Postcards From Berlin: Six60
Postcards From Berlin: Six60
The Six60 Movement is growing, and we are now based in Berlin after signing with record label FOUR Music/Sony Music. This also happens to be the first time we have all been together in the same city. Three of us live in an apartment in Friedrichsain and the other two live in Mitte and Prenzlaur Berg.
Before moving here we hit the road, playing sell-out tours in NZ and Australia, then to the US for SXSW, Summerfest, Wavefront and a bunch of side shows in San Fran, LA, New York and CMW Toronto. We then went on to the UK for Dot to Dot Festival, Great Escape (where we played with John Newman) and the big one, Glastonbury.
We later settled into Berlin in the peak of summer. Average 36 degrees, lots of beer and lots of basketball. Berlin is a great city, and seems as though time is never an issue. Whether its 4pm or 4am the streets are busy and there is something to do. Deep in culture, clubs, bars, museums, galleries, cafes, restaurants, cheap beer, and no liquor bans! Anything goes.
There are great food and flea markets most nights of the week (the Thursday Kreuzberg food market even has an New Zealand pie stall), nice parks, cool lakes on the outskirts of the city, an abandoned theme park (that you have to break into and avoid the lone security guard and his dog).
The clubs scene is one of the best in the world, its hard to describe them and do them justice. Really they are not clubs, they are small villages, multiple floors, open for 3 days on end, one with a maze, one in an old power plant and one with a pool in the middle of the Spree. There are loads of gigs to go to also – every band has Berlin on their Germany circuit and you can see a band every night of the week if you want.
Obviously this place is very different to home. We miss our families and friends, and at times the food. (Haven’t managed to find dim sum here yet – if anyone has any tips please hit us up!) It’s hard to find good coffee (funny enough the best coffee is at a NZ café called Antipodes, and an Australian café called Melbourne) and hard to avoid techno – ha ha!
Working with FOUR Music has been great. It’s always important to find people who are on the same page and since we arrived we have been working to get everything in place for release. Forever is going to be our first single in Europe. We have had photo shoots, video company meetings, art work and soon we will be filming a new video.
At the same time we are working on the second album. We have found a rehearsal space just up the road and on our days off we are working on new songs.
All this has kept us out of the live circuit for longer than we are used to, so in an attempt to play live with zero, have some fun and try some new material we picked up a residency at a well-known local club. All our attempts to keep it under the radar were pointless, every show was packed, with all kinds of people all singing the words and going for it.
We are about to start our German tour – it begins at the end of this month at Reeperbahn Festival where we are playing four times in one day! (It’s SXSW all over again!) Looking forward to the NZ summer and avoiding the Berlin winter which we have been told is brutal!