Down with the kids....
02 September 2013
One of the characteristics of our cruising this year (well, every year to be honest) is bad timing. This applies to weather and to cultural events. As far as the former is concerned we always seem to be constrained for time when the weather turns to shit and we end up under pressure to make passage in conditions that we'd really rather not.
As for the latter, we usually find that we arrive at a place to find that the concert, festival, exhibition etc finished the day before yesterday.
We're currently running for home, heading down the East coast of Italy, en route to Ionian Greece. In this enterprise we are running 50% true to form. The weather has kept us to a ratio of one day's traveling to five days holed up in port. On the most recent leg, we managed two consecutive days sailing and got as far as Brindisi, where we have been stuck for six days. We might get away on Sunday.*
On the other hand, our visit has, uncharacteristically, coincided with a big festival, celebrating the patron saint of the city, St. Theodore. This is a big deal, they've been preparing for days. Impressive sets of lights have sprouted all over town. The seafront is covered with Hollywood style medieval tents making the whole area look like a jousting field. Stages have been erected at strategic places including on the quay, right in front of Birvidik. These were accompanied by notices telling the local car owners to bog off and leave the place clear for Friday and Saturday.
"Oh Goodie" we thought. "We're right in the thick of it - grandstand seats on the wheelhouse roof." I wondered excitedly what we would get; Verdi perhaps, or Scarlatti; what about Vivaldi or Puccinni?
We first experienced a nagging sense of doubt when we saw the crowds congregating around the stage on Friday afternoon. These had a mean age of about 14 and were engulfed in a fog of hormones. We should have known earlier, of course - a Mozart quartet doesn't usually come equipped with a bank of speakers alongside which the Maginot Line would look as if it had been knocked up in Lego by a bored five year old on a wet Sunday afternoon in Norfolk.
Then the stage crew started setting up and testing the system. I've done some head-banging in my time, but the volume was unbelievable. The bass went right through you, finding the resonant frequency of your various viscera and jiggling them up and down like a jelly on springs whilst simultaneously inducing a range of heart arrhythmias. It did the same for various parts of the boat which vibrated, rattled and shook. Screws worked loose from fittings ** and we were fully expecting her to be reduced to kit form by the end of the evening. The noise, with no exaggeration, even set off the alarms on nearby parked cars.
We had a sinking sensation of what we were going to get, but the exact nature of the forthcoming torment, as well as the identities of the prospective perpetrator(s) were as yet unknown. Then Liz noticed that the T shirts worn by the roadies carried the legend 'Keep Calm and Love Fedez'. So I googled Fedez. I wished I hadn't.
Fedez, it turned out, is that most unnatural of beasts, that product of cultural miscegenation, a white Italian rapper. His picture adorns this blog entry for your joy and delectation. Oh Frabjous day! What ineffable joy.
I was all for clearing off to drink ourselves into oblivion and leave the boat and the cat to their fates. We could always reassemble the boat on our return and teach the cat to respond to sign language. Liz, however, pointed out a flaw with this cowardly tactic. Taking into account the large number of assembled yoof, we then took the risk of Birvidik being hi-jacked as an extension party space along with a concomitant reduction in the number of items on board. So we stayed.
It was hell.
The lead up consisted of a repeated loop of about eight rap, er... items. I hesitate to call them songs. They all consisted of a bass beat in 4/4 at around 110 bpm backed by a three (occasionally four) chord guitar riff. Woven over the top of this was a lot of shouting - mainly obscenities and references to unnatural sexual acts with close female relatives. All of this was delivered at what I estimated to be around 120dB, and we were about 50 metres away. God knows what it was like in the front row. This ran for about three hours, by the end of which I knew most of the lyrics by heart.
We sat and ate dinner without even making an effort at conversation. It would have been pointless - my hearing's bad enough at the best of times but we couldn't communicate even if we shouted in each other's ears. Despite resorting to earplugs our ears were ringing by the end of the evening..
To look on the bright side, Fedez himself only actually appeared on stage for just over an hour. Seemed longer. He was, if such be possible, even worse than the records. At least the lyricists on the recordings managed to keep to the beat and had some tone and timbre to their voice over. He and his sidekicks just hoarsely shouted. On top of which, Italian is a beautifully expressive, musical, lyrical language. It lends itself to opera, poetry and descriptions of architecture. It rolls and flows. It just doesn't sound right in rap. It doesn't have the harsh consonants and staccato cadences of English. German rap - now that would work.
The next day they took all the staging down. It took them about three days to set it all up and a day and half to take it all down. Seems an awful lot of work for an hour and a quarter's shouting.
*No we won't. We're going to be here at least 10 days according to the forecast.
** This is actually a slight exaggeration. One screw fell out of the headlining.