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Rating: "Skopje Leno inja Skofia Loka" says the taxi driver as I leave the cheerful little village of Skofja Loka to energetically head towards the Orto Klub in Lubljana, a venue of past glorious concerts with names like Jarboe and Tindersticks. We arrive in the city: the wonder of a small ivory-colored historic center that's bisected by a serpentine tongue of water; beautiful like a small Salzburg, with its castle on the hill and its countless little clubs where they play everything: from the most arcane contemporary music to jazz, from industrial (which is at home here) to Slovenian folk featuring characters worthy of a Paolo Conte or a Piero Ciampi. I enter the venue, order a Lasko (fantastic, back then I still drank..) and wait for the show to start: the young Slovenian audience is calm, way too calm! Here, a small Slavic Switzerland, noise isn't tolerated, and the volume of conversations is so low that you wonder if you're about to attend a concert or a bridge game between overweight old professors.
The show begins: the three Devastations take the stage and the silence persists, oh heavens, very few applauses and some solitary whistle. They kick it off with the "LeeHazlewoodian" Loene, an overwhelming piece that refreshes you from past loves, a sweet decadent rock in the manner of the greatest... And here the sly old Slovenians, masters of melancholy, start to melt and sing along: here's the "spirit" of a people!! The beer starts to flow (back then I drank, two drinks!) and I find myself in that blessed state of divine bodily warmth, ecstatic guts and a mind free of thoughts... I retrace with memory my loves to the notes of the Devastations.
Burp! "All The Previous Crimes" brings tears, and indeed I cry like a castrated calf, I put myself in a corner, beer in hand, keep asking for cigarettes and dream... beautiful, unique, exceptional! A violinist, long legs and a split dress, comes up to support the three Australians... the sound becomes silky and unreachable: they almost match the Master inspirations in their compositions. "You Can't Reach Me Now" is such a romantic song that it transcends contingent problems (Tolars flying away like leaves, the loneliness of a night in a foreign and sad city) and transport you on a bed of arms, belly, and legs known years before, right in this cursed city, and that now are the limbs of the person you greet as a friend in sparse convenience mail or lousy text messages, alas, children of our times. The emotional backlash of these tracks live is piercing and ruthless... Perhaps the beer's effect had transcended my mind over these three's actual musical ability, but it's one of the concerts I recall with warm and comforting memories.
The prophetic, in my case, "We Will Never Drink Again" recalls "People Ain't No Good" by King Inkiostro, and the beer roars serving as a natural distortion within my body to the gentle organ vibrations, to the soft and melancholic bars of these song-prisons from which it's very easy to escape, but not very appealing.
The Slovenians appreciate it, someone even collapses (these guys are real sponges) and the night comes to an end. A techno version of "Avanti Popolo" sung in Italian (!!!) starts and all the guys start dancing and singing it perfectly (?): I approach the singer of the band and tell him I'm Italian, that I like them a lot and blah blah blah, he immediately seizes the moment and invites me, along with a Scotsman, to drink (surprise, surprise) in a club suggested by taxi driver Dragan (soon renamed Giovanni), and the cars set off with twenty people towards this "exclusive club."
In short, the club is called "Kleopatrat" and is literally based in Skofja Loka: a brothel. I'm drunk as the muck of the Naviglio Grande and lose sight of the singer, I still can't remember the name, I have to look it up on the website, an Ukrainian approaches me and asks what I want to do... I spend the evening listening to her talking about her son, left at home, and I don't know what happened to the others... or how to get back to the hotel. I pay for the drinks at the counter and fetch Dragan (Giovanni) pleading him to help me... Dawn is near and the taste in my mouth is disgusting: perfectly Devastations, but it was one of the reasons I stopped drinking.
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