ARGUMENTS YARD by THE STOCKBROKER ATTILA;

Author:THE STOCKBROKER, ATTILA; [John Baine]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 4777952
Publisher: Cherry Red Books
Published: 2015-08-25T04:00:00+00:00

Our second tour was very different, being the annual Political Song Festival I mentioned at the start of this chapter, a huge event with many different performers from all over the world. The format was the same every year: the first week was spent doing gigs in East Berlin, then in the second week a selection of the acts went on tour to six different cities. Given that it was held in February the weather was as different as it could be as well: the sun-kissed memories of our first visit were replaced with sub-zero temperatures, treacherous pavements and even more defunct Trabants at the sides of the roads. This time the border crossing was a piece of cake - with our multi-entry visas and our invitation to the Festival we were almost welcomed by the Grenztruppen, and the West Germans didn’t seem as bothered as last time either.

But there had been an interesting prelude to the tour. The GDR Artists’ Agency had contacted the Sokolov Festival, a political song festival held in the Czech (at that time of course Czechoslovak) town of that name immediately before the start of their one in Berlin, asking them to put myself and the Neurotics on there. There were strong links between the two, and many performers were booked for both. I got a phone call a few weeks after our return to England asking me if we were interested, and we were booked: then, a couple of weeks later, the invitation was cancelled. On arrival in East Berlin the second time I found out why. The Czechoslovak communist youth organisation thought they’d won the argument with their elders about punk, but it turned out that they hadn’t. Punk rock was still officially decadent and reactionary over there: the Sokolov Festival went ahead with the usual acoustic stuff, and we went straight to Berlin. Bunch of hippies.

And there, of course, was George to meet and translate for us once again: this time we got to meet his then partner, the talented singer Ilona Vildebrand who had helped him translate my songs, and stepdaughter Fanny as well. Apart from some fantastic gigs, for me the most memorable aspect of the February festival week in Berlin – events took place in different venues all over the city centre - were the hours of discussions long into the night in Berlin’s Haus der jungen Talente (literally, House of Young Talents) opposite the Ministry building. This was the post event ‘party zone’ where festival organisers and musicians, party activists and, yes, some cynics and dissidents all gathered to drink copiously and share ideas and experiences. In seven days of intense conversation my desire to learn as much as I could about what was going on in the GDR forced my German into previously uncharted areas: in purely linguistic terms, I’ve never looked back. When I tell my German audiences that I learned their language in East Germany, it’s that week that truly sticks in my mind.

An awful

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