Anton Newcombe, leader of the The Brian Jonestown Massacre, was one of my more unlikely acquaintances in Berlin. His recording studio was just a few blocks from my apartment, north-west of Nordbahnhof, where affluent Mitte began to meld with the predominantly Turkish, working-class neighbourhood of Wedding. I sometimes cycled there for a late afternoon tea with him.
Anton’s studio was a converted, single-storey coach house at the rear of an altbau, on a quiet street that was once the northern-most of East Berlin’s city centre, a block from the old Chausseestrasse/Reinickendorfer Strasse border checkpoint.
Set at the rear of a courtyard cluttered with bicycles, the studio itself was weird and Tardis-like but welcoming, especially in the middle of a dismal Berlin winter. The walls of the large living and dining area were blood red. Antlered skulls and a gilt-framed painting of a nativity scene framed the sky blue walls and yellow door frames of the adjacent hallway. A large, sculptural collage that suggested an American flag hung on the longest wall, alongside a commemorative plate featuring a head and shoulders profile of Pope John XXIII, and a framed portrait of Mikhail Gorbachev, the last leader of the Soviet Union. There was also a large blue butterfly under glass. On a wooden trunk beneath the collage there was an ornate but tatty faux-mother-of-pearl accordion and an ugly piece of taxidermy — a stuffed weasel baring its fangs on a length of desiccated tree branch. Opposite, the narrow window ledges were like voodoo altars, filled with pot plants, wax skulls, kitschy statues, toys, African and Arabic-like busts, Polaroid instant photos and odd bits of bone, shell, and porcelain.
There were a couple of worn-out replicas of a ’60s Scandinavian-modern sofa but most visitors sit at a pine table that took up half the room.
The last time I was there, on a dull, rainy afternoon last week, the Canadian singer, Tess Parks, was putting the finishing touches on an album. Tess was at the table, sipping tea, and leafing through pages of handwritten lyrics in a notebook. With her was Joe Dilworth, a Berlin-based English photographer and bookshop proprietor, also well-known as a musician, who was waiting for the rain to stop so he could photograph Tess for the album cover. Anton, and his engineer, a large Liverpudlian woman named Andrea, fussed over a detail of a mix in the sound-proofed room next door. When Anton took a break, he chatted with Joe about instrumental effects on obscure mid-’90s recordings and fingered through the clutter on the table — scraps of notepaper, discarded biscuit wrappers (chocolate digestives), Indian bead necklaces, and coiled, unused guitar strings — to find crumpled packs of cigarettes. They were usually empty.
A couple of hours passed, during which, somehow, random strands of a four-way conversation were started, discarded and picked up again as Anton dubbed a new guitar track, Tess laid down her vocals and Joe loaded 6×6 black and white film into a vintage Rollei twin lens reflex before leading Tess out to the courtyard for her portraits.
When the rain eased, Joe and I took our leave. I risked the rush-hour traffic on nearby Chausseestrasse to take a round-about route home. The bike lane was blocked by construction work outside the foreboding 30-acre complex that is the new headquarters of the Bundesnachrichtendienst (Federal Intelligence Service). I was forced out into the road to cycle close, too close, alongside an accelerating tram. At the cobbled turn-off into Tieckstrasse, opposite the Dorotheenstadt cemetery, where Bertolt Brecht lies beside his second wife, the actress Helen Weigel, just a few feet from the philosopher, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, a too-sweet scent of shisha wafted from a gaudy Turkish bar. It hung in the damp air like cheap gauze.
First published (in a slightly different form) in The Learned Pig, UK, 2017.
