AN ODE TO BERLIN

 To celebrate the fall of the Berlin Wall here is a blog about music's influence during those years.

Thilo Schmied  was only 14 in March, 1988 when his heroes, Depeche Mode, were invited to play in his hometown, East Berlin.

More and more people were managing to escape from East Germany at this time, so as Schmied, a former sound engineer, says the authorities tried to appease those still there by holding concerts of popular western bands.

Only a few kilometers away from the Checkpoint Charlie border crossing, the British band had recorded four albums in the vast former ballroom of the Hansa Studios in West Berlin. 

 “I was at school,” he explains. “They said they would give us tickets. I said, ‘What?’ I still have the ticket. Six thousand people were there. I thought I’d die.”

In the last days before 1989, acts that went over ranged from

Shakin’ Stevens to Bruce Springsteen, while the Stasi fearfully watched on as young people swarmed near the Wall to catch concerts in the West by Michael Jackson , David Bowie and Pink Floyd.

“Music is not completely responsible for the Wall coming down,” Schmied  says. “But it’s connected politically.”

In November, it will be 25 years since the fall of the Wall (155 km of barbed wire and concrete watched over by towers), and Berlin is celebrating with special events and exhibitions that recognise the division of the city, the Cold War and the events leading up to peaceful reunification in 1989-1990.

To get a feel for those times we meet Schmied, a former sound engineer who has exclusive access to the famous Hansa Studios, outside the building, known as the Meistersaal, just down the road from the now reconstructed train station of  Potzdammer Platz.

Köthener Strasse 38, in Kreuzberg is a hallowed address for musicians and music fans. This is where many ground-breaking albums were recorded, particularly in the mid 70s to early 90s. Musicians say there’s a kind of magic in the place, to do with the acoustics of the oak-panelled Studio 2.

Past the foyer filled with old photos of rock stars and producers is a sweeping staircase which leads to the first floor Studio 2. With 15m-high coffered ceilings, wooden patterned floorboards, heavy red curtains and chandeliers, the “Great Hall by the Wall” started as a ceremony location for the Berlin builders society, where Master certificates were handed out. Later it was open to the public, and was also used as a chamber music hall, a venue for Gestapo parties and in the 1950s a ballroom. Musicians speak of the magic of its acoustics.

When the Wall went up only metres away in 1961 the building was relegated to the fringes of no man’s land, surrounded by fields, rubbish and gypsy camps. But in 1964 it was bought by the German record label Ariola and then in 1976 by Meisel Music Publishers, with Hansa being one of their subsidiaries.

Not only were the studios a lot cheaper than ones like Abbey Road in London, artists loved the freedom of Studio 2, with only a remote TV camera linking them to the control room down the hallway.

Close your eyes and you can start to imagine its most famous artist, David Bowie, in his elegant style, singing here during the three years in the late 70s he spent in Berlin.

Inspired by German Expressionism, the art movement that exploded there in the early 20^th century, writer Christopher Isherwood and the Weimar Republic as well as the theatre of Bertolt Brecht, he has since admitted some of his obsessions were “infantile” in the context of the brutality he soon learnt of.

But at the Hansa studios he did some of his most creative work, recording the albums known as the Berlin Trilogy  here – Low and Heroes, while Lodger was completed in Montreux and New York. He also produced The Idiot and Lust for Life for his friend and sometime flatmate, Iggy Pop (the godfather of punk).

On his 66^th birthday - January 8, 2013 - he came out with his ode to Berlin, Where Are We Now, the wistful single of his first album in 10 years, The Next Day.

We’re in what has become the studio’s café or green room but was once the control room, where the Wall and watchtowers could once be seen through the window, now blocked by a brick wall of a neighbouring building. And Schmied tells a story about  how one of the sound engineers, Eduard Meyer, flashed one of the lamps at the border guards, as if to say: “We’re here.”

“Iggy and David yelled, ‘Stop, stop they will shoot on us’,” he says.

Privacy was part of the appeal of the studios, and while there might have been deals going on outside, no drugs were allowed inside.

U2’s Achtung Baby with the song they composed here, One, was the last big Studio 2 recording in 1990 and 1991. In a salute to Germany they gave it the facetious title, possibly inspired by Mel Brooks’ The Producers.

Renovated in the 80s, Hansa Studio has had a renaissance and is now an active space with musicians from chamber music groups to the bands, R.E.M, Snow Patrol and The Hives recording here. 

We climb the stairs to the digitized Studios 1 and 3, try out the brown leather couch, check out the instruments and listen to Schmied’s choice of music as he operates the control panel, including Bowie’s last recording here, a 1979 rendition of Brecht’s BAAL.

Just before hopping into Schmied’s bright yellow van to further the tour, he tells a story about how in the early 80s Andrew Fletcher, the keyboard player from Depeche Mode, loved to sit in the street-level restaurant and eat pineapple and cheese on toast. When he established his own label he called it Toast Hawaii, the same name as his solo album.

With his rapid-fire monologue interspersed with videos of producers and others speaking about those heady days, Schmied takes us past Bowie and Iggy’s old flat, Hauptstrasse 155 in the borough of Schoneberg.

Two doors down is Neues Ufer, the legendary gay café, which opened in 1977, where the pair used to hang out along with Nina Hagen, the East Berliner who recorded at the Hansa Studios and today is still performing Brecht-inspired cabaret internationally.

I’m particularly excited to stop in front of Isherwood’s old home also in Schoneberg, where he may have worked on Goodbye to Berlin, which the film, Cabaret, was based on.

Another favourite Bowie haunt was the Paris Bar, an expensive French cafe in upscale Charlottenburg, where we later go for lunch and choose the omelet with lots of bread.

We pass what was the legendary Dschungel Club (with a similar reputation to New York’s Studio 54), where now there is an upmarket hotel and a florist.

The still-functioning SO36 club on Oranienstrasse near Heinrichplatz in the district of Kreuzberg, which took its name from its postcode, was home to the punk rock movement. The Sex Pistols had a rare Berlin gig here and it was also where the Dead Kennedys and Toten Hosen cut their teeth.

The historic Goya club and former theatre near the famous KaDaWe department store (Bowie sings of being “a man lost in time” near here) is where U2 and Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds had their first Berlin shows. Cave was one of the longest foreign muso residents of Berlin, living here from 1983 to the early 90s, and also recording at Hansa Studios, including the title song for the Wim Wenders film, Until the End of the World.

However, Schmied says talk of Lou Reed being one of Hansa’s artists is not true. His Berlin album was recorded in New York.

Five cool ways to get a feel for how much Berlin has changed since the Wall came down:

• On the plane read John Le Carre’s The Spy Who Came in From the Cold set in East Berlin or Stasiland by Anna Funder.
•   Forego Checkpoint Charlie and the adjacent Berlin Wall Museum, which though fascinating is crowded, overwhelming and touristy and visit the incredibly moving Wall memorials at Bernauer Strasse to see what division meant for the city. See: http://www.berliner-mauer-gedenkstaette.de/en/
• Travel back in time from there by catching the M10 tram arriving at the Stalinist-style Karl-Marx-Allee.
• Then walk up it and across to the East Side Gallery, a segment of the Wall, which has been turned into the longest open air gallery in the world. See: http://www.visitberlin.de/en/spot/east-side-gallery
• Have a drink at Yaam, a reggae club on the River Spree, and one of the 200 or so music venues that still exist in a scene dominated by techno and electronic music.