
My sister came to tour through Europe. For those of you who I haven't mentioned this to so many times you want to stuff cotton in your ears my sister is Amanda Palmer and she has a job as a rock star. Being the sister of someone whose job it is to be widely adored is a uniquely advantageous position, one that finds most of the lovely trappings without having to do any of the actual work. A fine example of this fact is the past week.
Amanda arrives in Amsterdam for a show in the middle of the European tour exhausted. The ashcloud had grounded her flight in, sadly, Iceland, and then forced upon her several ferries over the North Channel involving many sick bags. She has professed her disgust for the whole event by showing up in a tshirt loudly stating "F*CK THE ASHCLOUD". She is not very shy, my little sister. For her troubles she did, however, command an impressive headline in the Boston Globe which read something like, "Amanda Palmer Late, Still has Twitter Access". I'm still shaking my head.
Holly Gaiman has also arrived from London to work the merch table.

Holly is the daughter of Amanda's fiancee, Neil Gaiman, a very nice man who writes for a living. I have felt very protective towards his daughter ever since I went to rescue her from a date in a London club my sister had auctioned her off on for $750.
The show in Amsterdam is a Wednesday night at the Melkweg, a club found on one of the city's many incredibly narrow streets across from a police station. The driver of the band's van celebrates this setting by smashing into the side of a police car parked on the street and breaking off the mirror. Apparently this happens all the time, and they are all released in time for sound check. The show begins with more of a musical theater act consisting of conjoined twins named Evelyn and Evelyn, the other twin being played by Amanda's sidekick for the tour, Jason Webley.

A lovely shadow puppet story explains the background of the twins and involves a murderous physician and a truckload of chickens.

Speaking of the next day, my sister had asked if I would like to get on the van with them and drive to their next show in Hamburg and then onto Berlin for the weekend, where I already had a train ticket booked. I said no, I had to work, be a respectable citizen, excuses that led her to spit out that I needed much more rock and roll in my life.

But first Berlin. It's Queensday in Holland as I take leave, much to my delight since this holiday turns the country into the equivalent of Bourbon Street on Mardi Gras except even worse because it's raining and everyone is wearing orange. Five hours of pleasant slack jawed window staring later I'm at the Berlin train station. This is another of the brilliant things about Europe, the trains.

Berlin is a very cool city. It has all of the magnificent grand old buildings that are found in most major European cities, but is also permeated with a more recent and fascinating history that can make the antiquity seem somewhat irrelevant.

Amanda celebrates her birthday with true gusto and aplomb, the result of which is the necessity of a large blue bucket being present next to her on the stage the following night.

It is therefore no surprise that when we meet up in Prague the next week she announces to me that she's quitting her job (this is something she assures me that she says at the end of every tour).


Prague is a very beautiful city that like many other Eastern European cities maintains an eerie juxtaposition of lavish old empires frozen in time by the Iron Curtain. Like every American in her 20's I backpacked through Prague years ago, and was happy to find that the relative inexpensiveness of the city still held true. However so did the taxi scams, one of which attempted to charge me the equivalent of over €60 for a 3km fare. Only by threatening to call out my hotel concierge (in my experience, the only ones actually concerned about you getting ripped off and having a bad stay) did the driver let me out of the cab for a quarter the fare and not take me to the police station or nearest ATM, as he was threatening. Which leaves me wanting the share the following advice, when in Prague, use the metro.

Now is when it really starts to get fun.
I arrive backstage. Backstage, unless you were with Guns and Roses in the mid 80's, is usually a place best avoided. The crew is either running around cursing under their breath because they've misplaced the hex wrench or can't fit everyone on the guest list or trying locate the one corner of the room that has decent enough wifi to skype their girlfriend and where the hell is their laptop anyway. You do not want to be in their way.

Amanda first has to entertain 3 televised interviews in a row, including Czech MTV. As far as I can tell they all ask the exact same questions, but then again I'm helping myself to the cheese plate and miss most of it. Adrian Stout of the Tiger Lillies shows up, the self professed "World's most foremost Death Oompah band", who I remember as the only band at the Fringe Festival to feature a song about hamster buggery. They are, in short, a band worth getting to know.

As this Prague show is a last minute add-on, they do rock star sets instead of the more theatrical Evelyn and Evelyn, which is fine because it means more rowdy people can be packed in without the chairs lining the floor. Gaba Kulka who's down from Warsaw opens, then Jason plays. To me he's a bit like Tom Waits with a few of Ian Curtis's seizures thrown in. One of those, "I just smoked a pack of Camel straights with a quart of JD and I can't wait to do the same thing after lunch.." voices.

But truly great songs.
Amanda is in fine form, covers Billie Jean, has Adrian on stage to play the musical saw (with a violin bow) to the Tiger Lillies "Flying Robert",

and celebrates her tour manager's birthday with a sparkling cake followed by letting him sing "I Love How You Love Me" to send through youtube back to his boyfriend in Seattle who he still hasn't been able to skype.




The next day is drizzly so I take in the lovely Uměleckoprůmyslové Museum, which I think is Czech for "little old gorgeous things that look like a pain to polish". Lunch is at Ariana, a small Afghan restaurant that 13 of us literally crash like downloading every google map at once.

Great week.

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