REVIEW BY ELLY

hi. i got to talk to tom barman last night.

i saw dEUS last night at Slim's here in San Francisco. Before I tell you all about the show and everything that happened there, let me give you a small bit of background on me and how I found out about dEUS, and about the last time I saw them live.

(this is gonna be a long email)

I am an american. My father is in the army.. I have spent most of my life in Germany (my father was stationed there), which is how I came to find out about dEUS: on european MTV.

You have to understand that dEUS is no where NEAR as popular in America as they are in Europe.

The first time I saw dEUS, they weren't very good at all. They opened for Morphine at the Warfield here in San Francisco. The Warfield is a big venue, and no one seemed to care about dEUS, not even the roadies. They seemed generally tired and in a bad mood at that show.

Regardless, I still loved them, and when I found out they were playing at Slim's I almost wet myself. Slim's is a small club here in SF, and a lot of bigger and smaller bands play there. It's great because you can get really close to the stage, and even if you are in the back you aren't too far off from the stage at all.

It was only $5 to get in, and two bands played before dEUS. I missed the first band and got there for the middle band, which was some weird b-52s-ish girly band called "Action Plus." They were okay but I wasn't that excited over them.

the club was full of europeans, which i thought was pretty cool. i have missed hearing german all the time in public places. i'd definitely say that the crowd was probably 60 to 80 percent europeans.

I was standing to the left of the stage near the backstage door, holding my free dEUS poster and basically being a lame fan, when Tom walked right out of the stage door and almost bumped right into me! He and the guy who plays the violin were just wandering around the club, getting beer and listening to the wack all-girl band.

So, I got up ALL MY COURAGE and went over to talk to Tom where he sat at the bar. I was really worried it was going to turn out to be a bad sitcom plot where the kid goes up to talk to his favorite star and GETS DISSED. But he was really really nice. I leaned over into his ear and said "Hi! I'm a really big fan!" (lame) and he shook my hand and said "Hi, i'm Tom." and then I told him about how there is a mailing list and all these web pages and shit just for his band on the internet and he was like "oh i don't know very much about that" but he seemed generally pleased and smiled a lot and I touched his knee and it was pretty fucking cool.

(note: i am rarely this obsessive about a band/celebrity/whatever)

so then I went back to my spot in the crowd and waited for the weird girl band to finish their set. It took the crew FOREVER to set up for dEUS.

dEUS finally played and they rocked hard and completely. they started out with suds and soda, worked down through a couple of songs into little arithmatics... stopped after that to do a great great great version of "serpentine" and then worked back up to "thank you for the roses." Then we clapped them out for an encore (ahh it took them FOREVER to come back out, my arms hurt from clapping) and they did the song about "you can sit on my face, you can stand in my place" (i forget the name) and ended on Via.

all in all it was a fucking great show. very few instrument problems.. they seemed to be really cheery and happy. tom danced and shook his ass a lot. i had a great time. i was like eight feet from the small stage.

so that's it. thanks for reading this far.

elly