Gentlemen & Assassins:Genesis….The Short and sweet of it.
Two very jet lagged men met me in Berlin Germany. My old mate Sxip Shirey looked a bit spent since he’d had to haul his varied array of hybridized, re-imagined toy instruments, guitars, pedal boards etc… over here from NYC. Brian Viglione trailed just behind with an effiently packed case and drum ware. As always, he did his best to seem chipper though I could sense extreme fatigue.
No rest however: we packed up from my place in Prenzlauerberg and headed east to Nalepa Strasse and the former DDR radio station HQ complex for the 1st of 2 rehearsals. This would be our first time playing together and the London gig, G & A’s very first live appearance. No pressure.
A couple days later and we found ourselves packed up in Andrew Rastegarnia’s van outside Victoria Station and were off to his house in Willesden Green for a couple hours nap and a much needed taste of classic home made Iranian cuisine before soundcheck.
It was hard to think clearly. Everything felt foggy. Five months of preparation were culminating in a blur of travel and a vague notion that in just a few hours we’d be playing in front of a Camden crowd. We knew what we had to do but what was it really?
I had wanted to strike up something musically for sometime with Sxip and we had managed a few gigs together in Berlin. When I later had the chance to play a few songs live with Brian in Prague as part of famed producer Martin Bisi’s tour (more of that later) I felt immediately that the trio would be a dream team of sorts. I put the notion to him backstage as soon as we finished. We fixed a time frame and he was in. Ok, fantastic. Now the work of making it real. This was another matter altogether. For crucial steps as this I have, over the last 11 years, often deferred to my wife Melissa Fowler: “The Fixer”. She thought it was a brilliant idea and got straight to working on the many hundreds of emails and phone calls to see who might be interested: what clubs and bookers might want to take us on.
I can say, that the concept of three front-men of this particular pedigree coming together for a tour seemed intriguing to most, though the questions on everyone’s lips was one that we had completely overlooked: “What’s the name of the band then?”.
“Sorry didn’t quite catch that…damn the line’s really fucked today. Tell you what, i’ll call you tomorrow and we’ll work out the details” Melissa and I stared at each other, half smirking, half ruddy faced and embarrassed by our obvious over sight. The good news though was that Martin Bisi was on board as our tour partner with his solo project. Brian Viglione would be drumming with him also. I would later find out just what a powerhouse Brian really is. Martin on the other hand was the man behind the wheel as producer of an alarmingly large percentage of my record collection including: Bill Laswell, Herbie Hancock, John Zorn, Afrika Bambata, Sonic Youth, Iggy Pop, Swans, Foetus, Dresden Dolls, Cibo Matto to name but a few….get the picture. This was going to be good.
I spent most of that night going through old lyrics and scanning youtube for anything of interest in search of a succession of words that when put together might describe the tour. A tour name. As I was nodding off in despair in front of the screen, a familiar voice had me pry my sore lids open and take notice. I heard:
“Gentlemen and assassins and ladies of the night
I call upon you this evening in the hope of shedding some light
I can’t go into details or finger unfounded fools
But there are some here among us who are not playing by the rules”
It was Ian Dury of the Blockheads. A major icon for me and a London poet I had always admired and related to.
I had always loved to imagine the idea that we’d be playing for the street urchins, vagabond ruffians, hoods and prostitutes of the city. It’s not like we haven’t done it before.
So, Gentlemen and Assassins it was. Now we just had to get the music over. Melissa drew up some wonderful poster images, we put up some videos of earlier collabs with Sxip and I and wrote up a sufficiently impressive one sheet and we were in business.
The short of it, the very short of it, was that we managed to book 6 countries for a 3 and a half week tour. Starting in London. The place of my birth. The place I also had been avoiding for many years; though now, swaggering along with this pack of real deal geezers, I felt enormously confident and my sense of fun and cheekiness was aroused, a much more appropriate attitude, I must say, than any misgiving.
