This one you`ve never heard before: Charlie Megira covers Israeli Indie legends Top Hat Carriers!

The time: summer 2001. Charlie Megira's debut album has just been released in its first edition under the tiny label we founded, “Lies & Deception Music", and Megira was preparing for his first show ever - as a warm-up for Shy Nobleman at the Patiphone club. As I show in my film, the duo we made together about a year before - Les Lost Boys (when I play rhythm guitar and Charlie does his magic on lead guitar) - no longer functioned. In the summer of 2001 I was a kind of personal manager of Charlie, sort of a booker-promoter.

Nevertheless, Charlie wanted to check the possibility that I would go on stage with him, this time as a drummer. He strongly believed in taking a musician with no experience on a certain instrument and letting him grow and develop next to him. A lot of musicians who worked with him were like that, it really paid off for both sides. On the cover of “The End Of Teenage” Charlie put a sentence that sums up the matter and his belief: “The Voice Of The Untrained Will Be Heard Commercially”.

Back to 2001, we heard a lot of The Flaming Stars at the time and talked a lot about the short and concise licks of George Harrison. With these influences and a trick I learned from Meg White of the White Stripes, I prepared for the session. I had stage fright at the time and pretty much wanted to run away from performing with Charlie at The Patiphone, but I couldn't miss the session with him.

We took a few hours in a rehearsal room in Allenby street by the beach. When we got there, we tuned the snare drum so that it sounded like a piccolo, for a maximum bouncy/exotic effect. And then it started. But how did we come to play Top Hat Carriers?

The first time I visited Gabi’s home, around October 1995, he played me the song "Am I a political text?" of Top Hat Carriers and I asked him to teach me the chords. Then he asked me to teach him the chords to Cnaque/Pop’s "I met a girl at the disco" and we bartered.

Gabi-Charlie really liked Top Hat Carriers and related bands like Gingiot (Redheads). He saw their gigs in all its formations, knew how to imitate Tamir Albert dancing and adopted certain movements from how Ram Orion conducts himself live with the guitar. In preparation for the aforementioned rehearsal, we agreed that we would play “Political Text”, but this time in Charlie's staccato mambo-chic style - a style we called at the time "the staccato madness". Both of us loved this song in every way, and precisely because we made it an instrumental, now it makes me wanna go back and hear the never-getting-tired words written by the band's mysterious vocalist and pivot, Ohad Fishof, and Ruti Ashuri.

The second song I fished from the cassette, "Kiss Me Again", is a song by Les Lost Boys that’s never been heard to this day, except for the first two shows of Charlie at The Patiphone. When he played it live, he said in the intro, in a theatrical-Charlie-played tone, "It's a song by Les Lost Boys...". A cute tribute to the lost boy who stood in the crowd and smiled. Even though the original recording from 2000 suited very well for Charlie’s first album, it somehow didn't make it and over time got lost.

Gabi wrote "Kiss me again" after he saw a documentary about the “Temple Of Rats” in India and was completely taken away by it. We both really identified with each other then because we were a little heartbroken - each one with his own story - with messes of breakups, longings, comeback attempts and affairs, and the words go like this:

kiss me again
And what's in it?
The rats do it too

Chorus:
kiss me again
The rats do it too
kiss me again
The rats do it too
kiss me again…

"Kiss Me Again" finally sees the light of day here, even if in a one-off rehearsal version. A rehearsal recording is all one mic that usually picks up too much drums. Actually, the mix should be the other way around. In any case, it sounded crazy in the room, and after everything I went through with my film "Tomorrow’s Gone" - today it seems strange to me to give up the opportunity to come up as a drummer for Charlie Megira's debut show. On the other hand, I can't argue with who I was at the age of 27.

Although in the summer of 2001 Les Lost Boys no longer functioned in their original format, I chose to associate these recordings with Les Lost Boys and not with Charlie Megira stand alone, because actually in those few hours in Allenby by the sea - Les Lost Boys again worked together musically.