Munich and The Dashwood

The week before I came away on my little jaunt Team Beeches had a weekend away break in the fine city of Munchen where we played a show. It was a fun weekend apart from the fact that like an idiot I left my Ipod (that i had spent over 6 months filling up with my favourite tunes) on the BA plane out there...


Nevertheless, we had a fine old time. The gig went.... well. Yes - It went well. We all enjoyed it anyway. As is our way, we made a few mistakes but managed to gloss over them and i think the crowd left thinking it was deliberate anyway. The best thing about the night was that we got our first ever rider: they gave us free beer and free food - a trend that I hope catches on in English venues.


Our hosts - Clem and Tini - were smashing and showed us around town. We saw lots of cool things - including a very ace scale model of the solar system at the musuem - and we got drunk in some cool bars where it was very weird to see people smoking (the smoking ban only started on Jan 1st this year).


We spent most of energy that weekend searching the city for some Appel Strudel for Tom. The look of pure joy on his face when he finally, and unexpectedly, tucked into a slice at the airport before our flight back would have made Popes weep and will live with me for a long time.


Sadly, I seem to have lost the photographs of the weekend while I was transferring the pictures to CD. I´m gutted as there were some classic snaps on there such as: the aformentioned "Drooling drummer grins over steaming apple pudding", "Folically challenged drummer and guitarist show off their slaps underneath the sign for ´baldstrasse´", "Look Lucy! a green a roof!" and "Me and a german midget girl share a smile and a post show pilsner".


This talk of lost pictures reminds me of the greatest lost photograph of all time - The Dashwood. Mr Ian Clark and myself were celebrating finding a twenty pound note at Reading Music festival in the late 90´s by slurrping some warm lager and talking in American accents when we bumped into DC Mike Dashwood (from televisions cop series The Bill) who was leaving the dance tent. Through a simple blend of conversation and lies we convinced him we were americans and that we were big fans of his show. The elation of his spreading fame was clear in his eyes (or at least his pupils were very wide) and he eagerly agreed to have a photo taken with us. Now, I´m not sure if it was Karma balancing out the discovery of the twenty squid, a vengeful god who - being a fan of the Bill - punished us for mocking the dashing dashwood, or simply that we were drunk as lords, but the bag containing the camera was stolen/misplaced and the greatest picture ever taken was for ever lost.

I like to imagine that the bastard thief who stole the bag developed the film and has "The Dashwood" pinned up on the corkboard in his / her kitchen and has a little chuckle in the morning while making (and hopefully choking on) their cornflakes.