by Kounelaki » Tue Nov 05, 2019 9:49 am
Blixa on the fall of the Berlin Wall
‘I was in a studio with the Bad Seeds’
Blixa Bargeld, 60, is a German musician best known for his work with Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, and his own group Einstürzende Neubauten.
I grew up in West Berlin and it never felt like the Wall was going anywhere. The day it came down, I was in a recording studio with the Bad Seeds. We had the TV on and saw that something was happening, so we went outside. It was the middle of the night but the streets were filling with people.
A few weeks later, I managed to play in East Berlin with my band. We’d tried to do it for years and this time we were just waved through the old border. East Berliners came into our dressing room. A couple of years ago, I needed surgery. I had a meeting with the doctor and he brought a poster from that 1989 show. He’d been a medical student in East Berlin and was now head of the clinic.