Couldn’t get the visa to take Manhattan, Attempt to take Berlin…

I don’t know why it is that I have the same taste in music as Germany, but I do. While favourite bands of mine like The Auteurs and Carter USM are ignored by the pudgily welsh indie historians of Grim Britain and neglected by the kids they serve – in Germany everyone seems to know who they were and seems to hold them in the proper esteem. While, in Germany, Art Brut (and we should pause to note here that we’re mates because we think they’re amazing – we don’t think they’re amazing because we’re mates) are rightly heralded as the best thing to come out of Britain in a decade – here their press remains grudging and unable to see past the novelty band they simply aren’t. And, to an extent, they like us – which proves nothing and undermines my point but is, all the same, why I bring it up.

We’re just back from launching the album in Berlin (It was decided to release it over there three weeks prior to its coming out in the UK so as to give bittorrent uploaders a bit of a decent run-up) and, as usual, it was a pleasing excursion into the realm of minor indie celebrity. They give you things there, you see: bounteous dressing room tables overflowing with rolls and sweets and cakes and ale, dinner, beds, taxis and an audience. We’ve a track on the covermount of their premier music magazine. Their principle mainstream online entertainment portal picked our cover art over REMs for it’s weekly album review link. The kids want things signed, the crowds want an hour and a half and the interviews! Ah, sweet luxury of interviewers who don’t care why Julia left some band and why I want to kill Pete Doherty…

But still, self-indlugence aside, we’d love Berlin anyway. It is nothing like other european cities. Its most pertinent apsect is not it’s past. London, Paris, Rome and their lesser cousins are monuments, tombs – preserved relics of dead things. Paris is romantic because it was once so; London similarly cool. Their sights are distinguished by no one living (and Buckingham palace is an exeption on only the most technical of grounds). All that stuff about a vibrant, multicultural, polyglot society is nonsense and made moreso by its shoehorning into the ugly narratives of the idiot academy. The vibrant are living in museums and, wherever their history lives, it is not London, nor Paris, nor Rome.

Berlin is different. You can’t say what Berlin is like because it doesn’t know yet, it is still happening. While it is full of History, it is not full of hindsight – you can guess what will happen to it but you can’t be sure. There is graffiti everywhere and it can’t be washed off because some of it is graffiti that will come to have mattered. There is no order to the architecture, just a competing jumble of attempts to impose order. There are patches of wasteland everywhere - grassed over and strewn with old railway sleepers – even right in the centre where a Yo Sushi and two Starbucks could happily have been inserted. In the east, the DDR’s apartments – built purposefully large and luxurious so as to ease the discomforts of limited resources and compromised freedom – can be bought or rented for a London pittance and filled with a thousand fliers for parties, gigs, art shows, cabarets, anything that can be tried before the calcification sets in.

People you talk to had Nazi grandparents, were communists until they were ten, are anarcho-syndicalists now but still buy strawberries at Easter with the unabashed glee of those who do the impossible. You can mention the war – as befits a work in progress you can mention anything that helps – but you won’t be speaking the same language. The end of our history was the beginning of Berlin’s and, while it can’t last forever, it will be ongoing for a generation at least. I think. Maybe.

Maybe there’s a link between all this and the difference in musical tastes? Maybe germany was less poisoned by the comfortable self-satisfaction of the victor’s children in the sixties? Maybe fun and dancing don’t cut it as motivating factors for music when they are not enshrined in the canon of a generation’s birthrights?

I don’t know. We played a gig, sold some merch, went to an amaaaaazing bar…