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.
