Tango Bravo concert in Berlin: Everyone is sweating here

There's an unclear noise over the Kotti as I get out of the U1. A group of people are sitting on a filthy couch on the roundabout and music is blaring from a loudspeaker while Wolfgang Kubicki looks down on them from the FDP election poster behind them. “The left doesn't call us the economic party for nothing,” he says, but nobody here really cares about that. Instead, loud advertisements are now heard over the littered square - you just can't afford Spotify Premium on the Kotti roundabout. The people on the couch don't seem to care and keep playing until the guitar strums again. Next to me, apathetic people keep running up and down the subway stairs while I wait for you.

We have arranged to meet here this evening to listen to “the hottest disco rock in the capital”. At least that's the announcement. We're actually in the middle of moving this weekend and everything hurts, but then we thought a beer and some music in between wouldn't hurt either. It is Saturday after all, and we also know the band's bass player because we have often suffered together in the pub for our football club. The band is called Tango Bravo, and today is not just any concert, but the release concert of their very first album.

So while I'm waiting for you, I'll try to guess who's on their way to the Monarch and who's hanging out for other reasons - not that easy. The guy with the bloody cut in his eye, maybe? The vacillating one who sniffs a cigarette from another young man with a mullet? The guy in the fishnet shirt? The group of young women with bare midriffs or the two guys in football jerseys?

Then you're finally here, we get another burger as a "basic" and first we have to find the entrance to the Monarch. Behind the plastered door, up the stairs, the small room is already full when we arrive, it smells of cigarette smoke. It has something of a living room, one from the 70s, where you can smoke. In one corner the band is still changing – all in Bee Gee white, just like Tango Bravo is performing. We'll get a beer.

Soon the four musicians in white jump onto the stage, praise the “beautiful view of Berlin”, the subway passes by at our level again, but we don't hear them. Because the beat starts. The drummer sets the rhythm and: He sings! And how. Bass, guitar and synthesizer certainly take us back in time fifty years. The time of disco, of “real” bands with instruments and stuff and the time of hits. The album is called “Disco Rock Forever” for a reason. The sound is so good that you look at me in surprise: “They are so incredibly well mixed,” you say, and you never say anything like that.

It starts out rocking, then gets funkier again, then more ballady again. It takes me a while to figure out who the drummer-singer's voice reminds me of. Liam Gallagher? Yes, perhaps. Does it sound a little like Oasis or does it sound like Ram Jam? Then the “Love Songs” come along and I somehow think of Roy Orbison. You don't know. They are Tango Bravo songs, and yet they always seem somehow familiar. They are catchy, one hit after the other, or not. In any case, you feel like dancing, and everyone else in the room sees it that way too.

“They would need a few more background vocals, then it would be even hotter,” you say. And then we finally walk away from the bar, further into the front of the room. By the time of the encore, everyone is sweating and all the tension in the band is gone - now everyone can deliver their solo. They do that too. The synthesizer melody once again lays over the grooving bass. And in the end everything is over quicker than expected. Too bad. We'll get another beer. At the merch stand I find out that Tango Bravo has been around for ten years and that they recently won the biggest live band contest in Europe. Doesn't surprise me.