Music soundtracks our travels, kills time, and distracts us in a fun way. In Berlin, where there are more than 300 train stations and you can see everything panoramically from the S-Bahn, a well-loaded smartphone or MP3 player turns the journey into a movie with music.
I have more records about Berlin than any other city. I can’t help but think that the city should be a nexus or main place where all currents intersect; Opened in 2006, the musical equivalent of the mighty Berlin Hauptbahnhof is a powerful symbol of reunification.
So 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 artist. The city was involved in old German classical music circles. Weber’s Der FreischützConsidered the first romantic German opera, it premiered in 1821 at the Schauspielhaus, today known as the Konzerthaus Berlin.
The Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra was founded in 1882 and is headquartered in the extraordinary, asymmetrical, tent-like Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra. First recording of the orchestra Wagner’s ParsifalIt was directed by Alfred Hertz in 1913. Hissing and crackling echo primitive technology; The musicians crammed themselves into a small room to sit as close as possible to a giant recording horn.
Berlin’s cabaret songbook is unsurprisingly extensive. The most famous work is Dietrich’s Falling in Love Again.
The Weimar Republic was headquartered in the Reichstag, but the mythological narrative had it run from cabarets and bars. Tourists search in vain for the short-lived and vastly exaggerated collapse of Weimar. As for finding the ghosts vaguely hinted at 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 17 Nollendorfstrasse in the Schöneberg district, which he shared with the British war correspondent Jean Ross, who had been the model for Sally Bowles in her fiction and who had recently starred in the musical. – Cabaret.
There were 38 cabarets in Berlin in the early 1920s. Presumably Isherwood saw a performance called Tingel-Tangel, which took place at the Theater des Westens (Kantstrasse 12). Marlene Dietrich and Josephine Baker performed there. Berlin’s cabaret songbook is unsurprisingly extensive. The most famous work is Dietrich’s Ich bin von Kopf bis Fuss auf Liebe eingestellt (fall in love again English version) was recorded in both languages for the 1930 film The Blue Angel, shot at the Babelsberg film studio near Potsdam.. Danish tenor Max Hansen, founder of Kabarett der Komiker, recorded a number of cheeky show songs, including Meine liebe Lola and War’n Sie schon mal in mich verliebt?, which satirized Hitler as a homosexual..
Nazis had too much art and culture Entrance – degenerate. Jewish music was banned. In the 1930s, Lithuanian Hirsch Lewin ran a “Hebrew Bookstore” at Grenadierstrasse 28 (now Almstadtstrasse 10) – the building is still there – and devoted the rest of his time to recording and releasing klezmer songs on the Semer record label. The Nazis trashed his shop and destroyed many shellacs and original records, but in 2016 an international collective released a series of songs on the Berlin-based Piranha label. Scholem Baith is a bold call-and-response number that’s as effective as any Dietrich song.
Iggy Pop’s Passenger is a hymn to the Berlin S-Bahn, which he uses almost every day.
Hitler loved Wagner and hated jazz, experimental music and the Romani people. In Nazi propaganda studies, Swedish-born Zarah Leander’s 1942 hit Ich weiss, es wird einmal ein Wunder gescheh’n (HRNow HE One day Miracle Will to be), recorded at Lindström Studios (Schlesische Strasse 26).
During Soviet times, East Berlin musicians played safely to avoid censorship or worse. German easy listening, or schlager, was a safe space, and the GDR’s state-sanctioned Amiga label released hundreds of albums filled with songs like Ilja Glusgal’s 1950. Nein Nein Nein – in a black comedy you can imagine soundtracking a Stasi raid. The DDR Museum has a large collection of albums from the period. As the influence of jazz and big band faded, the schlager became more cheerful, filled with singers and ersatz country and western artists; It is sometimes considered a forerunner of the kitsch camp Eurovision farce. German audiences love it; Last year the Mercedes-Benz Arena in Berlin hosted the 25th Schlager Nacht. This year’s “good mood music” festival will fall on November 16.
The careers of Lou Reed, David Bowie and Iggy Pop intersected many times. Reed was the first person to go to Berlin mentally. 1973 album Berlin It’s about a couple separated by drug addiction and violence. The title track evokes the atmosphere of bierkellers and cabaret. Reed said he sees the city as “the home of German noir and expressionism” but also sees the Berlin Wall, now memorialized as a museum and art gallery, as a metaphor for a broken relationship.
Did the concept album inspire David Bowie and Iggy Pop to try for real? The former said he went there to get away from Los Angeles and his cocaine-induced psychosis. The story of how he recorded the three important albums that would later be grouped as the Berlin Trilogy is long and complex, and many songs from Low (1977), “Heroes” (1977) and Lodger (1979) evoke the city and the cold war. East. Title track frHEM”Heroes” (Also published in German: “helden”) became one of Bowie’s best-loved songs, featuring lovers by the wall and guns shooting above their heads. miscarriages undergrounds it was first recorded in Los Angeles for the film The Man Who Fell to Earth (the film ultimately did not use his material). He told Record Mirror in 1977 that the song was “about those who remained in East Berlin after the breakup – so the light jazz saxophones represent the memory of it”.
Iggy Pop’s Traveller (From 1977’s Lust for Life) Might be an ironic comment on working with Bowie. You can also hear it as a road trip song, “on a winding ocean voyage”. But the German photographer and former partner of the singer, Esther Friedman, told Zeit magazine that it was “a hymn to the Berlin S-Bahn”. Pop “used the S-Bahn almost every day,” he said. “The travels inspired him to write the song, especially the route to Wannsee.” Bowie and Pop recorded at Hansa Tonstudio at Köthener Strasse 38, a few doors south of the Berlin Wall; This map showing the course of the wall also shows. Many other artists followed suit, including Depeche Mode, U2 and Boney M.
Also in 1977, the Sex Pistols took a short trip to Berlin, which inspired their wild singles. sunny holidays. Johnny Rotten (aka John Lydon) didn’t have lovers kissing by the wall in Berlin; The song opens with the sound of walking boots and the line “A cheap holiday in other people’s misery.” Lydon later said: “I loved Berlin. I loved the wall and the craziness of the place. The communists looked at the circus atmosphere of West Berlin that never sleeps.”
Berlin’s underworld in the 1970s and 80s ranged from DIY art scenes, slum activism and junkie culture
Nico, who worked with Reed on the first Velvet Underground album, played his last concert at the Planetarium in West Berlin in June 1988. Born in Cologne, Christa Päffgen grew up in Berlin and sold underwear in the KaDeWe store. Nico was buried in the Grunewald-Forst cemetery.
Berlin’s underground scene in the 1970s and ’80s alternated between DIY art scenes, slum activism and junkie culture; heroin users congregated at the Bahnhof Zoo (as seen in the 1981 cult film Christiane F, with music by Bowie). Tangerine Dream were (despite regular line-up changes) one of the most enduring bands to emerge from the scene. They played big concerts in West Berlin and were one of the first big names to perform in East Berlin. Their concert on 31 January 1980 in the Palast der Republik, home of the GDR parliament (since demolished), was heavily trafficked.
Radical music attuned to the devastated wasteland of Berlin would come from West Berlin industrial/experimental rock band Einstürzende Neubauten, whose lead vocalist/screamer was Blixa Bargeld, a key member of both the Bad Seeds and the Birthday Party. Steh auf Berlin (Wake Up Berlin), from their debut album Kollaps, is a classic garbage sound track performed on anti-instruments made from scrap metal and construction tools.
The New German Wave punky synth-pop coming out of Neue Deutsche Welle (NDW) was easier on the ear. Nena’s 99 LuftballonsAn international hit in English, it was a mainstream hit. I remember a friend promoting the Dutch compilation album Die Neue Deutsche Welle Ist Da Da Da in 1982; I thought this album was the ultimate in over-imported cool. Much of the music on the album sounds like Kraftwerk sped up and made jumpable, or at least made suitable for Andy McCluskey’s jump dance. Some of the best Berlin-based NDW, punk and metal bands were mixed by Harris Johns at the 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 Dead Kennedys ran wild, is still standing, but I can’t see it coming to Bargeld’s Monday roller discos. Gayhane, the “QueerOriental Dancefloor” night organized by the club every month, is a legend.
Opened in 1991, Tresor was one of the first clubs to bring Detroit techno to the city and continues to host famous DJs. Another large club, Berghain, occupies a former power station near the monumental socialist boulevard Karl-Marx-Allee. Built in the modernist-monumental style favored by the Third Reich, the former Templehof airport was home to raves. Said to have its roots in West Berlin’s liberal attitudes towards nightlife, Berlin’s zero curfew rule makes it a hotspot for tech tourists. Detroit-born DJ Rolando continues the transatlantic alliance; its remix expo 2000 pays tribute to Düsseldorf-based Kraftwerk, whose influence on many of the above-mentioned acts has been well documented. Berghain resident Ben Klock subzero It looks like a retro-futuristic train on ice tracks and is the perfect way to end our S-Bahn adventure.