To us musicians, Vega is the Promised Land. It is the Queen of Music Venues, the ultimate approval of the efforts of the practice room, or the attempt of foreign bands at venturing out internationally. VEGA is the place where you heard them the first time: Coldplay, Placebo, and more recently Daughter. VEGA is long queues of suspiciously squeaky clean teenagers on a Wednesday evening where you hurry home to check who’s playing, only to find out that it is some – to us of a dignified age – complete unknown but just as squeaky clean a teenager.
VEGA is the place where all the black-clad, scull decorated Fernet gargling locals sit and wait on getting properly pummelled by Hank Williams III. VEGA is my local venue, and even when it is cold we cycle there in T-shirts to avoid the cloakroom queues. This is where opening acts that you perhaps had wanted to check out, but just had not quite managed to get to as you met Jake and Dellefar (Lapdog Dad) at McKluud (http://www.mckluud.dk/).
VEGA is the place where Daisy (author’s wife) by chance had a lengthy talk with David Bowie.
VEGA is standing in the concert hall waiting while technicians fix obscure stuff on stage and I then skip to the bar area to fetch beer and hope I can find Daisy again on my return to the hall.
When our local haunt is packed at 6 PM on a Thursday, you can rest assured that it is due to VEGA guests meeting in groups, surely as excited as kids but trying to pretend that they are skeptical because of the latest record, and we are sitting at our table trying to guess which kind of music they will be hearing, before we actually ask them.
To me, VEGA is cycling there after the sound test. I park my bicycle by Lagkagehuset (a baker’s shop) to avoid it getting buried later among the audience’s mountains of bicycles. I walk through the elevator, greet the woman who is on duty and who has always been extremely kind and walk on to meet the others. Even though you have played loads of club gigs, it is still with some sort of devoutness that you arrive at VEGA. It is still bleeding VEGA!
And there we have Leigh Pearce, the chef of all chefs, welcoming me and asking if Daisy will be coming and if we are ready for his mushroom risotto, and the draught beer dispenser is tempting me while friends are popping by, and you can have all the skill you care to muster but this is different as this is your home ground, this is your Vesterbro (Copenhagen neighbourhood), and this is your VEGA.
Then, you are due on stage, the last visit to the old terrazzo clad toilet, while scaling the steps up and into the darkness, hearing the sound of the audience chatting in the concert hall, the music the engineer plays on the sound system as our backliner smiles at us with his arms crossed and his eyes asks “Yeah? Are you ready?” You steel a glimpse of the audience on the hall floor and f**k, it can fit a sea of people, it’s insane, our manager tells us “30 seconds”. Rasmus rubs his cold hands and says true to tradition “This can only go horribly wrong,” and then you’re at it, playing at the world’s most spectacular concert hall, shrouded in distinguished geometry, made of fine wood, truly beautiful and full of memories and greatness.
VEGA is also Lille VEGA (Small VEGA) where I have gotten lost three times in what seems like an Alice in Wonderland universe of altering hallways, staircases, mezzanines and storerooms. You are basically trapped in a scene from Spinal Tap.
