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.

Sami Scenes

My latest story in Australian House and Garden, December issue, just out. See below. They have published it as a Christmas story. I was most interested in the Sami people's own traditions.
Check out the photos in the magazine when next you're in a newsagent....for some reason I can't copy them.....but they are beautiful. I'll add some of mine here.

High above the Arctic Circle, the Sami people preserve a unique ancient culture and lifestyle as they follow their reindeer herds across a mesmerising landscape, writes Diana Plater.
The temperature is a freezing -5C but I’m warm in my boots, woolly hat, thermal overalls and huge leather gloves. I am watching as our guides  lasso four reindeer, one for each of our group, and  the animals take their places, ready to pull our  sleds through the snow. We’re soon flying over frozen creeks, past lakes and forest. For anyone from Australia, this is a Christmas fantasy come true, and it’s  possible to imagine Santa’s workshop is coming up just around the corner. We’re a few kilometres from the town of Kiruna, north of the Arctic Circle in Sweden’s Lapland, bound for a lake near the village of Jukkasjärvi. For about 150,000 indigenous Sami people, this stretch is a small part of the huge area that makes up their ancestral homeland, known to them as Sápmi. It covers the northern parts of Norway, Sweden, Finland as well as the Kola Peninsula of Russia. Our guide, Nils Torbjörn Nutti, explains it’s been Sami territory “since the ice started to melt about 15,000 years ago… when they followed the reindeer up from what is now northern Europe”. Unlike Rudolph and friends, these reindeer don’t fly, but they can withstand temperatures even lower than  minus 40oC. They’re the lifeblood of the Sami people, providing them with transport, food, milk, warmth and clothing. The Sami way of life is intimately intertwined with these animals. “We’re still working with the reindeer, but also with a lot of help from technical things,” says Nils, referring to the use of snowmobiles to round up the herds as they follow a time-honoured seasonal path along the Norwegian coast, through northern Scandinavia and Russia and down to the Baltic Sea. Later, in Jukkasjärvi, we are invited to climb inside a Sami tent, a lavvu, where a fire of bark and birch is burning. Here we eat a typical herder’s lunch of smoked reindeer meat with flat bread, and drink coffee from wooden cups. Bar the caffeine, this is the way many Sami lived for millennia. In more recent times, there were dark years when the Sami’s languages and traditions were officially suppressed, and many of them were moved into modern housing. Yet their unique culture and spirit has survived. These days, an elected Sami Parliament sits in Kiruna, working for increased self-determination and the protection of Sami languages and land. Kiruna, the northernmost town in Sweden, is being gradually relocated because of damage from a huge
underground iron ore mine, so there’s a palpable sense of change in the air. I meet up with Laila Spik, a Sami cultural guide and the author of several cookbooks and guides to native plants. In this region, the latter include  båsskå ( Angelica archangelica ) , better known to us as garden angelica or wild celery. Its stem is eaten, the leaves are dried for tea and the roots can be used for medicinal purposes. As the eldest daughter of the family, Laila was taught about Sami ways by her reindeer-herder father, to ensure their cultural identity wouldn’t be lost to future generations. Core tenets include shamanism, which is a belief in animism and spirits, Laila tells me. Goddesses also feature prominently, including the fire goddess, who must always be fed first each morning. “She was the goddess who helped the child be born and who protected the people, and we should never forget her,” says Laila. The Sami are also exponents of one of Europe’s oldest song traditions, known as yoik, said to go back several thousand years. Relying on melodic and haunting vocal sounds instead of instruments, it’s a form of musical expression that’s winning fans and popularity beyond the Sami people, especially since a yoik performer won a talent show on Swedish TV. It’s the landscape that has me mesmerised. The day before my reindeer sled adventure, I’d spent some time at the ski resort area at Bjorkliden, which is about a 90-minute drive north of Kiruna. Our guide, Amanda Malis, took me on the back of a snowmobile up to Låktatjåkko, Sweden’s highest mountain lodge, which offers a spectacular view of Lake Tornetrask and Abisko National Park in the distance. We warmed up next to a roaring fire and ate waffles smothered in cloudberry jam. That afternoon, I took a train from Bjorkliden, whooshing past historical railway stations and scenes of people ice-fishing from camp chairs, before pulling into Kiruna. I feel I can’t leave Sápmi without trying another local activity: dog-sledding. One evening I squeeze into a sled behind a mother and her two daughters. As we take off, the huskies stop barking, intent on running, and silence descends as we scoot across the snow. Whizzing through the forest of white-capped birch trees, spirits are high and we stop at a collection of lavvu , to find a piano perched in the snow. When our guide invites us to sit down and play a tune, the first song I think of  is, naturally, Jingle Bells.                     #
H&G TRAVEL
204 Australian House & Garden
  

INNER-CITY VIEWS

It's always fascinating looking out my kitchen window in inner-Sydney Ultimo. There's a passing parade of pedestrians and drivers, which never seems to stop.

There's people walking into the city to go to work, students walking in the opposite direction.
There's grandmothers taking their grandchildren to the pre-school up the road. And on weekend nights the crowd emerging from one of the best, local pubs in Sydney: the Lord Wolseley.

Our local homeless woman never stops moving. Up and down the street every day. She's on a mission. To collect bags and odds and sods to fill up her trolleys. She sleeps next to them under a huge, blue tarpaulin. She gets moved from one spot but just ups all her belongings and goes to another. She's tiny and grey but she's as fit as a fiddle. And very, very serious.

My city view is a stark contrast to my country view - escarpment in between the rainforest trees. Birds of every description. I particularly love the lyrebirds who come to peck at their reflection on the sliding door.

You wake up to the sound of birds and cows mooing in the paddock there, not cars and construction.

Each wakening fills me with curiosity.

BORN TO DRIVE

 

I went to see a film this week, Bruce Springsteen and I, expecting to see a biog about the life of this notoriously private superstar.


Instead it was a series of self-made videos by fans about why they love him interlinked with old concert footage showing his raw animal energy.

(Of course I love The Boss only for his song-writing skills.)

There were some surprisingly eloquent comments by his fans and not so loving ones by one poor, long-suffering sod who was sick of being dragged all over the world to Springsteen concerts by his girlfriend.

I think I first got hooked on Springsteen's music because it was so good to drive to. Darkness on the Edge of Town was the first of his albums I bought - it was a cassette that was soon destroyed by all the dust flying into the car's cassette player. But boy it was great driving music.

And of course Born to Run was any self-respecting roadie's anthem, perfect for exploring wide, open highways.

My iPod is still full of The Boss, interspersed with a strange mix of heavy metal, Punk and country rock. No accounting for tastes, I guess.

Open roads, highways, bush tracks, corrugated strips of red earth, they all welcome that Jersey boy.
It doesn't matter if you're driving a ute, a four wheel drive or a pickup truck.

And he's not bad listening for a long plane trip either. Just don't do what I have been known to do without realising it: sing out loud with your headphones on. Now that's NOT cool.

Bruce Springsteen's former rented home in New Jersey where he is said to have penned Born to Run

Photos: Diana Plater                                        

Opening a Window to a Good Education

If you’re wondering why I haven’t been blogging lately it’s because I have been hiding away in another world for the past six months – the world of academia.

It’s a strange, ghostly place where people can be seen shuffling down corridors or emerging from dark offices, where they have been working on PowerPoint presentations about Barthes and Derrida.

They tend to wear stockings and sandals (the women) and men’s sandals (the men) and have little interest in fashion or hair styling.

It’s a nice change from the world of celebrities, who only read something they have written themselves. Was it Elle who said that?

They have read 20 books to your three chapters and not only have they done that but also analysed them to the nth degree, using words you have never heard before and can’t even find in the online Macquarie dictionary.

They urge you to dig deeper and connect your paragraphs with linking sentences, to have an argument and to ask questions. So different from journalism, especially today.

But I wonder does anybody read those journals they so religiously publish in?

It’s easy to be cynical and scathing but on closer reflection you find they have some very interesting things to say, a way with words you couldn’t have imagined and some are supremely humble about their work – the truly talented ones of course.

It’s been a "good education"  – and one at times when I was at my most disheartened and frustrated I wanted to drop out of. But it’s opened me up to writers I hadn’t heard of before or read, new ways of contemplating old ideas, and an antidote to Alzheimer's, if ever there was one – better than crosswords any day.

When I finish my Masters of Arts – with any luck in a couple of months – I will post all the books I have read this year. What an incredible and varied list. And then maybe later all the articles, poems, links and sound poems.  And maybe even my finished Masters creative writing piece and exabloodyJesus – sorry I mean exegesis.

Now that was a word that hadn’t entered my subconscious before this year.

When the fish aren't biting

I find camping grounds scary places. You wonder why people didn’t just stay at home – with tents the size of McMansions, BBQs bigger than the average stove and enough fishing gear to send Lake Jindabyne dry.

So we normally avoid them at all costs.

That’s why I’ve discovered the Snowy Mountains in summer is not a bad alternative to the beach. The clime is slightly cooler and in Kosciuszko National Park you can camp anywhere you like so long as you can’t be seen from the road.

Our aim on our five-day trip was to do a major Alpine walk, explore a bit, try our hand at freshwater fishing and camp out. I’ve since realised it pays to be organised on such expeditions.

Many years ago when I lived in the Kimberley and Northern Territory my ute was equipped with a tin box full of camping utensils, including a couple of billies, a swag and water bottles. All have disappeared over the years. So into the back of the trusty Subaru we packed a couple of sleeping bags, a tent, the fishing lines and hooks, a bag of plastic plates and cups, knives and forks and  a thermos.

After a magic day of walking from Thredbo to Charlotte Pass, we headed off on our camping adventure. It was years since I’d been to the Snowies in summer and it was exciting to see the wildflowers out in bloom and the mountains green from all the rain. The unexpected part was also seeing people had lit fires at their camping spots – no bushfire ban so far these holidays.

Mmm, some matches might be a good idea, I thought as we stopped in Khancoban to buy supplies, including a torch at a rather under-equipped store. At the petrol station we were able to get fishing hooks.

“Do you have bait?” we asked.

“No, you have to go to 42 Alpine Way for that,” we were told and we headed back past the store.

An enterprising local had a thriving business selling worms from the neatest shed I’ve ever seen – with rows of caps and stubby holders displaying his collecting habits.

We asked if he knew where we could buy a billy – and he suggested the local op shop.

No billies there but decent frying pans and some more plastic plates.

“You need something good and deep for frying the trout you’re going to catch,” the woman in the store said hopefully.

 

Back up the road we found a good little picnic spot for our lunch and a possible place to throw in the line but then I realised we’d forgotten to get a license. Having been stopped before by a Hot Lips Houlihan lookalike when fishing on the south coast, we didn’t think it was worth the risk.

At Cabraumurra we swapped yarns with ruddy-faced men from Merimbula who’d been exploring back roads and finally picked up a licence as well as emergency food of tinned tuna and fresh bread. We were directed to Three Mile Dam opposite the Selwyn Snowfields as a good place to camp and fish.

It wasn’t long before we found a spot and took the tent out. Problem was it was missing a part and was therefore useless and anyway I thought we’d be warmer and more comfortable sleeping in the car. Then the March flies struck, stinging even through layers of clothes. Lucky the one thing I hadn’t forgotten was the Aeroguard.

Down at the dam the late afternoon sun was warm, leftover Christmas cake and luke-warm tea tasted heavenly as I read a novel and my husband fished. I could hear the wack wack of him hitting something with an empty bottle but ignored it.

But the fish weren’t biting, even with all that fresh worm bait. All he’d managed to catch was a pile of March flies.

 “Don’t worry we’ll go into Kiandra tomorrow and have a big brekky,” I said.

It wasn’t till the next morning as I stood at the Kiandra cemetery eating my bread and tinned tuna, since we also discovered the historic town had no shop or café, it dawned on me what would have made perfect bait: March flies.

A country pub joke

I was in the tiny hamlet of Wee Jasper recently, having taken a back road from Tumut to Yass (NSW).


After winding our way down the mountain on a rough, potholed road through part of the Brindabella Ranges, we stopped for a drink at the pub overlooking the Goodradigbee River. You can usually find a few jokes and funny comments on walls or in posters at such pubs, if not from patrons sitting at the bar.

I thought the one I found tacked to the wall worth sharing but can only paraphrase it:

Well Julia Guillard and Bob Brown decided it was time they visited the "country", talked to country folk and hopefully drummed up a few country votes. They dressed in their moleskins and Akubras and headed bush. Just for good measure they took a blue cattle dog with them.

Finding a nice country pub they wandered in to the bar.

"A couple of middies," Bob asked the bartender and they settled in the corner with their dog, waiting for likely constituents.

The next thing an old farmer came into the bar. He looked at the dog, picked up its hind leg, put it down, looked puzzled then walked up to the bar and asked for a drink.

About ten minutes later another farmer came in. He also looked at the dog, picked up its hind leg, put it down, with a very puzzled look and walked out again.

Yet another ten minutes and another farmer came in. This time he also did what the others had done but Bob could stand it no longer.

"Hey mate, why are you all looking under our dog like that?" he asked.

"Well," the farmer said. "I was told there was a cattle dog in here with a couple of arseholes."