by The music of our travels sounds, kills time and evades, entertainingly. In Berlin, which has more than 300 train stations and where you can see everything panoramically from the overhead S-Bahn, a well-charged smartphone or MP3 player makes a trip into a movie with a score.
I have more records related to Berlin than any other city. I can’t help feeling that there should be a nexus or a mother center in the city where all the currents cross – a musical equivalent of the Berlin Hauptbahnhof, opened in 2006, a powerful symbol of reunification.
But which artists would play there?
For a child of the 1970s, it would be easy to start and end with David Bowie. But Berlin is more interesting than any one artist. The city was on the old German classical music circuit. Der Freischütz de Weberconsidered the first romantic German opera, first performed in 1821 at the Schauspielhaus – today known as Berlin’s Konzerthaus.
The Berliner Philharmoniker was founded in 1882 and is based at the unusual, asymmetrical, tent-like Philharmonie Berlin. The orchestra’s first ever recording, of Wagner’s Parsifal, directed by Alfred Hertz in 1913. The hisses and crackles show the underlying technology; the musicians crowded into a tiny room to sit as close as possible to a huge recording horn.
Not surprisingly, the Berlin cabaret songbook is extensive. The most famous entry is Dietrich’s Falling in Love Again
The Weimar Republic had its headquarters at the Reichstag, although the mythological narrative wishes it was run from cabarets and dive bars. Tourists search in vain for the decadence of Weimar, which was short-lived and wildly exaggerated. Regarding the discovery of the essays vaguely mentioned in Christopher Isherwood’s novels Mr Norris Changes Trains (1935) and Goodbye to Berlin (1939), as Isherwood told Bowie: “People forget that I’m a very good fiction writer.”
At the end of 1930, after several moves, Isherwood settled into an apartment, at Nollendorfstrasse 17 in the Schöneberg district, which he shared with the British war correspondent Jean Ross, the model of Sally Bowles in his fiction – and, eventually, the opera. – Cabaret.
There were 38 cabarets in Berlin in the early 1920s. Perhaps, Isherwood caught a show called Tingel-Tangel which was taking place at the Theater des Westens (Kantstrasse 12). Marlene Dietrich and Josephine Baker performed there. Not surprisingly, the Berlin cabaret songbook is extensive. The most famous entry is Ich bin von Kopf bis Fuss auf Liebe eingestellt (Falling in love again The English version), recorded in both languages for the 1930 film The Blue Angel, was filmed at the Babelsberg film studio in nearby Potsdam. Danish tenor Max Hansen – who founded the Kabarett der Komiker – recorded many comedy show songs, including Meine liebe Lola and War’n Sie schon mal in mich verliebt?, which satirized Hitler as a homosexual.
The Nazis appreciated a lot of art and culture Entartete – degeneration. Jewish music was banned. During the 1930s, the Lithuanian Hirsch Lewin ran a “Hebrew Bookshop” at Grenadierstrasse 28 (now Almstadtstrasse 10) – the building is still there – and spent the rest of his time recording klezmer songs and releasing them on his Semer label . The Nazis trashed his shop and destroyed many of the original shellacs and records but, in 2016, an international ensemble released a selection of songs on the Berlin-based Piranha label. Scholem Baith it’s a call-and-response number that packs as much punch as any Dietrich ditty.
Iggy Pop’s The Passenger is an anthem for the Berlin S-Bahn, which he took almost every day
Hitler loved Wagner and hated jazz, experimental music and Roman folk music. In studies of Nazi propaganda, the Swedish-born Zarah Leander’s song Ich weiss, es wird einmal ein Wunder gescheh’n (1942) is a frequently cited song.IKnow That Someday a Miracle Will happen), recorded at Lindström Studios (Schlesische Strasse 26).
During the Soviet era, East Berlin musicians played it safe to avoid censorship or worse. German easy listening, or schlager, was safe terrain and the DDR’s state-sanctioned Amiga label put out hundreds of albums full of tunes like Ilja Glusgal from 1950. Nein Nein Nein – which you can imagine with the soundtrack of a Stasi raid in black comedy. The DDR Museum has an extensive collection of albums from the era. As the influence of jazz and big bands waned, schlager became more hazy, full of crooners and ersatz country and western acts; It is sometimes considered the forerunner of the kitsch-camp Eurovision shtick. German audiences love it; last year Berlin’s Mercedes-Benz Arena hosted its 25th Schlager Nacht. This year’s “feel-good music” festival will take place on November 16.
The careers of Lou Reed, David Bowie and Iggy Pop clashed time and time again. Reed was the first to go to Berlin – mentally. His 1973 album Berlin it’s about a couple trapped by drug addiction and violence. The title track evokes a bierkeller-cum-cabaret atmosphere. Reed said he thought of the city as “the home of film noir and German expressionism”, but he also saw the Berlin Wall – now a memorial museum and art gallery – as a metaphor for broken relationships.
Did the concept album inspire David Bowie and Iggy Pop to try the real thing? The former said he went there to escape LA and cocaine-induced psychosis. The story is long and complicated as he recorded three significant albums that would later be made as The Berlin Trilogy, and many songs from Low (1977), “Heroes” (1977) and Lodger (1979) inspire the city and the cold war. east The track title from “heroes” (also released in German as “In progress”), with its image of lovers at the wall with guns shooting above their heads, has become one of Bowie’s most popular songs. Low Underground first recorded in Los Angeles for the film The Man Who Fell to Earth (which ultimately did not use its material). He told Record Mirror in 1977 that the song was about those left behind in East Berlin “after the break-up – hence the faint jazz saxophones that represent the memory of what was”.
Game Iggy Pop The Passenger (from 1977’s Lust for Life) which could be an ironic commentary on working with Bowie. You can also hear it as a car-driven song, on “winding ocean drive”. But German photographer and former partner of the singer, Esther Friedman, told Zeit magazine that it was “a hymn to the Berlin S-Bahn”. Pop “took the S-Bahn almost every day,” she said. “The trips inspired him to write the song, especially the way out to Wannsee.” Bowie and Pop recorded in the Hansa Tonstudio at Köthener Strasse 38, a few doors south of the Berlin Wall – as this map showing the course of the wall shows. Many other artists followed suit, including Depeche Mode, U2 and Boney M.
Also in 1977, the Sex Pistols made a short trip to Berlin, which inspired their frenetic single Holidays in the Sun. There were no lovers kissing by the wall in Johnny Rotten (AKA John Lydon)’s Berlin – the song opens with the sound of marching jackets and the line “Free vacation in other people’s misery”. Lydon later said: “I loved Berlin. I loved the wall and the insanity of the place. The communists looked into the circus atmosphere of West Berlin, which never went to sleep.”
Berlin’s underground in the 1970s and 80s ranged across DIY arts scenes, squatter activism and junky culture
Nico, who worked with Reed on the first Velvet Underground album, played her last concert at the West Berlin Planetarium in June 1988. Born in Cologne, Christa Päffgen grew up in Berlin and sold undies at a department store. KaDeWe. Nico is buried in Grunewald-Forst cemetery.
Berlin’s underground in the 1970s and 80s ranged across DIY arts scenes, squatter activism and junky culture – with heroin users congregating in Zoo Bahnhof (as seen in the 1981 cult film Christiane F, soundtracked by Bowie). Tangerine Dream was one of the most enduring bands (despite frequent lineup changes) to come out of the scene. They played huge concerts in West Berlin and were one of the first big acts in East Berlin. His 31 January 1980 gig at the Palast der Republik, home of the DDR parliament (since demolished), was heavily bootlegged.
From Einstürzende Neubauten, the West Berlin industrial/experimental rock band with Blixa Bargeld – main member of Bad Seeds and the Birthday Party, as lead singer/screamer coming with radical music, connected to Berlin’s growth country. Steh auf Berlin (Wake Up Berlin), from their debut album Kollaps, is a classic piece of trashy noise made on counter-instruments made from scrap metal and construction tools.
Easier on the ear was the punky synth-pop that came out of Neue Deutsche Welle (NDW) – the German New Wave. Nena on 99 Balloons, an international hit in English, his mainstream hit. I remember a friend revealing a Dutch compilation album called Die Neue Deutsche Welle Ist Da Da Da in 1982 which I thought was the ultimate in transgressive import discovery. A lot of the music on the album sounds like Kraftwerk stepped it up and made it pogo-able, or at least suitable for that Andy McCluskey skip dance. Harris Johns mixed some of the best NDW, punk and metal bands based in Berlin at his Music Lab Berlin studio in the backyard of Tempelhofer Ufer 10 .
Many venues have come and gone, Kreuzberg’s SO36, where Einstürzende, as well as Die Toten Hosen, Throbbing Gristle and the Dead Kennedys were held incorrectly, is still standing, although I can’t see Bargeld turning up with for rollerdiscos on Monday. The club’s Gayhane, a monthly “QueerOriental Dancefloor” night, is legendary.
Opened in 1991, Tresor was one of the first clubs to bring Detroit techno to the city and continues to host big-name DJs. Berghain, another big club, has a former power station off the famous socialist Karl-Marx-Allee boulder. The former Templehof airport, built in the modernist-meets-monuments style favored by the Third Reich, was used to host raves. Berlin’s zero curfew rule, which is said to have its roots in West Berlin’s liberal attitude towards the night, attracts tech tourists. Detroit-born DJ Rolando maintains the transatlantic alliance; a remix of it Exhibition 2000 She pays homage to Düsseldorf-based Kraftwerk, whose influence on many of the aforementioned acts is well documented. Berghain resident Ben Klock Subzero It looks like a retro-futuristic train on ice tracks and is a great way to end our S-Bahn odyssey.
