This morning I enjoyed breakfast at the hotel with my friend and rockabilly hero Levi Dexter, then walked around the town of Bethune, France, and took in the sights and sounds. I love France, it’s no secret, and the small towns have their own joys: flowers, parks, architecture, small shops, and bakeries. The Bethune Retro Festival began to open for the day with lots of antique cars, a vintage fire truck display, and of course American 1950s rock ’n’ roll music bouncing off every building.
I also found myself, as I often do, finding peace and solitude walking through a cemetery north of town. The French do necro-sepulture-theatre-macabre so well! The greatest of creepy and spooky and decaying presentation in the world. I love walking through French graveyards almost more than anything else. Collapsing crypts? They got ’em! Morbid inscriptions on fantastic art nouveau funerary statuary cast in nineteenth-century concrete? Oui, oui! Even their new and modern headstones aren’t terrible: the highest compliment I can give.
There are a great number of military graves from World War I buried here, with a large amount of English and Welsh and Scottish and Irish soldiers laid to rest in a special section. Reading the captions on the graves are always so heartbreaking, young men who died over a hundred years ago, with messages from their wives and families. I hate war. It’s all so freaking sad and pointless that all these young men had to die out there on the battlefield.
Wandering back into town, the rain began to drizzle just as the Bethune Retro Festival started to come alive. I suspect it will be a rainy night tonight for my show, at 7 pm on the stage at the Place de la Republique, but I’m going to get up there with my buddies the Don Diego Trio (and special guest Mitch Polzak) and rock the hell out of it. See you tonight.
See many more photos at Deke’s original Facebook post!
