Except it turns out that now I’m going to have to adapt the little speech I give when someone asks me what I do, because for the past five weeks, Hubert’s single “Brenna tuats guat” (It Burns Well) has been number one in the Austrian single charts. Artists such as the aforementioned Lady Gaga, or Adele can, for the time being, suck it. The new album quickly reached number two and has remained in the top 5 for weeks, with both the album and single being awarded gold.

The song – I was going to say “geht um”, but I’m back in England now and can stop trying to constantly formulate sentences in German in my head, as I was doing last week – is about the contemporary issues of the financial crisis and Hubert’s objection to the burning of foodstuff for fuel. “Everyone knows that money doesn’t grow on trees and neither can you eat it, but it burns really well” he sings, “but we stoke up the wheat, the turnips and the maize and if we keep on stoking, it’ll all go to hell”.

(Also on Youtube)

It’s been nearly two years since I was there last and so the other day I felt I should brush up on my mountain names. Untersberg, Gaisberg, Hoher Stauffen – they’re the important ones to know in case of being tested. I’ve also been watching the weather reports and the Föhn wind (incidentally spelled “Fön” if you’re artistic and decide that you don’t like the h any more) seems to die off at the end of this week and cooler, wetter weather might greet me. Or, of course I could run up one of those mountains whose names I know and simply find myself covered in snow.

There’s some work to be done out there, some hanging out to be done and I think glasses need to be raised to a brilliant single by a very clever client that’s been top of the charts for the past four weeks:

This is of course all dependent on my ever choosing what clothes to take with me on my trip and the way things are going, I might just be staying here, alternating my gormless stare between my wardrobe and the ORF weather report.

Another work day, this time heading to Sittingbourne with John to do some filming. The lady we filmed was quite a pro, used to speaking in front of a camera and accustomed to all the nonsense of walking past the camera as if it’s not there, or filming a visitor arriving outside a door and then filming them being let in from inside the house.

By the way, you’d think the number of times I’ve done this now, I’d learn to wear quieter shoes, but no!

In the car on the way there I suddenly realised that I might as well shunt today’s original idea for a 7 Days shot to tomorrow, as I don’t like to waste the opportunity of getting a picture while doing something *gasp* outside the house.

It was a very nice hotel, clean, comfortable, efficient, but the view wasn’t up to much, being as it was of the surrounding industrial park. We’re not talking nuclear power station cooling ponds or anything, just businesses and big stores … and people with diggers scraping up the earth in the rain, putting down sheeting and stones, but then not finishing the job before we left when all they had to do was level out a few piles into the spaces and they’d have been done, my God, I could have done it for them. Except I was in a taxi on my way to the airport when I saw how little they (ok, apparently) had left to do.

I had a vague Google Maps printout of Landsberg, printed at that helpful scale where you’ve got some roads, but possibly not all of them and you might have to squint to read the road names anyway, so really it’s just the shape of the town with one restaurant marked on it. It was to this Italian restaurant that we asked the taxi to take us, except as soon as we were through the door and the taxi was gone we discovered that a big party was due to arrive there in half an hour, completely filling the place.

We’d seen shops and the possibility of eateries out of the taxi windows on our way here, so decided to amble back in the direction we’d come. As if to entice us the right way, across the road was the old town gate, the Bayerntor, built in 1425 as part of the town’s defences. The tower, which we didn’t climb, is 36 metres high.

We headed down Alte Bergstraße, back towards the shops and, we hoped, food. Down was very much the operative word, the lane falling steeply away before us at 18º – one of those times where your feet end up going a bit faster than you’d like, but there’s not much to be done about it. At least you’re on the pavement and not on the cobbled road, on which one car went careering past with enough speed and noise on the cobbles that we agreed we’d hate to live on a cobbled street like this as it would just sound like the cars were headed to your front door the whole time.

The houses down the lane were painted in pretty pastel shades and from one building, a music school, we heard the sound of recorders being played followed by appreciative applause. At the bottom of the road the evening sun was hitting the colourfully tiled roof of what I now know is the Schmalzturm, the Lard Tower. Usually I do all my sightseeing research before I go on holiday, so I know what I’m looking at and know what not to just walk past. So it’s a bit different for me to be doing my Googling post-break.

The tower is the oldest in the city, built in 1290 in the Witches’ Quarter and got its name from what happened in the market below. On sunny days the market women would set up their stalls in the shade of the tower so that their wares would last longer – among them, lard, which really doesn’t benefit much from a dose of the midday sun.

It’s not that difficult to guess that this ornate building is the Rathaus, the town hall. Though I’m pretty sure that this is the first Rathaus I’ve seen with little pink cherubs all over it. Maybe it’s the Rathaus der Liebe or something.

We found somewhere to eat and have a sit down in the shape of Maxximilians on Georg-Hellmair-Platz. We took a window seat looking out onto the Stadtpfarrkirche Mariä Himmelfahrt, a large church in typical German style in that it was first mentioned in 1219, but doesn’t look all craggy and made of stones like our churches would, but instead is rendered and painted, looking bright and new.

I had ham and cheese pizza and lemonade, confident in at least those words when reading a menu, while Suzy tucked into a herby soup and then something sort of stew-like from the special medieval menu, which had involved a whole lot of words I’d never seen before.

After our meal, with the light beginning to disappear, we walked towards the weir I’d seen on the satellite photo on Google Earth – only to find once we were there that it was behind a thick 4-foot-high wall, so Google Earth was my best bet for seeing it. Thus Suzy took these photos for me before we continued wending our way through the town, heading back to the main square where we’d seen a taxi rank.

These mannequin heads in the windows were freaky, looking just enough like real heads to give you a turn every time you caught sight of them in your peripheral vision.

We walked past this huge cloister church, which was not only highly decorated on the external walls, but also had murals painted on the ceiling and walls of its atrium. Clearly Landsberg is big on painting pictures of stuff on other stuff.

As the sun set we crossed the bridge over the Landsberg and looked back up the river Lech towards the weir. That little gold roof poking out above the tree on the left hand side belongs to the Mutterturm, a ridiculously Disney-esque Romantic style little castle that’s almost more turret than castle.

We’re back from a super weekend in Germany seeing Hubert von Goisern and guests at his festival in Kaltenberg. Our friend Elli took this paparazzi shot of us in front of the barrier, where we spent the two days, singing, cheering, dancing in our seats and, of course, photographing. I’ve been going non-stop since our return, organising updates for the HvG website and doing transcripts for Kippertie. Most of the photos I took while away were of the concerts, but on our first evening we did a little wandering around Landsberg, so there’ll be those photos to put up at some point. Not forgetting the fact that there are New York stories still to tell, Come Dine With Me at Lauren’s, the pumpkins growing at the end of the garden, the cow on my desk, photos of my nieces …

I spent today at Reading University with John, assisting him on a shoot for a video to illustrate an element of quantum computing: that atoms can be in two different places at the same time and my head can explode if I try and contemplate that any further. According to the professor for whom this little film is being made: if you think you understand it, you don’t.

We filmed three actors behaving as atoms, with one atom repeating actions and then getting her atom friends to help out when she had to be in more than one atom place at a time.

John’s not been in this 7 Days run, so I thought I’d get him in a cameo once we’d got the car packed up and were ready to head home. The round mirror (actually one of two) on the back seat of his car gives a clue as to why he’s not had the time to join us: he and Sam are now proud parents to twin girls, Anya and Lily, born on 7th April.

Thanks for another great week together, it’s been fun!

So after filming students for the West Kent Schools Themed Book Award on Friday John headed here and took over the living room with the very fancy Red One MX camera and lights, backdrops and reflectors.

My first job was to stand under the lights while John got set up, warm myself in the huge heat they were giving off and hope that my hair was still looking as nice as it did when I had been faffing about with it while I waited for him to arrive. Important thoughts, I’m sure you’ll agree.

The next job was pretty easy too, looking straight ahead, turning, looking to the side and turning to face straight ahead. And that was it. John had what he needed for the site and now we could turn off the lights. Except we forgot, so while John was checking the footage on my iMac the living room and the parents in it were being heated in a somewhat unorthodox manner.

One extraordinary thing about the Red video cameras is the quality of the footage and the stills that you can take from it. Usually video stills look like video stills, but these photos in this post are stills from the video John shot of me. Pretty cool, huh?

We found the Humber Bridge information centre on John’s iPad and headed there, hoping to get a good view of the bridge. As we got close the top of the suspension bridge was visible here and there and I attempted one-handed photos through the rain-dirtied windows of the moving car. One-handed, because the other hand was too busy feeding my face from the crisp packet. Surprisingly, none of those photos came to anything. When we reached the centre it was shut and the bridge was mostly hidden by trees. It was so damn cold that we weren’t about to lug all the kit along the path that went through the trees just on the offchance that the view was better the other side, so while I used the one lot of facilities that fortunately were open, John found a better viewing point with Google Street View on his iPad. Aah, technology. And aah, that’s better.

We found the viewing point, on a quiet road lined with houses with large front windows overlooking the Humber river and bridge. Winter’s darkness was falling and it was cold and grey, but an information board revealed that while the river may not look so spectacular at that moment, the estuary and mud flats are in fact home to thousands of birds, to seals and endangered species of fish and is designated as a European Marine Site.

John set up the camera to film some timelapse footage and I froze my figurative nuts off in the cold – and took some photos too. I really must hurry up and get myself a wide angle lens of some sort. Either that or people should make things such as the Humber Bridge a bit smaller. Not that John had any trouble with KipperTie’s fancy pants Red One MX camera, which can also produce stills that look like photographs rather than video stills.

We had visited the Humber Bridge as a family on holiday when we were kids. It will have still been the world’s longest single span suspension bridge back then. Now it’s the seventh longest. But Wikipedia tells me that it’s still the longest bridge in the world that can be crossed on foot or bicycle.

Though we’d stood on the bridge as kids, this time we crossed it in John’s Navigator and I snapped a few shots of the suspension cables, completely forgetting to look out of the side windows at the view. Then I tucked the camera away and let John drive me home while I went to work on inspecting the inside of my eyelids and the car seat studiously backcombed my hair into a magnificent beehive. Again.

Incidentally, the carousel? I took it home in my crammed rucksack, wrapped in bubble wrap, flying about 630 miles across Europe at 30,000 feet above the ground and it did just fine. I took it wrapped in bubble wrap in my shoulder bag about 5 miles in the car to Suzy’s and back and consequently had to glue one of the horse’s legs back on.

I learned a couple more mountains while I was in Salzburg. I think I am able to identify the Untersberg now without needing to be where I was first told its name. Stauffen is the pointy one, which I might get next time and Watzmann is the huge one that you can see from outside the computer shop. And probably from some other places too.

I managed a bit of German here and there, but it’s difficult to dare to venture into the world of der, die, das, den, dem when everyone else around you is speaking great English. I’m pretty sure I didn’t start any diplomatic incidents though. Unless of course I offended the pastry guys by only saying goodbye to one of them with “Pfiat Di”, instead of all of them with “Pfiat Euch”. I always got into the right side of the car and I didn’t get wanded at airport security this time, so there was no opportunity for me to proudly proclaim “BH!” as the officer’s wand beeped over my underwire. Not that I’ve done that before or anything.

This two language business is totally confusing though and I’m finding more and more that I’m losing the ability to speak English. H’s daughter got some candy floss and I was asked what it was called – cotton candy? “No, that’s American; we call it candy floss” … Ten minutes later: “what do you call it again?” Me: *blank stare* *panic*. And I swore blind to H there wasn’t a verb for doing reconnaissance. But reconnoitre is a stupid word und darf mich ruhig am Arsch lecken.

Click for the set

We grabbed a bite to eat on the ship and then went downstairs to watch Xavier rehearse a little with Hubert and Wolfgang Niedecken from BAP, who had stuck around for the last day. Once again, everybody was performing with everybody else.

The first group up was Stelzhamma, a more traditional group from Austria, with strings, brass, accordion and percussion. They played a short set before Willi Resetarits came on stage. He was at the very first Linz Europe Tour concert in Vienna in 2007. I met him briefly back then, determined to exchange a couple of German words with someone, but didn’t get to see him perform as that was the time when a storm ripped through the stage, causing the concert to be postponed to the day after Suzy and I had returned home.

I have no idea what Willi was singing about, but he was an engaging performer, at times standing right in front of the audience on the big speakers, at times sitting at a little table, as though singing to a small party in a little bar room. He is a Burgenland-Croat and Hubert and his band came on stage to sing a couple of Croatian songs. “Put the words on the floor,” he said, handing out lyric sheets, “then no-one will know you’re reading them.”
The video’s a bit shaky, but you get the idea:

After Willi came the Moldovan rockers Zdob si Zdub. In 2005 they represented Moldova at the Eurovision Song Contest, coming sixth in the final. They have incredible energy and were the first band with whom Hubert connected when looking for bands for his tour in eastern Europe. In fact they’ve even recorded a joint version of Hubert’s biggest hit Koa Hiatamadl, which of course they performed in Linz. It’s pretty cool seeing a Moldovan star singing the refrain of that song in front of an Austrian audience, who of course immediately join in. Zdob si Zdub also performed Everybody in the Casa Mare with Hubert’s three singers, Maria, Marlene and Elisabeth. This was already a firm favourite for me and Suzy, as we’d heard them play it a few times on the street music day. Sadly no-one seems to have Youtubed it for my repeated, if not endless viewing. There is this though:

Konstantin Wecker, a German musician, was the next to perform, bringing with him his Bösendorfer grand piano. I didn’t see how the stage hands got that on stage; I assume they just used magic. When not playing the grand he would stroll the stage singing, backed up by Jo Wecker on keyboards and a number of other musicians. There’s a snippet of melody of his that is still stuck in my head that’s been going round in my head, only to be thrown out occasionally by the song that he and Hubert performed together, “Einfach wieder schlendern”.

At about quarter past eight the big “Europa” backdrop was taken down and replaced with Hubert’s Bad Goisern dragon. Hubert’s set was planned as the last of the evening and I was a little surprised by it starting so early – not realising that it was going to turn into a set of mega proportions. Having played one of the traditional instrumental openers the band played “Heast as nit”, another very popular song of Hubert’s, usually reserved for encores. But today, they’d play it at the start, because – why not?

Later in the set both Willi and Konstantin came back on stage to each join Hubert and his band for a song: Willi playing the harmonica for the “Fön” blues and Konstantin on the keyboard to accompany Hubert for the traditional Austrian folk song “Abend spåt”, the latter being a song that the audience wouldn’t have heard Hubert play since the 2004 “Trad” tour.

A few songs later and Hubert finally announced the evening’s special guest. A huge roar went up from the crowd as he announced, “Xavier Naidoo!”, who came on stage … wearing his rucksack. I know not why. They performed “Siagst as” , the duet from Hubert’s “S’Nix” album. I’ve seen Hubert and his band perform it alone before and so it was pretty cool to finally see it with Xavier too.

Siagst as – Part 1

Siagst as – Part 2

Xavier’s own set followed, integrating support from Hubert and his band and Wolfgang Niedecken and an hour later Hubert came back for the second part of his set with his band. It was nearly eleven o’clock by now and Hubert remarked that although they went past the curfew a little last night and were about to now too, stuff it, the penalty was fixed so they might as well keep playing. Woohoo!

I’ve already blogged the story of my being up on stage with the rest of the crew as Hubert thanked the various members of his team at the end of his set. After we’d all filed off stage again one final song was performed, with all the musicians who had appeared that day on stage for “Schluss, Aus, Vorbei”. Over, end, past – and the Linz Europe Harbour Festival – and with it the Linz Europe Tour 2007-2009 – finally drew to a close just before midnight on Sunday, 5th July.

Click for the set