Trick or Treat! Halloween with Snøffeltøffs at Bang Bang Club – Win Tickets Here
By John Perye . October 29, 2014
Jack-o’-lanterns, creepy crawlers, and things that go bump in the night, it’s that time of the year again, Halloween! After the kiddies have had their fill of treats and have been put to bed, it’s time for the adults to have their fun. How does two floors of freaky psychedelic visuals, Halloween decorations, free blood-shots, and live music sound?
For a bit of fright head on down to the Bang Bang Club on the 31st and watch Berlin’s own Snøffeltøffs celebrate their album release entitled Hokus Pokus. I spoke with singer/guitarist Julian of the band to get the skinny.
How would you describe Snøffeltøffs sound?
It’s a mixture of different styles of music we kinda got into over the last couple of years. GARAGE rock is probably the broader term for the music we play, but there’s also other musical influences like surf, country, blues and of course punk rock. We played this show in Le Havre and this chick came to us after the show and said our music sounds like bluegrass grunge. We liked that. It’s like a good cheesy pizza with tabasco on a hungover sunday.
Where did you start and how long have you been together?
We started in Berlin in a tiny little rehearsal room in the basement of a bigger rehearsal room complex. The room is pretty bad because it’s right under the men’s lavatory and the whole pipe system goes right through our room and you can actually tell when somebody took a shit. It’s not so great but we kinda like it, it’s like our own little hole. We’ve been playing together for 2.5 years now, but we’ve known each other for 10 years and played together before. We were both sick of all this “4 people – 4 decisions” bands we had in the past. Now we’re a 2 piece band with a 4 piece equipment on stage.
The upcoming show on Halloween is a record release party?
Yes, finally got our first album Hokus Pokus set to release after a long period of work in several studios and are excited to play since we haven’t been playing at home in a long time and just got back after a 4 week tour across Europe. Even though there was no intention at all to play one of those classic record release shows, but we needed a release date anyway and the cool guys at Bang Bang Club asked if we wanted to play on the 31st of October, so it came quite in handy. Funny enough, it took us a month to realize that our record release show is actually gonna be on Halloween since the album name came from the old H-Street skateboard vids and not of Halloween. It’s gonna be awesome, as the whole place will be decorated and everything. Proper Halloween CARNIVAL of Souls + us playing. We even got Night Shirts from Munich to open for us which makes it even better. Buy the record, we’re broke as fuck!
Is Berlin a great place to play live music? Do the crowds respond well to what you are doing on stage?
It is, definitely, especially since we had the chance to COMPARE Berlin to other bigger cities on our recent three week tour that led us through western Europe. Of course, there are other great cities, but Berlin crowds are always somewhat different (read: better), which has a lot to do with the fact that we’re from Berlin and we have a lot of friends and fans here, which makes it more fun to play. But even when you go see a band as part of the crowd, people are always very thankful when bands are playing. That and the fact that you can basically go see a decent band at any day of the week. One could argue that it’s easy to become oversaturated with bands in Berlin, but people here don’t really feel that way. This, however, doesn’t keep you from going to bad shows from time to time, whether it’s a 10 people crowd and everybody’s in a bad mood even though the band’s super good, or 500 people that are super excited but the band sounds horrible.
Those things happen, but in general it’s a great place for giging bands. As to people’s response to what we are doing, we can’t really tell, since you hardly see anything when you are on stage because of the lights and adrenaline and everything. That being said, we never really played a bad show here and there’s always people coming to tell us they really liked what we did on stage and it’s also getting better and better since there’s a growing amount of regulars at our shows and those people always bring new people and so on. We must be doing something right.
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For your chance to win one of two pairs of tickets, just e-mail: win@staging-berlinlovesyou.kinsta.cloud
Supporting the band will be Night Shirts. Friday October 31st at Bang Bang Club – Mehringdamm 61 Kreuzberg
For event page, click here.
(B&W photo credit NEØLYD)