City vacation: where you can experience good music in Hamburg – Reise

Hamburg is the birthplace of the Beatles. Not their musicians, but the band, who spent their childhood and lout years in the live clubs around the Große Freiheit. That’s why now, around 63 years after their first appearance on August 17, 1960 in Indra in St. Pauli a fan festival with cover bands and other mushroom head disciples, which, with touching devotion, claims parental rights for the Fab Four for Hamburg: the “Come Together Experience” on June 30th and July 1st. The program finds its venues in the neighborhood clubs, some of which already existed back then, including the Indra itself.

But the actual announcement that Hamburg is still a young music city, although most people think of Udo Lindenberg, comes from Reeperbahn Festival, which continues the tradition of St. Pauli as the heart of North German pop music and is now Europe’s largest club festival. The first festival after the pandemic restrictions in 2022 offered around 400 concerts in clubs and clubs, to which 40,000 guests flocked.

Open air on the Reeperbahn: The band Kraftklub inspires their fans in front of the Dancing Towers.

(Photo: Imago/xim.gs)

The four-day pop music hype that has taken over the district has meanwhile also become an international meeting place for the industry. For some indie souls, the vain running around of people with plastic ID cards around their necks feels like the continental drift between football fans and Fifa.

But despite the enormous urge to expand the concert marathon, which was founded on a small scale in 2006, the Reeperbahn Festival still offers a wide range from young talents to stars like Billy Bragg, who will be one of the headliners of the new edition at the end of September. And of course the club scene benefits from the hustle and bustle of the masses, even if many guests panic at the abundance of the program, so that they only stay three songs long.

One of the noise caves, which have been ensuring the flourishing of independent diversity in Hamburg for years, almost brought down a high-rise building. A concert by the German punk band madsen in the Molotov Club, which was then still located in the basement of the post-war ensemble “Esso-Hauser” on Spielbudenplatz, is said to have triggered such a loud crack in the concrete in 2013 that the high-rise windows were forcibly cleared that night. Since then, the Molotow has been on the west side of the Reeperbahn, but it’s still perhaps the most important way to convey the message that live music can make you happy.

City trip: The Skybar on the second floor of the Molotow on the Reeperbahn - in a quiet moment.

The Skybar on the second floor of the Molotow on the Reeperbahn – in a quiet moment.

(Photo: Gregor Fischer/picture alliance/dpa)

As in the days of John and Paul, subcultural musical life continues to take place primarily within the walls of St. Pauli. Here are the great music halls of Docks, Great Freedom and Kaiserkeller, whose operators had unfortunately completely isolated themselves during the pandemic due to loud lateral thinker messages in the club scene. Founded in 1968 verdigris with its influential mural by Werner Nöfer and Dieter Glasmacher is right next to it. It’s mostly disco here, but there are also concerts at the 1889 Tanzsalon, which includes Indra, the delivery room of the Beatles’ debut.

The loophole for bohemians and their music is this Golden Poodle Club, who lives on in a colorful concrete block on Hafenstrasse after a long, eventful history of hot nights, but also demolitions and fires. The more committed to the soul, jazz and dance genres mojo clubwhere, among other things, the after-show parties of the Elbjazz Festival take place, lies under a gigantic hinged manhole cover between the Tanzenden Türme and Operettenhaus, Reeperbahn 1. This is where the club started its legendary concerts and dance nights in 1989 in an empty bowling alley, which like so many other things not recognized as a creative nucleus in the area, but rather demolished for an investor project.

This destructive fate is now threatening one of the city’s most important music venues, the Astra Stuben in the Sternschanze, a former pub in a railway viaduct, in which no doubt every Hamburg band has performed at least once – with a view from the stage through the panes onto the striking steel rivet bridge, which is now connected to all the surrounding buildings, some of which are listed, and other club catacombs should be so that the Deutsche Bahn can torment a new construction overpass that can only be called monstrous in size and appearance.

Far away from these hard-fought areas in the center, another temporary attraction for concert-goers is formed in the summer. The International Summer Festival auf Kampnagel, which was founded in 1986 as a theater festival, now offers a program balanced between music and performance over three August weeks – this time with the Sun Ra Arkestra, of course, without Sun Ra. The Beatles Festival also takes place without John and George. But maybe with Paul and Ringo?

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