Madame Moustache

The other night, I went to see some friends play at a venue in Brussels called Madame Moustache. The venue itself came as a surprise, a gem in the middle of the fish district in Brussels, that is: a little door lost in the middle of lobster restaurants, fish retailers, fish market stands, fried fish, fresh fish, fish fish.
Entering Madame Moustache is a little bit like going to Disneyland, the corridor is Moresque, a first room on the left is Mexican-ish, the bar is dressed like it’s Bastille day, another little room has a 50s milkshake sort of feeling, which might explain why it never seems to be particularly populated. The main room has a giant cardboard looking caravan painted in the most intense colours on the left and further back, the stage which has a little burlesque twist with its red velvet drape of a proscenium.
Strangely enough, that evening, it seemed like all of Brussels had ended up at Madame Moustache for all sorts of cryptic, drunk or random reasons. We hung out with the band drinking beer and chatting while another one was performing on stage. The music was excellent which put us all in great spirits. I constantly bumped into people I knew or had already met and I suddenly felt like I was living in a small village. I suppose that may also mean I’m officially ‘back in the old country’. My friends band eventually got on stage, so we all crowded upfront holding tight on our beers while snaking through the crowd. We were a couple girls on the front row, one of which, Anne, the guitarist’s girlfriend and of course, the founder of Indigeste (see prior blog entries) had had to bring her mother to the concert. Her mother was visiting from Paris and kept taking pictures of the band with some digital zoom monster of sorts. Anne kept yelling at her : "Who cares about taking pictures! You have to listen to the music mom! Just listen to it!" Anne was drunk, her mother too so I shifted towards Vero and Steph who had a slightly more relaxed vibe going on. We sang along the lyrics and I kept feeding Nico, the singer, with well-deserved beer throughout the concert.
By the time the last song had ended, the place was so crowded we could hardly move. After trying to have a good time in the space, we ended up having to migrate to the backroom. To access it, we had to walk up a number of flights of stairs in pitch darkness, then we ended up in some huge room lit by electric chandeliers, the bulbs of which tinted the space with a dusty dirty yellow light. The room’s architecture pointed at a Medieval Flemish style home, the first encounter with reality since the entrance of Madame Moustache. A couple of people were lounging already, constellations of bottles of gin and beer spread out on office like tables. A chap was cutting a line of blow in a corner for a friend.
I suddenly measured the amount of alcohol consumed in the evening and realized I needed to sleep, or at least sit down for a moment. I made myself comfortable on a pile of pillows while chatting with Vero about her last shag. Eventually Anne reappeared after having dumped her mother in a taxi and started the typical French monolog about weight, that is: an anorexic looking girl with a tiny waist trying to convince you that she needs to loose "6 kilos, I need to loose 6 kilos. See, I use to have a very pronounced jaw line and I feel like somehow, I’ve lost it, I don’t know, I look at pictures, and something’s missing, or really something’s extra". So I candidly suggested she stop drinking for a while. She smiled and me, then bursted out laughing and finally said : "No, I have a better idea, and this is what I always do, I keep drinking but I stop eating… of course the problem is that end up drunk all the time which becomes depressing, so then, I usually shift to vodka which makes me even more irritable, and it’s a terrible cycle but when I keep it going for a couple weeks, it usually does the trick". Hysterical, ridiculous Anne, gotta love her and her beautiful full-lived punkness.
Although the night was far from being over for them, I decided to be good and took off. I thought I’d stay at my studio space that night, a 10 min car drive from Moustache. As I was getting ready to open the door of my studio, a friend called me from across the street : "Hey ! Fred ! How’s it going ? Wanna come over to my place for a last drink ?". Very tempting proposal, I followed him to his place and as I sat on his patio, the Belgian expression ‘Bruxelles village’ resonated in my head.