I have flown through Frankfurt often enough. But it had been some twenty years since I had walked its streets. The excuse was a concert by The Analogues. To call them a Beatles tribute band would do injustice to both groups. The Analogues, with none of that dressy-up carry on, play all Beatles music, especially the post-live, studio stuff that The Beatles never got to play live themselves. There are added harps, violas, violins, singers, as each song demands. And, being a very focused Dutch band, their homework is, quite literally, note perfect.
I Ryanaired into Frankfurt Hahn and had a two hour bus ride across flatland (free local tour) into Frankfurt. I was staying in a fine hotel near the main station. Friendly, efficient, not in your face type of place. I did a little recce when I arrived in the bus station in the centre of Frankfurt and sorted out the area not to go to, adjacent to the hotel. As I passed along one side of the train station, I saw four well-armed (not the usual lightly-armed) cops surrounding a young man and asking him a few teasers. It was a routine I had seen a few times in Berlin and Hamburg – one policeman asks questions while the other four or so stand around in a silent ring, on guard, eyes on the object of the questions. When I met my friend from the train, a few hours later, I outlined the local area in which we would not be socialising. Off then for an Italian meal in the nearby Kaiserstraße.
Now Frankfurt isn’t wedding cake Munich or grungy Berlin or dark, northern Hamburg. But it’s not just a financial centre either. The old city centre was crowded with visitors – German mostly, it seemed – and I heard very little English. It was relaxed and easy-going, and good-humoured. The following day, we took a long river tour along the Main, then wandered about a little before catching a taxi out to the concert in the Jahrhunderthalle, on the outskirts of the city. According to a wall festooned with dozens of names, Yehudi Menuhin, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix and Rory Gallagher (twice in 1973) had all played there. Our driver was a young, feckless chauffeur (he didn’t give a feck, that is). At one stage, I tapped him on the shoulder and told him – in bad German – that I had no wish to die before getting to the concert. He sulked silently but slowed down, for the rest of the trip. We had a similar death-defying lunatic on the way back in, who added to his repertoire the variation of slipping in and out of lanes like a dive bomber to the accompaniment of flashing lights (other drivers).
The Analogue concert was wonderful – Revolver with Sergeant Pepper and songs from Magical Mystery Tour thrown in as a bonus. If you closed your eyes, you could have been listening to the originals. From the harp in McCartney’s melancholy She’s Leaving Home to the staccato notes at the end of Getting Better, from Sergeant Pepper. We played a whispered game throughout the show: a Lennon or McCartney song? Lennon’s quirkiness and unique lexis set against McCartney’s wistfulness and beautiful, stand alone melodies.
We had a drink back in the hotel later and mulled over the songs we had heard. The following day, we did the standard bus tour of the city and a lot of walking around. We ended up wolfing down enormous ham hocks (Schweinhaxe) with Sauerkraut in a fine restaurant in the older part of the city (what was left/rebuilt of it anyway). And there was an Alsace band playing in one of the squares too.
On the Monday, we slipped down past ‘the dodgy quarter’ (the bad boys were probably still in bed) and had a mooch around. It was my friend who spotted this charming sign
It was clear enough what it meant: no guns/knives/sprays/knuckledusters in this area between the hours of eight at night and five in the morning. Our only question was: what happened outside of those hours? The thing is though, Frankfurt city centre felt safer than Dublin, tidier than Belfast and less swamped by humanity than London. As a city not really on the international trail, it seemed more and more like a little secret the Germanians were keeping to themselves.
I Aerlingused home from the main Frankfurt airport (where I overnighted on the way back from Istanbul last year) to the tail end of an Irish Indian Summer. Good Day Sunshine, as The Originals had it, in one of their little Lieder.