Keeping Some Dark Secrets

As you should know by now, Johnny Foreigner are currently touring around Europe supporting Sky Larkin and we have a number of updates for you. Two blogs on Johnny Foreigner’s myspace recount the tour so far, and they can be found here (Johnny Europa) and here (part 2, the Germanic States). Those long-term fans will recall that on Johnny Foreigner’s previous European tour the band lost their passports in Amsterdam and struggled to leave, only being saved by their picture in a copy of NME, however this time they struggled to even get to their first date at the Paradiso after their bus broke down before they’d even left the country.

However, it was fortunate that they did manage to get to the Paradiso, as the band played a blinding show which the good people at FabChannel recorded, and is now available online and can be seen on their website. Our speculation was proved correct, with 2 of the 3 titles we cited being played during the set. The band opens with Graces/Feels Like Summer; Graces being a 34second-long calm intro which manages to include the lyric “trade heartbreak for sentiment to pay the rent” which was given as a potential tagline for “Shotgun Not!”, the fictional Johnny Foreigner movie back in an earlier interview, before launching into the tyrade of Feels Like Summer, a more familiar track which the band opened a number of dates on their winter tour with The Futureheads with. What happens with the instrumental track that was played on some of their dates, such as that at London Astoria, and now seems to have been replaced by Graces, remains to be seen.The more renowned Yes! You Talk Too Fast follows, and other classics Eyes Wide Terrified and Cranes and Cranes and Cranes and Cranes also feature. To the writer’s great pleasure, Absolute Balance makes a return to close the set after Yr All Just Jealous, a song that we don’t think has been played since the summer festival season.

Custom Scenes And The Parties That Make Them is an upbeat track which seems to reflect on the time the band’s spent in New York City, with the even-more frantic Kingston Called, They Want Their Lost Youth Back being less secretive, revealing its provenance not only in the title but in the gap between songs where Alexei likens Kingston, (the source of this fantastic live performance from New Slang) as “the new Birmingham.” This is followed by Temp Promenade…did I just hear them shout “war economy” or are my ears playing tricks on me? As someone whose never seen the Los Campesinos similiarity other than between Heart Swells/Pacific Daylight Time and Sword, Buried, I’ll blame it on my ears. Either way, the result is a good one and hopefuly the new tracks resemble those to come.

A number of our Continental-European friends have also been posting a selection of photos, reviews and interviews with the band, and they can be found at the links below. If anyone would like to translate the articles better than we (with the help of babelfish) can, then we’d love to hear from you. From what we can make out of this interview, revenge and despair are the emotions which describe Johnny Foreigner’s music (a fair analysis, but who are we to judge that anyway?), album 2 (can it have a name soon please?) will sound more like an album, and also more like the live sound than Waited Up Til It Was Light’s polished greatest hits collection (which may or may not be given a European release), they’d like to tour with The Smashing Pumpkins or Broken Social Scene and there’ll be a headlining tour once they’re back in England. We can’t wait.

Photos from Paris - Soundofviolence.net

Review of Paris show (French) - Converse or Not Converse

Interview (German) - WhiteTapes.de

Review of Cologne show (German) - WhiteTapes.de

Filed under: Johnny Foreigner by Jay