Category: The Hamburg Diary

Saturday February 26

Mark:

We did um and ah quite a lot before deciding on coming straight to Hamburg. We’re aware Corona restrictions are still in place and won’t be relaxed until next week, but we’ve thought it could be good to chill and get our bearings for a while, then when things do open up we can kind of hit the ground running so to speak.

We’ve only got two relatively short drives to get to Hamburg from Stockholm. A few hours to the Swedish port of Nynäshamn, then two hours or so the other end from Rostock to Hamburg. In between is an eighteen hour ferry trip. We weren’t able to book a cabin so we’ve resigned ourselves to what might not be the best night’s sleep on some kind of couch thing somewhere, should we be lucky enough to snag something like that. But no. This isn’t that kind of ferry. Instead, all the seating is on one deck of the nine it’s made up of, meaning aeroplane type seats in huge rows all over the deck. But somehow we’re one of the first people on which means we’re able to get ourselves a row of four seats right at the front of the deck in front of the huge windows looking out to sea. Not only that, but we’re able to inflate the double airbed we’ve been able to bring. We’ve also brought sleeping bags and pillows. With that, we essentially have a cabin right at the very front of the ship and now feel like we’re travelling in totally relaxed luxury. As the ship sets sail, we sit in our seats, reclined with our feet on the bed, and pour ourselves cups of some kind of Japanese citric wine. Yeah. We can manage 18 hours like this. We chill for the evening, then as night falls, it’s in bed to sleep until the sun comes up bright and spectacular in the morning. In between, at 10pm, four hours after leaving, we make a scheduled stop at Gotland, a Swedish holiday island, where just about everyone gets off and hardly anyone else gets on. This creates a bizarre situation where, for around an hour, we’re the only people we can see. Alone on a ferry in the middle of the sea. Even once the new arrivals are on board we’re able to stand at certain points and look all the way down from front to back and not see a single person. Pandemic and upcoming European crisis may have just combined to make this happen with people still holding off on travel plans. We don’t know but it is all very strange.

When morning comes, by 9am-ish we can see distant landfall and have a wonderful chill on the bed in the sun watching the busy sealane while contemplating the gradual encroaching landscape before us. There’s none of that usual travel feeling of, ‘Are we there yet?’ No. We could quite happily stay here all day and another night. As it is, we casually pack up and leave for the car around noon for the drive to Hamburg.

Maja:

I have long lost count on how many ferries I’ve been on, but the whole concept of even being able to buy a ticket for a longer trip without a cabin is new to me. Usually when I get on a ship I like to spend the majority of the time in the cabin sleeping and preparing for the adventures the next day but today we don’t have that opportunity. Having learnt our lesson from our first ferry to Ireland, Mark waits with the car while I get to reception as quickly as possible to try to get to the top of the list for possible cabin cancellations. Standing in line there, I overhear the receptionist explaining to an eldery woman that they’re fully booked. The inquiring lady then asks, in that case, would it be OK for her to inflate an air mattress. The receptionist replies that that would be fine. Yes. This is perfect. I ask the receptionist the same thing, just to inform her that I plan on inflating my air mattress as well, and she is apologetic and encouraging. Great. So we manage to get some seats right at the front of the ship as the other seats are slowly filling up. There seems to be a high school trip to Gotland, and the ship is very lively with a lot of youngsters making a lot of noise with a fair bit of drinking going on as well. Children are running around, crying and the guys on the school trip are talking very loudly just behind us. And then I go forward and inflate a big air mattress. The pump is loud and I can feel the stares in my back but I don’t care. It’s better to get this over with before people fall asleep. As soon it is inflated I lie down on it and just internally laugh at the absurdity of the situation. It is actually quite fun. I’m the only person comfortably lying down in this area. Also, the cost of the air mattress and sleeping bags are cheaper than the cost of a cabin, and this is way much more fun. In a bizarre way. 

Some strange japanese liquor in our cups and we talk the evening away and sleep wonderfully the whole night. In the morning we warm ourselves up by singing a couple of songs and playing some guitar while watching the horizon as Germany gets closer. What an amazing part of the trip this has turned out to be. 

Mark:

We are totally giddy with excitement in the car as we get closer. Then, shortly after 3pm, we’re suddenly on the Reeperbahn on which our hotel is situated. Wow this is bringing back memories. I was here twelve years ago in 2010 with my Madrid pop punk band Drunken Monkees. That time when we were fresh off recording our album and thought a German trip, starting in Hamburg, would be the way to try to break ourselves, or at least get something going. We had a wonderful time here and made quite a few useful contacts before we realised that the shoulder injury I was carrying wasn’t going to go away and I wasn’t going to be able to play at all. So we called it a holiday, stayed a while longer then headed back to Madrid without having played a single show. And where the first thing I did was go and get shoulder surgery in which some kind of calcium ball about a centimetre wide was removed from between the bones of my right shoulder. No wonder I couldn’t move the thing. But we still managed to create a lot of memories and make friends, and here I am again. We find our hotel and unload our gear – on the first floor this time. Result. Then it’s off to find a parking spot, a task that takes a frustratingly long time and we still don’t manage to find a free area. But we eventually find a reasonably priced place a little walk from the hotel, so we accept that for now, go back for shower and rest, then take a walk out to have a look at this place.

Maja:

Hamburg is vibrant.

HELLO HELLO!!! The Reeperbahn is breathing life like a monster. It’s alive. It’s been a while since I saw this many people and everyone seems to be after a good time and a good night. We walk to a kebab place for dinner, and then off to the London Pub for a celebratory pint. Tonight we’re celebrating arriving in Hamburg and hoping for as much success and experience as we can get. And I get to hear a lot of stories of when Mark was here with The Drunken Monkees. 

On our way back to the hostel we take a walk to the BeatlesPlatz and down the street next to it which is full of nightclubs. All around is crazy but this street is absolutely deserted. It is clear to see that Hamburg is still suffering from the Covid restrictions which we knew, but it is feeling a little bit strange. So the town feels really vibrant and alive. The streets are totally full of people, but dancing is still banned so the clubs are closed. I’m not even sure why there are so many of the people here or what they plan to do, but since the pubs are open I guess that they make do with that. The whole thing gives me a bizarre feeling. The combination of things being closed and alive at the same time. And little do I know, but this feeling will soon get stranger.

Mark:

The nightclubs might be closed but this place is still alive, alive, alive. And I’ve never seen such a concentration of entertainment venues like the Reeperbahn and its nearby areas. I’m sure there will be a lot of cover band activity, but it really seems like almost every second venue we pass is a potential place for us to play. On the immediate face of it, I’ve never seen so much possibility.

And, for people of a certain stripe, there’s an abundance of possibility of another kind. This place is full, and I mean, full, of sex bars of all kinds of varieties. It’s so open and full on, you can’t really even call it seedy, although what goes on in these types of places I have no idea and I have no intention of finding out. 

Oh, but our hotel room looks out right into the back of one of those sex places, the very biggest one with silouhettes of naked girls in various positions plasted over all four stories of its pink walls. Turning our back on this scene we head out into the night to get a closer look at the city and begin our participation in it. We’re not quite in the mood for a packed and crazy place so I decide to head to The London Pub, first for what I remember being its more chilled vibe, and also because I hung out in here a lot when I was here and got to know Tina, the owner, quite well. I wonder if she’s still here. Unlikely given the time distance and whatever Covid has done to these businesses, but you never know. If she is here, I’m hoping for a friendly face in a strange town and maybe maybe someone to help us get a bead on how things are round here and what kind of places might be good to focus on. No surprise that Tina is no longer here. Left a good few years ago, but the new boss is a good friend of hers so the connection is still there. And while the place is relatively chilled enough for us to get a comfortable spot at the bar, it’s still busy enough for the two staff to be kept rushed off their feet so there’s very little chance for chat beyond a snatched word here and there. Just the one drink here and we discover we’re starting to hit the wall. So back to the hotel it is. We’ll have another look at this place tomorrow. 

Right. That Drunken Monkees Hamburg thing, and the Drunken Monkees experience in general. If you’re interested in reading about that, I covered it in detail in Mark’s Diaries along with the whole of my six years in Madrid in a breakout section. You can find that here: https://marksdiaries.wordpress.com/category/professional/2017/september-2017/

To find the beginning of my time in Madrid just search for ‘The Madrid Story’

Hamburg begins at part nine. Or you can search ‘Album done, summer here’

Day one

Sunday February 27.

Mark:

After a mercifully slow morning we’re out early afternoon but everywhere around the Reeperbahn is closed. Everywhere. Oh well. We give up and come out to try again around 7pm. But again, most places are still closed. After the fully pumped up environment we found ourselves launched into last night this is a confusing and frustrating experience. But we find two possible venues where the people we speak to make positive noises but it’s more, come back in a day or two when the manager might be around. In one of them is some kind of test the power of your punch boxing machine with a few enthusiastic participants playing it. This creates a quite annoying punctuation of aggression every now and then which makes talking to the assistant manager quite difficult and, when we leave, we’re not entirely sure we would want to play there anyway. This is added to the guy talking to us about playing a three hour set. Or at least playing a few sets in a three hour period taking the bar deep into the night. We do not do covers so that wouldn’t work for us; no-one wants to see an originals band for three hours. Even in famous land, only the very top top and legendary acts play for three hours or more. More often, you’re looking at an hour to an hour and a half.  We have a slight language barrier along with the sounds of that mad boxing game so he doesn’t quite grasp all this. But he still seems positive and he does come round to the possibility that we could play for an hour or less while another act takes the rest of the night.

Maja:

How can a city have felt so alive just yesterday and today feel like a ghost town? I don’t understand it. I just don’t get it. Someone, please come here and explain to me so I really understand. This just does not make sense. At all. 

Maybe it’s a German thing? When we were in Berlin a little while ago, the whole city was closed on Sundays as well. It was so closed that even the supermarkets weren’t open. Come on guys. Seriously? Do you need to close down the entire country every Sunday? Even my little city of Stockholm is alive on Sundays. Walking around here seeing everything being completely closed makes it feel like I am in this little town in the countryside with everything being closed so the people could go to Sunday mass. Only the things around is a club town with music and sex clubs everywhere and that is very much not fitting my image of being in the countryside. 

As we do the second round out in the evening some bars are starting to open up, which gives me a little hope. Maybe it’ll come alive soon. I am giving this place the benefit of the doubt, the restrictions in Hamburg have been very strict and many places are still completely closed because of covid. Let’s see how this develops.

Day two

Monday February 28

Mark:

Almost everywhere is still closed. Still. This has gone from excitement to mild frustration to perturbance bordering on actually quite annoying by now. What’s going on and when  will places be open? 

But today we take a walk to the far end of the main strip for the first time and in a bar called Cowboy Und Indianer we are greeted by the owner, Sven, who is very enthusiastic when we introduce ourselves. He says places are still waiting for the weekend and the relaxation of Covid restrictions before they open. Makes sense and we kind of knew Hamburg would be quiet enough this week but that doesn’t massively help our levels of slowly mounting impotent frustration. This comes again when, after saying, yes, we could play in here, like the guy yesterday, he brings up the three hour thing. Oh dear. When we tell him a bit more about what we do, he says he could be open to our suggestion of maybe playing part of a night and leaving the rest of it to someone else. So OK. Another tentative lead. Let’s see. 

Another place we think we might just have a lead, or at least a chance to network, is a  cool looking nightclub type live music venue at the end of our street called Molotow. It’s advertising a show tonight by a guy who plays more or less in our ball park. Could be cool to check out. But when we get there it is, yes, you’ve guess it, closed. However, there are some people inside painting and organising and we get the attention of one of the girls. At first she’s like, go away, we’re closed. But we’re insistent that we would like to talk, so she agrees to come to the door. Once she’s opened it and is face to face with us and we’ve told her what we’re about, she’s all friendly smiles and is very happy to help. She tells us that this place is closed for a little while longer yet but she does give us the names of a few places we could try. We’re very grateful and let her get on her way but they don’t seem right for us. They’re more venues for established acts to play. But still. You never know. The right email to the right person and we might just be able to rustle up a support slot one night which, apart from anything else, could open up a contact or two.

Maja:

We’re just walking. Back and forth. Up and down and the right way around. How long can you even walk trying to hustle gigs? My feet hurt and our mood just keeps on getting worse and worse. We can’t even talk to anyone, everywhere is completely closed. At least we’re building up a view of which venues where it would be possible to play in once they open up. Often we take a look inside a venue, a bar or a restaurant and we’re able to screen the place even if it is closed. Our screening often goes like this. ‘Oh Mark, look at this place.’ ‘Yeah.’ And we go lean forward to look inside the window. ‘Too small.’ We say pretty much simultaneously. Or it’s the wrong feel of the venue or something else. Like if we get a really bad feeling about the place or the clientele there’s no point trying to get a gig there. So we walk around and build ourselves a picture of where we’d like to come back to once they’ve opened, and if there’s anything remotely interesting we go in and ask them if we can play there. 

This is how we hustle. Until we drop from exhaustion.

Day four 

Wednesday March 2

Mark:

Like we did in Berlin, we’re thinking that any night we don’t get a gig, we could take ourselves off to an open mic somewhere, but we have a look today and discover there isn’t a single one happening tonight. And that list of 20 plus that we found, on closer look, we discover that nearly all of them happen only once or twice a month. Or, in one case, four times a year. So it really isn’t as abundant as it first appeared. And of course, Corona and all that, the list is hopelessly out of date. Totally understandably so, but yeah. So many of them aren’t happening anymore, or the places have closed down, or not opened yet. And that is really what’s happening right now. And again, we kinda knew it when coming. Hamburg isn’t really open until this weekend and we’re starting to see that it’s really mainly a weekend city anyway, or at least that’s how it’s currently operating.

Today’s the day to go out and see if we can find somewhere to park the car for free. We go and rescue it from the paid parking we’ve had it in since we got here and set off for the outer suburbs of Hamburg. Here, Maja decides to follow the route of the overground S Train so that we can hopefully be near a train station when we do eventually find parking. We also use the drive as an opportunity to take a detour or two and check out areas where we know certain venues are. What we discover is that, apart from the Reeperbahn where we’re staying, bars and venues are very sporadically spread about the city. We’re gonna go check the city centre later too, but with that being quite close to where we are, we can now see that we really are ideally situated and probably won’t have to travel too much for gigs. We also see that there’s going to be no point coming out to these areas to hustle and can’t now either because, yes of course, everywhere’s closed.

It takes a while, but we do find our parking space then jump on a nearby train to go check out the city centre which sits in the middle of a whole bunch of sea channels, so bridges and river-looking things all over the place. And while the Reeperbahn is nothing but bars of various description and a few shops, here there are hardly any bars or venues and we’ve found the place where you can buy things that aren’t food. We start to think about walking back and seeing what we can find barwise to possibly hustle on the way but we come to the conclusion that there probably won’t be anything, so as we reach the edge of the city we jump on the train and head back. Totally confirmed. For hustling, the only place to be is the Reeperbahn.

Day five

Thursday March 3

Mark:

Moving day. Our hotel was booked up until today and we decided on Monday to check out the Kiez Bude, the hostel I stayed at all that time ago. And boy were we impressed. Even more so when they agreed to beat our room rate at our current place. It’s also right across the road from us, so a really simple transition to an amazing, pink en suite double room in, and yes this is really true, a former brothel. And they fully, er, embrace their past in the whole decor of the place, which includes their famous side by side two person toilet. The place is empty and we have our pick of rooms and so are able to bag their most famous and most popular room, the pink room. It’s up one flight of stairs, so a little carrying for us, but nothing major. We can handle this. A game changer here is that it has a kitchen with a microwave and a fridge. Things you normally take for granted, but a major deal when living on the road. This now means we can make more of our budget which, up until now, had seen us cutting back by mostly having noodle cups made with hot tea water from the last place, supplemented by as much fresh fruit as possible. Living like we do, when you have no kitchen facilities at all, it’s noodles and the like, supplemented by as much fresh fruit as possible, or have breakfast, lunch and dinner on the street or in cafes or bars, or restaurants in extravagant moments, and damn that can add up. 

Not only does the Kiez Bude have a kitchen, it also has a bar. Or at least a bar type area. Currently unstaffed and unstocked, but still a really cool hang out place to have. And at the back of the bar is a huge, and I mean huge, sofa on a slightly raised stage type construction. This will become our office for writing sessions and we sit here, literally as I type this, surrounded by sex memorabilia – is that the right word? – and erotic pictures. There’s even a Kiez Bude calendar over the bar, and the picture of the page for March is our room. This bar is just two or three metres from our room. And from our window we look right out onto the Reeperbahn and Beatles Platz. We can now see exactly how busy things are without even venturing outside. And yes. It’s Thursday, so approaching the weekend, and there is indeed a little more activity than we’ve been seeing since we got here on that explosive Saturday. Maybe we can actually find a few more bars open now. Time to go hustle.

A little high lighted inventory.

The London Bar. Why not? Quite small, but could possibly be good for low key daytime gigs if they’re up for it. They’re not. Apparently they’ve tried music in the past but neighbours upstairs got that thing vetoed and they don’t want to touch it anymore.

We go next door to the Scandinavian bar. We’ve hesitated about this place due to it’s silly boxing machine but we’ve thought, why the hell not, so here we are today. We meet the actual owner Anil. He says we could possibly do something in here tomorrow but he’s also leaving Hamburg tomorrow for the weekend. He may well let us know today, he may not. He doesn’t.

A few more bars are open that we’ve not seen and we go and check them out, everytime having to stop and have our Corona stuff checked before we can even go in and see the place to decide it’s too small or unsuitable and so we immediately turn and walk out.

What we are finding quite a bit is that people perk up when we tell them why we’re here, but we’re also finding that a lot of managers aren’t about and so we still can’t make any inroads.

One place we might be able to make some kind of inroad is Cowboy Und Indianer. And anyway, it might be a place to go have a drink. As soon as we arrive, Sven is there to greet us like long lost friends. And there’s a band playing. Great. We order a pint and settle back to enjoy the band which is a three piece playing covers. Before our drinks are finished, Sven is round to us with free shots. Wonderful. Thankyou very much. Then, when our drinks are finished, he returns and gives us free beers. We might just be able to get used to this. When we order another round, he comes and talks to us and says that we may be able to play here on Monday. Nothing confirmed, but cool. Something of a possible. 

We arrive back at the hotel to discover there’s nobody there. Nobody. Not, no guests. I mean, no staff, nobody. The admin office is a few doors down the street and there’s no-one running the bar or anything else. And we know the guests for the week have left and that no-one else has checked in. We are totally alone in here. 

Day six

Friday March 4

Maja:

Hamburg has finally eased its covid restrictions. Finally. Now dancing is allowed again and places such as nightclubs that have been forced to close can open up again under the 2G+ rules. 2G+ means that you have to show full vaccination plus a booster or a daily test, and if you can show this you’re let in and can act as normal in the venue. Which means that you don’t have to wear those horrible super thick facemasks anymore that Germany has decreed you have to use as soon as you leave your seat. So finally we can have some kind of normality inside the venues again, and more places have opened back up as well. And we are here and ready for the reopening of Hamburg.

We made sure to rest yesterday after the move to have energy for hustling a town that is opening up. There’s no point wasting energy on a closed city. We’re out at 6 PM all prepared and ready to hustle for gigs. Our first stop is the Thomas Read Irish Pub and Club. Honestly I think it is a bit of a strange concept to have an Irish pub combined with a club, I always thought that an Irish pub would be a kind of chill place to sit and enjoy a couple of pints with friends and at times there would be some music or football going on. I would never really connect that experience with a club. That just seems a little bit wrong to me. We go in and enter this relaxed beer garden too cold for anyone to sit in, leading into the pub. The pub looks like it could have been taken right out of Ireland and placed here. The interior is full of the traditional dark wood that you would find at any Irish pub, there’s a couple of people already in drinking beer even though the place opened just a couple of minutes ago. They’re comfortably sitting at the bar as much a fixture as the furniture itself. We sit down at the bar for a second while Mark shows me the Whiskey selection which is one of the most extensive I’ve ever seen. I first look at just one shelf which is full of different kinds of high end whiskey which I would just love to try, and yes, the place has a great selection. I understand why Mark has talked so much about it. And then my eyes wander to the side of that shelf and I find another one. And another one. There must be three or four shelves of whiskey. Now I get it even more. That’s a lot. 

Mark:

When I was here with Drunken Monkees, we actually met and hung out with the guy who actually devised these shelves and personally sourced all the bottles. It was a matter of great pride to him and he told us that the bar owner just totally trusted him and let him get on with it to create the concept, which is still very much in place to this day.

Maja:

Well, much like Mark’s previous Hamburg experience, we’re not here on vacation. We’re here to work, and that means hustle. We need to find the manager so Mark asks the bartender while I look around a bit more. The bartender seems interested in what we have to offer, and actually goes to find the manager who is running around in the club and live event area downstairs preparing for tonight’s gig. It’s actually very cool that he is trying to get hold of the owner for us. But he soon comes back and says that the owner is far too stressed trying to set up the venue for the first gig since today is the first day in ages where they have been able to have music on. Fair enough. He also asks us to come back later, when it’s calmed down a bit. Sure thing. And we leave to try somewhere else.

There’s this bar or maybe I should call it a restaurant right under our room which we had a good feeling about but it’s always been closed. As we walk out of Thomas Read we decide to check it out. It is open. The place is called Bei Teresa and there’s a couple of young people there singing karaoke and drinking way too much for the time of the day. It’s obvious that they are using the place as a pre party before going out clubbing. We walk in and ask for the manager. There seems to be two of them, Teresa and Tommy. Approaching Teresa she meets us with positive sounds and asks us to ask Tommy. He is busy running back and forth at the back of the venue. He seems really positive and welcomes us to come play tonight. Great. We decide to return in an hour or so to set up. The night is still early, and we have other places we want to go to before it gets too late. And now we have our first gig. Progress.

We walk to the area around the back of the London bar. We’ve already scouted it and seen a bunch of bars there that seem like possible venues for us to play in. We go in and talk to a few bar managers, but we soon discover that a whole bunch of bars in this very area go through the same booker. After being sent to talk to this person, then that person and so on a few times, we finally meet the one lady responsible for all the live music in this very concentrated area of venues. She’s perfectly polite and pleasant and gives us her time, but it also becomes very clear that she is only interested in cover acts that can play three 45 minute sets in a night – the format we’re discovering is pretty much the standard around here. Nothing original. At all. And all the bars in this immediate area only have music through her, locking off this whole place to us. There’s no point lingering around here. Time would be much better spent in other areas where the music isn’t sourced through bookers in this strict way. OK. Fair enough. Let’s go back and play our gig.

Mark:

This is really frustrating. Walking up and down and around this area in the past week or so has been so exciting and full of promise as all we’ve been able to see is venues advertising live music. More than I’ve ever seen in a single area, including Benidorm – again, cover town. No originals please. On this one street alone earlier in the day, we stood in one spot and counted no less than seven live venues, and that was just the ones that advertised the fact. So to come and discover that they’re all sewn up with coveracts and no room for anyone like us is a bit of a kicker.

Maja:

And here I ought to explain in case you wonder why we are walking to all these venues like this, trying to talk to the managers. It’s because this is the only way we have of any chance of getting to play. We’ve emailed every venue we could find, around 40 plus venues in Hamburg, but we haven’t even gotten a single reply. Oh that’s actually wrong, we got one nice reply with someone that couldn’t put us on but recommended us to email a couple of other venues. Which we did, of course. But that is all fruitless. No one is answering, no one gives us an opportunity. I don’t know why, but that is how it has been so far. So that leaves us with two options, scrap our dreams of music totally and just go live conventionally, or to actually get out into the world, knock on doors, and generally just make it happen by sheer force. So here we are, investing in ourselves, backing ourselves, and trying everything we can just to get the chance of playing in front of people. 

But it’s kinda like this. Music is dead. Original music is dead. Very few people are trying anymore. Not like us. We are trying to revive it.

Mark: 

The hard truth is that, while we shouldn’t kid ourselves that it was ever easy, it’s now all but impossible for young or new acts to come through and has been for a while. Live venues are closing everywhere, of course, physical sales are barely a thing anymore and haven’t been for a long time so there’s little to no money for acts or record companies to make there, and streaming is little more than a vague promotional tool for artists; hardly anyone but the biggest make any real money. There have been cases of people receiving royalties of less than $20 for five to six million plays. Please go and read that last sentence again. The big stars make the big bucks this way largely because the model is set up to give people who sell more, a bigger percentage share of their sale. And there’s just a big general feeling that fewer and fewer people are bothering to have a go anymore. Damn, even I’d given up on songwriting and the thought of being part of an originals project at all before Maja came along. Noel Gallagher has said that he doesn’t see how another band like Oasis could happen anymore.

And on the day we put this account out, I see an interview in The Independent newspaper with The Who singer Roger Daltrey. He says that musicians can’t earn a living in the record industry anymore. ‘They’re being robbed blind by streaming and the record companies. Our music industry, I think, has been stolen. I think we really do have to be concerned when young musicians can’t earn a living writing music.’

Going into the financials, he continues, ‘The streaming companies pay so little in the beginning and then the record companies take 85, 90 per cent of that. You need a billion streams to earn 200 quid. That’s the reality.’

This is all the backdrop against which we’re operating, here now, really having a go on tour, lockdown odds and all the rest of it stacked against us. But we are writing our songs and taking ourselves out to have a real go at it. With that, we’ve decided we have to make it happen for ourselves rather than wait for someone to open some kind of door and give us permission to do it. We’ve seen around here how acts pass the hat around, even cover acts which has been a bit of an eye opener. But that really could be a way to do something and to generate our own income; bars aren’t going to pay original acts to play, and until you’re known on a pretty big level, no-one’s going to come out and pay entrance to a venue to see you. So if we’re to really do anything, we have to do it ourselves and we have to do it now. 

Maja: 

We get back to our hotel room and pack up our gear, including preparing the two trolleys with stuff strapped on to them. We are now ready to walk the extremely long walk to our gig. All twenty steps from our door to Bei Teresa’s door. Finally we’re about to get to play a full show. It’s been a while since we did that. The clubbing boys leave for their clubs as we start setting up, and there’s this one guy meaning to leave any second now, and he just keeps on staying. It’s quite amusing to see how he just stands there with his mouth half open watching us, meaning to leave, but never quite doing so. There’s a couple of other people there as well. As we get into the show, I especially notice this older couple that totally seem to enjoy every song. I decide I’m playing for them tonight. Thank you for being here, thank you for listening, and I am glad you’re enjoying it. I enjoyed playing for you tonight.

As we finish Tommy asks us to come back and play tomorrow. Today has been a little too dead but he really likes what we’re doing. Great. We just got ourselves a return gig. This is just brilliant. We played and the owner likes us, an original act, enough to ask us to come back. That doesn’t happen. This is brilliant. This is success. Happy we set out for our shortest journey ever back home to drop the equipment off in our room which is directly above the venue. Once there, considering it vertically, we are just a metre or two away from where we just played. 

Mark: 

Yes, the gig was disappointingly dead, but the few people who were in there really seemed to enjoy it, especially an older German couple near the front window who tell us they stayed because of the show. And the staff has been giving us good vibes about it  all too. Great.

I might just be getting ahead of things here, but I’m starting to wonder if this could be a residency. Tommy wants us again tomorrow, whatever has happened tonight. Based on that, once we’re upstairs in the room, me and Maja are starting to talk about this being a place we could just come and play on any off night. And if we are able to be here everynight more or less, maybe, just maybe, word could get around and we really could start to build something. Right under our hotel room. But all those thoughts get destroyed when we return downstairs and outside and see the opening hours of the bar. Only open at weekends. Damn. This really is a thing. Oh well. On with tonight and after that, at least we have a show tomorrow.

Maja:

Happy and giddy with the return gig and the prospects of an eventual residency, we freshen up and leave for our next hustle. Let’s go to Thomas Read. Mark has a really good feeling about this place and thinks that it could be a big possible gig for us, so it is high on the list of venues to visit. So we go and first I think that the line of people is to the nightclub next door, but no. There are two queues. One is to the nightclub, but the other, almost equally long one, is to Thomas Read. An Irish pub. Come on, this is just ridiculous. No way we’re waiting all that time to go into a full venue. Apart from the queuing time, the fact that there is a queue tells us that it will already be far too busy inside for anyone to have enough time to talk to us. Let’s see where else we can go. There’s this music club down at the far end of the club road, Indra, which has always been closed when we’ve been walking by. Let’s see if it’s open now. It is. There’s a guy outside having a smoke and we ask him if we need to show him our covid passports. He looks up at us with a smile and a completely ununderstanding face. But as soon as he opens his mouth to say hello, we can see that he has nothing to do with security and is in fact very very drunk. He then tries a ridiculous move of leaning very far forwards while holding onto the gateposts either side of him. Of course he can’t maintain the position and is soon hurtling down the few steps, heading for a heavy fall directly at us. His body is centred on me andI have to use quite a bit of strength to keep him from falling on the ground and dragging me down in the process. What a place already, and we haven’t even gotten inside the doors. We leave the drunkard where we found him and enter the building. Finally we’re here. Indra. The place where the Beatles began in Hamburg. It’s a big room, with maybe room for 200 people, with a stage in the back and a bar close to the entrance with a couple of bar stools for the last brave guests of the night. We sit down by the bar and order a drink, weissbier, celebrating the opening up of Hamburg and our life here. First gig down, second booked, which is a return gig. It certainly means we’re doing something right. Cheers. There’s a drunk DJ with his friend standing next to the stage changing vinyl discs on a very fancy looking DJ table, with boxes of vinyl singles that they look through all the time. We go to the area in front of the stage to dance completely alone on the dancefloor, moving around to the tunes of great 60s music with our private DJ in the fully packed club district in Reeperbahn. Yes, I’d rather be here than any of the full nightclubs catering as a meatmarket for 20 year olds. There’s almost no-one here but the owner of the club, a couple of regulars and the DJs. Exactly the kind of crowd we’ve come out to meet. And, don’t tell Mark, but I only think one of them was trying to come on to me. 

When we return to sit by the bar, we’re immediately greeted with shots on the house, and then we get to speak with the owner, Sam. And yes, he tells us all kinds of stories about the Beatles, including them playing in this very room, but it looked slightly different then. And he says they often played to no-one but the cleaner who used to put her fingers in her ears since she didn’t like the sound of their music. Hearing that story I feel oddly validated. Especially after tonight’s gig to an almost empty venue. I haven’t really been through that many non attended or under-appreciated gigs, but it kinda feels good to know that no-one even wanted to listen to the Beatles when they were new. I don’t think people anywhere like to listen to new music, and that is becoming more and more a pressing problem for me. We need to find the places where people want to listen. Hey, don’t get me wrong, I’d play anywhere if there’s even one person listening to us, but it’s obviously better to play where people want to listen. Well, not necessarily. If that one person is the right person, that’s the gig you want to play. But you’ll never know that. Right now it’s just a game of trying to get in front of as many people as possible. And play as much as possible, trying to gain experience. 

After sharing stories of the Beatles for a while, Sam leans in to inquire who we are. So we present ourselves, sliding over our card. The Diaries. Sam jolts back in shock. He’s heard of us and knows who we are. He says he remembers seeing an email we sent to another venue in town. So all those emails weren’t wasted afterall. I guess all you need is one to land, you just can’t possibly know which one until you’ve sent them all. He apologises that he can’t put us on right now, but there’s a gig tomorrow and he’d love for us to see it, so he puts us on the guestlist. We explain that we have a gig to play tomorrow as well, but he replies, ‘Just come before, and you can come back after you’ve played.’ As he says that, he pours us another round of those lovely baby guiness shots. 

Day seven

Saturday March 5

Mark:

We have very high hopes for tonight. Guest listed for a 50s rock’n’roll revival show at Indra that could lead to us meeting all kinds of people. Sam, the owner of the place with all his positive thoughts could have developed a lead or two for us to look at. And in between we have the second show at Bei Theresa to play. This last one produces a quite comical moment when I look out of our window mid morning and see Tommy sweeping the front outside area. I pop my head out for a hello to the owner of the venue right beneath our window that we’ll be playing tonight. He’s full of morning’s joys and once again exhorts us to, ‘come back.’ Yep, we definitely will. He shouts up a lot more that all sounds wonderful, encouraging and positive, but the wind, traffic noises and basic language barrierness all combine to cause his words to be somewhat lost. But the sentiment all stays intact and I make what I think are the right faces and noises at the right times and he waves a happy goodbye and goes back inside. As do I.

Maja:

It’s great to know the plans for the day. Quite unusual, but great. So during the day we can just sleep in and prepare ourselves for the show coming up. And for the show for which we’re on the guestlist. This is my very first time being on the guestlist to anything which is a moment to remember in itself. I, not knowing anybody here, walked into the coolest original music venue in Hamburg and got put on the guestlist for the show the next day. I’m having butterflies in my belly from just thinking about it. Or maybe it is belly rabbits. I like the concept of belly rabbit punches more so that is what I decided I feel right now. For the one who doesn’t know about belly rabbit punches, it’s the feeling you get in your belly when you feel so excited about something that you feel all warm and tingly in your belly. And my belly is punched by all the cutest little rabbits right now. 

Sleepy and a tad hungover from yesterday, the time just flies by and we need to get going again. If you think you’d get home from the bar, go to sleep and then wake up and be able to do things during the day before going to the next event when you’re on tour, you’re sorely mistaken. It’s just not possible. You need all the time you can get to rest during the day to show off the best you during the night. We’re straight up from bed to the show at Indra. It’s a 50’s Rock ‘n’ Roll show and everyone there is dressed like they stepped right out of the TV screen of a recording of an Elvis show. The girls are  wearing dresses with the typical iconic make-up you’d see on Marilyn Monroe. And they’re all velvet red lips and big hair. The guys have their combs ready to time and time again fixate their big hairs into perfection. The understaffed bartenders stress behind the long bar to serve the thirsty 50’s crowd and many of them are ordering cocktails while the poor barstaff are probably just asking, ‘Why can’t they just order beer?’ There’s people swingdancing in front of the stage, where the band is nowhere to be seen, and I can’t help wanting to join them. It looks fun. It’s a scene taken straight from the 50’s. Maybe I am in an alternative universe together with everyone who thinks they belong in Grease? We’ll never know.

We say hello to Sam who is busy behind the bar serving everyone drinks, and retire to wait for the band to start. It looks like we’ll have time to catch the first couple of songs before leaving to go play our own show. Everything is timed to perfection and the band will be out any minute now. Any minute now. Did you hear me, I said any minute now. Apparently not. Five minutes after showtime. Ten minutes, 20 minutes, 30 minutes. Any minute now. No. The clock just ticks by and we start to feel itchy as we need to get going to play our own show. Finally we give in and go to the cloakroom to collect our jackets. The band still hasn’t started. But just as we’re gathering our things, the band comes on. Finally. We can catch one song at least, and then we’ll leave for our own show. The band is surprisingly ill fitting to the crowd. Everyone is dressed modern with T-shirts and they look more like they’re going to chill with friends on a Tuesday morning and hadn’t bothered to dress nicely for it than that they’re about to play a 50’s Rock ‘n’ Roll show. But the music is really good. They even have a double bass which is played with great enthusiasm. That’s so cool. I’ve never even seen a double bass before. The song is short and the crowd goes crazy as it finishes. We, on the other hand, go the other direction and leave to some very surprised faces. The girl at the entry inquires as to why is the world we would pay 12 euro to see a show and leave after the first song to which we’re able to answer in a cool fashion. ‘We were on the guestlist. We need to go play our own show now. We’ll be back later.’ 

We collect our gear from our room and walk the ridiculously long distance of all the way down the stairs to our own gig. We’re a little underwhelmed to find that there are just a few dining guests scattered around the place. Nothing we can do about that. Maybe it will fill up later. We get on with it and set up in the window this time with the thought that it might help to bring people in the door. So we start and we go for our calmer songs, because the people sitting here just look like they want to enjoy their meal. That’s fine, my voice isn’t in that good shape today so I don’t want to give everything until we get a bit more of a crowd. But we’re not getting a bit more of a crowd. One couple after the next, the people finish their meals and leave. Leaving us to play to a not so happy bar staff. It’s depressing. It really is. So we turn around and play out for the street trying to get people in, but there’s almost no-one walking around. How can that be? Everyone around here seems to be wanting to go to the nightclubs. But even as we look across the road at Beatlesplatz, there’s hardly anyone walking by there either. We have a moment of hope when this one big group of people that stops by the window and we play them an upbeat song in an attempt to get them in the venue, and they are really digging it. They’re dancing to the music, and the lads seem to love it. We can see some lively discussion as they debate whether to enter the building or not, but they reach the conclusion not to, to the disappointment of some that gesture strongly and encouragingly to us. I feel my heart sink, this does not look good. Playing to an empty bar. Soon afterwards we pack up, get a beer each on the house and drink it to the hollow feeling of a completely flat gig. 

Well, not every gig is a success. According to a few stories we’ve heard this week, even the Beatles played to empty venues around here at times.

But what we do have is the experience of playing a gig that fell flat now. Honestly I think I did some of the best voice work I’ve done so far, and we’ve had the experience of using our gear and playing for real. Maybe the bar staff enjoyed us? They were at least really encouraging and nice to us.

What we also have is the fact that we played a gig. So we can go back to Indra after having done it, and enjoy the evening where people know that we’re performing musicians even if they haven’t gotten the chance to see us yet. I mean, we just played a gig, and they were there watching someone else. So that is what we do. Tonight was a success, there just weren’t that many people there. So we’ll take that, and go and show our good side at Indra. I mean, we’re on the guestlist for a reason. 

At Indra the show is over and the crowd is now getting down to dancing and drinking. We sit down at the bar, say hello to Sam, buy some beers and chat to each other and the people around. Sam keeps us going with free shots and it feels really nice to just be here and decompress after the gig. During chatting with Sam, he tells us that the bars he’s involved with that we could play at are either fully booked or won’t be having live music for a while longer yet, so we’re just in Hamburg a little too early for him. But he does say that we would love to hear from us before we come next time so that something could be arranged.

Turning my attention away from the bar, I suddenly find I’m sitting next to the singer of tonight’s band and he starts talking with me. I’m not sure why. Maybe he thinks I’m just pretty or maybe he knows I’m a rockstar on tour in Hamburg having played her own show tonight. I never get to know, because he is just too drunk to make any sense of. Changing seats to the other side of the bar, we’re not in that much more luck. But at least it is amusing. There is this guy that starts talking to us and he totally hits on me so obviously that Mark goes and stands in between us. Then Mark starts to tell him all kinds of embarrassing stories just to make him feel uncomfortable, with which he succeeds. Mark gets all attentive on me, telling me he doesn’t want to leave me alone with that guy so he stays close to me the rest of the night. We even go to the toilet together so no-one will get a chance to hit on me. It feels safe that he does that for me, especially since we’re alone in Hamburg not knowing anyone. And we know that I seem to attract all kinds of guys, and that can be very scary at times. 

Mark:

On the face of it, tonight could be seen as having fallen a bit flat. But really, it signifies a triumph and a real breakthrough. Everything suddenly looks different now. We might not be playing any shows with Sam or his friends, but he couldn’t have been any more positive and he really does think there could be something for us next time round. With that, we feel like we’ve established our Hamburg base, or at least a potential one. With Lenny in Berlin, we have our potential Berlin base. This basically means we now have very real toeholds in the two main entertainment cities of Germany. And with Germany being the leading musical territory of Europe, we may well have created our own set of keys for unlocking the gates to the whole continent. And we came to both cities not knowing a single person. We’ve done this through sheer footwork, determination and personality. And we still have Ireland and London to explore.

Day eight

Sunday March 6

Nothing today. Nothing nothing. It’s been a major major week with major major results. We give ourselves today off. Totally. 

It’s a great day for sleeping and watching movies, sometimes at the same time. Everywhere is closed anyway.

Day nine

Monday March 7

Maja:

I am not great today. My health is a little bit frail I would say. I’ve always been very prone to catching colds and when I get sick I get very sick. If my mum got the sniffles from a cold, I would be out with a high fever for two weeks. It would always be like that, so I am a bit afraid of getting sick. I do my best at keeping myself well, and today I feel like if I don’t stay in bed I might feel worse. So in bed I stay. I have a gig today that I want to be able to do. Or at least I think I have a gig. 

Mark:

Maja’s not feeling the best today and Mondays aren’t the best days for hustling anyway, with most managers treating them as their Saturdays or Sundays after their busy weekends. We just pretty much continue where we left off Sunday until around 6 when I decide to take myself off on a mini hustle and to see what’s going on. We’ve not heard from Sven of Cowboy Und Indianer so I also want to go and see if there’s anything happening there. I have his number, but I’m heading out anyway so I might as well swing by. If we’re on, Maja will come out and play. If not, she’ll take that. I’m thinking not, otherwise we would have heard something by now, and yep, that is the case. Oh well. I still have his number and he has mine, so let’s see.

Right next to Cowboy Und Indianer I discover a bar called Lehmitz that hasn’t been open the whole time we’ve been here and they have live music advertised. I go in and am told there’s a guy I should speak to who’ll be here in an hour. Cool.

I now check and see The Irish Rover is closed until Thursday. But I still want to go and have a look at it and check out the area it’s in. Besides, I’m out anyway and really want to carry on with having a walk out somewhere.

The Irish Rover is just inside the very clearly geographically demarcated zone that designates the city centre; a ring road encircles it, and it is also buttressed by parks and waterways. The area I’ve come to see is indeed something of a social oasis within a city centre which is overwhelmingly a commercial entity. There aren’t any other potential venues for us here, but what we have is a wonderful large open plaza type area with restaurants cafes and bars dotted around its perimeter. At the apex of all this heading into the city centre is The Irish Rover. Cool. We will return. Now it’s time to return to Lehmitz, the bar I was in earlier. 

I enter and this time meet the Nick I was told to come back and talk to. Like so many other people, he talks about the three hour concept, to which once more I reply in variations of, ‘not our thing.’ When I tell him we’re on tour he’s impressed and thinks we could possibly do something on Thursday but he’ll need to speak to someone else here called Arthur to check that out and hopefully confirm. Oh well. Sometimes it goes like that. OK. Fine. Still, another possible place. I’ll take that for a Monday walk. 

Day 12

Thursday March 10

Mark:

Our hustle target for today is The Irish Rover and Fleet Und Keiker, two venues that were mentioned to us by Sam at Indra. We take a walk out towards the city centre. Approaching The Irish Rover, we see a guy standing outside who we say hi to and quickly establish that he is the manager. He’s interested to hear our story and, as we continue, he becomes more and more animated and interested. By the time we’ve finished, he’s decided he’d love to give us a chance to play over this weekend and says we should maybe drop by later to confirm details. Wow. Brilliant. Thankyou very much. We resume our walk.

We arrive at the Fleet Und Keiker sometime mid to late afternoon. This is normally an ideal time to try to catch a bar in a quiet period and to be able to chat to a bar manager, but we’re discovering that this is a waking up holiday city and the concept of ‘normal ideal times’ means nothing here. The place is packed and the greeter seems seriously harassed. He suggests we return tomorrow sometime mid afternoon. We thank him for his time and leave him to frantically get on with it.

If we can catch someone at the right time, this looks like it really could be a good place for us. It’s an Irish bar welcoming Irish musicians, and is kind of a cellar bar accessed down a bunch of roughly cut, ancient looking stone stairs. And the interior appears similarly anciently appointed. Among the posters, well kept behind glass adorning the walls of the stairs is one celebrating the pubs of Cork, all arranged in a pint glass formation. Oh this is a trip down memory lane. All my old favourites are there, including Fred Zeppelins which is where I used to run an open mic night. I really thought the presence of such a poster, along with my own correlating experiences would have been something of a conversation starter, but no way. Not right now.

Before he disappears into the chaos, our greeter friend is kind enough to refer us to Paddys, an Irish bar very nearby. So we head down there to see if there could be anything going. Oh dear. The place looks lovely, but tiny. Not for us. Back to the Irish Rover it is. Ralph is still there just outside the door. We’re thinking of dropping in for a drink but the quiz, that was on when we passed by earlier, is still going and he tells us there’s not a seat to be had in the place. He also tell us that he was really thinking of putting us on tomorrow but he’s had a look round and discovered he can’t get enough staff to open the downstairs bar that he was hoping to put us in. Still, a very positive contact and this is definitely a place to mark and return to next time.

Back to drinks at the hotel bar, which leads to thoughts about what we’ve done here in Hamburg. We didn’t get exactly what we wanted in terms of stage time, but what we have got what we didn’t realise we actually needed; we’ve made so many contacts for the next time we’re in town. Just like we did in Berlin. Pitched against that criteria, our stay here, which has for much of the time threatened to be quite underwhelming, suddenly looks like an enormous success.

Day 13

Friday March 11

Mark:

We make it Fleet Und Keiker by 4pm but are totally taken aback by how busy it is again. Nowhere near as much as yesterday, but still. We settle in for a drink and, when a small opportunity opens, I go and introduce myself to the owner. Although clearly busy, he is interested to take the time to listen as I talk about us, and has a few questions, such as how long we’re around and the like. Well, we’re leaving Tuesday so we really don’t have much of a window. He says he has nothing at such short notice, but would be interested to hear from us when we return. Wonderful. The theme from last night continues.

Now it’s off for fish and chips in The Irish Rover which is quite simply one of the best fish and chips I’ve ever had. Ralph makes an appearance just as we’re leaving and we have a little hello with him, but we also get to meet quite a few of the bar staff, one or two of whom are from Ireland. Cards get passed around and, in all, we feel we really get to make quite a bit of a presence in here.

When we get back to our hotel, we discover the atmosphere is significantly more upbeat than it has been for our entire time here. An entire German stag party has descended upon us. And a very joyful and welcome diversion it is. A group of around ten guys are in our bar just heading out when we arrive and they hang around for a little longer as we all make our introductions to each other.

Maja:

The adorable stag night guys. Absolutely adorable. They felt so incredibly missplaced in an area of sex and rock n roll, such as the Reeperbahn actually is. As we talk to them, I just feel like we have to give them a little show, welcoming them to the place they actually are at. Keizbude on the Reeperbahn in Hamburg. So Mark gets the guitar, and I stand up on the bar, totally owning the space giving them a private performance of I Like You (Better When You’re Naked). They love it. 

As soon as we finish, they ask if we have any ideas of where they could go for their stag night, which is an odd question. If you just go out to the Reeperbahn, you’ll find so many places to go to. I recommend a transvestite burlesque bar that someone tried to get me and Mark to go to, but we never went. It’s way more fitting for a stag night than it is for two musicians just wanting to play gigs.

Day 14

Saturday March 12

Mark:

A huge walk today as we simply take in the environs of Hamburg without any of the pressure of the hustle. Just a lovely walk with no ulterior motive. Oh that feels nice. And the sun is shining. We stroll down to the docks and walk along them all the way into the heart of the city, along the way stopping for crepes which we lazily consume while sitting at the water’s edge, contemplating the endless shipping and general docklife activity. 

Then up and away we go again, meandering through the crowds in a careless promenade. Reaching the far end of the docks and we come across a bridge and high walkway leading into the city centre. Why not? That takes us into the main shopping districts and back out to the lake before we start to think about maybe dropping in for a quiet drink somewhere. Maybe Paddys, the lovely, small Irish bar we came across a few days ago. We picture ourselves hanging out at the bar, chatting cosily to the regulars and bar staff and generally introducing ourselves to the scene a little more. When we catch sight of the place, we immediately realise none of that is going to happen. International rugby is on, and it’s England v Ireland in the six nations no less. One of the biggest matches in the calendar. So no. There’s going to be no quiet cosiness happening in here today. Oh well.

Back to the hotel for drinks it is, and the lads are there again so another lively hangout with them as we hear about their own assorted adventures on the Reeperbahn last night. We take it easy because we’re planning on something of a late night tonight. We want to go to Indra, arriving after the show there to maybe talk to Sam, tell him about the things we’re doing and see if any kind of tentative groundwork can be laid for a return visit. Apart from anything else, we think it would be good to catch him properly once more before we return home to Ireland.

When we get there, the place is every bit as quiet as we thought it would be and Sam once more welcomes us joyously. We are very warmly welcomed into the company of the bar and introduced to the off duty bar staff who are enjoying an afterwork drink. And some of Sam’s good friends are in and we meet and chat with them as well. It all feels like we’re among something of a secret Hamburg club, far away from the madness of clubland. A place where we can talk social and business, and generally continue our introduction to Germany and Europe. Given the connections Sam and his friends have to venues all over the place with their general live music business interests, this place really does seem like something of a gateway to Hamburg. And with Berlin and Hamburg being pretty much the central areas for music in Germany and Germany being something of a music centre for Europe, right here right now really is one of the best places we can possibly be.

It’s all rather wonderful and the guys are asking all kinds of interesting questions about us and our music. We talk to them a little about our story and they’re enraptured. We tell them of shows we’ve done in Berlin and Hamburg, and about plans we have for playing Ireland and America, and they lap it all up. Then, almost inevitably, they want to hear some music. We have something of a rough studio production of I Like You Better (When You’re Naked) but nothing with really high production values. But by now they’re so invested in the story they want to hear what we have. OK. Let’s have a listen. Sam is very keen to get this on and finally hear what we sound like, so he follows our instructions to the link and the song itself. He hits play and out it comes. Now, this song has elicited some of the strongest reactions I’ve ever seen to any original song in a bar environment. In The Trap in our first ever show, it was demanded as an encore after we’d first played it as our second song of the night. A few people told us it was the best song they’d heard in years, and a friend with some kind of links to the music business offered to buy it off us. Although yeah. I’m still not entirely convinced he was joking. At songwriter events, it has routinely been met by the biggest audience reaction of the night. And in all kinds of settings, we’ve had people come up to us out of nowhere and sing parts of it out to us. In short, it’s fair to say it’s a keeper. But as soon as it comes on here, as a cold, raw studio recording in a huge room, especially when coming on just after the full, classic, studio productions of high octane supergroup classics we’ve been listening to. it does admittedly sound just a little bit flat and quiet. And empty, being just acoustic guitar and vocal and nothing else. But still, all the joyous energy of the performances are still there, and a song is a song right? Wrong. I’ve actually known this as a fact for sometime, and have been advised on it when even thinking of pitching a song to industry professionals; don’t think people can hear the song shine out in its raw form. For most people, unless the full production is there, they have no idea what they’re listening to and this goes right to the top. Right now the production isn’t there, but we still think it sounds wonderful and fun and we dance joyously around the room as we hear it for the first time on enormous speakers, even as we know its sound doesn’t even begin to touch the huge budget productions we’ve been listening to all night. As soon as the song comes to a close and we return to the bar, it’s clear that our new friends only heard the production, or maybe didn’t really hear the song at all, or just didn’t like it. It wasn’t for them. Fair enough and absolutely, no harm and no hard feelings. Surprising and a little disappointing maybe, but in any creative endeavour you have to accept not everyone is going to like what you do, and that goes for every piece of music ever recorded, no matter how successful or universally lauded. What we’re not prepared for is what happens next. We simply cease to exist. The guys form a huddle and start talking – inexplicably still in English – about the most benign things imaginable. Like talking for the sake of talking. Not one person acknowledges our presence as all we can see is backs. I look at Maja and then back at people who, until just a few moments ago, we considered nascent friends. Now, because they didn’t quite connect with our song, we’re dismissed and totally judged as people they simply don’t want to know, or wish to be associated with. ‘This is ridiculous,’ I whisper to Maja. ‘So they didn’t like it, or maybe it didn’t sound great in here. Fair enough. But this?’ No. This is wrong. ‘I think we should just leave,’ I say. ‘Let’s just walk out the door right now and never come back.’ So that’s what we do. Without a glance behind us, without a word of thanks or goodbye, or any other kind of acknowledgement to our hosts, we slip silently out of the door and into the cold, but far more warmly inviting night. What. The. Hell. Was. That?

Maja:

I can’t understand what just happened. Absolutely not. But what I do understand is that no-one will accept a song they hear on speakers without a full production. But still, the behaviour they showed us is beyond unacceptable. I am angry. As we go outside I shake away the anger and let it be replaced with a feeling of ridicule. It’s too ridiculous not to laugh about. And I am utterly confident in our music, and I know that we’ll go all the way, so to ridiculous act like this. Well. At least it makes a fun story.

Day 15

Sunday March 13

Mark:

I wake up with a horrible feeling as thoughts of last night flood in along with the morning sun. I’m still hurt and insulted. And massively disappointed that our friendly ally could have revealed himself as such a superficial fake and turned on us like that. As we progress into the morning and debrief and digest what happened, we start to think that, apart from the fact that maybe we arrived Hamburg a little too early as it emerged from Covid restrictions, it really is essentially a coverbar/nightclubbing town and not worth coming back to for any kind of development. Apart from Tommy, not one person who said we could do something with them has come through. Not even, massively disappointingly, Sven – I might just give him a pass and say his intentions were pure and genuine but maybe there were too many other things going on for us to get full consideration. I mean, the guy gave us hugs and free drinks everytime we walked into his bar. But just like here, in so many other places also we’ve encountered so much huge and encouraging enthusiasm on the surface, giving us so much optimism, and none of it has ever translated into anything tangible. Not one person acted on it. Not one phone call or email. Not even when people promised to call back within an hour or two. And then last night just topped it off as Sam got written off. As the morning progresses we kinda get over it but no, we don’t really want to talk about it with each other. We silently agree to just forgot about those guys and move on. As we do, we agree we ain’t coming back to Hamburg until we’re playing the proper big places. And no. Sam will not be on the guest list.

Maja:

I can’t believe it either. Hurt is an underestimation. I loved the inclusive feeling we used to have at Sam’s, but after getting that kind of response, there’s no going back. After giving our everything to our art, I think we can be entitled enough to give our attention to people who actually believe in us. Sorry Hamburg. I’m starting to feel done with you.

Mark:

As we work into the day and start to feel active, we take the 40 or so minute walk out of the city to pick up the car and bring it back to the carpark near the hotel. It is now ready and waiting for our departure.

Then it’s chill time before we get ready to go out and play the last show of our European adventure. This is Leah’s open mic event at the Alt Liebe, the venue we played last minute on Thursday after our show at The Brauerei was cancelled. We get there and discover it isn’t an open mic as such as it is an acoustic cover show at which members of the audience can get up and do their thing. Which is normally sing a cover song or two with live backing. So, essentially a live acoustic karaoke with open-ness for other elements. Into which we fit. Leah plays pretty much the first half of the evening herself, then the floor opens up a little more in the second part of it all. During all this we get talking to a girl sitting next to us called Lulika who can’t get her head around being able to get up on stage, let alone the concept of doing it, or trying to do it in any professional capacity. In our chat she agrees to film us when our turn comes. When we get around to that, we’ve decided our two songs will be My Game My Rules and Six Sense Lover. Up we go and we tear into both of them.

Maja:

I get up on stage and as soon as I sing the first note I realise. I can’t hear myself at all. My heart drops like a stone but I go for it anyway. It seems like the audience can hear me so that’s something at least. But it just feels terrible. It’s really hard to perform but I can’t even be bothered to care about it. I just go for it. Even if it’s terrible, I gave it a proper shot.

Mark:

The reaction is promising and pretty cool, but it’s clear this crowd does go more for the covers, as they rave and cheer and whoop for that kind of thing when the singers get up. Fine. And they do give us a fair chance so that’s all cool. But there’s something about our performance that, after the event, makes us think we played far too fast and really didn’t do ourselves justice. Last night of the whole tour and we’re a little bit down with ourselves. But we have a recording. When we get back to the hotel, the first thing we do is listen to it. Oh. Oh. Oh. Wow. Really not bad at all.Would we put it up? Maybe, maybe not. But not anywhere near the trainwreck we really feared we’d delivered and certainly not too frenetically fast. Maybe a touch on the faster side, but not too fast. You learn and learn and learn. In the moment stage and live perception can often be so different to reality. But normally it’s the other way round to what we’re experiencing here; you think you’ve done a bang up show, everyone cheered and everyone’s patting you on the back and you think you knocked it out of the park. Then the next day you listen to it and you want to burn the tape. That is, if these things were still on tape. Here, we were convinced we’d delivered a disastrous mess but what we have is not just listenable, we realise it was actually really good. We’re stunned. With that, we really start to decompress, especially as we’ve been slightly tightly wound ever since we got off stage. Although we did all the right things afterwards, said thankyou at the right times and smiled all our smiles as though everything had gone exactly as we’d planned it to, inside we felt just that little bit deflated. Well, now we realise it actually had all gone as planned. And with that, ladies and gentlemen, we have concluded. Tour is done, lessons have been learned, and now with this new recording we can see and feel that our level really has gone up and up and up. We’re going to leave that there for now, get back to Ireland, shake all this off, and then start to put ourselves back together again musically with all we’ve learned and all we’ve developed since hitting the road in Berlin that first night back in the first few days of December at heavy metal bar Brette Bude. Oh damn, we really have not done this the easy way.

Maja:

Is there a easy way? I think we’re doing it the only way it can ever be done.

Day 16

Monday March 14

Mark:

We stay in all day today. A bit of writing in the bar, and also a little movie watching. But overall a total chill. And why not? All our hustling and playing is done. We’ve seen the city plenty and, above everything, we have a big travelling day tomorrow with Maja contemplating an epic drive. And the next day. This is going to take two days as we drive through Germany, Belgium and France, then an overnight ferry to Rosslare, right on the south east corner of Ireland, before driving through the countryside to home.

Maja:

After all that, I really think we need a sleepy day. Sleepy sleepy day. To sleepy sleep sleep.

And yes. I speak like that.

Day 17

Tuesday March 15

Mark:

Three countries today as we leave at midday and slowly pull out of Hamburg, getting a wonderful look at this enormous European port city with much of the road away from it and to the south winding a way up and around it all as we find ourselves in among cranes, ships and sea. And industry. So so much industry.

Then the open road as we drive through the slowly changing landscape crossing from Germany to Belgium, all the way through Belgium then into France, arriving at our motel sometime between 10pm and midnight. It’s a wonderful place. A perfect little double room with a shower that just feels like heaven. Next stop breakfast which we’re delighted to have included in our micro stay.

Maja:

I am glad that I like to drive since there’s a lot of driving to be done. I love watching the beautiful scenery flashing by. And I also think it’s so cool that the scenery keeps changing as you change countries. Germany with it’s deep forests doesn’t quite look the same as Belgium, and there’s an even bigger difference entering France, which offers stunning views of open fields. And with Mark talking about this, that and the other, it’s easy to keep entertained. 

Day 18

Wednesday March 16

Mark:

Up early for breakfast to get on the road in good time for the ferry. Yes, this is going to set us up well and it’s with some anticipation that we make our way to the dining area. We walk into a small, very quiet and clean cafe type environment and they’ve got all the little things you might expect in a few containers on the right as you walk in. Bread rolls, mini baguettes, cake, yep, actual cake, and the butters and jams and things. Then a little fridge containing yoghurt and juice. And tea available of course. And then… and then…we look around to see where the actual breakfast is, accepting far too slowly and reluctantly that this really is it. A few containers of cold bready/cakey things. And yoghurt. We laugh into our disappointment, accept it, fill up on as much of this as we can, and then hit the road again. To be fair, I thought the cake was quite nice.

On the way, I realise with some excitement that we’re in the Normandy region and are going to be driving fairly close to the D-Day beaches. As we progress and I start to see the map a little better, my excitement really rises as I realise we’re going to be driving within just a few miles of Omaha beach. Oh we have to. We just have to. We’ve had thoughts of a nice French restaurant dinner somewhere on the way, but we’re about to smash into those plans with a spectacular history trip to one of the most iconic battlefields of World War II. We find the car park in the shadow of the monument to what happened here. Directly underneath it we leave our shoes and socks and walk the whole way to the edge of the sea and ever so slightly into it. Then we turn and recreate the steps of the men who stormed this beach in 1944, marvelling in terrifying awe at the huge expanse they had to somehow negotiate to have any chance of making it to anything even remotely tentatively resembling safety. It’s actually an uncomfortable walk with the sand being very solidly packed and deeply ridged. If it was anything like that on that day, then the almost impossible task they faced now appears even harder. Back to our shoes and socks and we have a look around the rest of the area, including the museum which we don’t go into – we really don’t have time for that, but there’s plenty of hardware out front and back to take in. Including an actual landing craft and a huge World War I field gun turret. It’s grey and raining and a little cold and time to get going again anyway. But now, out of nowhere, we’ve had a trip to Omaha beach. Next stop, ferry on which, for the first time of all our sea trips, we have a cabin.

Or so we think. We have a short pitstop at a service station where Maja receives an email. The ferry has been cancelled. No idea why. There’s some rigmarole, during which for a while it looks like we might not even be able to travel until sometime next week. But then the company manages to put us on a replacement. Or something like that. Although we now have no cabin. Again. Damn. We just can’t catch a break with these things. OK, so on we go and we need to find somewhere comfortable enough to spend the night. And this is no silent ship like the last one we had on the way to Hamburg from Sweden. No, this one is full of other people who were bumped from the cancelled ferry and plenty of people who had a cabin but now don’t. We find ourselves in mutual consolation with a few of these people in a large dining type room at the front of the ship. With our guitar. After a while, a few people start to ask if we could play a tune or two, but we know they’re looking for songs they know. A bit of a sing song and the like. We decline, saying we only play our own songs. But as the ship leaves port and we all settle into the rhythm of the sea, a few people gently start to ask again. Among them are a group of six or seven guys from Cork, and a father and daughter sitting very close to us on a long couch type thing we’re sharing. When we insist they really won’t know anything that we’ve got, they say that’s fine, so we shrug and we’re like, OK. Might as well. There are a few other people dotted around this area and they look up with some mild interest as we get the guitar out and set ourselves up.

Maja:

As soon as I set foot on the ferry, it’s like the air changes. It’s so obvious to me, like I could touch it. Almost like a taste on my lips. A taste of freedom. A taste of warmth and welcomeness. It’s the people. Everyone around me is so friendly. They speak with laughter in their voices. With kindness. Even though a lot of the people on this ferry are very disappointed that the ferry they were supposed to travel on got cancelled, the feeling of happiness is larger than anything. I think I’d describe it as jolly. And once again I think to myself. I love Ireland.

Mark:

It can sometimes be a songwriter thing to ask if people want a fast of a slow song. When I’ve been in an audience I don’t think I’ve ever asked for a slow one. I’m surprised when that’s the consensus here. Oh. OK. So we settle wonderfully into Insanity. 

Immediately they’re with us and a few raised eyebrows show that a few people are thinking, Oh, we might just have something here. We finish to enthusiastic applause and requests for more, and let’s go fast now. So we do. We’re off now. By our second song they’re just into it and the people dotted around our section have started to move closer. A few of the staff have now stopped what they’re doing and the people in the bar area are now looking over here with some considerable interest. We finish the second and our small original group, especially the guys from Cork are saying, ‘You guys are not stopping anytime soon.’ Wow. Songs they’ve never heard before, and they are really, truly, into it. The boat is really rocking now. No. Really. The sea has picked up underneath us and is picking the ship up with it and as we sway to our own music, we almost lose our balance a few times. As Maja tries her standing on a chair performance, she’s having to have one foot on a table to stop herself from crashing to the floor and, at the first opportunity, abandons all thought of continuing to perform from up there. 

All this is adding to the drama and pure epicness of what’s going on right now and, by the third song we have an actual substantial audience as almost everyone in earshot is gathered loosely around us and all talk in the bar area has totally ceased, all eyes on what’s going on over here. We end up playing for 25 minutes to half an hour, finishing to a great reaction and genuine gratitude for what we’ve just unexpectedly brought onto the ship. We declare ourselves done and are met with, ‘We’ll let you take a short break.’ The guy who says it is only half joking, but people drift away and yes, we are done because, apart from anything else, 25 minutes to half an hour is generally a full show as far as we’re concerned. And this one has been the best show of the whole Hamburg experience and one of the most exhilarating and exciting shows of the whole tour. Still doesn’t quite top the incredible night of Laksmi and a Zum Krokidil performance or two are up there as well. But yes, this is one of the more memorable moments and it’s come out of absolutely nowhere. Thankyou for persuading us guys. It’s a perfect way to finish the tour which might not quite have taken in as much of Europe as we wanted, but which has concluded with us playing while travelling on the open water between France, the UK and Ireland. As a result, although this possibly isn’t totally geographically accurate, we’ve just instantly added three countries to the tour itinerary. So yes. Right at the very last we’ve managed to make it into an actual European tour.