Live and direct from Arlanda airport!

It’s been about two months now that I hooked up with fellow Irishmen and music nerds Simon Conway and Brendan Gregory when they both happened to be visiting Berlin at the same time. Simon was over to hang out and see the place (and do some hardcore record shopping), Brendan was over because he was playing live in Berghain under his Chymera alias (does he still use the I Am An Exit alias?). I actually met Bren the night before at a tiny bar in Kreuzberg where Mano Le Tuff (Berlin is full of Irish people!) was throwing a little shindig to celebrate his birthday. I remember being downstairs in a tiny underground cellar area watching the lads DJ and ordering a beer when all of a sudden I saw a few people get up quickly and head upstairs covering their noses, more people followed suit, starting to cough and sneeze and I suddenly felt my own sinuses become a tad ticklish so I followed everybody upstairs. It transpired that a girl had brought a canister of pepper spray in a bag with her, and somehow this had gotten smashed open, filling the whole lower level of the bar with pepper spray fumes! Even the upstairs part started to fill up, so all the doors and emergency exits had to be opened for a while, and we all stood outside clutching our beers and sneezing and laughing at each other. It soon cleared out that so the party got right back on going. Those crazy Berliners! Pepper spray! Now *that’s* hardcore clubbing!

The next night after a late dinner (I’d actually planned on bringing the lads to a really good French restaurant called Le Crapule that I’d been to before but it had recently closed down, so we went to the one beside it instead) we decided to check out Watergate before we went on to Berghain as Bren wasn’t on until 4am and neither of the lads had seen Watergate’s famous flashing lights ceiling yet. When we got there the three of us were stopped by the bouncer and asked what we were coming in to see, whereupon Simon Conway smartly rhymed off several artists that were playing, the labels they were on and the promotion companies that were involved to which the bouncer replied “Actually no that was last night”, but after a bit of friendly haggling he let us in. It was only 11:30pm or so, native Berliners wouldn’t normally be seen dead in a club before 1:30am, but we checked out the flashing ceiling (I’ve seen it a few times and it’s still pretty impressive!) and got our vodka and orange juice orders in. I forget who exactly was playing that night, but the warm-up DJ wasn’t the best.

Eventually we made it to Berghain, Bren kindly negotiating us past the hundred deep queue as “friends of the artist”, and then proceded to get the whole main room dancing with his laptop + access virus combo live set. Berghain nowadays is the stuff of legends, however I still think it’s a bit overrated. Or maybe I just don’t like how big it is, I was always a fan of smaller 250-ish capacity places. I’ve always had better nights when it was just the Panorama Bar open on its own (although even that’s a bit big!)

A belated thanks to Bren for the guestlist! He’s living in Barcelona now (the Berlin of the Mediterranean) and is doing gigs almost once a weekend, check out his Myspace site for dates.