The boys, France, The Gossip, famous French women, and Kate Moss’s skinny ass. All in a day for Bob Husak.

All right, before I continue down the path of mind-numbing recaps, let me put down a few words about the bands we were touring with in France. The openers were a talented British pop/rock act called Pete and the Pirates who were great guys all, and I believe we felt a certain kinship with them since we were both new to this sort of tour. They tended to hang in there partying as long as possible. After us on the bill came The Kills, who had their own bus. They were both very nice and they tended to keep a relatively low profile. The headliners were none other than Olympia’s own The Gossip, who were very over in France. Beth Ditto was great and highly extroverted, and the other two plus crew were swell folks also. Their drummer was excellent and was quite a sight to behold at sound check. Anyway, the first show at Le Bikini in Toulouse was a thrill. The French fans are very loud and supportive. It was a great feeling walking out in front of 2,000 screaming fans every night and playing our set. One last word on Le Bikini: The owner and his staff are quite the cooks, and they provided us with an incredible steak dinner, along with non stop fine wine. We felt like royalty. I also want to note here that aside from Paris, every hotel room we stayed in was smaller than anything you’ll find in the States, with tiny cot-sized beds.

We had a picturesque drive the next day through the South of France (we even got a brief look at the Mediterranean) on our way to the large industrial city of Lyon for the second show. The venue here was big but less impressive overall than Le Bikini. The catering was also less lavish, but still damn good. We did an interview in our dressing room with a couple guys for a webzine and then made the mistake of napping before our set. So we went onstage feeling a little groggy and we played a shorter set than usual but I believe we pulled it off and still managed a solid performance. The next morning we left early for another long drive back to Paris. When we were in the city negotiating traffic, PIAS kept calling Lars and telling him we were late for an important video interview they had scheduled. He got a little pissed, and when Snow jokingly mentioned that we might be looking for a new tour manager Lars testily shot back, “Good. Fire me.” Man, that was funny. When we finally reached the PIAS offices Garnet and Snow did the interview with a music channel called Virgin 17 (they only had mics for two people and I had to use the bathroom). Afterwards we made our way to a FNAC music store (kind of a cooler French equivalent of Best Buy) to sound check for an in-store performance. They already had a backline set up, so we were in and out of there quickly. We then made our way over to the evening’s venue, the Olympia, which, as anyone in France will tell you, is legendary. Everyone from the Beatles to the Beach Boys to Jimi Hendrix to the New York Dolls have played there. The room was indeed very impressive, and Canal + had built a very cool set onstage because they were filming the evening’s performances for a TV special about the tour. After sound check, Joe le Taxi whisked us back over to FNAC where we played a short five song set for a nice crowd of fans. The Kills were also present for an autograph session. Directly after the set we went back over to the Olympia (ed. pictured above) and waited around. Before our show we were interviewed in the backstage bar(!) for Canal + by a beautiful woman named Emma (ed. de Caunes, pictured above) who we found out later is a very famous French actress. The always-entertaining Pat had come over all the way from London and she gave us the business. Anyway, we went out and put on a great show. Oh yeah, also lurking backstage, I should mention, was none other than Kate Moss, who is dating Jamie Hotel of The Kills. She seems pretty spirited. Everyone was fairly sauced by the end of the show and we all climbed into cabs and went over to a posh club where The Gossip were doing a DJ set. G & S were looking a little out of it after awhile and Pat put us in a taxi. Unfortunately the driver took us to the wrong hotel but we got it figured out despite our drunken condition.

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