The Violets
Bang Bang Club, Berlin
Wednesday December 5 2007

Location: Berlin. To be a little more exact, tonight we are somewhere in East Berlin - not that such distinctions officially exist these days, but nevertheless if the Wall was still standing we'd be on that side of it. To be even more exact, we're in in the Bang Bang Club, an authentically dark temple of Der verrückte rock und roll Musik conveniently located for urban rapid transit purposes under Hackescher Markt S-bahn station. When the trains go over, a strange rumbling fills the club. It's like being inside a Throbbing Gristle sonic art installation. A bit.

We are here to see The Violets...

...along with a mere handful of other people.

Now, that's a surprise, because Berlin has a reputation as a seething cauldron of alterno-music action, and post punk-ish bands from the UK are generally considered hot stuff in Germany. You'd think The Violets would be packing 'em in - they're surely just the kind of band that the Alternativer Kopfen of Berlin would dig. But it seems that hardly anyone knew that The Violets were in town. There was apparently no promotion for this gig: no flyers, no posters, no mentions in the listings, and nothing on the web aside from The Violets' own tour date list.

A brief mention did pop up on the Bang Bang Club's MySpace page a few days before the gig, but that hardly counts as heavy-duty crowd haulage. Here at the venue itself, quite apart from the absence of an audience, there is also no support band, so a very minimal crowd stares disconsolately at the empty stage for a very long time, until, at last, showtime arrives.

Playing as a three-piece on this occasion (apparently the band's latest bassist couldn't get time off work) The Violets embark on the faintly surreal task of entertaining a wide expanse of empty floor. But there's no slacking around here.The sound is sharp; the band play with their trademark blend of offhand cool and sparky energy, and if the smattering of applause which follows every song is hardly roof raising stuff, that's a function of audience-size, not audience-enthusiasm.

The guitar works overtime to fill the space and obliterate the trains. Effect-laden scritches and skitters bounce off the walls; the drums nail structure to the floorboards, and the vocals scythe the air. It's not all new-wave guitar shredding, though. The Violets' latest songs see the band extending their tenatacles in other directions: the sample-pulse and vocal cut-ups of 'Co-Plax' nod in the direction of Minimale Elektroniks - a very Berlin sound, in a way. You can almost see Brian Eno and Conny Plank lurking in the shadows, nodding appraisingly. 'Mirror Mirror' makes an unexpcted appearance, jaunty and energetic - its presence in the set presumably due to the fact that, as an early song, it was originally written in bass-free mode, and thus fits in neatly with tonight's bassless incarnation of the band.

The end of the set list doesn't mean the end of the set - encouraged by the enthusiasm of the audience, The Violets keep going, plucking songs out of their memories and thin air, and eventually wrap up on an impromptu, delicate, moving, version of 'Nature Of Obsession' - just a voice and an uncharacteristically restrained guitar. It's a counter-intuitive way to finish, perhaps, but highly effective. The scattered souls who comprise tonight's minimal crowd set up a credtitably maximal burst of applause. There may not be a great many people here, but every one of them is now a Violets fan. That's a result worth coming to Berlin for.

Thus enthused, we contemplate travelling to Leipzig to see the next date on The Violets' tour. Alas, time, money and logistics don't quite work out, so the trip doesn't happen. Probably just as well, since by all accounts the Leipzig gig turns out to be a repeat of the Berlin experience, with certain additional, erm, challenges: no sound engineer and not even any DI boxes.

I suppose all this goes to show that there's more to playing a successful tour than simply booking a string of gigs. It's necessary to ensure someone at every stop along the way is taking care of the nuts and bolts and putting the essentials - everything from flyers to support bands - in place. If nobody's doing that stuff, the chances are the band will find itself falling, as The Violets did tonight, into the awkward gap between booking and promotion. And The Violets are far too good to be messing with that kind of fuck-about.

Next time, let's hope Berlin takes care of business.

Essential links:

The Violets: MySpace

For more photos from this gig, find The Violets by name here.