Dead airports are better than real ones.
Blood of a Poet, Berlin, July 2022
A lot of people say never go back.
The trauma of return.
But after throwing my possessions around Berlin in some kind of occult pentangle, after not moving here, during Brexit, lockdowns, my ceiling falling in, and becoming editor of a British publication, I find myself lucky to return to a city of ever-revealing depths, like many never returned to, seeking only my Avengers cane, I left at the show I was invited over for.
It was very weird playing an aircraft hangar in Berlin, among legends. Disused hangars, when the purpose is not to board a plane, are symbols of the acid house raves I was too young to attend in the UK.
I was here on the invitation of the great Danielle de Picciotto, who co-created the Love Parade back in 1989, celebrating the fall of the Berlin Wall, with east and west uniting in the “Summer of Love”. She went on to form bands, write books, and work as an artist across mediums. I was playing aside Berlin originals, acid-house poets, cabaret legends, a brilliant set by DJ Ragu, Danielle’s partner in both HackedePicciotto (Mute) and beyond. Sisters guide each other. As I would later in this trip witness what is labelled an ‘abusive relationship’. I was happy to be able to inspire, stand up - and call out. I confronted a bully who left a young female with no space, only pathologically centring himself as the person in need. To face that strongly makes me feel strong. To disclose personal experience for the sisterhood. In my day it was not possible to be a victim, that is what the heart of my novel, Psychomachia is about. We had to shut up, withhold the stain of dominance. Leaking inside us. Rotting our self-belief.
Recently I confronted someone else I’d overheard talking me down. I stood my ground. I have always loathed professional confrontation and I shook like a leaf above it, but after many years of having no care for my reputation other than wanting my stories to sing like Greek tragedies of rumour, heresy, and the shock of difference, ever wanting to be noticed, rebelling against the control of heteronormative class structures, in pain, flaying publicly, all the research now feels like I’m on the road.
Everyday I feel like my years are only just beginning to emerge as considered actions beyond experimentation. I take the liberty to be pulled to the ground, saved from the functioning airports that rip in chaos like climate change, asking three people how to manage walking the snakes of security with a fucked up foot on the way here, getting three different answers. They’ve removed the “How was your security experience?” buttons.
There’s so much further to begin… but it was a damn fine, iconic night. An audience is an honour, thank you to everyone who comes. Here, it spread out into the summer, in a typical laidback Berlin scene, and I will remember the smiles of people watching.
Tempelhof personifies peak Berlin. The airstrips used by the US military to get supplies into West Berlin run like a huge exercise circle on the flattened landscape where pilots threw sweets to the Russian-ruled East Berlin children as they landed and are now the location of summer sports that are so niche you’ll never see them again. It’s a film set of weirdos drinking radler (lemon shandy) and Fritz Rhubarb, finding one another to live beyond the success culture of London.
I walked over today with cuz Morgan and her DJ/musician pals. We found shade in the free garden allotments. Ate vegan ice cream. Walked past the BBQ areas. Now war is alive again, we consider life in the portakabins for the Ukrainians: behind fencing enclosures to keep them safe, but in situ, it’s difficult to separate the camp from its zoo-vibes. Forming another They, who can leave, but will They make it back home? Empathy is not condescension. Obviously the war is much closer here. The talk is about gas rationing over winter, merino underwear.
My flight that was supposed to leave Sunday was cancelled, and only vast expense would get me through faster than the next available alternative in a few days time, so I will check into a shared workspace in Neukolln in my unexpected extra time here, inform most of the submitters to our upcoming War issue of Ambit that they have or haven’t made the 90 pages and I will administrate the show we are having to postpone at Rough Trade East. Extreme weather terror. The system melting. Too many planes. No AC. Public transport warnings. I’m working with seniors, they’ve been suggesting the cancellation since the media began this fear of 42’ heat. English gardens will set on fire as compost combusts. Let’s keep everyone safe and stay cool. All the graphs I see on Twitter make it very clear we’re getting hotter, faster. The show is now on 21 September and will be less of an experiment in how to create a magazine experience as a live show but will showcase more, and recognise the live space and its purpose. Tickets are still available.
As you may know, I like perspectives to be articulated in all angles, all ages sometimes showing in the shy and earnest nakedness of creativity. It doesn’t matter whether you’re junior, becoming established, or senior, there are always different truths which forego the other. That has always been the obsession with youth, to contain it, before it tips out of naivety towards power. Yet we’re all works in progress. In lockdown I let go of youth culture for the first time but as peter hope-evans proves in his performance on all dates of the Ambit Pop Tour of the south coast, that does not mean we let go of youth. We’ve started making a road movie with Savage Pencil on this tour, the guest editor I’ve learnt much from: his diligence. He’s rarely professional, cares. Vigilant about terrorising eyeballs. His stories are good. He’s been around. That’s why he's still here. The BBC called him the “illustrator of grunge” in an interview we did in Brighton, before the first show, and we’ve detourned the ‘naughty lil sister’ of Ambit Pop takeover which will influence the standard 90-paged journal irrevocably.
Youth was also evident from Stephen Mallinder’s Q&A in Brighton - he was very much a fan of the class of people in the room, instigators and people who had led him towards his own invocation as a musical spear. The author David Quantick at The Piper in St Leonards was excellently entertaining upon Savage Pencil’s own youth, being a Dalek, calling out Deliveroo riders as “didgeridoos”, the essence of inspiration for his comic in Ambit.
It was a good experience to break the creative cherries of a few friends in the first event of the Ambit School, encouraging them to share words, it was an experiment, and became smoother and clearer in intent each date. Much as touring and more performance does. I love to play, and the suggestion of Jonny Halifax Invocation to join with our music was appreciated. As Vagrant Lovers what we did was new. Featuring the songs Blang! Records are putting out as a vinyl single later this year. We shared the top spot as it emerged to be a demanding programme for people withered after Covid, aware their time is their own, after spending so much of it with themselves, a sense of community beyond those we immediately love becomes less of a priority as digital communities carry increasing value. When the connection’s working. Youth culture gets reclaimed by the young rather than the culture that makes us buy into being Peter Pan, avoiding the issue of death, which is what so much of the fear of Covid has been about, as we’re all delineated beneath Davos-steered hegemony. Raving on without the wisdom of seniors in formerly intergenerational spaces seems a daft occupation. Shielding creates age gaps again. Cancelling does the same. So let us roll forward.
.
This is the fullest my life has ever been, so I will cherish the extra time I had to discover the Co-Star app by the canal one evening in Kreuzberg..
I believe in flying on full flights - so I’m okay with being bumped along a few days, ideally with warning time, as I have the liberty to be able to work almost anywhere, and the liberty to fly. The journeys of the skies are now a trial sinking into the pits of security and the chaos of neo-nationalism and climate change.
With travel always echoing past experiences louder than day to day life, I feel closer to a chapter presenting on TV, recording from a similar reclaimed space in Munich back in the 90s, Terminal Einz with Paradise Lost (I think one of them got done for paedophilia, so there’s nothing to say being part of anything gets you away from the freaks). But still, these hangars are pragmatic feats of order, design and function.
Once a thing is killed, or preserved, condemned as historical, in some way they claim dystopian identity in re-purposing, a ghost, yet there’s a museum stature to hangars, as they signify a movement as potentially influential as the hippies, demanding peace and love. All the original raves were encased in these kind of spaces, so for me they breathe of a pedastalled culture. Much as I hope one day, our vile polluting planes, hang like dinosaur bones, in some kind of mad and sexy testaments to engineering that hadn’t cracked zero-impact living.
At an art show, ace-ing it with Morgan, I was rewarded to remember the importance of putting one’s vision out there - as purpose and product often float purposeless in this Gaian matrix return to pixel compost as we head into ever more fucked up times. The staff get automated out of economic migration, and there are not enough people to be interested, because time is taken by screens and work. We are in the chaos years where the code is re-written in a free-form simulation of organic science vs pre-meditated “preparation” gain of function designs, to copyright the cure before there’s even a symptom. This innocence and experience operates at such a feudal level of basic financial warfare, presenting symptoms in a system without holistic global communication, where walls, barriers, result in a fascist genocide of economy-based eugenics survival policed by invisible gods of profit.
The globe looks flat if you haven’t got a bird’s eye view.
So efforts by the German progressives to instate a 9 euro ticket for public transport in Germany on all trains, to encourage people back into public transport after Covid and with the war, I hope it sticks for longer than the summer offer. I like to write on trains, and would prefer to travel without spitting out pollution behind me. I never want to be “airport complainer”, it stinks of privilege to have time to complain of the idiocracy but the whole thing’s like a broken suitcase. Wheels are falling off the dirty bastard airplanes, any kinda pilot is being called up, warplanes are surely the dirtiest bastards, but I still cling to the romance of being IN THE CLOUDS to paradises beyond. It’s luxury. And we are not the legislators of this chaos, all we can do is use our agency to share experience to hopefully provide support for one another. I may have said before, but I didn’t get in a plane till I was 17 and developed a casual approach to flying in my early 20s, DJing in the 90s. (Although karma came for keeping flights waiting in Ibiza, London, New York, wherever, having that final beer, rolling on last, first off (a trick passed on from The Prodigy) when I found myself alone and unable to board in Dublin, with no passport and a taste for finding a solstice party, only the streets to pick up my pieces. I came home via rehab. A whole other book to be written.)
Part of my attraction to Berlin is rooted in the free-for-all nature of reclaiming Mitte as the wall fell, with people like Dimitri Hegemann breaking into a bank vault and claiming Tresor as a nightclub, and before then, Mark Reeder’s early interventions as Factory Records man in Berlin, arranging concerts for Joy Division, New Order, and getting tapes into East Berlin, organising the first concert in a church, and eventually being employed by the GDR as a music producer. (There’s a podcast with him on Cold Lips). These are my guiding lights of counterculture.
So in the heat of the moment, bombing out to our aftershow on Friday, not really wanting to be limited by possessions, my suitcase already in one place, magazines elsewhere, beach bags about to be taken to the lake, barely touching the ground, giving half my stuff away to replace it with fresh vintage, returning to the stage with the plane behind, the RosinenBar THF where I applied my German third leg, gifted by photographer (and founder of Das Wasteland Records) Martyn Goodacre, when he heard I’d been using a stick of polished copper-piping from my old boiler on our Ambit Pop Tour of the south coast of England, after twisting my ankle on the country lawn of Rob and Greta a week before. Meeting me off the plane, at a station, presenting me with a spectacular metal spike and bamboo-cased cane - which slips to reveal an umbrella. I felt an entertainer with my boater hat. A Prankster tour leader. He said Rod Stewart. I got Elton John from Lias Saoudi last time I saw him, in my rose-tinted glasses that I am delighted to have found another pair of recently, as they’re very limited edition, and environmentally considerate.
Most of our sunglasses will outlive us.
Never mind how far we fling them.
Much as this will likely be the only time I ever perform in front of an airplane, especially one reading Troops Carrier, it is always good to be reunited with things that matter to you. There are always echoes in travel, and I am very happy to be able to do so again. Covid was unreal. And the fear continues. Masks still used in Berlin, a return to the awareness, whereas in London, we carry on regardless.
On my final leg home, over Germany towards France, I give thanks to the European Court of Human Rights to protect us, praying that freedom of expression nearly exists, as another phase of distancing from Europe leaves us to create our own world.
I wear a Deutschland bucket hat. I pick it up after a meeting in Brick Lane, dropping mags into Rough Trade, signing books, chatting to Laurence from Felt.
London is diverse AF. I have my stick here, returned like a medal through bulky luggage, in the trial of contemporary flight as a souvenir. I don’t need it to walk now. Healed. Thank you body, you are my champion, supported by friends.
Recommended:
Maroula Blades, book
Danielle de Picciotto, books, music, art
Jason McGlade at Tacheles, photography, art
Cassandra Press
Jacolby Satterwhite at Julia Stolchez Foundation
