How We Wasted Exactly Zero Hours in Prague
Prague was last week. Currently I’m on a sunlounger in Mallorca watching middle-aged men in swimming trunks paddle through a hotel pool with their underdressed kids in tow. The contrast is not subtle. But Prague was good enough that I don’t want to wait any longer to write about it.
A small group of us made the trip to the Czech capital for the Electronic Beats Festival—Grimes, The Whitest Boy Alive, Woodkid, and Mike Skinner were on the bill—and what could have been a routine press trip turned into something significantly better because we decided to use every available hour instead of killing them. Nike, Frank, Jessie, Katja, Nina, Pierre, Kai, Nele, Johan, and me: an improbable but functional crew.
Prague itself is beautiful in a way that resists reduction. There’s the part that gets trampled by tourists, and then there’s the other part, which feels almost decadent—elegant, like a city that knows it could double as a film set and leans into it just slightly. We saw both.
The lineup alone would have been worth the trip. Grimes in 2012 was operating in a category of her own—something between bedroom pop and low-grade dread, performed with the intensity of someone who has decided the stage is the only honest place left. Woodkid hadn’t yet become the cinematic-orchestral fixture he’d later turn into, and catching him at that stage felt like arriving at exactly the right moment. The Whitest Boy Alive were as precise and unhurried as ever, and Mike Skinner was exactly as weirdly compelling live as The Streets had always been on record.
Backstage the drinks materialized with a regularity that made it difficult to keep count. We spent time with the artists in the way festivals rarely allow, and somewhere in there we met Janet, who ran the Czech version of Kleiderkreisel—the clothes-swapping platform that eventually grew into Vinted—which felt like a collision of worlds that had no business meeting on a Tuesday night in Prague.
Then a party boat on the Vltava, because of course there was a party boat on the Vltava. I have no precise memory of what time we got back to the Hilton, only that the sky was already doing the early-morning thing and that the hotel wanted forty euros for twenty-four hours of internet, which remains one of the more offensive prices I’ve encountered in a country I was otherwise enjoying immensely.
Pierre organized everything with the kind of invisible competence that makes you realize how much normally goes wrong on trips like this. I love traveling in a group when the group is the right one—you don’t have to navigate the loneliness of a foreign city alone, and the stories that come out of it are better for having witnesses. Back to the pool now. Those middle-aged men aren’t going to watch themselves.