Day 3

Tuesday March 1

Mark:

One of the massively encouraging things on our Hamburg adventures so far is that we’ve found evidence of 20 open mics in and around Hamburg. One of them is at the end of the street at a huge bar called The St Pauli Brauerei. Except when we get there we’re told they’re not doing it anymore. Oh well. Corona and all that. A lot of things have changed we will discover more and more that a lot more of those open mics are no longer in operation. However, this place is at least open and we go in and see Simon, the boss. It’s only just opened this week and he says they may well have a place for us but please wait to see how the weekend goes. Fair enough.

With that we decide to check out an open mic at a place that translates as Friendly And Competent. That’s up there in great pub names as far as I’m concerned and I’ll let you decide if I’m being sarcastic or not.

It’s a bit of a trek out there but we make it in good time and get our name on the list. It’s quite a big place for an open mic with a pretty decent sized stage and very good sound system, all overlooked by a sound engineer who does his very best to give everyone the best possible sound – a not too common aspect of open mics.

We’re told we’ll be on fourth or fifth and we settle back for the show which demonstrates the highest overall level of any open mic we’ve attended. Everyone’s also getting the chance to do three songs rather than the usual two which is cool. We decide to go for I Like You (Better When You’re Naked), a first play of Six Sense Lover and Rock’n’Roll Tree. I’ll tell you now that, for better or worse, we’ve decided/realised that I Like You (Better When You’re Naked) is kind of a hit so will play it at every opportunity even as we start to believe we have quite a few songs that we think are, well, better. But we do love Naked and since when did songwriters have any idea of what their best songs were? Sometimes you just have to listen to the audience.

Naked gets the best response of anything all night. Rock’n’Roll Tree perfectly holds its own and, be far, this first outing of Six Sense is a little messy so it doesn’t really get a full chance. But we recover and really smash it out in the end so it’s partly rescued and goes down pretty well in the end. A girl sitting near the front is also kind enough to agree to film us on Maja’s phone and we end up with a pretty good version of Naked. It would be nice to be able to bring you one of the other songs because you’ve probably heard Naked once or twice already, but we weren’t best please with them, so this is what we have from tonight.

There’s a bit of a paradox about this place. It has a really cool vibe and, like I said, some of the best performers we’ve come across. But no-one really talks to anyone else. There’s no actual sense of songwriter community, or any other kind of community really; two of the best performers sit at the front, do their thing and leave. Which is also quite disappointing. We do manage an enthusiastic chance with one duo of wonderful performers, but they tell us this is the first time they’ve played their own stuff live, so the novelty value is still high for them. 

When everyone’s had a go, it’s time for the closing act to do their thing which is a cover duo. They play for half an hour or so and then the floor just seems to open up again and people can just go up and have another go. We watch this in mild confusement for a while and then, after a few people have done their thing, the host comes and asks if we wouldn’t mind going up and closing the evening. Wow. That feels like something of an honour really, first time out. So up we go and play Insanity and Freefall. That done, it’s time to start making our way home. We do that by very luckily arriving just in time to catch the last train to the Reeperbahn. 

Maja:

I’ve barely been drinking at all in Sweden and my alcohol tolerance has been greatly reduced which is something I really get to notice during our recently once again increased nightlife. I’ve had maybe two pints after performing and was not planning on getting back up on stage. I prefer to perform sober so I’ve always waited with the drinks until after performing, for the socialising part of the night. But tonight I got asked out of the blue to close the night. Of course I am going to close the night. There would be a waste not to. So we get up on stage, Mark is ready and we blast into Insanity which is a gentle but epic song. It goes down great. The crowd is cheering and I am so happy I was able to sing this song without lyrics. I’ve had a hard time with memorising all of our lyrics, there’s just so many songs to memorise and each and every one of them are incredibly lyric intense. But now I am able to do that song without lyrics. That’s an achievement for me. Let’s go for Freefall next. I love performing Freefall, the song is hard and deep with gentler moments in it and it just feels amazing to perform. When I sing it I can’t help but really go for it and to use my whole body really feeling the beat and the melody of the lyrics. As the song ends I sing the last line ‘I’m going down’ and drop down on my knees bending backward with my head almost touching the ground behind me. And the room absolutely explodes in applause. As I stand up I see the whole room looking at us and cheering. Feeling uplifted by the atmosphere of the room I say ‘Thank you, would you like to hear another one?’ fully expecting an answer. And I am met with embarrassing silence. OK, thank you, another lesson learned. Never ask the audience if they want to hear another one. Especially not in Germany. I honestly don’t believe the people here know enough English to understand my question or to answer it. And people don’t like getting put on the spot like that even if it’s clear to see that they would have loved for us to go on for longer. But this is great, you learn by making mistakes and I need to learn everything I can. I need the experience. So we thank everyone for an awesome show and start packing down our gear. This has really been an amazing night, even though the people here are not really that up for socialising. A couple of people tell us that we performed really well and we got the biggest reactions during the night, but it’s clear to see that this won’t lead to anything. It won’t be a cool afterparty to go to and there’s no future gigs to be found here. We might as well just say thank you and go back home to sleep and continue with the next day filled with the energy of finally having been able to break the no performance period we’ve had. This is the first performance since Artliners in Berlin, and it is great being on it again.