The Neurotics rocked their arses off, aided by possibly the best PA system I’d ever heard them play through – another preconception about the GDR gone by the board, no primitive sound systems powered by old tractor parts or whatever – and it was plain that the crowd had never seen a live band like that before: they loved it. Billy finished things off in fine style, an electric solo singer/guitarist in every sense of the word, and we joined him for a spontaneous, unrehearsed and chaotically rousing version of The Clash’s ‘Garageland’. Our first ever gig in the GDR had been a roaring success, but things were about to get even better: backstage we were given an invitation to the following February’s Political Song Festival – the event Billy had played earlier that year - which would mean a whole week in Berlin and another national tour. We celebrated with a lake of VEB (literally ‘People’s Own’) Berliner Pilsner beer. No, it wasn’t real ale, and for once I didn’t care.
The next gig was in East Berlin, the capital city, showcase of the whole tour, filmed and recorded for national radio and TV. So the next morning it was back on the cracked and cobbly roads, past a succession of broken down and occasionally burnt-out, abandoned Trabants and Wartburgs, and into ‘Berlin, Hauptstadt der DDR’. The East Germans had about fifty per cent of the divided city, but for them their half WAS the city: the rest was simply ‘Westberlin’. George drove me to the artists’ agency, where I finally got the chance to put a face to the Uschi I’d been talking to on the phone from England. I picked up another huge wedge of cash, doled it out to a bunch of disbelieving Neurotics, and we made our way to the gig.
We were playing in a huge square, packed with around 6,000 people: on previous nights acts like The Dubliners and Dick Gaughan had done their stuff, along with other acts from all over the world, and now it was our turn. I started events off once again, and after a few of my own songs decided to test out their Clash knowledge with my version of ‘Spanish Bombs’. Some punks down the front started pogoing – and the gig just took off from there. I was very well received, but the Neurotics went down like heroes: that gig remains for me the best one they have ever done (I’ve seen a few!) and there is an iconic picture of Steve with his guitar at the end of the set, receiving the acclamation of six thousand people, his biggest audience ever. Billy played another stunning set in a thunderstorm, and then it was back to the hotel and a very interesting encounter indeed.
So far everyone we’d met had been very much part of the official set up: nobody was forced to help with the organisation or attend the gigs, and we seemed to be surrounded by enthusiastic volunteers, music lovers involved to a greater or lesser degree in the national communist youth organisation. The gigs were much like gigs anywhere else, to be honest, the only difference being that there weren’t many punks (and LOADS of mullet haircuts!) and the ideology of the state which was promoting the tour coincided, theoretically at least, with my own. I was really keen to get into some serious discussions with the activists around me about the pros and cons of life in the GDR, but at that point everything had been such a dash that I really hadn’t had the chance. And so it was that the very first proper discussion I took part in was with someone who absolutely loathed the place and was desperate to leave.
Back at the hotel (where The Ramones and ‘Dallas’ were on TV – West German stations were freely available everywhere in the GDR apart from Dresden, and many GDR citizens were thoroughly familiar with both the best and the worst of Western culture) Billy introduced us to Mario, whom he had met the previous February. Mario had been trying to set up gigs and had tried to go through the official channels, but his application had been rejected and now he was involved in the underground punk scene and was getting a load of hassle. He told us that there were a number of illegal gigs happening, mainly in churches, but there was always trouble with the police: he’d had enough, he said, and he wanted to emigrate to the West, where people could travel where they liked, organise the gigs they wanted, buy fashionable clothes and not be like the grey sheep he lived and worked with, happy to fit in with the system…
So what about the people who had set up this tour, I asked him. Were they all grey sheep? What about people like George, outspoken, humourous and full of life, who refused to join the party, but who loved his country, appreciated the good aspects and wanted to fight to make socialism better? Did Mario know about the reality of life in the West, where the simple guarantee of the basics necessary for life didn’t exist, where there was homelessness, poverty, unemployment? Yes, he did, he said, but he didn’t care. It was what he wanted, and that was all that mattered. I guess that was the point for Mario and those like him, before and after the fall of the Wall: they thought that they’d be OK ‘cos they were clever and confident: as for the fate of those who weren’t, it wasn’t their problem. The classic individualistic ‘Western’ worldview in a nutshell.
But the overriding point that struck me about that encounter was that if a young bloke already known to the authorities as a dissident could spend half the night with a bunch of Westerners in a hotel room complaining about the system he was living under and not get thrown in nick, then the GDR couldn’t quite be the evil, repressive hell hole the Western media made it out to be. He left us a tape of some of the bands he’d been trying to organise gigs for: as Womble said, they made Crass sound like the London Symphony Orchestra. No reason to ban them, of course, but every reason not to listen to the tape more than once…
We talked to Mario until well into the early hours, then, after he’d gone, discussed what he’d said amongst ourselves for a while longer – all washed down with copious amounts of beer. By the time we got to bed the sun was coming up, and not long after that George was back, telling us it was time to get up and on the road for the next gig in George’s home town of Halle Neustadt. Halle Newtown, I thought to myself. The Neurotics should be in their element there…
Bleary-eyed, back on the road, past more broken down Trabants and occasional packs of wild boar, cousins to the ones on the menu last night. Halle was indeed a new town, home to massive chemical plants which spewed ghastly pollution everywhere, and most specifically into the river Saale, which was a dead zone, stinking and yellow. I was shocked. East Berlin had taken my nose back into childhood with the smell of the Trabants’ two-stroke engines and the brown coal (lignite) used in industrial production – but Halle was in a different league. Trees spindly and dying, grass stunted, and the effect on the lungs of the local population (especially in a country where 90% were chain smokers) could only be guessed at. What had this got to do with socialism?
I asked George.
‘It all dates back to a declaration by former SED party chief Walter Ulbricht, comrade’ he said, sarcastically. ‘Ulbricht said that the industrial development of the GDR and the increase in the living standards of its people was more important than environmental considerations.’
‘But that’s a complete fucking pile of bollocks!’ I said. If the very air the people breathe stinks, the rivers are dead and the environment a danger to human health it is a betrayal of everything socialism is supposed to stand for…’
George agreed. As did absolutely everyone I met at my gigs in the GDR, whatever their point of view on other issues. For me the pollution question – beyond belief in the Halle/Bitterfeld area but bad everywhere, especially in winter when domestic chimneys spewing lignite smoke added to the industrial fog – was by far the worst aspect of life there: many people inside and outside the ruling party were involved in campaigns against it, and at the time of our first visit some of them were suffering considerable harassment as a result. Environmental activists would play a huge part in the left wing (yes, left wing: the Western commentators want us to forget this, but it was) movement which eventually led to the collapse of the Wall and the forming of ‘Neues Forum’ and ‘Bundnis 90’, the East German Green activist party which still exists to this day.
We drove through Halle to our venue for the afternoon’s gig – not in a new town at all but th
e exact opposite, Schloss Moritzburg, an atmospheric, 500 year old castle. Another open air event, sunny weather, beer in abundance, a large, receptive crowd… and a lone, clueless bonehead in a ‘Britain Is Great’ T shirt who ‘sieg heiled’ during Bragg’s set and was thoroughly put in his place by the big-nosed balladeer from Barking. Another surprise: firstly, that there would be anyone cretinous enough to do that in the GDR, of all places, and secondly, that he wasn’t immediately dragged away by the authorities. As would happen here, fellow gig goers had a go at him, there was a brief scuffle, he disappeared and that was that. All as it should be really. But, unbelievably, there really was a problem with neo-Nazi boneheads in the GDR, especially at the football: a problem that would only get worse after the Wall came down…
The gig finished with a thunderous collective version of the Neurotics’ ‘Living With Unemployment’, then loads more beer and another chance to quiz the local population. Rent? About £20 a month in modern terms. Water free: heating, electricity a tiny, nominal sum. Nobody needed to worry about the necessities of life, that’s for sure. Accommodation just about adequate, though the outside of the older buildings had been left to go to pot (often bullet holes from wartime battles were still clearly visible) and the modern flats had mostly been built in that drab utilitarian style common to many Eastern European countries. Despite the basic provision by the state, a few daring people, mainly from the alternative scene, squatted in unoccupied buildings to give themselves more space and to keep out of the way of the authorities.
I learned about the Trabant cars: you put your name on a waiting list and eight to ten years later you got one. Spare parts were often hard to come by and there was an unofficial ‘swap shop’ in every town. They were very flimsy, often broke down and the bodywork fell to bits at the slightest encouragement: the state of the roads was encouragement enough for older models, hence the relics at the side of the motorways. Nevertheless, people took pride in them, decorated them in all kinds of esoteric ways – and, of course, it was a big deal when your number came up at the factory and you took charge of one for the first time. To compensate for what would be seen by many in the West (not by me, I was a non-driver then and remained so until the year 2000) as a grave infringement of personal freedom, public transport was plentiful and incredibly cheap.
We talked about history, some of which I knew from previous study. After the War all East German military-related industry and everything owned by the Nazi state and by war criminals, large private firms (some of which had profited from Nazi atrocities in a big way) and large landowners had been confiscated and nationalised. Successive Five and Seven Year Plans increased nationalisation, though small scale private enterprise, both rural and urban, was still possible, in contrast to the Stalinist forced collectivisations in the Soviet Union. From the Seventies onwards, as well as catering for the basic necessities of life, special consideration had been made to improving the availability and quality of consumer goods, to the point where the GDR was generally considered to be the best-equipped of all the socialist countries in that regard.
But yes, everyone agreed, the pollution was terrible. Far worse, I said, than anything I had seen in the West. So why, I asked, was capitalism, where the incentive is purely to make money, better at dealing with pollution than socialism, where the incentive is supposed to be a better life for all? A local party ideologue gave me the official line. While the Marshall Plan was ploughing economic aid into West Germany, the GDR was paying reparations to the Soviet Union, meaning that modernisation of industry in the West was far more advanced and the GDR was still reliant on older style manufacturing methods. The GDR had fewer natural resources than West Germany, and its coal, brown coal or lignite, was of inferior quality and therefore far more pollutative.
It all sounded plausible… but we socialists claim to be custodians of the planet, and it wasn’t acceptable, was it, comrade? Stinking rivers, smoggy skies, withered trees? And still less acceptable was the persecution of fellow socialists who complained about it!
He looked a bit flustered. If the East German authorities thought they had imported a bunch of line-toeing punk ideologues, they had another think coming.
I quickly worked out that the real, committed socialists were the questioning activists, and the dogmatic timeservers trotting out the official line mostly didn’t believe a word of what they were saying and just wanted to feather their own nests and have a quiet life. The best way to question dubious aspects of the GDR when talking to this kind of Party hack was to couch my arguments in classic, idealistic Marxist terms and let them confront their own contradictions. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, many of them confronted them head on by confirming that they’d never believed a word of what they were saying and joining the right wing CDU: one of those, of course, was current German Chancellor Angela Merkel, a one time FDJ Secretary for Agitation and Propaganda. Says it all really.
I was knackered: not much sleep the night before, an afternoon gig, lots of beer and hours talking to friendly people on a warm, sunny day. Off to bed and, the next day, off to Suhl, a particularly good gig for yours truly at another open air event in the town square (I went on after perhaps the worst pop band in East Germany, mullets and all, which may have partly explained the reception). On the way, we got stopped - for speeding. GDR motorway speed limits were rigorously enforced, maybe a good idea given the nature of the vehicles and the roads, and we found ourselves with a 200 mark fine, which was paid with smothered guffaws. We really did have too much money…
Back to the hotel for a good rest: the following day was supposed to be a day off. It was there that I met Anne McElvoy, a young English journalist – at the time, I believe, correspondent for The Times, later an author of several books about the GDR and now a well-known writer and broadcaster. She’d turned up to see Billy, and we ended up having long arguments about the system: I remember her as being quite right wing, but witty and charming. She gave me her phone number – for strictly professional reasons, I might add – and asked me to get in touch when we got back to England. I never did.
We’d had an offer to do an unofficial gig at the student club at Berlin Humbolt University on our day off, so back we went, and a great time was had by all: no PA, café tables for a stage, a lovely punk rock atmosphere – and this was an unsanctioned gig with no FDJ officialdom present whatsoever. We danced on the tables, did loads of silly covers, talked to students about their lives, met a militant from the South African ANC called Pinky, in East Berlin for education and military training, and a few of his mates, spent hours drinking and talking with them and finally crashed in some empty rooms in the student accommodation block. ‘Crashed’ being the operative word. We were having an absolutely fantastic time. The next day George told us that the authorities were none too happy that we’d left Suhl a day early and done an unofficial gig, but he’d had a word and it was all sorted out. Well done George. Once again, this didn’t appear to be quite the monolithic, authoritarian state the Daily Mail had warned us about…
Now we really did have a day off, and I had plans for the large sum of GDR marks in my wallet. I made my way to the main state musical instrument store in the centre of East Berlin and spent several thoroughly enjoyable hours trying out violins. I narrowed it down to two: a beautiful modern one made by a local luthier, and a splendidly battered mid-19th century Bohemian folk fiddle with the most fantastic tone I had ever coaxed out of an instrument in my life. I could afford either: thanks to our hosts’ generosity I could afford anything in the shop. Sound before beauty, I decided, and I bought myself a piece of Czech musical history. Years later I had it properly valued and identified, and even in its battered state it is worth a fair sum: far more importantly, armed with a Barcus Berry pick up, it has been a vital part of my armoury ever since I founded my band Barnstormer in 1994. Very often, when I take it out of its case, my mind goes back to those days in the GDR.
Later in the day it was back in the van and off to Leipzig, whe
re we would be playing the following day: after a good night’s sleep there was plenty of time to explore the town, a hotch potch of ancient, cobbled streets and modern open squares in the Soviet style. The gig was in an old Zeppelin hanger: a huge crowd and another storming night, ending with the by now traditional ‘Garageland’ and ‘Living With Unemployment’ belted out by all concerned. The local English language students had asked me to do a poetry performance too, which was most enjoyable, and then it was back to the hotel and another attempt to spend all that money. I recall Colin from the Neurotics ordering a huge bottle of cognac. By this time I was feeling really uneasy about the whole money thing: paradoxically, since it was I who had the least left, thanks to the violin. ‘Find something good to spend it on!’ I urged the others. I think Steve bought a camera. But Colin and Simon? Cognac, taxi rides, and rounds of beers for anyone that wanted them. And there was still loads left over. We ended up giving some away.
Then back to Berlin via another speeding fine, and the final gig – again at the university student club, but an official one this time. Once more we ended up doing a bunch of covers: Billy joined me on Eric Bogle’s ‘Green Fields of France’, then he did a great version of Sam Cooke’s ‘A Change Is Gonna Come’ and we all bashed out ‘Garageland’. Amid much mutual congratulation and audience acclaim, our first tour of the GDR, the first ever by a bunk of UK punk rockers, was over. Apart, of course, from loads more conversations and loads more beer…
The next morning we said thanks and goodbye to Billy, Wiggy and Peter Jenner, and a more poignant goodbye to George, whom we dropped off on the motorway so he could hitch a ride home. We were all very much aware that we could visit him but he couldn’t come and see us, and he had become a really good friend: things were made easier by the fact that we knew were coming back the following February. Then it was home. Or as Simon put it: ‘Back to the land of poverty and unemployment. And the rat race.’ I knew I wouldn’t miss the awful roads and the pollution, or the toilet paper, which resembled fine sandpaper: as George put it, they made it like that to ensure that every last arsehole in the GDR was red. But there was lots I would miss: the lack of advertising, the laid-back, non-competitive lifestyle, the absence of poverty and unemployment, the sense that everyone was on the same side and working slowly towards a common goal. I was sad to leave, and very pleased to know that myself and the Neurotics would be coming back just six months later. Without further ado, I’ll continue the story.
ARGUMENTS YARD Page 21