Schokoladen 20th January 2008

Perhaps I'll document all the gigs we play for the next couple of months. This third show was in Schokoladen, a tiki-kitsch-distressed looking place near Oranienburger Strasse in Mitte. An area previously alien to us, but one we'll return to next Sunday. As we'd cleverly not indulged in much free booze before we played, and taken the further intelligent step of practicing for a couple of hours on the day, the gig went really well. Remarkably so since my nerves were shot to fuck, as we'd learned the guitarist from Einsturzende Neubauten was in the audience. Daniel gave him a copy of our album later, but I wasn't really prepared to play for Berlin rock royalty so early in our campaign here. He'd come to see the band Am Thawn who shared the bill, the three of whom made a thoroughly convincing Neubauten-style largely instrumental noise. By the end of their set I'd had plenty of agriculture-grade free red wine that had to be remedied by a sauerkraut-and-cheeseburger (the Bavarian) from Kreuzburger and have vowed to be much more sensible next weekend for the sake of my insides. In band/musical developments, I've decided lipstick pickups are the way forward. They perform marvelously in the little duosonic I brought over last week, and I may chuck a pair of low-output lipsticks in the Electrical Guitar Company beast to tame its squall. We're also planning to recruit a violinist sooner rather than later.