“Me shoes?”
“Yes, Tummy, your shoes. They’re standing right in front of me, and you’re not in them.”
The story that I was trying not to tell Michael was this: I had been lying in bed some time after midnight when Michael was already sleeping, and I was sexting back and forth with Momoko. Our conversation eventually got me so horny that I asked her if it would be okay if I came up to her room. Her reply was, “I thought you never ask.” So I put on me hotel bathrobe and me hotel slippers and snuck out of the room to meet up with Momoko.
“Err ... yeah. You see, Michael, I’m wearing me hotel slippers. I’m actually still in the hotel. Walking. It’s quite a big hotel you know? Lots of floors. Very fluffy carpet too.”
“Right,” Michael said, and I could hear him rolling his eyes. “Listen, Tummy, I think you better come back here now and get packed. Our flight leaves in three hours.”
“What are you talking about?” I checked me watch. “Tholen said our flight leaves at eleven, not at seven.”
“His flight leaves at eleven all right,” he said. “But ours leaves at seven. We’ve decided to extend out European tour a little bit.”
“Oh yeah? Where are we going?”
“Have you ever been to Rome?”
* * *
Have I ever been to Rome, are you kidding me?
L-O-bloody-L!
Me mum had been dragging me and me family to Rome for Easter every single year since I was born, and sometimes even for Christmas. She was a Catholic fangirl if there ever was one, and her idol was whoever was pope at the time. She had a poster of him hanging over her bed, I’m not even kidding. I wish I was. So yes, I’d been to Rome before. I knew every fountain, every tourist landmark, and every single street inside the Vatican. Apart from me hometown, there was no place in the world that I’de spent more time of me life in. I could even order food in Italian. Una pizza capricciosa e una Coca Cola per favore. See? I was basically half Italian.
So yeah, we were going to Rome. Michael had been monitoring the media fallout after our Brandenburg Concerto, and back home they’d already started slaughtering us, with some news websites cleverly calling our latest escapade
Brandenburg Gate-gate
, so the guys had decided to let Tholen deal with the media at home on his own while we stayed out of the limelight for a day or two. We could have stayed in Berlin, but for some reason Julian wanted to go to Rome. Unlike me he’d never been to Rome before, and he was sort of intrigued by all the media hype that surrounded the ongoing papal election. He wanted to go and see for himself what it was like. He almost reminded me of me mum in that respect, which was a bit eerie, but there was nothing anybody could do about it. If Julian wanted something, then he wanted it. And since we had tons of cash from all the music we had sold through our website, we were actually in a position to do something crazy like that. Just go to the airport and spontaneously board a plane to Rome. Business class.
Our flight to Rome was scheduled to leave at 7:15 in the morning. We were sitting in row seven, surrounded by men in grey suits reading the
Wall Street Journal
, when at 7:23 the pilot’s voice came through the intercom, telling us that our departure was delayed for a few minutes because we were still waiting for three passengers who had checked in but weren’t on board yet. There was some moaning and groaning among the other passengers. Nobody likes it when their flight is delayed because a couple of idiots can’t make it to the aircraft by the time they were bloody told. A minute or two later we heard steps hurriedly coming down the boarding bridge. From the sound of it, it had to be a lady in very high heels and two guys wearing sneakers with rubber soles. And before I even saw the lady, I heard her apologizing to the cabin crew, who were waiting by the open cabin door, in that funny mix of English and Japanese.
“So sorry! Honto ni gomen nasai! Omatase shimashita.”
Then Momoko’s face appeared, followed by Cameraron and Audiomike, and she kept bowing and apologizing to everybody, the cabin crew, the pilot and co-pilot whom she could see through the open cockpit door, and to all the men in grey suits reading their
Wall Street Journal
. And as they passed us on their way to the back of the aircraft, she waved at us with both her hands and with that big smile on her face.
“Oh, herro! Ohayo gozaimasu!”
As they went on down the aisle towards the economy class, Michael, Julian, and Ginger looked at each other and at me.
“What the hell is she doing here?” Ginger asked.
I felt blood rushing to me face, and I started sweating. When I had told Momoko that we were going to Rome, I had no idea that she would follow us. Or was she just following me? Anyway, of course I couldn’t tell the others that I’d been the one to tell her about what was supposed to be a secret trip to Rome, because then I would have had to explain what I’d been doing in Momoko’s hotel room at 4 in the morning. So I just said, “I think she’s going to Rome.”
I know, it was a rather stupid thing to say on board a flight to Rome, but I really couldn’t come up with anything better. Ginger opened her mouth to let me know what a stupid remark that must have been, but she was cut short by Julian.
“I told her,” he said.
“What? Why?”
“So she can report on our flash mob concert at the Colosseum.”
Oh, so we were going to have a flash mob concert at the Colosseum. That was kind of interesting news to me, but for the moment I was relieved that Ginger stopped asking questions because Julian’ explanation seemed to make sense to her.
“Oh, okay,” she said and leaned back in her seat. She went back to reading her book, Michael continued punching keys on his laptop, and Julian ... Julian stared at me with a weird and almost undetectable smile on his face, as if he wanted to say, ‘I know what you did last night.’
And this is exactly what freaked me out about Julian sometimes. He always seemed so inconspicuous, but he really wasn’t. He never said anything, and so many people thought he didn’t have anything to say, but the truth was he always kept his eyes and ears open. He knew everything, and he had an opinion on everything. He just didn’t share that opinion indiscriminately unless it was necessary or unless it served his purpose. His quietness was what made people underestimate him. He didn’t seem like a threat at first glance, so people just didn’t pay attention. Julian was like a Trojan horse. He seemed so nice and innocent, and he looked so pretty, but then at night he opened his belly and the soldiers came out and they destroyed your city or toppled your government.
Knowledge is power, and Julian knew a lot. Which, I suppose, is why some people started to think of him as dangerous. I meself briefly considered killing him in order to protect me relationship with Momoko. But of course I didn’t do that. It’s just one of the thoughts that cross your mind when somebody finds out that you’ve done something illegal, something that could get you in really big trouble. You either have to kill them or be really
really
nice to them for the rest of your life. I decided to be really really nice to Julian, because I knew he had no reason to expose me relationship with Momoko, and I didn’t intend to give him any reason. So I just pretended that nothing was wrong. Maybe I should have talked to him. You know, a little conversation in private to clear things up. But there really was no opportunity to talk to him alone. Somebody was always around, and things got more and more hectic by the minute.
Well, that’s life as a rock star, I suppose.
The Gospel According to Michael – 9
Rome was the first large-scale test for MINDY. The task: organize a flash mob of 500 people in front of the Colosseum for a secret surprise Puerity mini concert without anybody noticing, apart from the 500 of course. In order to do that we recorded a 15-second promotion video with the Colosseum in the background in which we said, “Hi, we’re Puerity. We’ll be playing a mini concert for you and your friends at 6 p.m. at the Colosseum today. Please come and see us.”
I had MINDY send that video to everyone who had at one point or another visited our website or our YouTube channel, or who followed us on Twitter, or who had bought one of our songs on iTunes, and who was within a five-mile radius of the Colosseum one hour before the concert,
and
who was 20 years or younger. Most of our fans were teenagers anyway, but we couldn’t rule out the possibility that the police chief of Rome or some civil servant or any other authoritative figure had visited our website or our YouTube channel before. We didn’t want to give them the heads up and the opportunity to shut us down before we even started, so MINDY filtered them out and sent our invitation to the under 20-year-olds only, while our fans who were not in Rome were only notified of a concert live stream without being told where that concert would take place.
What can I say, it worked like a charm.
There was a patch of lawn on the Piazza del Colosseo, right between the Via dei Fori Imperiali and the Arch of Constantine. That’s where we decided to set up camp. After we had recorded and uploaded our little promotion video, we had about an hour to kill before our gig was supposed to start. Julian and Ginger decided to take a tour of the Colosseum while Tummy and I stayed behind on the piazza to guard our belongings. We had brought our travel PA system which was no bigger than a large suitcase. Then there were Julian’s and Tummy’s guitars and Ginger’s keyboard, all wrapped up in their bags. Nobody took any notice of us, because we really just looked like a bunch of backpackers who took a little break from sightseeing to enjoy the magnificent view of the Colosseum in Rome’s late afternoon sun.
The piazza was fairly crowded the whole time, buzzing with a Babel of languages created by hundreds of American, French, German, and Japanese tourists, but at around a quarter to six the crowd began to turn considerably younger, more Italian, and more female. Ever growing little clusters of fans moved slowly and aimlessly across the piazza, looking for our non-existent stage and checking their mobiles to see if we had provided any more information. Julian and Ginger joined us again, and team Momoko was hovering nearby, filming unpretentious shots of those four inconspicuous young backpackers among the crowd. We finally unpacked our instruments and plugged them into the PA. It took us less than two minutes, including a quick sound check that I conducted from my laptop computer which also contained pre-recorded drum tracks because I obviously hadn’t brought my full drum kit to Rome. As soon as the first sounds emerged from the PA, the crowd coagulated into excitedly giggling and shouting teenage fangirls surrounded by confused tourists who looked on in wild bemusement. Julian put the microphone stand in front of him. He turned around and looked at each of us. We all nodded to signal that we were ready to go. Then, at the strike of six o’clock, Julian faced the crowd, put on his endearing smile and said, “Ciao Roma!”
The fans went wild. We now know that it’s what they always do whenever Julian does anything, even if it’s something as trivial as blowing his pointy little nose. But back then all this was still pretty new to us, and standing in front of a screaming crowd sent shivers of excitement through our bodies. If you look at the footage you can see the big fat grins on all our faces. We enjoyed this tremendously. We were high on adrenaline. Just a few weeks earlier we had been just a bunch of school kids who enjoyed jamming away in my basement, with no real ambition to become famous or anything. Now we were able to summon a 500-strong crowd of screaming fans at an hour’s notice in the capital of a foreign country. It gave us a feeling of accomplishment and of power. We thought we could do anything. Anything at all.
We played a total of four songs that afternoon:
Rome
,
Original Sin
,
Last Supper
, and
White Smoke
. There was an obvious pattern there. Being so close to the heart of Christianity, Julian thought it would be a good idea to pander to the local crowd. Personally, I think the fans at the Colosseum would have enjoyed our mini concert just as much if we had played a set of completely different songs with no religious references at all, but in hindsight I have to admit that the impact this concert had on what was going to happen in the next couple of weeks would have been nowhere near as big.
Since my drum tracks were pre-recorded, I didn’t have to perform with the others, so I had time to film the gig with my mobile phone camera. I streamed the video live on our YouTube channel. At the beginning of the concert we had some 8,000 live viewers from all over the world. At the end of the concert they were over 50,000. Another five million watched the video within a week, but even that was nothing compared to the second video we were about to shoot that day, and that one wasn’t even planned.
We were almost through with our final song,
White Smoke
, when a police car with blinking blue lights and blaring sirens made a right turn from the Via dei Fori Imperiali into the Piazza del Colosseo and came to a screeching halt right behind our little makeshift stage. Ginger turned her head just as two policemen got out of the car and came walking towards us. She looked at me with her eyes wide open and a panic-stricken look on her face that unmistakeably asked,
What the hell are we going to do now?
I shook my head ever so slightly, signalling her that we weren’t going to do anything, although, to be fair, she may very well have mistaken that for
I haven’t got a clue
. Julian and Tummy didn’t even notice that something was going on behind them. Tummy was completely entranced by the 500 screaming girls in front of him, and Julian ... well, Julian was in his element. He was so absorbed in his own performance, the whole city of Rome could have gone up in flames around him and he wouldn’t even have noticed. It wasn’t until the music stopped when the policemen had found the off switch of our PA, and the fans started booing, that Julian finally realized that something was going on and he stopped singing.