In Hamburg, I played a show at the Golden Pudel Club. I was warned by my friend David Fenech that I shoudn't misjudge the venue after one glance: punk is the word. In fact, the people at the Pudel were extremely gentle, especially Thomas, an intern from Leipzig who picked me up at the airport, brought me to the hotel near the club. Thomas spoke about some German re-nationalism tendencies in art, that he tries to fight with friends through a big travelling exhibition (I forgot the name). The club itself is involved in resistance, the area where the club stands along the port being entered in a gentrification era. The Pudel hires homeless people who sleep under the bridge nearby to give a hand: they close the restaurant every night, assemble the fences, pile the benches on the tables outside. This is real resistance against gentrification, not the blabla we are used in the medias.
We organized a double screen with Thomas and the DJ Richard von der Schulenburg, a very nice man who played incredible music after my Jean-Jacques Perrey documentary, early electronics and minimal & melodic stuff. I wanted to ask "what is this?" after every track. The night being hot, we didn't have people until midnight. When I came on stage after the film, we had a lovely little crowd, very there. Starting with the piano, I went on with songs, red my robot text about Werner Herzog and then invited Felix Kubin on stage. Together we read some Molière in German; but I gave him a bad translation as I read the good one. We also made a tac tac competition. I was surprised because Felix didn't play in the seventies with that popular toy.
I was told that the director of a Hamburg film festival was there. I briefly spoke with a French director who I saw the film, Sarah Leonor. She made "Au Voleur", the next to last movie with Guillaume Depardieu, a very good film which reminds me of Terence Malick's wonderful "Badlands".