TAKE A DEEP BREATH – LIFT UP YOUR ARMS – BREATH OUT SLOWLY

A quick reminder of our 2009 highlights:

El Dorado – the new album, along with our grand tour of Germany ... two US tours, one to the East, and one over to the West-Coast ... then China again (this time we went to Shenyang) ... the WOMAD-Festival in England, with ecstatic Britons dancing in torrential rains, not wasting a thought on changing their dress code: it's mini skirts ... and wellies! One of the most impressive moments (to say the least) ... and then of course the WOMAD-BBC3-stage, hosted by Charlie Gillett. He’s such a warm, and incredible passionate music lover! We had thought of playing 2 songs for the radio-show - plus bits of interviews - but he just kept urging us on, saying “let’s not talk – let’s hear more of your music!”. We felt so much at home with him and his fans ... in the rain.

Sadly Charlie Gillett died on 17. March 2010. With him we all loose a very very special person ...

Summer 2009 also brings us to picturesque festivals in Spain: the Pyrenees, the Basque country, and steaming Barcelona. We also play our favourite festival “Musicalarue” in Luxey, in the south of France, we're invited for a showcase at the renown Schleswig-Holstein-Musikfestival in Kiel (hey, that place actually rocks!), and then ... one day we play at Hamburg’s Airport Terminal 1, the next day ... we fly from there to England! Autumn then takes us to Israel (fantastic!), and Jordan (magnificent!) ... with everything being topped by our sold out concert at the "Théâtre de la Ville" (yes Sarah Bernard's place!) in beautiful Paris ...  what a grand finale to our international concerts. We take our bows ... merci mille fois!

2010 is going to be creative big time. We'll be touring less …  let's say we're doing homework: we're working on the ultimate 17 Hippies-Songbook, that'll be finished sometime later this year, plus ... wait, just come back, and have a look at our home-page occasionally, we are getting more stuff ready!

If you’ve just stumbled upon us, here’s our story (in short):

Our bands history - and that of of our band members - almost reads itself as a chronicle of the Berlin music scene. From Krautrock to Punk, and Jazz to Classical Music … you can tell, we’ve been around! With the 17 Hippies we started off playing “unplugged” - meaning unplugged - our line up changing from three to twenty or so musicians.

A few years later we “condensed” into what we are now, and for the past six years or more, we’ve been playing with the same thirteen people (with the exception of Danda, our new bass player) Our groove foundation is bass, banjo, guitar and ukulele (and sometimes accordion and tenor horn), and then we add cello, violins, clarinets, trumpet, and trombone … I guess you’ve got it: no percussion! Right from the start we mixed the music we heard on the streets of Berlin: traditional music from Eastern Europe, France and Western pop music to create our own “Berlin Style”. As we went a long, we found out, that we had started to write stuff too … with lyrics in German, English, and French.

On top of playing more than 1.500 gigs around the world we have written the score for a couple of movies (including the prize winning film HALBE TREPPE - Grill Point - by acclaimed German director Andreas Dresen, music for theatre; we’ve performed as a circus band, have joined up with other musicians to perform and record albums (with Les Hurlements d’Léo from Bordeaux to form HARDCORE TROBADORS), or with Marc Ribot for our “17 Hippies play Guitar” album.

For our 10th anniversary we produced our first DVD, showing all sorts of stuff we’ve done, places we’ve visited, and footage of a live concert in our hometown Berlin. And we found time to record a few albums, the latest - before El Dorado - being HEIMLICH (released in February 2007, playing in more than 20 countries from Japan, and China to the US and Canada, from Algeria, and Morocco, from Spain to Russia) …

2008 takes us through 10 countries, and we record our latest album El Dorado. We play with Johnny Kalsi from the DHOL FOUNDATION in London, and work on a joint stage program with BOOM PAM from Tel Aviv.

Our  EL DORADO album is released in the spring of 2009. We go on a world tour, playing more than a hundred concerts in 15 countries.

We spend the spring of 2010 "off road", taking a break, and preparing new stuff. In summer we'll be playing assorted festivals in Germany, and across Europe.