff there we split into two factions. Sasha, Ananmstasia and myself are more interesed in walking around the city and the others want to go to the guy from Aero CCcp's apartment and eat and freshen up there.St Petersberg has turned on a bright 30 degree sunshine for us and it is difficult to not feel a little bit hot and sticky in the heat. We head for the Winter Palace and then walk down to the river and explore that part of  town. I am shocked when Sasha points out the nucuar warhead sitting inside the gate of the Military Museum and there are lots of people sunbathing near the river that somehow reminds me of Paris for some reason.

St Petersberg, like Amsterdam was a city built with cannels and I marvel at all of the old buildings and how beautiful they are. The vibe in the street is way less aggressive than Moscow and it all seems very relaxed. We see a street market and there is a guy who has a box with a sleeping little silver fox inside it. I have never seen one of these before and am amazed at how grey they are. He also has an eagle and a monkey. The monkey is drinking a can of red bull. The eagle looks very old world and regal. I have never seen on of these type of eagles before. We get back in plenty of time and order dinnr at the club resteurant.

It seems that neither what I order or what Anastasia orders are actually available and we have to settle for 2nd or 3rd best. For some reason we get our food a long time before Sasha gets his and I leave 1000 rubbles with them and head off to soundcheck as it is important that I get there on time because if I don't the other bands will lose out as since I am playing last I have to soundcheck first. Volodya tells me I have 20 minutes and I tell him that I will be as quick as I can but that it's not his place to tell me this and if I take longer then I will just take longer. I have tuned the guitars up before we went walk about and have everything ready to go, so it should be pretty quick if the sound guy isn't a meathead..

Luckily, the soundguy is friendly and helpful and speaks good english. The amp this time is a Fender Deluxe and is 1001 times better than the piece of shit that the 16 Tons said was an amplifier. I get an adequate sound out of it after fucking about for a little while. The trick is to not have the volume above one and a half out of ten and then it doesn't sound too fractured. The soundguy is also a bit suspicious of the foot drum and doesn't seem to want to use a stand for it either but we bung the SM57 on a stand and set a small hall reverb for it and it sounds fine. I am off in about 20 minutes so everything is still on schedule and I can relax now beacause it seems that although the PA is not as good as the 16 Tons, the sound guy is better so the chances of playing a good show are not so bad.

None of the other bands seem to have too many problems sound checking and the first two of them are using a bloody large amount of pre-recorded material which in Russia doesn't seem to be so badly viewed as cheating a bit as it does in the west. I can't say that I liked either of the St Petersberg bands very much. I don't really catch Hot Zex's soundcheck but Sasha said it was OK and everything is running on time moreorless.

The first band begns on time but the club is pretty empty. After they finish on time the DJ 'Scaley Whale', who as far as I understood it was meant to DJ after all the bands had finished jumps up and DJs for about half an hour for no apparent reason. This puts everything behind schedule. It is a worry as we have to catch the 2 oclock train to Moscow and if it runs too far behind time we will be forced to simply hoof it mid set as the trainfares are pretty expensive and it would be crazy to have to buy another if we missed the train because of a fucked up playing schedule. Hot Zex cut there set a little and I am reduced to about 40 minutes or a little longer if I can get on stage quickly.

I have my guitars tuned and ready to go when Hot Zex come off and after placing the cameras to record the show on either side of the stage I plug the guitars in and am ready to go. Thank God I didn't have to do the piano and the cello this time as well. Both the sound of the acoustic guitar and also the electric guitar are really good today and I play a set that is just about exactly as I would want it to be. I have to cut out 3 songs to make it fit and after winding up with a 6 and a half minute version of 'The Old Grey Coast' I frantically pack up my stuff and then we grab a taxi and head to the train station. There is no time to do merchandising or anything other than leave the club and get paid. The taxi gets stuck in a traffic jam so we pay the driver and run the rest of the way on foot. We get tothe train with 3 minutes to spare and just manage to sit down on our beds and laugh before the train moves out.

THe feedback fro  the audience was also really good this time and alot of peolle actually said how much they liked the show. It was a little bit of a case of talk and pack and shake hands at the same time but when I finally sit in the train and can relax I feel that it couldn't have gone much better and since I had a good stage sound this time I actually also relly enjoyed the show too which makes all of the effort required to do it worth it this time around.. Thank you St Petersberg. I love you for that.


Day Seventeen:

Well, I don't think day seventeen could have started much better. I stayed up for
hours on the train looking at the strange white light in the sky and marvelled that
it was true that at this time of the year everyone is a cat and "We See in the Dark'
is real at least for now. After all the rushing to the train and the dodging of the traffic,
on foot with guitars, plastic kiwi, cameras and merchandise..... having a nice safe
doesn't stop train to look after all that shit is like a Christmas present from the Black
Santa. Thanks Santa, my arms are long enough already and I don't want any baggage
at all for now. Not having to be responsible for anything seems just great at this moment.

Nobody else is around while I star out the window. I feel on top of the world and I can
really relax. I'm even pretty sure that I haven't lost anything more than a sock and even
if I did it would have a hole in it anyway. I feel good about music for once........and
am glad that I can stare out the window at the white sky for hours without having to
speak a word of english to anyone for now. Champion......Silence is golden and so is the sky.

The train is a much newer model than the Stalin special we had last time. The dust inside
the first train was monumental in it's thickness. If you painted it black you could have sold
it as coal. It was that fuzzy. So, yes-even-here---things are lookin' up. I eventually climb into
my train bed and sleep like a crow. When we get back to Moscow, Sasha hails a taxi like
only a Moscower can and we are inside an unlicensed cab heading back to the shack. We
have made a deal about the price before we put the car into gear and in the twinkling of an eye
and a few squashed pigeons later we are back where we started. Everyone seems a bit sleepy
but everything is really good. Sasha fogets that his bass is in a gig bag on his shoulder and panics just as the taxi wizz's out of sight. We all laugh when we realise that we haven't lost it at all and
at the stupidity of that and also on how lucky it is that we hadn't lost it cos we'd never get it back if we had.

We talked a bit in the morning about the studio stuff and the mixing and I offered to come into the
studio with Sasha to help him with the re-mix of Love Speed Death and any other changes that he
might want done to the project data of the eight other mixes that are still in the oven. We return the cello first and I am still really glad we didn't take it to St Petersberg. We find the house better this time and we are only maybe 20 minutes late which seems to be par for the course here. There was
an interesting thing that happened before we got to the studio when I went into a supermarket to
buy an ice cream. I was sitting outside on the steps waiting for Sasha to buy whatever he went in there to get. He had been amazed at my ice cream and really wanted one too  but it seemed that
I had the last one and he must have just about taken the fridge apart looking for another the same.

In determined Russian thoroughness he ended up with one that was twice as big as mine and only half the price. It took so long for him to buy it that I had eaten mine already and so greedily wanted some of his too but felt too much of a pig to suggest this so shut up. Just as he had finally chosen his one there appeared an "out of nowhere" football team long cue which is typical for Moscow.

In the time it took for him to emerge from the belly of the supermarket I had talked to an elderly russian woman about my ice cream and been accosted by a drunk with a cough.I had told the elderly lady as best as I could how many rubbles the ice cream was and where abouts in the fridge it lived. The drunken man, I had to actually stand up and walk the other way from to get rid of. Like a grumpy homeless dog once out of immediate barking distance he forgot about me and was on his toddy.I was glad he waddled off. I go and have another look in the doorway of the supermarket to see maybe Sasha has been arrested or something. I am glad that he isn't, wonder how he can possibly take so long to buy an ice cream and we head off to the studio.

We stand outside the Metro while he eats it because he doesn't want to eat it in the Metro. He
points out that the people in Moscow don't usually eat in the Metro and that they also don't
litter it with their junk either. I think about this and can't recall a single morsel being chomped
down their anytime that I have used it. I think this is great in a way and shows that the Russians
aren't slobs like the rest of the west. God bless them for being so thoughtful.

Yuri has done most of the details of the re-mix and has the song on the board when we get there.
We adjust reverbs on the snare and increase the volume by around 15db of the quiet vocal part in
the middle of the song. In comparison, the sampled snare is noticely dead to my kiwi ear but we
can't change this to a suitable real snare so we get it sounding as good as we can. It sounds
pretty good and I wonder about the fact that it has the set of lyrics for Motorcycle Baby that
Sasha had before I changed them around. I have made some of their meanings broader but
it is moreorless the same thing. In some ways I wonder if the song really goes with the other
recordings but it is fine to re-mix it anyway and it still sounds good to me so we then go
through any other changes that may be needed. Yuri has changed a few things in the interim.

We go through each point bit by bit and eventually settle on a series of accepted suggestions
for each thern.Everything sounds moreorless right. It's all sounding pretty good. I think maybe at
least one of the mixes could be a bit over cooked but this is no problem as we already have
a "copy master useable version" that we could go with if we had to. It is interesting to see how Yuri thinks it could be better and to some extent it is personal taste. At least he understands what
it means by "the guitars need to be a bit more like water'" than he did before and other terms
like "the other version somehow made it to guitar heaven more than the last mix". We make a few more jokes about the first pancake and Spike 99. Both say how much fun it was to do the session again and all the best for the future.

The studio bill has come to a staggering offically undisclosed amount rubbles but now (probably much to everyone's surprise)we have an album made from start to finish in 8 working days studio time. By Russian standards this is cheap. There was a couple of times during the sessions when the studio owner came in and wanted some actual rubbles on the spot.It was Friday night and he was dressed up like a pencil sharpener. I saw at least threee 5000 rubble notes and a few green ones too exchange hands. The studio guys all split the money between themselves as soon as it hit the tarmack.Gone in a flash.This seems to be the style here.Moscow swallows everything whole. It all slides into the pocket. Jake.

About half an hour before we split, the studio owner came in and asked to take some photos of me and the guys to use for the "who's was who at the zoo" studio wall portraits. We oblige, promise more beautiful amounts of zeros to come rubbles and then we are off into the Metro again. CDRs
in our hands. I don't think we could have dome much better. I will compare the mixes once I get back to a stereo that I know and it's a case of either that mix or the other mix would be fine to all
intents and purposes. Sweet.

Anastasia cooks a nice meal and we buy some wine. I buy the most expensive bottle of Penfolds Cabernet Sauvignon that I have ever brought in my life ( 1800 rubbles for a 2003 - It was absolutely perfectly ready) and once we have had a few Sasha is brave enough to unlease his Russian Mickey Mouse voice. He seems to be able to do without moving his lips much. We chill out, listen to the mixes again and I go to sleep fairly quickly. Tomorrow will be my last day in Russia. I leave in the morning of the next day. I wonder what is left to do and hope there is some time to go shopping for some things that I wanted to get before I go back to New Zealand. Let's hope it's not too difficult to find them. It seems that everything here is difficult to find to me but I guess that's because I'm not from Moscow. It's nice to be able to relax a bit. I feel pretty tired in ways.

Day Eighteen:

My God, my last day and so many things to do. We have planned to go to Sasha's fathers place in the evening for a meal and I bang another day of my diary into Anastasia's laptop before we head off into town. I want to get some european style leggings for Elena and Anastasia has kindly offered to help me find some in amongst the myriad of womans clothes stores that one can spend a long time wandering through in Moscow. We hit the Metro, bypassing a few of the 100,000 homeles dogs that seem to always be hanging around the train stations and cross over from the orange line to the blue line and then out into the street. The first shop proves fruitless and ludicrously expensive in comparison with other european countries.

I buy five pairs. Three blacks, a dark blue and surprisingly enough to Anastasia an interesting pastel orange that is about the same apricot colour as the cello on the 16 Tons gig flyers.
I've used these flyers for handy postcards to friends in New Zealand and various parts of Europe. We then go to a bookshop to buy some russian language books that I want to give as a present too and then on a whim Sasha invites me to a museum of a famous Russian poet who was murdered for being anti Stalin but still revered by the Russian people. It recreates his study and office in a 3D cubist type fashion and there's a liberal amount of red paint splattered over everything for effect.

Sasha tells me not to speak any english near the counter and we get in cheap as tourists are charged twice as much and wander around it for a while. It's pretty cool and I admire the guys bravery for taking the piss out of Stalin to such a degree that the KGB decided to polyfiller the cracks of his life on a permanent basis. The price of speaking freely in Russia at this time could be and often was one's life. They are changing over the artwork posters in the foyer as we leave and on an anarchistic whim I manage to pocket an interesting one from last week without anyone except Anastasia noticing. She smiles and looks at me in a magpie type way and we head off towards Sasha's fathers apartment. It was the first mailing address I had for Moscow when I first started dealing with Dairy High and a touch base for all of the red tape we had to peel off and swallow with regards to the split seven inch single we did in 2007. Sasha's CD collection is still at his fathers house as Anastasia's apartment is too small to house it and when I see it in combination with his father's DVD and CD library I can understand why. Sasha's father must have just about every interesting movie ever made.Not only thay but he had a lot of them on VHS before DVD became standard and has had to upgrade large parts of the library as technology and rubbles permitted. In a way he's almost responsible for me being here in that on one of his annual yearly pilgrimages to New York he returned with a Cakekitchen CD and started (almost) all this off by accident.

We bung the new mixes into the stereo as he is keen to hear what we've done in 8 days and smiles like a cat with a hot tin tail after Fuck the Neighbours. Somehow a rather expensive and dare I say rather good Cognac appears and in true Russian style is bottomed up the kyber. I am also surprised to find the production parts I maled to Moscow in 2007 for the single are in the study. I open the envelope that is covered in Cakekitchen stamps and marvel at what an interesting package it must have looked like to Russian customs. Sweet.

The meal that we aristocratically consume in installments is delicious and conversation, food and alcohol flow pretty freely amongst the 5 of us. 6 if you count the cat called Dasha. I ask Sasha's father some questions about life in Soviet times and his answers are soberly shocking. It seems everybody knew somebody who the KGB made sausages out of at some point and as a safe in Godzone Kiwi I can't help agreeing with Fred Dagg about how lucky we actually were by comparison. The evening progresses in a good fashion and eventually we have to head back to the Metro as I need to pack up all of my stuff for leaving tomorrow and it won't be easy as it seems to have grown a little bit over the baggage allowance that I am supposed to adhere to. A couple of extra presents are added to the equasion plus the 40 CDRs I got Sasha's father to buy me for my mix down machines back in New Zealand. You can't get these downunder anymore.

When I get back to Anastasia's apartment I deshell the CD cases and also do this for the remaining
unsold merchandise and thus having made it as small as is possible cram it into the gunny sack
called Graeme's luggage. My hand luggage suitcase has also broken a hinge somewhere along
the road to St Petersberg and the plastic kiwi has also sprung a leak. I guess I must have squashed the air out of him too quickly getting him into the Martin case before we dashed for
the train. Let's hope I can repair him when I get back to New Zealand. I guess it takes until about
one in the morning to pack up all my stuff into the two bulging cases. I forgot to mention that before
we went to return ther cello I also brought a whole pile of food type presents for the McLeans and
my mother as well, so the suitcases are choca full of chocolate and other goodies. If it all weights
too much I will just have to eat some of it. I do the old trick of two coats together, crammed to pocket busting full with books and hope that it all gets through. I don't really sleep so well this night
and spend quite a few hours in the dark mulling over what has happened to me in Russia before
I finally drift off. Wow.

Day Nineteen:

I wake up about 20 minutes before the alarm is set and am surprised when I stare at happy yellow
smiling man clockface that lives on the coffee table that I woke up automatically. I shave and
pack up the coffee funnel and other last minute stuff and then breakfast with Anastasia and Sasha
and then Sasha takes me to the train station. I allow an hour for delays and we manage to connect with the train with about 5 minutes to spare. I thank him for everything and give him a hug and then disappear into the train. I am surprised that he waits to wave goodbye and I smile and wave back.

Getting to the airport proves to be pretty easy and I do a little last minute filming in the airport including a quick brave shot of some Russian Polceman whom I have not been brave enough to
point a camera at for fear of it being confiscated. They are busy searching somebodies bags and
don't notice me and then I put the camera away and go through customs. I decide not to change
any euros into rubbles until I have gone through so that I can calculate exactly what I will need to
convert once I see what everything costs without the duty bunged on it. The customs x-ray my
bags but don't open them and then they stamp my passport and collect the two pieces of paper
that I have had to carry with me ( as well as my passport too) at all times whilst being here. A
loss of either paper would almost certainly guarantee me being arrested and bunged in jail for not having the correct papers and I am most glad to return them to the state and move into the duty
free zone. Lucky duck.

Much to my surprise it doesn't seem possible to cash in euros in the duty free zone. There is a machine there that is supposed to do this but it will not accept any of the three 20 euro notes I have or the 10 euro either and I don't want to try converting a 50. I wanted to get Elena some more magazines in Russian but I don't have any rubbles left and the machine won't swap me any either.
I try almost all of the machines but it is exactly the same problem with them all and then finally
when I hear my boarding call and move to the correct departure gate realise that I have somehow lost my boarding pass. This is a bit of a problem and even though I can remember my seat number
and have my passport I am not permitted onto the plane until I have had another hand written one
issued and stamped with a Moscow Airport insignia. I am the last one onto the plane and it has to
wait for me. There is no place for my hand luggage and I thank my lucky stars that they actually
let me on board. I also seem to have lost my book and it occurs that I was using the boarding pass
as a bookmark so this at least explains where the original boarding pass disappeared to. Shit.

It is a long 10 hour flight to Singapore and then I have 12 hours to wait before the connecting to the 8 hour flight to Auckland. I don't bother to watch a single movie and actually manage to sleep or at
least catnap in a fashion. I read a little from time to time. I don't film anything out of the plane window this time around. I guess I feel kind of exhausted in a way. It's lucky that they let me
on the plane. I stand a good chance of getting back to New Zealand now. Good.

Day Twenty:

I don't know about you but a day spent in an airport or flying is like lost time somehow and it's difficult to know how to make the best of this time in limbo. I have thought about the half price
(normally $300 NZ) 6 hour camera batteries that one can buy duty free and decided that camera
two needs one as well. I convert 150 Euro to around $300 Singapore and buy one for $168. That's
a good saving and I know that I will never fork out $300 NZ for a rechargeable battery so it is either
now or never. There is an impressive selection of current and also slighty obscure books also
more or less at half price in the airport so I get "A Short History of Tractors in Ukranian" by Marina
Lewycka and "Self' by Yann Martel, which I didn't even know existed. I love "Life of Pi" and have
never seen this book in New Zealand so I am pleased to shell out a pultry $17.50 Singapore to get it. Bargain.

I have allowed a good budget for food at the airport this time and although there is an international
press there too they don't have any russian magazines although they do have German, French,
and Spanish ones. I also get Elena some Davidhoffs, which are also absurdly cheap in comparison to the import tax prices. I manage to find a couple of out of the way places to sleep on chairs there
and with my passport and boarding pass safe inside my inside zipped up pocket and my broken suitcase hand luggage as a pillow I unplug and replug my jetlagged brain and can finally unwind
a bit of the tension that is always with one when one is trying to function in a country that doesn't
use one's mother language as a mother language. Singapore airport I consider to be an english
speaking country in comparison. I guess it more or less is.

Eventually the flight comes up on the board and then even more slowly the gate opens and then eventually we can get on the plane.The guards at the airport search me a little more throughtly than anyone else but get bored and go onto the next poor sod and with boarding pass firmly clenched in my hot little hand I find my seat, which is right at the back of the plane. I ditch my luggage in the overhead locker and breath a sigh of relief. The flight is easier and I manage to catnap a bit. I still can't be bothered to watch any movies and although I try a couple of American ones I can't get past 15 minutes without being annoyed by the arttitude of the people on the screen to not want to send them to the off position for the rest of the flight.True. Another knitpicking detail that I forgot to mention is that since the day before going to St Petersberg I have had trouble with big gigantic blisters on the insides of both of my little toes. I think the cobblestones in the Red Square are mostly to blame for this and just the overall share amount of walking I have done in Moscow as we hardly ever used a car for anything. I have been popping these with forks, toothpicks and a pair of nail clippers that I always carry around trying to get a bit more comfortable a walk but I am still hobbling a bit as I go about the airport and it is actually nice to sit on the plane as it gives my feet a chance to rebuild themselves a bit. Ouch.

Day Twenty One:

My Giddy Aunt...the last day of the tour dairy. The triumphant return of the conquering barbarian to his pig farm in the whops. It has been a bit of an effort to remember all this stuff and a good way to get RSI banging it all down lickity split inbetween coffees and sandwiches but I am glad that I have managed it and it is a more or less truthful account of what it is like for someone from the DIY Kiwi Underground to work with people from Russia with a similar type of appreciation for the making something interesting in an artistic kind of way, more than for the money or the glory it may or may not bring. It is a comfort to know that the songs will sound exactly the same whether it sells a million copies or is burned out one by one as CDRs. But let's hope it sells a million just for kicks anyway.

The flight from Singapore to New Zealand is long and fuzzy and I catnap again and read a little and reflect alot about what has happened since I left my own country. It seems to take forever to Auckland. When I finally reach terra firma and have just collected my baggage (after examining about 27 different but almost identical little black suitcases of the cheaper variety) an elderly customs officer with a glint in here eye asks me where I have travelled from. I tell her that I came from 'Russia' and her eyes light up like a Christmas tree. She asks me a series of rather blunt and accusitive questions which I answer in a "You must be joking type way" and when she directly asks if I have any pornographic material in my baggage I am tempted to reply "If you're looking for a thrill Grand Ma I ain't got nothin for you, you'd better wipe the steam of your glasses and head down to your local video store" but say instead that I am not interested in that sort of thing. Nevertheless she tells me that I should go down isle 3 in a bullyish type fashion and points her long boney fingers in the general direction of three little barracaded off lines.

I sort of aim for isle 3 but it's not exactly clearly marked out so well. I realise I am actually in isle 2 but proceed and a guy asks me for my papers and I show them to him and he lets me through.  I am almost out of customs when Grand Ma shouts at me "I told you to go to isle 3" and drags me back. I head off to the counter at isle 3 and a rather unsmiling grumpy bald guy asks me for my passport. I give it to him and reply that I know he's only doing his job to which he replies in an outraged voice "What do you know about my job" and then asks a whole pile of have you ever type questions which he insists that I only answer in a yes or no type way and informs me that there will be trouble if I do not obey. I am kind of outraged by this and since I have nothing to hide am tempted to piss him off a little bit for fun but he seems like a real little Hitler type and is so self important as to not even enquire if I have a conecting flight to another New Zealand destination. So I bite my tongue a little and read a book while he makes me wait for 20 minutes when they are not busy and have only one other person there that is being given the once over.

The guy who is eventually given the task of searching my stuff makes me sign a statement and read a whole pile of sign away your rights type papers before he will go through my stuff but he is the least aggressive of the three and is at least approachable. He is looking for me to be scared but I am calm and I think he senses that I have no fear of him looking at my stuff. He pulls everything out onto the table and goes through it all but it is as I have told him. I have no drugs, no porn, no guns and just because I went to Russia doesn't mean that I am a criminal. As he becomes more and more sure that there is nothing to nab me on I begin a counter offensive and ask him if I can speak to his superior officer as I wish to lodge a formal complaint about the unsmiling grumpy guy, whose badge number if I remember it correctly was CO 311. He is a bit surprised by this but gets his superviser after about another ten minutes.

The superviser is a guy called Paul Williams. He also seems a bit bolschy and when I try to explain how rude the officer was to me I can tell that he is fishing for words that could be considered to be obscene that he could perhaps nail me on. I have to hold my tongue and quickly delete most of the everyday words that I would use that seem applicable from my list of possible adjectives and nouns and finally settle on "loser". Much to my surprise Paul Williams is most upset and offended that I have called his officer such a thing. I tell him with a fairly wide grin that I could have called him a lot worse and inform him that I will lodge a formal complaint about the quality of service and lack of consideration of the New Zealand Customs Officers that dealt with me in Auckland. I ask for an apology to be given by grumpy face (well he was extremely aggressive, rude, inconsiderate and arrogant)but Paul refuses to let me speak to the guy and I guess that there's bugger all I can do about that. Paul gives me a pamplet on New Zealand Customs to read and also his business card.

I then have the difficult task of getting everything off the table and back into my cases and as is always the way it doesn't fit back in as it was so tightly packed and when I eventually get it sorted I am escorted to the free gate by the guy who searched me. I shake his hand and say that at least he treated me OK and that I know he was only doing his job. He smiles at me and I tell him as a parting shot that I know people high up in the Police force and Local Government and that I will make sure that grumpy face gets his arse kicked good and proper. The customs guy scruggs his shoulders, sort of laughs under his breath and that as they say is the end of that.

I guess I was in there for over an hour and twenty minutes and am fairly annoyed when I am finally  let go but once I am free for a little while I forget about it and decide that I had better get the bus into town. I wonder if they realise that most of the illegal prohibited things that they unsuccessfully didn't find after pulling all of my things to pieces are most likely to enter the country via the sea and coastal ports as these are far more unprotected and monitored far less that the International airports. It stands to reason that those bringing these sort of things into the country don't want to be caught so they will chose the least monitored path to achieve their ends. Anyway, enough of that. Much to my surprise there is actually a bus getting ready to depart. I take it as far as K Road and then wheel the case up to the Glengary bus stop and the bus takes about 20 minutes to come. When I get to the McLean's house in Glen Eden, Jo and Jimmy are there but Keith is  still at work and Eva-Rae is at school. I unload some of the presents and relax. I have made it back to Auckland alive. When I look at the footage from the Moscow and St Petersberg shows it all seems a bit unreal. The tapes have come out pretty good and we copy them onto Keith's harddrive for safety and so that he can bung a few into youtube when he gets the time. I will  need to work out which of the 3 audio sources we should use for each song as there is a choice  of stage left, stage right and audience centre. Check out youtube in a couple of weeks if you are curious and have nothing else to do.

So....that is indeed the end of the Russian experience. I wonder what they are doing back in Moscow and I wonder what will happen to the record? Only time will tell. I also wonder if old grumpy face might think twice a little bit before he mouths off at the next unlucky sod but somehow I think that he will be just as nasty to the next person he sees as a possible criminal. A little fish in a little pool with a big mouth isn't worth the trouble to get pissed off about. I'm glad we all have better fish to fry.Good luck with the duck and may a better force be with you soon.      

Postscript:

It's been a few week now since I am back in the shack jack so a few more details have filtered through the loincloth of time and I couldn't resist adding another fifty cents worth of dribble to the spitoon know as the Russian Tour Dairy. First up, the great news is that I managed to fix the inflatable plastic kiwi. I'd bunged him in the bath at the McLeans house when Jimmy had gotten out and it seemed that it was a slight tear near where the blow up valve is that was causing the problem. I brought a tube of Araladite and very carefully patched it over the hole and then left it until the next day and now he sits happy as a sandboy on top of the piano monitor in the lounge, beak facing north and belly full of sprudel.

The postcards have mostly turned up but the Russian Airmail Post is shocking and to some extent probably bigoted. It took 25 days for an airmail postcard to get from Russia to Gelsenkirchen in Germany, which is even longer than it took for the ones posted a few days later in St Petersberg to get to New Zealand. I guess the Russian's still think the Germans are shit in some respect. One could have riden a bike from Moscow to Nordrhenwestfalen in about the same amount of days as the airmail postcard. Oh well, at least it got there.

Another thing that has cropped up since the shows is some handheld footage from the lefthand side of the stage of the 16 Tons show in Moscow. The pictures are pretty grainy and a bit wobbly and often incomplete but there is an interesting amount of detail present with regards to the stage layout and it is a different angle from our own on a tripod footage which Campbell Walker has promised to help me process and sort out. We will get this stuff on it's bike next week and when it's done we will bung it into youtube. No photos from the shows have surfaced yet but looking at the footage we have there are a fair amount of flashes going on so there are some of them out there somewhere.

Dairy High are busy with the a million and one things to do business of covers and artwork and approaching labels and all of the other rigmarole that seems to happen after one makes a record and I have even posted over another vocal for Love, Speed, Death that I recorded here becaue I thought of another angle for it and couldn't resist the temptation to suggest it to the guys. It's interesting to think that one can still keep working together from one end of the egg to the other and a ninth song on it would make it easier for a record company to sell it as an album. Longer than 'Pink Moon' is a must in this digital age of 80 minutes are possible albums.

Thanks again for ruining your eyes staring into your screen reading this and I hope it was at least a bit of a laugh in places. I must say now that the dust has selted I am glad to be back in my little world and I even tidied up the flat and brought a couple of new heaters as it is so freezingly cold here that I have been avoiding my house pretty much and staying at Elena's because it is so much warmer in her apartment. Home at last... Caio4now...Bingo.