Berlin

I got to Berlin last week, and played five shows over the weekend. All of the venues were pretty special, but I mostly forgot to take photos. My favourite was Tacheles, an anarchist squat bar in the old Jewish Quarter. Fortunately, it's famous and lots of other people have taken much better photos of it than I could. Have a look at this, for example.

We played there twice (that's me and Ms. Hannah Curwood, who doesn't need to wear a suit jacket for people to know she's serious), on Saturday afternoon and Sunday evening. Playing on Sunday evening meant we were opening for the world cup final, which worked pretty well. Tacheles hospitality is legendary.We also played at Madame Claude's on Saturday night. It looks like a brothel, but in real life it only used to be a brothel. Now it's full of hipsters. It's got a great little downstairs room, and the best sound guy in the business. He also acts as a sort of sheepdog and musters the audience from other parts of the bar before each set, then makes them sit silently throughout the proceedings.

Friday night was Intersoup, which was a pretty cool place to play my first European show ever. Another basement, another silent audience. On Sunday afternoon we played at the garden bar at Mauerpark, which is where you used to get shot if you tried to climb over the Berlin wall. These days that happens a lot less.