Another Saturday night in Brussels

FLYER-BXL-WINDOWS
Originally uploaded by MonkeyGone2.

...9pm: Hit the Grand Place where Hooverphonic are playing a free gig as part of the city council's Iris Festival (the yellow iris is the symbol of Brussels). The place is rammed and the band, Belgium's answer to Morcheeba or Moloko, seem to be going through the motions a bit. But the combination of loud music, warm weather and a beautiful square overcomes any misgivings.
...10 pm: Slipping out the back of the square just before the encore, we make our way to Windows, for sets by two local bands inspired by 60s Americana: Monsigneur Lafayette et ses Virtuoses and Eddy Tornado et les Scandaleux.
The monsignor and gang play psych rock of the Seeds/Os Mutantes variety. A six piece (including a guy playing bongos and theremin), they really got the place moving: an extremely tight, well drilled and skilled combo. Cool outfits and facial hair too. As my mate Leigh said, if they were 10 years younger and in London you could imagine a scene forming around them.
I've written about Eddie and the Bhoys before. Since the last time I saw them, they have dropped the burlesque (no maked visen with billy club), dropped the Sham 69 cover, added a double bass on some tracks and generally got a whole lot better. Twirl your partners, ladies and gentlemen.
...12.30 am: Off to the Zebra bar to catch the end of a live set by Aschka (aka Debbie) and the DJing skills of Sensu. Some people say he is the best DJ in Belgium. I don't know about that, but he certainly has skills. A recent conversion to Dubstep seems like a good way of taking the Brussels club sound beyond its minimal torpor.
1.30 am: A private party downstairs in Biberium. The birthday girl has already gone and we are left with the stragglers and a tech house soundtrack. Another whisky coca, s'il vous plait.
2.45 am: Washed up at Celestin, the bar that opens 24 hours a day, seven days a week. This time there isn't a fist fight between Albanian gangsters going on (unlike my previous visit, but then that was at 8am). It ain't what the Dutch would call gezellig, and the R&B soundtrack can get a bit wearing, but it's a great place to end the night. Cheers!

Guillaume the Weird Human Jukebox and other delights

Guillaume the Weird Human Jukebox and other delights
Originally uploaded by MonkeyGone2.

This picture shows one of the many wonderful sights (no sound alas) from the final evening of Cinema Nova's 10th anniversary celebrations. Guillaume, an engaging young man who I had previously known only as a bartender at Recyclart, entertains the crowd with his 'Weird Human Jukebox' show. Customers choose songs from a list of 166 tracks that Guillaume has memorized by tapping the song number into a calculator and paying the requisite 20 cents (10 cents for Beatles songs) through the slot of the barricaded ticket booth. He then plays whatever they have paid for, from Bert Jansch to Jacques Brel, Johnny Hallyday to Sun Ra (I plumped for 'Space is the Place', performed with a gusto not heard since Edward Barton years).
Inside the cinema itself, the evening began with Pierre Bastien and his Mecanium (a mechanical orchestra made of lego), soundtracking a movie by Dutchman Karel Doing. After a short break and a beer, we returned for Spaceheads (Andy Diagram and Dick Harrison, former cohorts in the ten-years-ahead-of-their-time Manchester alt pop combo, Dislocation Dance), with visuals from London-based filmmaker Greg Pope.
Spaceheads, who play a kind of dirty jazz electrobeat that occasionally touches on John Hassell or Miles Davis (circa Tutu) territory, but always remains defiantly itself, distinctly other, battled British train chaos to get to the show. And we were glad they did. As Andy Diagram mixed live trumpet loops (including basslines created by tuning his instrument down two octaves) with Dick Harrison's upright yet fluid and very funky drumming, Greg Pope took a drill to the celluloid spooling through the projector, to create a series of scratches on the film stock that, together with the powerful music, made for a very psychedelic and fittingly experimental, yet accessible, end to a fine evening.

What Freddy did next?

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Originally uploaded by MonkeyGone2.

Property developer Frederic Nicolay is one of the key shapers of Brussels nightlife. After revamping Place St. Gery in the city centre from 1996 onwards with bars such as Zebra and le Roi des Belges, more recently he has tuned his attention to Place Flagey in Ixelles, opening the hugely successful Cafe Belga beneath the renovated former RTBF radio studio dubbed Flagey that is now a concert venue, cultural centre and recording studio.
So, where's next? Well, if I were Mr. Nicolay, I would take a short drive up the hill from Place Flagey toward the European Parliament. Place du Luxembourg, the square outside the Parliament building, is always rammed on a Friday evening when the sun is out. But between Flagey and Luxembourg there is another, somewhat forgotten square, with great potential as a nightlife destination: Place Raymond Blyckaerts.
Slightly set back from Rue Trone, the rather rundown square is well connected to the Brussels bus network, close to the Elsenhof cultural centre, large enough to hold plenty of people and has two cool quirks: a great monument to the 19th century Belgian Romantic painter, Antoine Wiertz, and a now empty 1970s Danish Tavern, Andersen.
The kitsch-cool exterior of the tavern is still intact. With a little renovation and a similar mix of hip music and events as Cafe Central in St. Gery, Andersen could soon be a destination for those travelling between/escaping from the nearby haunts of Place Flagey and Place du Luxembourg.
Once Andersen is established as an anchor, other hip bars, restaurants, etc will spring up in its wake, turning this currently sleepy square into a buzzing hive of activity. That's the theory at least. To misquote Nick Drake, time, time will tell us.