Day eight

Thursday December 9

Mark:

We wake still in something of a state of disbelief at what just happened last night, which can also be added to the reaction from Tuesday. One question someone asked me last night keeps swirling in my mind. ‘What the hell just happened in here?’ It was ‘only’ an open mic, but it’s the single best show I’ve ever played. The best set of songs I’ve ever played and the greatest reaction to an open mic act I’ve ever seen, let alone been part of. Now I’ve got a little distance from it, albeit only a single night’s sleep, I can honestly say I’ve simply never seen an act, new or established, come into an open mic and affect a room like that. Certainly no first timer I’ve seen has even come close and I’ve seen a lot of great debutants who’ve really made an impact. Last night was an event that I know we’re going to remember but I think people who were there are going to remember it as well.

Maja:

Laksmi sure is the best show I’ve ever played. The feel of the place, the reactions we got, and the pulse of the music we played was just incredible. Simply put, it was amazing.

Mark:

This all adds up to a big feeling of validation that we have something here which really could be something. If you have any thoughts of doing anything as an original act, in pretty much any creative discipline, you have to be able to go into a room of strangers and, with no hype or expectation, transport them and really provoke a reaction. It’s a huge ask and a big thing to expect of yourselves. But we definitely did that last night, and warmed up for it very well by what we did the night before at Maja’s first ever open mic. We already had some kind of faith and belief in ourselves otherwise we wouldn’t have come out here to do all this in the first place. But it goes to another level when your own perception of reality could be comes into contact with actual reality and they at least in some way correlate.

After having turned up with nothing in the book until the 19th, so far in Berlin, we’ve now done a performance of some kind everyday. But now with nothing else on the horizon it’s time to get out and hustle the street again. If we don’t do it today, we’re going to be backing right up into the weekend. Also, today gives us something of a buffer possibility if we get asked to return or call tomorrow to speak to a manager. We now know that once Saturday comes, all bets are off. Then you could also be looking at Monday or Tuesday before managers start surfacing again. Or so my truly extensive experience of bar hustling tells me. Tonight is optimal and we have nothing on. Out into the early Berlin evening we go. It’s snowing and the temperature is only just hovering above freezing. But that aint going to put us off one little bit. We’re hustling.

Once more we head out over the bridge that crosses the huge expanse of railway tracks, and so affording our epic view over to the east of the city, right to the iconic TV tower. Over that and around 10 minutes later me and Maja are deep in conversation and not really paying much attention to our surroundings. The person coming the other way isn’t much more alert. So it’s quite the public scene when all three of us intersect each others’ paths and we realise we’re face to face with Katia. Bang. So great to meet her like this and she reacts exactly the same way. The bizarrer thing is that for the past ten minutes we’ve been in message communication with her as she’s been asking about our interest in the apartment and we’ve had a few questions of our own. Now, after the initial excitement of this out of nowhere meeting we can see if we can just get things sorted out. Maja’s been the contact point on this so she asks what the state of play is. So far we’re booked into the hostel until the 13th so some kind of immediate turn over would be good, and if that happens, we could well be settled there until the new year when we can make more plans. But it isn’t. Good. Katia proudly says that the room is available for us from the 20th. Oh balls. That really doesn’t work. If not for this place, we were thinking of doing our show on the 19th and possibly being out of here by the 21st. Or something. We still really don’t know. But her dates, or her landlord’s dates, or whatever, just seem a bit too messy for us. We tell her we’re not completely out, but that this looks like it really won’t work for us. No problem, she says. We’ll stay in touch. Well, we will anyway and it really has been great to see her. And to have this issue come to some kind of conclusion, even if not the conclusion any of us were really looking for. We chat for a little longer, then go our separate ways, our heads fully back in the game. That game includes making our way to Loophole, on the way hustling any venue that looks in any way promising, the idea being to concentrate on the Neukolln area. But first, and this is where we’re on our way to now, we’re walking in totally the opposite direction to head into Friedrichshain and Fargo to hopefully meet Lenny and organise a show there for the coming days.

He is indeed there when we arrive, and very happy to see us. ‘No problem,’ he says as soon as we’ve done our hellos and I ask. ‘How would tomorrow be for you? Say, 9 O’Clock?’ Great. And that’s that. Gig booked. Knock on enough doors, battle through enough nos and you find these people. Friedrichshain done, we now head south to Neukolln to see what we can tap out of what we believe could be a solid hunting ground for us. It’s quite a trek and as we enter the main area of Neukolln, we see that it’s wide busy commercial streets and not many bars. Our theory? Go deep. Hit the side streets. Get right off the main beaten track. Our Berlin is not out here where the mainstream and the tourists go. It’s in there. Down secret streets and hidden alleys. Into tiny bars found only by the most intrepid. And locals. The first corner we come to we find a dark, lonely bar. Could this be a thing? I’m not sure but then Maja sees the writing on its A board. ‘Spoken word night.’ A bar that has something like that has to have something for us. Spoken word is the definition of off the main track. We go in and are immediately greeted by a friendly guy who says he is indeed the manager. He’s whispering to us, as someone is in full spoken flow in a stage through another room that can’t quite be seen from here. He asks about the vaccination thing and we then tell him why we’re here. ‘Oh, I love the sound of that,’ he says. He gives us his card that identifies him as Nanoso and continues: ‘That’s definitely something I’d be interested in and could work with.’ Brilliant. Strike one and strike one. I just knew Neukolln would be our hood. We’ve been walking a while to get here and he also says he’ll be able to talk a little more at the break so we stop and have a drink, and he also goes behind the bar and pours us a shot of something spicy and tomatoey. When the break comes, he asks us to define our sound a little and we hit him with rockpop, and tell him a little about what we’ve been doing. He gets more and more interested and says that he does music in here on Saturdays and that it sounds like we could be something that fits right in with that. He’ll be looking at that over the next few days, although we’re also sure he’s quite booked up. But he invites us to send an email and we’ll take it from there. Brilliant. He goes off to take care of business and we write and send the email there and then. Then, just as we’re about to leave, he comes back to us and suggests a direction we might want to walk in to find more bars that would welcome us, including one in particular that he recommends. Brilliant.

We head down there, now also realising that we’re not too far away from Loophole. It could be a good idea to casually make our way down in that general direction, hustling promising looking bars on the way. Then, once at Loophole, we could see if our American promoter friend Mikey is around and see if there’s any joy from the email we sent after meeting him at the show on Sunday. We come to the bar that Nanoso told us about and see a jazz jam in full flow. Looks promising until we see a sign in the window, which is basically a list of all the rules of the bar’s open mic night. No this, no that, no something else. Oh dear. Looks like you could fall foul in here without even intending to. What a fragile line one must walk just to be allowed to exist in this place. We immediately decide we want no part of it and continue walking. For another ten metres or so when we find another bar we could check out. We walk in and straight into the jaws of an unplugged open mic night; a guy is literally performing to our right as we walk in and is surrounded be the audience, which we now walk right through and across to get to the bar. We’ve literally just walked all over his stage. We’re met there by a guy called Peter who is happy to hear from us and who directs us to follow him so we can talk. Out the back of the bar and we enter a small theatre-like space where Peter sets himself up on one of the rows of seats. We have a chat here and he says we sound like something that could fit in here, but that we need to talk to someone else. Peter gives us an address to contact the guy and recommends that we get in touch and say we dropped by. Great. Thankyou very much, and will do. Onto the next place. We find this not too far down the same street and walk into a busy bar where the owner, nevertheless, is happy to entertain us. We are then told that the bar has stopped live music for now, but that if we were to return in January or February, there could well be a conversation to be had. Brilliant. Put this bar on the list too. We’ll be back.

Continuing on and we find another bar to go and talk to. The guy behind the bar isn’t the manager, but I get a good vibe from him and sound him out. He says this could be good, and if we want, we could come back in half an hour or so and speak to the main guy. He also tells us of a few other places would could try. As we’re there chatting, we’re told the main guy has indeed just entered the small and interesting building. We’re introduced and he listens politely and with interest at our pitch. When we finish, he says, ‘It sounds great but look around. There is hardly any business here. You’d be playing to nobody.’ Yeah, that would be a shame. But again, he invites us to come back in a month or two and try again. In the meantime, he says, we should go have a look at a bar a few doors down. This sends us back the way we came and to a place we’d disregarded and walked right past. In the window we see one of the people we were told to ask for. We know this because we recognise him. It’s Wynton from Zum Krokodil who we saw perform a few days ago. We walk in, he looks up and very much recognises us and invites us to sit down. When we give him a card, he says, ‘Oh, you’re those guys.’ He didn’t see us the other night but says he heard all about us from one of the managers the next night. ‘I heard really good things,’ he says. ‘So what can I do for you now you’re here?’ We tell him why we’re in Berlin and what we’ve done so far and he’s in some state of disbelief. ‘I really didn’t think there were any guys like you still around trying to do things like this,’ he says. ‘The fact that you’re here and have been having some results is really inspiring and gives me hope.’ Wow. This from one of the movers and well known names on the local scene. He gives us the number of the girl who organises music here and says we should make the call, although he does urge caution that we might not be able to expect anything to happen until some time in the new year. We might be detecting something of a pattern here. But hey, we now have a name and some kind of recommendation from what that person would recognise as a trusted source. He then also tells us of an evening he runs at Zum Krokodil on Sundays called The Sunday Slip which is a general open floor for all kinds of performers, but definitely also for the likes of us. ‘Come on down,’ he says. ‘We’ll get you on.’ Brilliant. An invitation from the man himself. We will indeed be there. And apart from all that, he recommends another venue to us that we should check out.

We thank Wynton very much for his time, attention and invitation. And yet another heads up. It really has been cool to sit down and really get to know one of the local musicians a little. One more friendly face to add to our Berlin adventure.

From here, we walk pretty much uninterrupted to our destination to discover Mikey is not around tonight and that it’s DJ night. We could pay the five Euro cover to stay, but we’re not really feeling it tonight. So we decide to make a beeline for Zum Krokodil to see if we can meet the manager Wynton told us about and say hello. When we get there, the place is very quiet and our guy is not in tonight. But we still do meet one of the other managers who’s happy to see us and have a little bit of a hangout, and we also talk quite a lot to the girl behind the bar. More footprints left in the minds of Berlin’s nightlife. It’s also time for another respite from the cold and this place does great Gluvine, although not tonight unfortunately. We still stay for a while and soon decide we’re done for the night. It’s been a great hustle. Possibly the most successful such venture I’ve even been on. No. No possibly about it. This is the most successful, most welcoming, most fruitful hustle I’ve ever been on. So many positive reactions. And we’ve discovered so much, created a few possible gig leads, discovered a new open mic, and so many places have encouraged us to come and try again next time we’re in Berlin. And we booked a gig for tomorrow. That gig may well be in Friedrichshain, but yes, like we thought, Neukolln is very much looking like our Berlin sweet spot. None of this is to mention that we’ve also now got a much better idea of where our kinds of venues are, what they look like, how they work, and what the people are like to deal with. 

Time to go home now, but before we do, we have one more venue to hit which we also have some hopes for – Madame Claudes. And I remind you that we met some of the bar staff on Sunday night, so we feel like we already have half a foot in the place, socially at least. But as we get closer and closer, it becomes clear that we’re now running on empty and are in no shape to make a good, lively presentation of ourselves. No. We’re done for the night. It’s very firmly time for home and bed. But what a night. In its own and different way, every bit as epic as last night. Eight hours and 15 kilometres of hustle in the snow in minus temperatures. If this isn’t dedication I have no idea what is. It’s given us a whole bunch of positive meetings resulting in more than just possibilities in the bars we visited; as a result we also have a whole load of heads ups to check out and chase down. Myself and Maja have pretty much always known that we share a very similar work ethic, but this is just beyond. I can’t think of anyone else I’ve ever been in a project with – musical or otherwise – who would have come out and done anything remotely like this tonight, and that’s without even factoring in the weather. This truly is what going out and creating your own opportunities looks like. 

Maja:

Cold, exhausting and exciting.