The Atomic Café (Club)
The Atomic Café was a Munich club that existed from January 11, 1997 to January 1, 2015 at Neuturmstrasse 5 ( Graggenauer Viertel ). The club was a regular venue for internationally up-and-coming bands for southern Germany and in the following years gained national and international fame in the respective scenes in the areas of indie , beat , garage , psychedelic , northern soul , rare funk and, at times, drum and bass .
The club
The club was run by Christian Heine and Roland Schunk . A silent partner was Alexander Lacher , who ran Circus Gammelsdorf from 1987 to 1990 and among other things publishes the music magazines Spex , Piranha and Riddim and operates the Groove Attack and Rough Trade distributors .
The aim of the Atomic Café when it was founded was to reunite the scenes of the Munich (non-techno) subcultures, which had been dispersed since the end of the dance hall and which had been decimated by the migration to electronic realms, in a new club in the city center. At the end of the 1990s, almost all of Munich's nightlife was displaced to the outskirts of the city or to the Kunstpark Ost due to the policy of the Munich district administration department at the time .
The rooms were kept in warm colors, the world of shapes is consistently based on Verner Panton and the Space Age design of the 1960s and was thus a pioneer of the Googie revival of the late 1990s. The club was designed by its operators Christian Heine and Roland Schunk and in some places by Christian Schaberl . The changing installations next to the DJ booth came from artists such as Andreas Kräftner , Anna McCarthy (sister of Nick McCarthy ), Christian Schaberl and Moritz Reichelt .
The Atomic Café combined a live club with a discotheque and cocktail bar at an admission price that was acceptable for the subcultural scenes, despite its expensive downtown location; In the first hour, admission (if there was no concert) was free and the cocktails were cheaper, which often led to a quick filling. The capacity was 350 to 400 people.
Concerts
Over 2000 national and international live acts were on stage, an average of two to three per week. For example, the band Stereo Total played at the opening ceremony on January 11, 1997 .
Some of the bands presented in the Atomic Café were only known from the recordings of the club's own label at the time of their first appearance in Germany, and several of them started an international career in the following years. So played there z. B. the Arctic Monkeys and Mumford & Sons before their breakthrough; the latter in front of only 150 guests.
Another hobbyhorse of the club was to host artists who had already started their careers in the 1960s in a small ambience; including Terry Callier , Bobby Hebb , Brian Auger , The Seeds , Tony Allen , Mal Waldron , Amon Düül II , Marcos Valle and The Last Poets . Many artists also appeared from the punk era in 1977, including The Undertones , The Buzzcocks , Wire and the UK Subs . Likewise was hip-hop represented monthly, u. a. with performances by Africa Bambaataa , Blowfly , Cut La Roc , EL-P , DJ Food , grammar , Guru , Jeru The Damaja , Jungle Brothers , Kid Koala , Lyrics Born , The Pharcyde , ? uestlove , Roxanne Shante and Ugly Duckling .
The 0.50 meter raised stage was very low with a clear height of 2.50 meters and, with a few exceptions, did without a barrier between the band and the audience, which was an extremely intimate live experience.
Club evenings
Over 5000 parties took place, an average of five to six a week - regular club nights and many special events; numerous local and international DJs played.
additional
- Again and again found readings (eg by. Heike Makatsch , Nora Tschirner , Hermes Phettberg or Werner Enke ), underground film premieres, Super 8 - and Lomo -Abende, Tiki -Zeremonien and the like instead.
- The club operated from 2002 to 2008 under the name Panatomic Music Co. his own record label, in which, among other things, the DJ, and compiler Martin Hemmel in Germany the genre French Pop 1960 (aka yé-yé) with the compilation series French Cuts known made.
- In the pre- Facebook era, the club was known for its well-frequented and openly contentious guest book .
- The club had its own recreational football team "The Atomic Allstars" in which, among others, Martin Lickleder from the Moulinettes and Peter Brugger and Florian Weber from Sportfreunde Stiller played. They were winners in the AZ Cup in 2007 and 2009 as well as in many other local tournaments.
- Some bands were formed here; the most well-known formation are Sportfreunde Stiller, who all worked behind the bar for the first few years and found their final bass player there in Rüdiger Linhof . For the first eight years, your manager Marc Liebscher ran the event "the smart club." In the Atomic Café on Fridays.
- After their performances in Munich, numerous national and international artists spent their private aftershow parties in the Atomic Café in larger halls or gave unannounced concerts; including Pete Doherty and Die Toten Hosen .
- Marlene Morreis worked as a bouncer for the club during her studies in Munich and was approached by Klaus Lemke for a role in the feature film Running Out of Cool (2002).
Closure and aftermath
For a long time it was already clear for the end of 2013 that the lease for the restaurant would not be extended any further. After a court-obtained extension for one year, the Atomic Café finally had to contest its last evening with the 2014 New Year's Eve event. On January 1, 2015, closed its doors and had a Lacoste - flagship store soft. As recently as 2013, fans had joined forces to form the rescue organization “Rettet das Atomic” and in early 2014 competed in the TV show Millionaire Election .
The online magazine Jetzt.de of the Süddeutsche Zeitung shot a time-lapse video about the last three days of the Atomic Café and the subsequent ten-day gutting. After the closure, almost the entire interior was preserved. Since then it has been distributed over numerous apartments in Munich. Over 100 exhibits have been added to the collection of the Munich City Museum . In 2014 and 2015, a documentary about the Atomic Café entitled This is Atomic Love was shot, which premiered on May 5, 2017 at the Munich International Documentary Film Festival and was then released on DVD. The journalists and filmmakers Heike Schuffenhauer and Marc Seibold were primarily responsible for this crowdfunding project .
Quotes
“All the important bands and especially those that should become important. 2500 concerts in the past 18 years came together and if you start to write down names, you can stop right away, there are so many really big ones, so many legendary fireflies and beacons. "
"Everyone just wanted to be themselves and that was unusual in Munich."
Awards
In the first year of 2013, the Atomic Café received the € 30,000 venue program award in “Category 1” of the Initiative Musik .
In the readers' votes of the major German music magazines for the “Club of the Year”, the club stayed in the top five until the end; he often took first place.
Web links
- http://www.atomic.de
- https://www.discogs.com/label/37559-Panatomic
- Atomic Café in the sub-bavaria -Wiki
Individual evidence
- ↑ 6. The Indie Living Room - Atomic Café ; in: Daniela Schetar, Friedrich Köthe: Münchner Schmankerl: For Münchner Kindl and Zugroaste. Gmeiner-Verlag , Meßkirch 2013. ISBN 978-3-8392-4058-8 ( limited preview in the Google book search)
- ↑ Photo gallery , Atomic Café.
- ↑ Bands , Atomic Café.
- ↑ Hip-Hop-Artists in the Atomic Café: http://www.atomic.de/hip-hops.html
- ^ Deejays , Atomic Café.
- ↑ Panatomic at Discogs
- ↑ Birgit Ackermann, Jochen Temsch: Hertzkammer - After “French Cuts” comes “Le tour” , Süddeutsche Zeitung, May 11, 2010.
- ↑ Guest book , Atomic Café.
- ↑ Atomic Café Allstars , Atomic Café.
- ↑ 15 years of Atomic Café , Süddeutsche Zeitung, January 11, 2012.
- ^ Daniela Derntl: Adieu Atomic Cafe , FM4 , ORF , November 4, 2013.
- ↑ We'll continue with the Atomic Café , egoFM , December 13, 2013.
- ↑ The Atomic Café 1997–2015 , Jetzt.de, 2015.
- ^ Photo gallery 1 , Atomic Café.
- ^ Photo gallery 2 , Atomic Café.
- ↑ Four walls for eternity , Süddeutsche Zeitung , July 7, 2015.
- ↑ This is Atomic Love (trailer) , Atomic Café.
- ↑ a b Annette Schimanski: Crowdfunding: Filmmakers want to make a documentary about the Atomic Café in Munich , Musikexpress , February 5, 2015.
- ↑ Max Scharnigg: Farewell to the Atomic Café - Where the Capri sun never sets , Süddeutsche Zeitung, January 2, 2015.
- ↑ Sponsorship award , Initiative Musik.
- ↑ Musikexpress reader voting: The 10 best clubs of 2014 , DJ Night (s) Jever, February 1, 2015.