Even after ten years, very few know what that means: this or that Milla. First of all, very clear: Milla is female. “Sounds nicer,” says Lena Britzelmair, the club’s new programmer, and nods to Gerd Baumann. The boss explains that it comes from “Müllerstraße”, where he has his music studio. The film musician (“Who dies earlier …”) didn’t like “Müllerton” that much, so he casually called it Millaton. This resulted in his pop label with his buddies Till Hofmann and football retiree Mehmet Scholl. And then there was the club that he wanted to call Milla Rouge, complete with a logo with a woman’s leg stretched up like in the Moulin Rouge club. But no one else found it funny, not Hofmann, not the co-investor Peter Brugger from the Sportfreunde Stiller. So simply: the Milla.
It was love on first visit. Although Baumann often uses the word “bitchy”. Standing tables with covers and pretzel sticks stood around “bitchy”, the bar was from Ikea, “horrible” and also “bitchy”, but Baumann and Hofmann looked at each other in disbelief in this run-down, whitewashed party and classic cellar called Stream bed under Holzstraße: “How’s something like that, a shop like that, in the middle of Munich?” A former water canal for a power plant, sloping, curved; very early on, as an architect later found out, “Westermilla”, a miller, worked here. There are coincidences!
In any case, the men immediately had fantasies: they thought of a tea dance with filter coffee and a couple dance. And Baumann envisioned a babbling artists’ salon, the “fuel” for which was Woody Allen’s film “Midnight in Paris”. But for that, he knows today, the Milla would have to be larger and wider to be able to set up wing chairs.
Instead of “Milla Rouge” and a woman’s leg, “Milla” is now written at the bar at Holzstraße 28.
(Photo: Stephan Rumpf)
There is no lolling about in the Milla. The audience stood close to the stage ramp when Baumann appeared here himself, whether with three quarter bloodwith his band parade, or whether he read poems with his film friend Rosenmüller. It’s one of the “coolest clubs in Munich,” says Lena Britzelmair, now not as a booker, but as a musician: she played here three or four times, no longer tonal correction, but as Rea Lenon and as Lizki. The view from the stage goes backwards past lovingly scrawled black, dark red walls up to the bar, “as a musician you get more than in other settings”.
It’s a stroke of luck that the three operators didn’t usually play in the room themselves (although it’s great: the Sporties’ secret gig), which Lustspielhaus boss Hofmann would certainly be able to do with his music and cabaret agency Eulenspiegel. They always let young, widely networked actors from the scene get involved. Like Britzelmair, who will soon be appearing in New York for her Viennese label. Baumann thinks Milla’s ideal cast is a qualified lawyer, and she’s hoping for a “long-term relationship”, also because she brings in the most interesting hip acts that he, the film music professor himself, doesn’t know at all.
Ten years ago, Till Hoffmann and Gerd Baumann visited their new club before it opened; Co-investor Peter Brugger from the “Sportfreunde Stiller” was not there.
(Photo: Stephan Rumpf)
Philipp Englhardt, who takes care of hip-hop and parties, is also there. As a producer Ditu and part of end of the world is he known in the “beat corner”, a weird hip-hop format, often without raps; at his “Bumm Klack” parties, which later became his label, people dance to rhythmic instrumentals. There aren’t exactly a ton of playgrounds for that in Munich. And when Milla is ten years old, you think back to curious formats: “Same Old Song”, for example, where JJ Jones and his comrades-in-arms interpreted the same piece, such as “Stairway To Heaven”, all night long. Or the “Milla Song Slam”, where eight musicians from all genres want to win over the audience for eight minutes each. A place for serious experiments, from queer-feminist “She-la” festivals to “Bass Meditation” to the hitherto unique street festival “Milla Walky Talky”, where the entire Glockenbachviertel was transformed into a musical tumult from the headquarters. One of Baumann’s highlights was the first “Jazz Jam”, he reckoned with five musicians on stage and three people in front. But the place was packed and screaming loud and alive.
Gerd Baumann played in his own shop with Sebastian Horn (left) and his ballads band “Dreiviertelblut”.
(Photo: Florian Peljak)
One secret, says Booker Englhardt, is that 90 percent of the team from the bar, the door, and the office are artists themselves and bring their bubbles in here, “so it gets very personal.” And so the three-day anniversary celebration will also be a family celebration, at which many favorites like Zouj, Lucy Kruger & The Lost Boys or Mira Lu Kovacs, the previous bookers get involved: from the pop avant-garde poet Mira Mann to Cornelia Breinbauer tiger tiger up to Thomas Schamann with the Dark Wave heroes stay modern and of course Ditu and L One with their synths and drum machines.
Starting from the music club, the entire Glockenbachviertel was conquered with the street festival “Milla Walky Talky”.
(Photo: Stephan Rumpf)
Memories are nice to The White Horse, the ladies band, an early one Wanda– Performance here in 2014. But above all, it has to move forward. “We just extended the contract by ten years,” announces Till Hofmann, “because something is always and what should be?” So no mood of crisis, where more and more music clubs in Munich are fighting or closing? One slipped from existential crisis to existential crisis anyway, says Baumann, but seems more amused than worried, because the Bergau family, the landlords, are particularly fond of them. They don’t want to make a profit with Milla, they largely do without public subsidies and a brewery, and they allow the “feeling of freedom” to cost something. Baumann would still like a filmed concert with talk series down here, like “TV Noir” by Berlin friend Tex, who gave a guest performance here. Otherwise they trust that the right team will keep it open and keep going, as Hofmann says: “Nothing linear. With the Milla, we didn’t just get on the wrong track spatially to stay, to make room for you and us give.”
10 years Milla, Fri.-Sun., 14.-16. Oct., Holzstraße 28, milla-club.de