Mighty Mighty, Wellington
March 8 | Reviewed by Joe Sheppard

The Berlin Bonanza managed to bottle no shortage of German culture – and beer – and import it to Cuba Street for nearly a fortnight of non-stop adrenaline. In between gigs from top-rate overseas and local groups and games involving vodka and pashing, there was some serious ping-pong to be played and glasses of Schöfferhofer to be toasted. The red-curtain lounge and adjacent bar upstairs at Mighty Mighty was a perfect venue for a classy range of partying – if only the regulars had got the memo to bring their dancing shoes and check their attitudes at the door, because they were just a little too many people there too kuhl for die Schule.

Every evening kicked off with the frenetic game of Rundlauf, a variation of table tennis that can include up to thirty players and is surprisingly entertaining to watch once a good rally gets going. Essentially, every person dashes around the table anticlockwise, running onto a shot that they have to return to the next person in the queue, who is doing exactly the same – all done to country music. A foul means you’re out, a new rally begins, and so on until two players are left to a best-of-five play-off. On a practical level however, there were two problems with this: Kiwis in general can’t play table tennis; and once drinks get involved, people don’t want to admit it when they’re out. As cheesy as it sounds, Rundlauf really is a game of honesty and trust, and if nobody wants to be eliminated – and why is it always the more useless ones? – it rapidly descends into a chaotic whirlpool and nobody has any fun. But when there was fierce competition between skilled players, Rundlauf really was an impressive sight, and nothing makes you walk the line quite like a bit of banjo or fiddle in the background.

Thursday night saw the wonderfully named Barbara Morgenstern play an energetic set of electro-pop, with a cute little cardboard model of the famous East Berlin television tower perched on her Yamaha keyboard. Accompanied by Parisian multi-instrumentalist Fred Avril, Morgenstern fused genres playfully over lively beats that clearly called for dancing. One long medley saw Avril stabbing out rhythms borrowed from funk while Barbara Morgenstern slammed her keys and stomped along diligently to the backing track, before Avril pleaded into his mike for a nine-volt battery, Morgenstern went missing, and the guitarist was left alone to play jazz chords and licks so expressively to the looped drums and bass that I would swear he was improvising, squeezing as much pleasure as possible out of each note for the very first time. When Morgenstern came back, they leapt into quite possibly the best pop song I’m yet to discover this year: ‘The Operator’. A polished power-pop chorus in English burst out from the schizophrenic dance verse (delivered auf Deutsch), the most obvious influence of which was probably the fun and feeling of an Atari videogame soundtrack. The deadly key change late in the song nearly floored me. Even the most blasé punters had their well-groomed heads shaking by the end of it, and some even forgot where they were and allowed their feet to tap, their faces to smile. Check it out.


For the finale, ‘French Kiss’, Avril went to town on an old black theremin. He danced at a rapid tempo to some highly structured rhythms, making use of both sweeping dynamics and staccato thrusts, to bring amazing life and variety out of an instrument quite sensibly wrenched out of the avant-garde cupboard and placed in the kinetic world of dance music. I later learned this was their first show together – which means that everyone who is seeing them at Hope Bros. or AK07 the next week can be guaranteed one hell of a gig.

Mighty Mighty really got into the spirit of things with some nice details: a retro poster in German with a flow chart about petrol refinement; pamphlets promoting the DDR (East Germany) Museum, recently opened near the Museuminsel in Berlin; a bartender with the East Berlin pedestrian-crossing men printed on his tee shirt. My only complaint is that I never saw a single Currywurst! Na ja, maybe I came on the wrong nights, but if I had my way there would be all manner of fried sausage going every night, and genuine döner Kebabs from Berlin too, because decent late-night eats in Wellington are damn hard to come by.

So the Berlin Bonanza really pulled out the stops for an all-inclusive party. Big ups must go to sponsors the Goethe Institut and the organisers for managing to bring such high-calibre music to Wellington for such a bargain ($5 on the door). The only Eurotrash at Mighty Mighty were the party-poopers propping up the bar or smoking out back instead of taking advantage of the immense wealth of free or cheap treats on offer. (Ok, maybe not the only Eurotrash – after all, there was a two-metre tall Meccano model of the Eiffel Tower.) Best of all, it was easy to duck in and out for a quick imported drink, because the handy location meant that you could skive off to another party after a little table tennis, before returning for some epic but very affordable beats. Imagine if it turned into an annual event – how cool would it be if Wellington had its own Teutonic festival to rival the great Berlinale or Love Parade?