‘It’s always good to make yourself feel small,” says Stu Mackenzie. We’re sitting behind the stage of the Ancient theatre in Plovdiv, Bulgaria, after the second night of his band King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard’s three shows there. The marble-hewn amphitheatre was built between 98-117AD. We’re flanked by columns bearing ancient Greek inscriptions from back when this place was called Philippopolis; the precipitous drop behind us reveals the east side of Europe’s longest continually inhabited city, the glowing cross of the Cathedral of St Louis and the shadow of the hills in the distance.
In front of the stage where the Australian experimental rock band have just spent two hours wilding out is an arena where man and beast used to do battle in front of a far more bloodthirsty crowd than the one that just drank the venue dry of beer. It’s hard not to feel like a speck here, awesomely adrift in all of human history.
