Hi, I'm Nancy Whang, and I play in the bands
LCD Soundsystem and The Juan MacLean.
I have a story from tour.
♪♪
This story is from one of the early days of LCD,
one of our first tours.
I think, like, even in our best circumstances,
we were still pretty shambolic.
It was always a little kind of rickety and a little punk.
The thing that we had going for us most
was that we were fucking loud.
No matter what happened, like, we could just, like,
tear people's faces off with just sound.
[ Man screams ]
We were five people on stage.
There was me and James, and then Phil Mossman played guitar,
and then Tyler Pope was on bass.
Pat Mahoney, who plays drums in LCD usually,
but this particular tour,
he couldn't come with us,
so we had our friend Jerry
come and fill in for us.
Jerry was maybe the greatest drummer that ever lived.
He played like a machine.
All that tension that was in him would just kind of,
like, slowly get released when he played.
♪♪
We were doing a tour in Europe, and our first show was in Ibiza.
We used to fly with all of our gear.
We land in Ibiza, and nothing shows up.
We have nothing.
There was, like, a mix between panic and resignation.
I guess, luckily, James had his percussion with him,
but I didn't have any of my stuff at all.
We'd have to try and scramble to find all this stuff
that we need, and, of course, like,
we play, like, weird, old analogue synthesizers.
Trying to find, like, an old Casio
was just, like, impossible.
We're playing at this club called Space,
which is a gigantic super club
and the people who run are really nice.
They've been there forever, and, like, their main gig is,
like, they do, like, a live sex show.
So, like, the owner and his wife, like,
they're on stage fucking,
and that's the show... in the main room,
the main attraction, the headlining act.
There's, like, a huge stage on one end.
There's, like, palm trees and neon lights and balloons
and pyrotechnics and stuff,
but then the room that we played, off to the side,
was this black, empty box.
We go to our sound check, and the best that we could do,
for my stuff anyway, was this Korg Triton,
which is this massive workstation
that is just filled with horrible sounds,
like, trance sounds and all that.
I'm looking at this thing, and I'm, like,
trying to program it, and it's just --
I have no idea what to do.
So, we're all, like, kind of freaking out a little bit.
This was Jerry's very first show with us,
so he was super nervous,
and we were so freaked out about the show
that we just needed to get as drunk as possible
as quickly as possible.
This is also the night that James invented the Irish Cunt,
which is his cocktail.
He emptied out a water bottle and poured champagne halfway
and then filled the other half with Jameson,
and then he proceeded to just drink this,
like, sports bottle from,
like, the squeezy spout to just, like,
drinking it like it was Gatorade or something like that.
It was time for us to play, and there's about 30 people in there
because, you know, like,
nobody knows who we are or gives a shit.
All the people in there, I think, kind of just ended up,
like, in their drugged-out haze,
just sort of, like, wandered through the doorway
and found themselves in our room,
and they couldn't figure out how to get out.
♪♪
I remember it was really funny, though,
because every time I hit a key on the keyboard,
some crazy, obnoxious sound came out
that didn't sound anything like it was supposed to,
just really cheesy kind of, like, '90s R&B synth sounds
or, like, your basic trance sounds.
♪♪
At some point, we're playing a song,
and, like, there's this weird random percussion happening,
and we're like, "What is that?"
We finally realized. We look down.
There's a guy in front of Jerry, like, playing congos,
like, on one of the synth drums that's just like
[imitating congas]
And meanwhile, Jerry is drumming and trying to get him off him,
so he's just, like, playing like this and, like,
trying to whack him off the drums.
[ Man screams ]
So, we get through the show.
I don't really remember what it was like
because we were all just blackout.
You know we, like, break down the show,
and then we just, like, proceed to, like,
continue partying.
The next room after us, too many DJs were playing,
and, you know, the room is packed.
There's some guy, like, shows up,
and he starts playing saxophone.
The party is like kind of usual characters
come out and, like, just dance.
There's, like, a little person and, like, giant drag queens,
and it's crazy.
So, meanwhile, we're still in the other room, like,
drunkenly trying to pack up our gear,
and, like, James, he's just standing there
on the floor cross-legged and just, like, bleary-eyed
trying to put all this stuff together.
And at one point, he just, like, kind of sits up
and, like, turns behind him,
and there's, like a curtain behind the stage.
He pulls the curtain aside and just, like, proceeds
to just puke his guts out,
and he thinks that there's going to be,
like, a drop-off behind the curtain,
but it's just a brick wall.
Then he finishes, and he finishes, like,
putting the gear back together.
We end up, like, staying out until, like,
the dawn hours of the morning.
So, the rest of the tour, like, our -- We never got our gear.
Our gear just kept chasing us around Europe,
and we never ended up playing with our own gear.
That run was only maybe, like, six or seven shows
or something that he played with us.
At the end of that run, Jerry was really sad to leave us.
He was so bummed out, and, you know,
he didn't really want to let on.
You know, we were having such a good time with him,
and we didn't really want him to go,
so we just told him to stay.
So, he just stayed with us, and when Pat came back, 00:06:03.989,00:00:00.000 he was just, like, our, you know, our tour buddy.