cool cats singing in the night

It was last year, round about this time of year. I was living in London and so was, until the next morning, a wonderful Indonesian friend. We spent her last evening together, drinking coffee, wandering the cold streets of London, drinking hot chocolate and taking photos of her and river and us and the skyline along the river and talking, talking, talking.

While we were walking along the Jubilee walkway (that bit between Westminster Bridge and the Southbank Centre), I heard some music from up ahead that I really liked. I love street music and this sounded like a lot of fun. As we got nearer, all I could see though was a small CD player and a girl walking and dancing in front of it. We slowed down and looked and she approached us and asked if we liked the music and we said we liked it very much. She gave me a CD in a paper envelope, on which she’d handwritten a date and location and the name of the band she was blasting into the cold London night.

It was called Katzenjammer and she told us that she was ‘just’ a fan, doing this promotion by herself because she loved the band so much and not enough people knew about it – that’s some serious fan points in my book! Anyway, for some stupid reason that I cannot remember, I didn’t manage to go to the concert, even though I had really planned to go. And so I forgot about Katzenjammer.

Just last night, I was zapping through the TV channels after watching two really old episodes of Monk. I came across a concert that happened this summer at a big festival in Germany and I really liked the music and the look of the girls – so pretty and spunky and confident and feisty and funny. And that’s pretty much what the music sounded like as well. I quickly looked up the concert in the TV guide and – as you will probably have guessed by now – it was Katzenjammer.

They’re from Norway, and they’re an all-girls band who play about twenty instruments between them and the music sounds like a delicious, sweet and tangy and slightly naughty cocktail of rock, circus music, folk, the music of the better class of cabaret, with a good dose of ska rhythms thrown in, sprinkled with scenes from a French café and the last stand in at Mexican fort. I know,  that’s a crazy mixture! But it works. It definitely works. I’ll even prove it to you.

Understand what I mean?

P.S. I’m not sure what “Katzenjammer” exactly means in Norwegian, but I suppose it’s very close to what it means in German, which would be either, literally, ‘cats’ wailing’ (probably closely related to ‘caterwaul’) or, in the figurative sense, ‘hangover’. 🙂

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