We're excited to start this blogging-thing! Here, we will once a week share a little bit of our lives, talk about creative processes, fun stories we've collected during our adventures in the 6 countries we've lived in, philosophic stuff, background of songs, band history and anything else we fancy talking about! And we'll regularly feature interviews with friends we picked up along the way - other musicians, tattooists, family...
Today, we'll start with a bit of a trip down memory lane, to the very beginnings of the Lürxx...
SPEED (from left to right): Sabú, Toni, Urs, Xavi
We had been playing in a band called SPEED for about two years which had released one single on a British independent label and it had always been the plan to pack up and move to London, UK, once we both turned 18. Xavi dropped out of school at 17 and started working odd jobs to save up some money for the move, and once Sabú finally had turned 18 in August 1995, we headed to the bright lights of London. The whole endeavour was unfortunately ill-fated and had "wrong place, wrong time" written all over it! SPEED and its blend of what we called "rhythm'n'modpunkblues" actually would have fit in quite nicely with the burgeoning Brit Pop scene. We did kinda have a Supergrass-infused-with-Sex Pistols-type sound. BUT... we had been into the 60s, the mod-revival and the late 70s power pop stuff way before Brit Pop made that all mainstream. As soon as it became mainstream, we lost interest. And we were just musically transitioning into more of a hard/heavy rock direction, influenced by bands like Guns'n'Roses, Motörhead, early Crüe, Nirvana and Amorphis. And that was a sound that absolutely no-one in the hipster city of London was interested in!! Not a chance. Not only didn't we manage to create any interest in our music, we didn't even manage to find a drummer... We were living in this dingy bedsit in Shepherd's Bush with a shower and a washbasin in a corner of the room which was otherwise taken up by a double bed and a dresser and that was it. It was damp (obviously! the shower didn't help!) and probably cold, but we were usually too drunk to notice much of that.
Sabú (then "Syff") and Xavi (then "Izzy") outside their bedsit in Stowe Road, Shepherd's Bush
We spent our days walking through London as sandwich men, looking for a drummer (the placards read "If you're a drummer - talk to us!"), drinking very cheap, very disgusting liquor, and writing and rehearsing new songs, like RIP and Wintergod's Slave. We also came up with the band name "Black Lürxx" around this time, the umlaut "ü" and the double-x were nods to our hero Nikki Sixx... After a couple of months we realised that we weren't going to get anywhere in London. It was a soul-crushing realisation, because that move to London was supposed to be an absolute dream-come-true! Turned out more like a nightmare, though. In January 1996, we packed up our meagre belongings and temporarily moved back to where we had come from. We couldn't afford a flat, so we (illegally) lived in our rehearsal room ("The Black Room") with no heating and only cold running water (January-March - ugh!).
Xavi on the mattress we shared in the Black Room. Notice the attempts at insulation...
In our heads, we formed an idea of what to do next: We would do what our heroes had done!! We would move to Hollywood! We had no idea about the state of the rock scene there at that moment in time, we had no idea about anything, really. And this was 1996, so we couldn't just google it. We bought a Los Angeles travel guide and listened to "Danger" and "Welcome to the Jungle". We absorbed G'n'R and Mötley Crüe interviews and biographies. And that was it. That was all we knew about L.A. ... We spent two months selling as much of our stuff as we could and finally - after borrowing some money from one of Sabú's rich friends! - bought two tickets to L.A.! And in early March 1996 we finally arrived in California. With our instruments, a rucksack, $1000, a tourist visa and absolutely no clue... That first morning, we thought we could walk from LAX to Hollywood. We also thought that Hollywood was by the beach. Yeah.
This is what we looked like when we immigrated... It's remarkable that they let us into the country...