Last month, Good because Danish went to visit Hamburg to experience the famous Reeperbahn Festival for the very first time. Even though we weren’t able to stay for the whole festival (which took place between 23. and 26. September), it was a blast and we are still quite overwhelmed for many reasons.
It took us a little while to write down all our memories – but now we finally want to share a little bit of our German adventure with you! What we already can say now: if you haven’t done it already, mark your calendar for next year’s Reeperbahn Festival between 21. and 24. September 2016 – it’ll be absolutely worth it!
Our experience in the beautiful Northern German city of Hamburg started on Wednesday, 23. September, when we – along with Mona Schnell PR – hosted the first Good because Danish Night at the cool venue KNUST. The showcase was not an official part of the Reeperbahn Festival, but we could still feel the festival atmosphere even there! Lots of people with festival badges showed up and stayed with some cold Astra beer in their hands to watch Ida Gard, marstal:lidell and Ida Wenøe play their wonderful music.
As a matter of fact we were generally excited to see how the Danish bands of this year’s Reeperbahn Festival program would present themselves in front of an international audience, a few hundred kilometers away from their known home ground.
One big downside of festivals are always the same old scheduling problems though, so due to our own showcase we unfortunately missed out on the shows of the Americana formation The DeSoto Caucus from Aarhus, one of our favourite folk five-pieces Heimatt and Copenhagen-based Canadian songwriter Of The Valley, who all three played at quirky Hasenschaukel on Wednesday evening. According to what we’ve heard – and seen – afterwards, it seemed that especially Heimatt presented one of their well-known great, energetic live shows that night, in front of a totally packed venue.
A nice thing about such big music events like Reeperbahn Festival are all the unofficial, small gigs one can stumble upon in the whole city. On Thursday, we luckily caught folk-rock band The Migrant and Heimatt play each a little acoustic set, presented by their German booking agency DevilDuck.
Later that day we stopped at a showcase of the London-based music collective Karousel Music, who invited besides our dear Ida Wenøe and other international names, also the lovely singer-songwriter Penny Police, who played a small preview concert before her official festival slots the next days.
Back at in the Reeperbahn area, we managed to squeeze into the packed Hasenschaukel to see funky country folk band Workers in Songs play and continue the party that their Danish fellows had started there the day before. And what a party that was! We felt like swinging a lasso, riding a horse or putting up some cowboy hats to those banjo tunes! The Roskilde-based five-piece is one hell of a fun live band – and it was great to hear some songs of their latest EP “Scrapbook” for the very first time live in Hamburg.
Based on the few concert impressions we made during our short stay at Reeperbahn Festival, we were pretty sure that all other Danish artists would do their jobs just as great, spreading their music abroad and making more people aware of the musical quality that Denmark is producing! With that in mind, it was at least a tiny bit easier to leave Hamburg and the festival surroundings. If you’ll have us – and a bunch of Danish acts – again next year, Reeperbahn Festival, we’ll be back!
Photos by Anna Lidell (13) and Jasmin König (5)
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