If an album title promises “69 ways to play pub rock”, but there are 13 numbers on the record, then of course it’s a joke. That Lunar trio knows many more ways to make pubs sound. Or open-air bars, like the other day at Giesinger Grünspitz. Live it is always a show and a horror feast, just as well staged rock cabaret as a quirky happening. Unpredictably diverse, because countless unique pieces from the Munich scene are involved in the performances of the Lunsentrio and thus exponentially increase the playing possibilities of the regular three-piece. First there was Hank Schmidt in der Beek, Sebastian Kellig and Nick McCarthy. The latter still doesn’t think about the rock star status he deserves with his bestselling band Franz Ferdinand and to be chauffeured in front of the Zenithhalle on March 22, 2022 with the “white-tiled Nightliner”. McCarthy prefers the “beer-wet sociability of the last tram home”, reads in the info on the third album of his favorite project. With this he advanced the “historical emergence of the genre pub rock as an alternative to stadium and super rock”.
There is of course no such thing as pub rock, i.e. one that is stylistically defined. There can only be one, that didn’t even apply to the producer and drummer at the Grünspitz gig. Because Sebastian Kellig was stuck because of the Corona and Brexit circumstances in London, where he runs the Sausage studio with McCarthy, three drummers like Cpt. Yossarian alias Manu da Coll (La Brass Banda) his part. Other guests followed, like on the album a dozen musicians like Theresa Loibl, Tom Wu, Mathias Götz or two of them Haindling cover everything from banjo to car rims. Nevertheless, the album does not get out of hand, which is also due to the fact that the trio trunk quintet (with Albert Pöschl and Martin Tagar) did not send any sound files around the world, but came to a barn for the first time for a close recording. Rock, folk, protopunk, ska and wave alternate with a rumbling, hearty counter revue, with many references to Ian Dury, for example, Eddie & The Hotrods or Vulture nosedive. These pop archaeologists also have “Isan” (1983) from the Berlin Turkish punks cobra raised a treasure with explosive power.
The contextual references in the artistic texts of the pullover poet, milieu painter and shouting rhyme shouter Hank Schmidt appear as clever as they are inexhaustible: from popular rock’n’rollers Andreas Gabalier to the Erich Mühsam record of the punk band Slime, from home minister to unknown prison novelist Peter-Paul Zahl, nothing absurd that he would not passionately tear up or praise in his plays. From the counter talk to the manifesto – the infinite ways of playing pub rock lie less in the how than in the what.