The last stragglers of the tour group leave the hostel today, excepting me. ‘Nice to meet you’, says Cristina as she shakes my hand with as much feigned sincerity she can muster.
I catch the BART over to Berkeley, the home to the University of California. Any of the places at the edges of San Francisco look more salubrious than West Broadway where the hostel is, and Berkeley is no different, except that it is almost entirely populated by students. Berkeley isn’t subject to the bay breeze, so it is much warmer here too.
There is another branch of Amoeba Records here and I have come to see an in-store performance by Coco Rosie, an odd sounding sister duo who employ children’s toys and a human beatbox amongst its musical coterie. One sister wearing a backward baseball cap and with her hair shaved at the sides sings in a squeaky scary fairy tale woman child voice, while the other is a classically trained operatic singer. Get the idea?
Anyway, though I arrive a half hour before the advertised time, there is already a queue and when the doors are eventually opened there are probably two hundred people waiting to get inside. Maybe like me they are deciding whether to pay money to see them do a full gig that night. The in-store performance is a short one of five or six songs, the last song causing a giggle as it broke the slightly hazy druggy feel by suddenly kicking into a techno dance beat leading some to start jigging. For the first time in my life, I queue up like a smitten fan to get my freshly purchased CDs signed. But I am actually just a knackered late thirty something and I don’t bother to see go to the concert in the evening, choosing to go to bed early.
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