Ton Steine Scherben (DE)
From Berlin
Popularity
Ton Steine Scherben has one upcoming show in the Netherlands: on January 7, 2027 at De Bunker, Eindhoven.
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About
Ton Steine Scherben earned their reputation partly through chaos: their very first big stage appearance, at the 1970 Fehmarn festival, ended with a building next to the stage burning down, and much of the radical left wing crowd assumed the band had started the fire. That kind of infamy suited them. Fronted by Rio Reiser, the West Berlin group sang entirely in German at a time when almost no one did that in rock, and their early material was fiercely anti capitalist and anarchist, making them the musical voice of the squatter movement and the new left. They ran their own label, David Volksmund Produktion, which kept them independent but perpetually broke. Blacklisted from public radio for being too extreme, they still built a devoted cult following. Over time their sound shifted toward more personal themes, love, freedom and loss, without losing that raw edge that later critics would call proto punk. The band dissolved in 1985 under crushing debt, Reiser died in 1996, and yet Ton Steine Scherben never really went away.
