The Gaslight Anthem @ Werkstatt, Cologne

I had been looking forward to this evening for a long time and then it was over a little bit too fast. I was working in the morning and had to rush to a rehearsal afterwards so there wasn't any chance to grab something decent to eat by the time we arrived at the "Werkstatt". The weather was fine, quite a few people were there and before we knew it our good friends of The Gaslight Anthem came out of the venue and the time turned back a few months. It was almost like they never left. I really enjoyed talking baseball with Benny again.
The show was fabulous. The whole band seemed to be in a very good mood and everybody looked like they were having a lot of fun. Although Alex (bass) seemed to be a little annoyed by the artificial smoke cannon. New songs, old songs, even songs of the upcoming record which will be out after this summer. Oh boy, I can't wait to get this goodie.
No one of the crew seemed to be interested in Fall Of Troy who played as the headliner for the night. Judging from their fans I didn't miss much since one dork was yelling their name while The Gaslight Anthem was playing. Those fanboys can really be a nuisance.

It was one of those special nights that don't come around to often and especially since I don't have that much money to burn. Somehow I didn't go to a lot of shows in the past few months so it felt really good to hang out with my friends for a nice summer evening. The only thing on the downside was that this was the opening day of the football Euro championship so I wasn't able to watch the second game of the day. Nevermind. Great Entertainment. Hopefully I will make it to another show.

KölnCampus: College radio in Cologne

There had been an urgent need for an independent radio station in Cologne for ages and since the local college radio station "KölnCampus" went on air a few years ago it's fun to listen to the radio again. Although the program is far from perfect the main difference to the established corporate and public radio stations is the choice of music they play. And that's where it really gets interesting.
Cologne is dominated by the WDR, the public radio and TV station Westdeutscher Runfunk". They air five radio programs and one TV broadcast. Their radio stations range from youth orientated programs ("1Live") to spoken word programs (WDR5) to a station for the music of, well, let's say elder people (WDR4) to an information based program for everybody else (WDR2). "1Live" was my preferred choice over the past few years although it's rather hard to listen to it because of the crappy chart music they play. Still when the clock changes to 8 pm their program suddenly becomes better with lots of in depth broadcasts about bands, famous people, they do reports on all kinds of topics and they have the german version of John Peel in Klaus Fiehe whose Sunday evening program is really worth listening.

What "KölnCampus" did was introducing a whole new load of bands to the airwaves. Sometimes the mixture is rather strange because when they don't have a program in the studio they have a computer streaming a shuffle mix of the music they have. Which leads to rather abrupt and weird combinations. Like havning a classic rock song first which is followed by a hip hop song which is followed by a hard trance track which is followed by a country song which is followed by a grindcore stomper. You get the picture.
Today though they have an hour of hardcore and punkrock tracks and that's pretty neat because I got to listen to some bands I had never heard of before or some bands I had long forgotten. That's what I really like about the station. Sometimes the really dig deep to bring up stuff which reminds you of something and then you can continue from there. This is the playlist up until now (it's still running as I write this at 11:44h am):

11:43 raised fist you ignore them all
11:40 agnostic front dead to me
11:37 bubonix fashion tattoo
11:33 Refused The Shape of Punk to Come
11:30 propagandhi anti manifesto
11:28 no fun at all catch me running around
11:25 millencolin twenty two
11:23 good riddance united cigar
11:21 bad religion against the grain
11:19 pennywise i get around
11:17 nofx whats the matter with parent..
11:15 anti-flag you can kill the protester...
11:11 against me white people for peace
11:09 lagwagon know it all
11:06 far from finished disaster
11:02 be your own pet love your shotgun
11:00 distillers, the drain the blood

Great stuff. Maybe it's the overture to tonight's Hellfire Radio broadcast, the punkrock show on "KölnCampus".
There's the chance to listen in via livestream which can be found here. I don't know the capacity of the bandwidth but for me it worked fine every time I checked it out.

Home sweet home

It was always rather funny to listen to those rap songs in which the lyrics describe the surroundings of the rapper, how he grew up, how hard and tough his life was roaming the streets of his hometown district. And maybe it was always funny because the cities and their disctricts were always somewhere else. There are songs about my hometown Cologne, but those were either pretty weird and bad (as in wanna-be gangsters singing about their oh-so-tough part of the town) or they were referring to other parts of the city I never lived in.
Now while listening to our local college radio station I came across a song which deals with the south side of Cologne, exactly the part of the city in which I grew up in. The video below is kind of interesting to me since it shows a lot of streets and places I frequently go to and I think the breakdance action was shot at the "Adler" memorial which is roughly 200m from where my parents live. I am in no way an expert on hip hop, but I found the chorus rather boring, still it's a nice song and a fine description of what life was and is like on the south side. Take a look:

O-Flow feat. Kurt Hustle aka Retrogott - Köln-Sued

Akiakane @ Sonic Ballroom, Cologne

I have been looking forward to this show ever since I found out about it on punkstelle.de at the end of last year. It's very rare for us to get to see Japanese bands play live in local clubs, so I gave the music of Akiakane a try via their myspace site and I instantly liked it. Very nice melodic punkrock with enough energy and aggressiveness.
Arriving at the "Sonic Ballroom" at around 2115h the place was decently filled but definetely not sold out. First up were a band from Cologne called The Bloody Valentines, a name today often associated with whiny emo bands, but those guys were more into the punkrock kind of things. Well, there were somewhere in the middle between classic 77 styled punkrock and German fun punk gods Die Ärzte, although only on the musical side of things. This was too much cliché. Interestingly though their bassist seemed to be blind, still he was making all the announcements and it seemed that he was writing a lot of the songs. So,w ell, yeah, they played for around 45 minutes which a quarter of an hour too much if you ask me.
When the samurai girls of Akiakane entered the stage the expectations were very high it seemed. There was some kind of strange atmosphere in the room. Noone knew what to expect now. Introduced by what seemed to be their tour driver from England they then went on to absolutely tear down the club. Fast, high energy and aggressive punkrock tunes, not very much talking on stage (maybe due to the lack of English knowledge - which wasn't true as I found out after the show when I talked to singer Moe for a few minutes), that's the way it should be. People seemed to enjoy the show and were dancing around, getting them back on stage for one encore after around 40 minutes. It's a pity the Ballroom wasn't more packed than the ~40 people who turned up on this Sunday night. But I really enjoyed myself and hope that they will return in the future. If not I might go and check them out in Japan. That's what their merchandise girl Nao told me to do. よろしく。

Weekend Round-up: Shows, shows, shows

So Friday started off with that show in Dortmund. And since I hate to repeat myself, I will just give the link here.
On Saturday then I was really wasted when I got up in the morning. Let's face it, I'm just not used to getting to bed this early in the morning. And every time I think I want to sleep way into the afternoon hours there's always some idiot in my neighbourhood who's redecorating his or her room. So no sleep 'til the next show and on this Saturday evening Kommando Sonne-nmilch were playing at Gebäude 9. I completely forgot about that show and only remembered it when I saw the poster for the Dortund show the day before. So I headed to the other side of the river and arrived at the venue at 8 pm. And noone's there. Which is strange, since all of the predecessors of Kommando Sonne-nmilch were sure to at least get a good attendance each time they played in Cologne. So me and the guys I met up with there had a beer first and then waited until 10 pm for the show to start. The music was just as expected, but the stage was fun. The whole band was looking like they were working for some construction company and in the back of the whole stage there was a huge plastic chainsaw. Great picture.
The show finished up early with just one band playing so we sat in the café a little bit longer, only to get annoyed by some dorkheads on speed who were climbing chairs and tables. I got home at around 1.30 am and prepared for the next day.
On Sunday Cologne's finest were coming home from a two week tour of Europe. Cobretti and Deny Everything teamed up with Tackleberry to play a show at the Sonic Ballroom. I have to admit the Ballroom is more and more becoming a punkrock institution in Cologne. There's shows almost every night and although I have to admit that most of them are not really my cup of tea I really appreciate what the people are doing there. They should just broaden the variety of different flavours a little more. Setting up a show like yesterday's is a step into the right direction. This could be considered to be the rebirth of Cologne hardcore pride. It's been quite a long time since I've seen an underground hardcore show attended by so many people with such good bands playing. Tackleberry started the whole thing with their positive and classic stop and go hardcore. The crowd seemed to like it and there were people bouncing around in front of the stage early.
Next up (after a very quick changeover. I REALLY like that!) were Deny Everything and their Lifetime-influenced melodic hardcore just had the same effect on the audience in the first rows. Stagedives and highfives, just getting in gear for their show with Gorilla Biscuits, I guess.
Cobretti were the headliner for the night, and their more aggressive and mean brand of hardcore fit perfectly to end the evening. Although singer Carsten seemed to have caught a cold, the sound was thundering and the crowd was having fun. Again, I have to say that I haven't seen anything like this in Cologne for a long time. Around 70 people turning up for a show on a Sunday evening with only local bands playing. This is great stuff and I really hope there's more to come in the future.

So this ends a weekend which I haven't had in a long time. It really was fun to hang out with a lot of people, meeting some faces I hadn't seen in a long time, just having a good time.

Great days in a row.

Honestly, the past few days have been the best in a long time. I had so much fun spendingt ime with the guys of The Gaslight Anthem who we had the honour to play with on monday. We talked a lot after the show, I then met the guys on tuesday to give them a short tour of the city which they seemed to have enjoyed. And then yesterday I spent the evening with them watching movies, going to a bar and talkeing and talking for hours and hours. I left at 5 in the morning with a smile on my face. This is what punk and hardcore mean to me. Meeting new people and just communicating with them. Broadening your own horizon by listening to their stories and opinions, getting new perspectives on different things, just having a good time sitting together somewhere. This is what you need every now ad then to remind yourself of why you're in this whole thing for such a long time. I know it happens every now and then, but you never know who you'll come across. And when you meet such nice people like Alex, Alex, Brian and Ben you know that it was worth the wait.
I really hope I can meet up with those guys again on ther stay here in Germany. And if not I'm going to fly over there some time in the future to have Ben and Alex teach me some Baseball techniques.

And thanks to those guys I'm listening to Bruce Springsteen all the time now...

The strange story of an old punk turned model in Japan

So I never had a morning like this. I was waorking as usual and while there was nothing to do I was looking at spiegel.de which is one of the (if not the) biggest German news site. And guess what I find there. An article about a friend of mine. He went to Japan to study there for a few semesters and now he's a model there. Something we all here were going nuts about. That guy is anything but a model. He always looks like he's way too tired, he always sneaks around like nothing can bother him, he always wears old clothes, worn out sneakers, and so on. But he's a really nice guy and he's a very good friend of mine.
So some guy I know from my internship last year did an article about him and his story which can be found here >>> Big in Japan: Wie ein Altpunk zum gefragten Model wurde (German). It's kind of funny to read a story you have heard and told a million times before. Yes, he was "casted" off the street. Yes, he didn't have any interest in modeling at first but was persuaded by a friend who was visiting him in Tokyo at that time. Yes, he's worked for very big names. And, hahaha, yes, he is an old punk! This is great, if there is one guy who deserves this attention it's him. Congratulations, David!

Meanwhile his roommates back in Cologne are going crazy because the media is calling them. Apparently they there are more newspapers who want to do an interview with him. Maybe the fairy tale continues over here...

Copa Colonia 2007: "The ball knows us"

It's a tough life. After drinking for the past two days, on Friday out of frustration, on Saturday because there was a good show, I was asked to take part in a football tournament on Sunday. Boy, that is hard. I had to get up at 10 am, I tried to at least wake up a little bit before the first game started at 11.30 am. Our team was "Bolzen" and we represented the magazine with the same name. A lot of players were acquired from Cologne Sunday League team "FK Trimmdich" and those guys can play. A nice location right in front of Cologne's big stadium, nice muscial backgroud with DJ Ben of "Bass Präsidium", so there we were. We were lucky enough to get through the group phase but then we were eliminated in the quarterfinal conceding the winning goal in the last minute losing 1-2. but it was fun and although I had a week off from work I feel like I might need another one rather soon...

Edelweisspiratenfestival

Today there was an "Edelweisspiratenfestival" taking place just across the street where I grew up. The park is called "Friedenspark" and at its outside stretches there is a huge memorial for the fallen soldiers of the World War I. The whole building used to be a fortress during the times of the German Empire back at the turn of the century (1900). Today it houses a center for children where they can play and build their own wooden fortress.


So today there was this festival to honour some resitance fighters from the Third Reich. Back then some young people from Cologne formed groups calling themselves "Edelweisspiraten" or "Navajos". They originally emerged from the "Bündische Jugend", some form of boy scouts during the Weimar Republic. Those kids roamed the country hiking and singing (to put it simple). When the Nazis took power the Hitler Jugend was the only youth organization allowed and all other groups were closed down. But those young people from Cologne didn't want to join the Hitler Jugend and decided to set up their own stuff which was pretty dangerous back then. They were harrassed by the police and the Gestapo and had to meet secretly in the parks of their hometown. Towards the end of World War II some of them even took part in sabotage acts to disrupt the military actions of the defending Wehrmacht. Because of that some of the "Edelweisspiraten" were assassinated just before the end of the war.


As said, to honour those people a festival was set up with lots of stands with food and drinks, a small exhibition from the local documentation centre which covers the history of Cologne during 1933-45 and there were bands playing on five different stages. Everything set up around the war memorial we used to call "Der Adler" (the eagle) because of the statue of a huge eagle that stands on top of the main building. The atmosphere was very lively and peaceful with all kinds of people walking around the place. I bumped into an old friend from school whom I haven't seen in ages as she was taking a walk with her boyfriend. Then there were other friends who were involved in setting the whole thing up. Lots of children running around, lots of older people. You could say it was a real family festivity.
I really enjoyed walking around there during a perfect sunny afternoon, but unfortunately I didn't have time to stay since I promised a friend I would meet her at the train station. But I will be back next year to take a closer and longer look.

Take a look at some pictures from last year:

Wild life in the city

I can remember that when I was young there were a lot of animal documentaries on German television and the two main characters were Heinz Sielmann and Bernhard Grzimek. They were the masters of animal documentaries and were awarded a lot of prices yet at the same time there were a lot of impersonations of them in comedy shows. There were always those sentences that "right now we are looking at animal XYZ in its natural environment and this is what it usually does and look at how it is learning to cope with the environment" and so on.

So ... today I am waiting at the train station for the subway to take me home from our rehearsal session. And while I am waiting there a young man goes up and down the platform. He's casually swinging his keys which are on some sort of strap band, whatever. While he is doing this he is obviously very anxious and nervous. At least his walking up and down - which he dind maybe 10-15 times while waiting the 10 minutes for the next train - looked like he was.
Suddenly he notices a garbage can at the bottom of the escalator. He starts kicking it and he notices that it swings. What follows next can be compared to little children who find out that certain actions cause a reaction by the object. Our young fellow was now experimenting with his environment. He started kicking the garbage can numerous times, trying to get a huge swinging effect. Then he starts walking up and down again, returns to the garbage can and starts kicking it again, this time with his heel.

This was very interesting to watch. It really gave me a smile after a long day.