Saturday Clubs

 

Jo Bartlett released a couple of days ago a song in which she recites the history of a club she often visited and also performed at. That inspired me to write about clubs that became regular venues when I was much younger.

Many of them no longer exist or have reopened elsewhere with a new concept. In the early 1980s, Stuttgart was a city that offered many unknown bands from Great Britain and the United States the opportunity to perform in small clubs. This was partly because there were promoters at the time who offered these musicians this opportunity and did not focus too much on profit. One of these promoters was Stefan Siller, a radio presenter who brought the right bands to Stuttgart at the right time with Paul's Music.

One of the first clubs in Stuttgart to embrace punk and new wave was the Mausefalle in the city center. In earlier times, it was a cabaret opened by Werner Finck, one of the most famous cabaret artists of the post-war period, who ran it until his death in 1978. The Mausefalle was located on the first floor on Tübinger Straße, right next to a strip club with the lovely name Natalie-Bar. It was quite funny to watch the club guests line up on the left side of the stairs while the nightclub guests on the right watched them sneak past bashfully.

I was lucky enough to see Dexy's Midnight Runners there at the time, when they were still performing in their sailor outfits, The Fall in 1981, Ruts DC, who combined punk and reggae with their powerful sound, and Trio, who were one of the first to make new wave with German lyrics before they became commercially successful in the NDW. ZK, who actually called themselves Zentralkommitee, were a bunch of brats from Düsseldorf who could barely play their instruments and were guests long before they filled stadiums as Die Toten Hosen.