Friday December 3
Maja:
We need to test the gear that we just bought so we’re setting up in the function room. The function room is a big hall that once upon a time used to be used as a breakfast buffet. On the blackboard behind the deserted bar desk you can read “OPERA breakfast buffet all you can eat €7,5.” There are a lot of tables scattered around the place with the chairs upside down on them. On one side next to the window there’s an art exhibition with paintings of bottle-like objects. We’ve been told that we can use this hall as a rehearsal space, but it is also used as an office by a guy sitting in the corner with a computer. We ask him if he’s OK with us rehearsing here, which he is, before we set up our equipment. We need to check that the new PA is working, so out of the box it goes. And up on the PA stand. And we plug it in the power jack. And it doesn’t come on. Aww come on. Really? We just bought this thing. Can’t you just turn on? It can’t be true.
As Mark frantically tries to turn it on in different ways, I go behind the bar to try to find a different socket. Yes there’s one here. ‘Mark, let’s try this one instead!’ Mark carries the PA to the bar desk and we plug it in. The light goes on. Yes. Crisis averted. So now we can finally actually start with what we need to do. We find a little better placed socket and start setting everything up. Mixing desk, two microphones, PA, guitar, mic stands and our little mashed up music stand. Everything goes up and that’s great. I’m really not that used to using the mixing desk yet, so Mark shows me what goes where and we try to get our sound together. It’s hard to get something that sounds decent. I think it’s because of the enormous empty hall we’re in. It has an incredible echo to it. It’s just so loud. And it is hard to hear myself, even standing slightly directed towards the PA since the delayed echo keeps coming at me drowning out every single sound I make. But in some songs it is actually quite cool hearing myself like this, with a ton of natural reverb. Like in the song Freefall. That song really feels good to perform like this. So as soon as we’re done we pack our equipment tightly on the trolley, and we have a large backpack with the cables and mixing desk and the guitar case can also be carried on the back. So when I have the guitar case on my back, and Mark has the backpack and trolley we can carry our whole gig setup. It’s light, but it is still a decent gig setup that we think is going to be decent enough for a pub with maybe 70 visitors. It’s perfect for us. With this, we can walk to most venues and just set up and play. Now we just need to find somewhere to play. But first, let’s sort out the parking.
We extended the parking yesterday at the hostel, but now I feel we have time to actually find out how to park around here. We get in the car, drive across the bridge into Kreutzberg and almost immediately find a free parking space about 10 minutes’ walk from the hostel. Problem solved. Now we can return our focus to the gigs.
Mark:
Ten minutes’ walk away. Are you kidding me? Damn, my legs are angry at me right now. I really fear they might not talk to me for the rest of the day.
Maja:
We have a gig on the 19th already booked at Artliners in Friedrichshain, so we decide that we want to go there to say hello to Yvonne who booked us and maybe on the way we’ll find some venues that seem promising that we can go in and hustle for a gig. Basically, convince them to let us play. We set out on our walk in the cold. I think it’s touching zero degrees outside, it’s really not that comfortable and it’s very wet. Quite yucky to be honest. It’s not the weather where one would enjoy a nice little walk outside. But I think that is in our favour. Only serious people go out when it’s not nice outside. Only the real rock stars would venture out in this.
We see a sign that is green and to me it looks like a sign belonging to a nice pub, so we decide to go in and try our luck. ‘Mark, let’s not go here, it doesn’t look right,’ I carefully say after we get a little bit closer. We start to see that under the sign is an entryway to a garden of sorts. ‘No, if we don’t dare to enter a place, we’re going to get nowhere,’ Mark insists. ‘Uhm, that’s not it Mark. I don’t think this is what you think it is.’ I continue to insist. We go in anyway. We get in the little garden, have a look around and realise this isn’t a pub. It’s a school. We laugh and continue along.
We go into a couple of more venues on our way to Artliners. A couple are not very encouraging, but there’s two that actually are. One of these is the third that we walk into, a venue called Fargo and the owner there seems very stressed but also very interested in us and asks us to come back early next week, since he is leaving for Hamburg during the weekend. The other interesting one is called Zumt Und Zunder. When we enter there, we’re told that the manager would probably be interested, but she won’t be there until a coup+le of hours later. Perfect. We’ll be back. To both of these places.
When we finally reach Artliners we realise it’s a venue for musicians, complete with stage, but it’s full and Yvonne isn’t there right now, so we decide to come back later and go get some food first. What that really means is that we’ll go hustle a little bit more before eating and then getting back to chat to Yvonne. Perfect plan, right? We laugh as we go down the cold street, and a heavy metal bar catches our eyes. That looks nice, doesn’t it? It’s a bit different from our music style, so I feel like I don’t really want to go in. But I see Mark light up. If you don’t ask, you’re making it a no already. I can’t argue with that. That’s the mentality to have and it will become something of a catchphrase in the coming days. I think Mark looks cool as, guitar on back, he opens up the doors to the venue. It’s a very heavy metal bar. Skulls everywhere and you hear bands that would probably be called something like “I will kill your children” or “Eat dogs screaming” or something horrible like that. I know my metal, but not to this extent. I’m not really sure how a place fitting for the band “Eat dogs screaming” would like a pretty little song like “All kinds of wonderful.” Well, it’s hit or miss, but to hit, you need to at least swing. The lady at the door is adamant that she won’t even let us even ask a question before we’ve shown her our vaccination passports. And left our contact information. we’d be done in the time it takes for us to check in there, but it is calm so we don’t have to stress that much about taking up her time from other customers. The conversation goes like this:
‘Hello, we’d love to play here.’
‘No, we can’t have any live music here because of our neighbours.’
Here we think, fair enough, time to leave.
‘Thank you very much for your time.’
‘Wait a minute.’
‘OK?’
‘There’s this bar nearby called Bretterbude, they can have music.’
‘Oh, thank you very much.’
‘It’s just down the road in that direction, and then a right turn at the intersection.’
‘Great. We’ll go there and ask. Thank you very much.’
‘Good luck.’
And now we have a little lead. Somewhere to ask that has music. Great. We thank her and leave the venue with a new bounce in our steps.
A couple of minutes’ walk and confusion later we manage to locate the venue. It’s pretty much the same feeling. To me it feels like we never even left the first place. We don’t take any time to hesitate but open the door and walk right in. And it is the same procedure as everywhere; vaccination passports and contact info and we ask the lady checking the information who the manager is. Turns out that she is, and she is called Ileana but she doesn’t speak English very well so a nice lad, Robert, sitting at the bar, helps with translation. Great.
‘Hello, nice to meet you Ileana. We’re a rock-pop duo and we’d like to play here.’
And then Ileana and Robert talk a bit in German.
‘You can come and play here at 10 pm.’
‘Great, tonight?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Awesome. Thanks a lot. We’ll see you then.’ And then it feels appropriate to leave, so we leave without even getting a proper look at the place. We bounce down the street in pure joy, singing, ‘we’re playing a gig tonight.’ As reality starts to hit we realise we’ve barely performed any of the songs and we’ll need a strong and hard setlist to satisfy that crowd. So we go for dinner at a fast food-like schnitzel place next to the hostel, and as we eat we write down the setlist on the receipt. Which we forget and leave at the table. Of course we do. But the job is done and we somewhat remember what it is as I put my lyric sheets in the right order; we’ve barely been able to rehearse some of the songs, and everything has been done during such a short and intense period, so I haven’t had the opportunity to remember all of the lyrics. As we get to the hostel room, I get into the shower. We have time, so I put our newest song, Insanity, on the speakers to give myself at least a chance to internalise the song. I sit down on the shower floor, feeling the warm water heat up my body as I focus on the one track demo I have on the speakers. This is what we call the one-microphone guitar and voice demos that Mark often performs and records to help us remember the songs. They’re a great tool for us, but they’re nothing that we’re going to make public. It’s the songs in their infancy, which is everything that exists right now for most of them and exactly what we need. And it’s wonderful sitting here in here in the shower, listening, singing along and mentally preparing to go up on stage. For the first time here in Germany, Mark comes and joins me in the shower and sits down next to me. It’s a quite big shower, and we let the water wash away the cold and nervousness. We don’t have time for stage fright. Tonight is going to be hard. It’s going to be a collection of upbeat songs, and we’re going to have to be really confident doing it. As always actually. Time flies and we get ourselves ready. Stage clothes on, bags packed and we’re off once again. To our first gig in Berlin.
Our first gig in Berlin. Our first gig on our European tour. Our first gig since our debut at The Trap back home in Ireland. After our first day of hustling for gigs. Today. Right now.
We reach the bar around 10pm. It’s full with people sitting at tables everywhere drinking and talking, and we stand in the middle of the floor confusingly looking around the place. Not one table is open. And no space is empty. Mark slips in and says hello to Ileana. And he comes back and says: ‘We’re playing over here.’ And signals with his arm towards the area in front of the bar. ‘Wait what, there’s no space there.’ Mark looks as perplexed as I feel. This is just impossible. There’s no space there for us.
Mark:
What Maja’s just described me as doing is exactly what Ileana did, although she did it a lot more off handedly. Almost as an afterthought, which is exactly what I suspect it was. She was caught, stumped for a second, then casually swept her hand across the room. ‘You can play there.’ There? There? I didn’t say anything, but yeah. Again. What Maja said.
Maja:
OK, so let me describe how it looks in this bar. Imagine a rectangular room. You enter the room on the long side of the room. On your left you have a bunch of tables, and on the right you have a bar and a bunch of tables. Left of the bar, there is a room with a pool table and toilets, and of course even more tables. There’s not that many people in that room. The bar is on the right short side of the long room, as I said before and in front of the bar there is a little bar table for two, where Robert and one other guy sits, and on the right side of the bar, next to the entryway there is also a little table, I think it sits four to five people there. There are also tables in the middle of the room, so the floor really isn’t an open space.
So when you hear this description, you might understand the sheer feeling of impossibility we have when we hear that we’re supposed to set up right in front of the table in front of the bar. In the little pathway that you would use to go from the front room to the back room in this venue. There’s no space.
Mark:
I’ve got to a lot of gigs with bands and we’ve seen the space we’re expected to set up in and we’ve thought, ‘how?’ But this is the first time I’ve ever been confronted with such a thing and thought, ‘This is impossible. Not going to happen.’ Yep. I really think this one isn’t going to happen.
Maja:
Oh well. We start off with finding where the electricity is. There’s a power socket at the entry side of the bar. Great. That means that we can plug in the PA and mixing desk over there. Mic stands up, mixing desk rudely on the table as we have to ask them to move their drinks to make space for us. We also have to ask Robert to move so we’re able to navigate the leads behind his chair. Yes, it’s that crowded and crammed that we actually have to pass leads around a punter, who is very accommodating and cool about it, but still. Despite all this, everything goes smoother than we might have thought, and before we even realise it, we’re ready. Mark goes around the bar giving cards to people, and I stand in the middle of the floor for a little while just observing the room and the people inside of it. Straight behind me sits Robert, and behind him is the bar. Mark is going to be on my right and there’s the table of four or five people to my left. Also to my left is the speaker up on its stand, and behind me is the mixing desk. In front of me are more people, many of them sitting in big groups around big tables, slightly elevated. In the backroom there is a group with Swedish rockers. I chatted with them a little bit before and they expressed excitement about seeing us. Cool. Really cool. The bar is buzzing and it is time for us to start. Mark comes back, we do a minor soundcheck, and we’re ready.
Mark:
Yeah. That going round and giving cards thing. A really useful exercise. It’s of course good for telling people who we are and what we’re about to do, but here it also allows me to gauge some kind of reaction from people who have come out to a metal bar and are about to be regaled by a pop duo with a single acoustic guitar. Metal fans actually tend to be quite broad in their musical tastes and you’ll find more ABBA fans, or admirers, than the international metal community would ever admit to. Even to each other. So as I go round and tell people what we’re about, there’s a lot of genuine interest, especially when I tell them we live in Ireland, are on our European tour and that this will be the first gig of the venture.
Maja:
We’re on. We start right off with ‘Smile Is Going Round’, then off to ‘I Like You (Better When You’re Naked)’, and then we introduce ourselves. ‘Hello we’re The Diaries, we’re from Ireland and this is our first show of our European tour!’ I’m not quite sure we’re from Ireland, but that’s our base so it’ll have to do. You got to say something. I think we get quite the response from the audience. People watch us, and some are really getting into it. The rest of the show just rolls on. Song after song, and some get more reaction than others. Two songs from the end the bar manager tells us we have one more song, so we finish with ‘Rock ‘n’ Roll Tree’. Applause and we thank everyone. As soon as we finish, the guys at table to our left gives us two shots they’d bought during the show in preparation for this moment, and praises our attitude and courage playing a place like this. The shots are black, and I’m not sure what they contain. Cheers, and we down them. They’re spicy and half of mine goes on my white shirt. It feels fitting getting a little bit dirty after a gig like this. We’re walking around the place taking down our gear feeling like rock stars. Everyone is talking to us, and we get a lot of praise for being gutsy and courageous and for what we’re being told is our punk attitude. It feels really cool.
Mark:
Punk attitude. I never thought about that. But yeah. Really cool to be thought of like that being, as we are, basically a pop act, albeit with what we would like to think of as something of an edge. Then, when I’m in the toilets a little while later, I’m spoken to by a guy wearing one of those T-shirts with a band name that’s impossible to read. I’m sure you know the look. And the kind of sounds those particular bands make. He introduces himself as Julian and says he really admires our attitude. ‘You guys have a lot of balls coming in here, setting up and doing what you’ve just done.’ Well, thankyou very much.
Maja:
It’s amazing to be getting the responses we are in here. A lady who doesn’t speak English gives us a fiver and says something along the lines of ‘really cool played, but you’re not quite loud enough for a venue like this.’ Ouch. But fair play, we’re really not a heavy metal band. But you know what? It was really cool to start off playing in a heavy metal bar.
Mark:
I was told that Maja’s first gig in The Trap, essentially a cover bar band in our small town of Clara, was a baptism of fire. Fine. Yes it was. But then to go from that to a heavy metal bar in Berlin? That’s out of the frying pan into a bigger frying pan. And she’s come through again. Well, we both have.
Maja:
After packing up, we have a beer each on the house and sit around talking to people. Then we thank Ileana and the barman and the others, and leave. We’re bubbling with energy, and Mark wants to go back to the other heavy metal bar and thank the lady there for her recommendation of this venue. So we go back that direction and see her standing in the entryway of the venue having a smoke. Great. We don’t have to go in and search. We go up to her, thank her for the heads up, and then we have a lovely moment when we’re able to tell her that we’ve now already played there. She is absolutely surprised and delighted. Great. Thank you. And off we go to drop by Artliners in search of Yvonne. She’s been and gone. Oh well, it can’t be helped. We went and found and played a gig in the meantime, she’ll understand. So then we go for our last stop of the night, Zumt Und Zunder. Perfect. It’s an artsy bar, and we go into it and take a seat. I stay there as Mark goes to the bar to buy us beer. I sit down and write a message to my brother, ‘We’ve just played a gig, and now it is time for us to start searching for the next one.’ I hit send and look up from my phone. Mark is standing in front of me holding two beers.
Mark:
I was waiting for her to finish whatever she was doing on the phone and look up. Now I have her attention, I say, ‘We’re playing here tomorrow at 8 pm. I just spoke to the manager.’
Maja:
Oh. My. God.
That was quick. In complete surprise I write to my brother ‘Scrap that, we just got a gig here for tomorrow at 8 pm.’ Crazy. So we sit down, and enjoy our beers while discussing the gig we’ve just done and the one we’re going to play right here tomorrow. The feeling is wonderful, it’s just amazing.
When we’re ready for home, we walk through the freezing Berlin streets. Tired and very happy, we reach our hostel room ready to sleep. We open the door and start unloading our gear into the small entryway of the room. Then Mark says, ‘Where did this come from?’ He’s pointing to a backpack. Oh. ‘Mark, we have a roommate.’ The shock is immense. I mean, it’s fine getting a roommate, we live in a shared four bedroom dorm afterall, but I sincerely did not think that they would put another person in our room especially during covid. And in our hurry to get out for the gig, we’d left the place in a mess. Whoever it is isn’t here right now so we frantically and start to tidy up so that our new roommate will have space for their things in the morning. With all of our gear we’re taking up a lot of space in the room. With the room cleared up and us a bit nervous about who the new person could be we go to bed, maybe at 2am. He comes in about 4am and as he does I slightly wake up and check the time. I’ll say hello to him in the morning. Good night.
Mark:
We’ve done it. We’ve proved we can come to a city, where we know nobody, with no leads, and just go out onto the street and get gigs. And we’ve already played one of them and had a positive reaction. At a heavy metal bar of all places. Corona and all its attendant restrictions may yet close in around us and end this whole tour thing. But what it can’t do now is end it before it’s begun. We got there first. Berlin, we are here.
