Rimed | Brad Spurgeon's Blog

Arriving back in Paris after 40 hours of travel from the south of South Korea, I got home to find my Internet broken down. So this means I have no Internet at home until Monday morning, and I head off again to India and Abu Dhabi on Tuesday. So there will be a short interruption in this blog, unfortunately. I am writing this after a day at the office, at the office…. But lack of Internet does not mean a lack of music and a lack of musical adventures. Last night I attended three venues in Paris, a new one, a recent one and an old one….

The first was a new open mic that takes place on the first and third Thursday of the month. I wish I had more time to write about all of these places, but I don’t. This new open mic takes place at a very cool bar called the Kolok, near the Bourse, not far from the Truskel. I found a very neat, young, with-it audience and the wonderful musician MC named Romain. I found good beer, a warm environment, a couple of mics, great service – and quite a loud audience….

I will give more information about the Kolok as soon as I have tried it again or got a better Internet connection.

From there I went over to the Orphee, which I have written about a couple of times recently on this blog. But this time I was hugely disappointed as the owner or manager of the bar insisted that I pay 10 euros to enter this place in order to entertain the large of audience of people who had shown up for the open mic. There are very, very few circumstances in which I will pay money in order to play my music, when I know I am bringing in people to listen to the music, and when I am also buying drinks for myself. After some discussion it was clear the man was not nice and not smart and not worth it. So I left.

I remembered that across the street at the every and endlessly genial Bus Palladium, I had a friend who was taking part in the musical talent “trampoline” event last night. So I decided to go in and give him my support. It turned out that he was not the only member of the talented bunch of musicians whom I knew. There was the band JFK, whom I ran into almost four years ago at the Truskel and/or Mecano. And it also turned out that I knew some of the judges of the competition, the band Gush. Gush is extraordinary, and if they had done the competition themselves, they would have won. So they were well chosen judges.

As it turned out, Rimed – the tapping guitarist – came in an equal second in the competition. Unfortunately, by the time the eventual winners played their set, I had run out of batteries on my recording device. So nothing to show here.

I attended my first open mic at the Mazet since it took a brief break for the festive holidays, and found that it was back to its regular ways. That means that it tends to start out fairly slow and discrete, and then it wakes up and becomes more intense, and often turns into a jam session at the end of the evening.

I met up with Conn Bux again, and he played some of his great songs, cutting through the chatter to have plenty of the many spectators applaud even during the middle of his songs. The Irishman was well received, to say the least.

I was pleased – if a little intimidated – that this time Conn’s friend, Saray, from Spain, asked if she could film me with my Zoom Q3HD recorder. I happily accepted. So I have more recordings here than usual of me….

During my set suddenly as I was singing “Mad World,” my upright bass player from the night before at the Highlander suddenly arrived, parked in front of the stage, and added another dimension to the song – injecting me with an instant fix of added energy as well. He then played with me on “Runaway Train” as well, and that was the end of my set.

Rimed showed up and played some of his sensational tapping, and there were a few other regulars who also played some lively and fun stuff.

I ended up cutting out at midnight, however, to go to Stephen Danger Prescott’s final Thursday night gig at the Galway before he heads off next week for Berlin. He will have one more open mic at the Galway, on Monday, though.