The Atomic Café is so famous in Munich that after it closed eight years ago, part of it ended up in the city museum. The bar, chairs, lamps, even part of the sequin curtain can be seen at the “Night” exhibition. “The audience at the Atomic Café was very diverse. There was the indie faction, there were the Sixtie fans, but also the guests who liked hip-hop,” says Heike Schuffenhauer, who made a documentary about the live club together with Marc Seibold has turned. “What we had in common was the love of music and the extremely well-curated program.”
A revival starts on Friday: the start of the new indie rock party series in the Live/Evil club in the Fat Cat, the temporary use of the former Gasteig. Those responsible for the evening are the former owners Christian Heine and Roland Schunk, who together built the brand “The Atomic Café”, share the rights to this day and therefore had contact with each other after their club closed – but little. Why the comeback now?
“The answer is very simple,” says Christian Heine, 58, whose hair is white, his mustache is black and his hands are smeared with oil. “It’s the first time anyone has asked us.” After the club had to close on January 1, 2015, Heine took a year off. “It was anything but easy,” he remembers. He’s wearing black Vans and a blue T-shirt, with his gray argyle stockings pulled up. Heine now works as the workshop manager of a bicycle shop in Schwabing with bikes, some of which cost five figures. If something breaks, he screws it back together.
Workshop manager and former club operator Christian Heine.
(Photo: Robert Haas)
Even as a club operator, Heine was a passionate cyclist in his free time, was active in the Munich club “RC Concordia 86” and tinkered with his Cinelli bikes. “As a proto-hipster, of course I had an old racing bike.” With a friend he cycled through the Perlacher Forest to Wolfratshausen and back, cycled indoors for training in circles in the winter and took part in international racing bike competitions. “During the day, the Atomic Café was a full-time office job. I made phone calls and faxed,” says Heine, who is a trained graphic designer, as is his partner Schunk. Together they designed the posters, posters and graphics for their parties and concerts. “I booked the indie bands, Roland the Sixties.”
There was a time when Schunk and Heine were on vacation together. In Beijing, southern France and Hamburg. But when it came to decisions about the Atomic Café, there were musical differences and squabbles like a difficult marriage. When the shared club ended because the lease wasn’t extended, Heine was 50 and Schunk was the father of a small child. For 19 years they ran a popular club from which they made their living. “And suddenly it was gone. Roland and I were left without a job, without a project, without a business.”
“So I turned my hobby into a profession again.”
Opening a store together again was unthinkable back then. Because after almost two decades they just needed some distance from each other. Heine wanted to start something alone. A gastronomic concept, a bar with a kitchen, but it didn’t work. The fact that he was known as a club operator beyond the city limits didn’t help him. “It will be loud if Heine does something,” the landlords thought and decided to hire someone else.
So Heine starts where he started in the working world before he took off as a nightclub operator. As a graphic artist, he designed brochures – but that wasn’t creatively fulfilling for him. Heine also says that his colleagues in the open-plan office were suspicious of him because they knew him as one of the owners of the Atomic Café. He never became one of them. So a normal job doesn’t seem to suit him and Heine starts working in a bicycle shop. “So I turned my hobby into a career again,” says Heine. But there are too many owners for the small shop to make it financially worthwhile. Heine gets out again and starts working on premium bikes in various bike shops around the city for a modest salary.
“We’re like the Muppet Grandpas.”
So is the Atomic club night a kind of comeback tour, like the ones older musicians do when they’re financially burned out? Of course not, Heine and his partner agree. You don’t want to do it for free either. “We’re not millionaires,” says Schunk. He is 53, his child is now ten, and has worked as a graphic artist for the past eight years and has designed and sold “luxuriously expensive” furniture for vinyl collectors. As Kidd Lando, Schunk plays jazz, even in the Live/Evil Club – but of course not at the indie evening. The Munich Britrock band will be there on Friday Blek le Roc play – and after the performance the DJs Ingo Black, Justin Barwick and Francesco Feilini will play. The following evenings should also remain indie-heavy. Doesn’t that cause trouble again?
“We’re like the Muppet Grandpas,” says Schunk. He is confident. Heine also, but he admits that he actually didn’t expect them to start something together again. But eight years off were probably enough – during which the two of them also got older. Celebrating as often as back then is no longer possible. The Atomic used to only be closed one day a week, but now the series only takes place every two weeks. But at least: initially for an unlimited period.
Back then they called it party control when they went to concerts and celebrated in their own club. They will do them again. There are also surprises. Features that they would have liked to have had in their own store back then, says Schunk. “There will be no fireworks, no magician pulling rabbits out of hats,” says Schunk. No lava lamp either. The Atomic Café club night operators aren’t taking the glitter curtain out of the museum either. It should stay there, says Schunk. Heine says: “We’re still alive – and want to do something.”