I get up really early, at 4:30am, and take my DAT recorder to record the muezzin’s call to prayer at the Blue Mosque, and three other mosques before sunrise. The call is amplified through relatively small megaphone-like loudspeakers at the top of the towers, which distort the voice like a guitar amplifier. The voice echoes off the walls of the old town. I get drunk from the magnificent sound.

Afterwards the driver takes me to a little tea-shop by the river where waiters, clad in leather jackets, deliver fragrant tea in small cups to the waiting cars.

All afternoon our crew sets up the stage, then we have a lengthy rehearsal/soundcheck, because we haven’t played together in several weeks. As always we brim with new ideas and the band sounds wonderful. In the evening we do the short 75 minute show for Roche. The audience is all dressed up in Tuxedos…

By 11pm we have all assembled for drinks in the Kempinsky hotelbar, band and crew and my friends Rolf and Michael, who have come from Cologne, Germany, and from Ankara, Turkey, where Michael is a News correspondent for
German television. I’m buying rounds of Cape Cods, before we discover that the Turkish cherry juice tastes great with vodka. It gets you drunk…