LastCentury

Back in the days

I started to perform my own songs in one of Europes most vibrant little music clubs, the famous GO IN, in my home town Berlin in 1979. Like pretty much everyone else I wrote classic anti-war, anti-nuclear, anti-racist, anti-money and anti-asshole folk songs. Yet inspired by the women’s liberation movement of the time, many of my lyrics also denounced the day to day troubles of a girls life in a mans world. My songs usually came with a few word games and twists, a humorous hint at my own flaws here and a mean little joke with a wink there, just to leave a question mark wether to laugh or cry or be pissed off. Over time amidst all my sarcastic songs about women’s rights, political chaos and human (notably male 😉 ) errors there were also many of those about friendship and children and love and particularly those about how to un-love. Looking back, I believe I had a whole bunch of songs about how we should take big little men less serious, smile their self-importance to smithereens and let go of unhealthy male company, an art we as women could cultivate with much more elegance and empathy for ourselves (I still think so). Although usually performing solo, on occasion I had the pleasure to play with guitarists or other songwriters as a duo and shared concerts or participated in friends events frequently. During the eighties it wasn’t unusual to play each day of the week or more than one gig a night, with life music played in bars until the sun came up. By 1996, labelled the „small woman with big songs“, I had written several hundreds of songs and played thousands of gigs in Clubs and Theaters, Festivals, Exhibitions, Street parties and even trade fairs in Berlin and all over former West-Germany. Frankly, until then it had been relatively easy to pay the bills and get by just playing music. For most of us it didn’t pay much but you didn’t have to compromise, always got paid and money wasn’t so important either. But getting to the mid 90’s the live music scene in former Westberlin had taken hit after hit, as more and more old clubs closed down. The legendary Go In and Folkpub, the Banana, Steve Club and countless others were gone. The Internet was taking over. If you weren’t willing to hustle and couldn’t travel constantly it became necessary to think of other means of income to pay the rent. Numerous musicians quit playing, some literally vanished, many left Berlin to go to some hotter spot. I decided to take a short break and do something else for a while. The „short“ break lasted until 2014.