Izzard brought the beer center stage.
Not just power, but stamina: their headline shows would run for three hours or more, with ever-changing sets of 60-or-so songs, despite their prodigious drinking (they would have a bathtub filled with cans of beer on stage; on their final tour, they added bins marked "piss" and "puke").
Torleif points out a wooden building known as a schøtstue, or 'assembly room', where apprentice merchants would gather to drink beer and stage violent games and initiations.
The most telling example was his evocative version of Merle Haggard's "The Bottle Let Me Down," a brilliant song that's been covered by practically everyone who's ever stepped onto the beer-soaked stage of a honky-tonk.
"We grew out of the beer-cork stage into lagging for ten-for-a-penny pictures of baseball players," Nelson Algren wrote about the real White Sox in "A Lot You Got to Holler," a story from his 1947 breakthrough book, "The Neon Wilderness".
He said police, firefighters, the city clerk's office and risk managers communicate swiftly to get permits in place, notify affected neighborhoods and troubleshoot unique challenges — as when producers of a beer commercial staged a helicopter landing on Brand Boulevard earlier this year.
We were part of several Arts Council-organised mixed platforms, during which we'd have to perform half an hour after performance artists such as The People Show and have to clean up beer-soaked stages littered with such joys as ferret shit!
In the preceding hour, we are fully squadded, sipping beers and casually debating the merits of Haim as we stake out our spot in the main stage beer garden.
For an artist who has cut short more than one Australian gig in the past, after punters allegedly hurled full beer cans on stage, that's almost a news story in itself.
Beer's first stage work, the ballet Der Fischer und das Milchmädchen (The Fisherman and the Milkmaid) was produced in March 1810 at the Court Opera in Berlin.
