Long before their fateful meeting, Chester Travis and Tim Hook shared a rich and varied musical history. The past few years have seen Chester release three EPs, score a feature length documentary and tour with Grammy Award-winning musician Kimbra. Meanwhile, Tim’s schedule had him touring Europe, accompanying singers in Vietnam and playing international festivals such as The Great Escape.
Eventually the two would meet while working together in a guitar shop on London’s famous Denmark Street. There they whiled away the days writing together and composing the next chapter of their musical adventure. Now both living in Berlin and drawing on influences such as Elliot Smith and Wilco, the country-folk duo are recording an EP together and taking a full band on the road for a series of festivals and intimate shows in Germany.
This gig marks the second time Tim and Chester have played together at English Theatre Berlin | International Performing Arts Center but their first time with a full band.
Support act: janine villforth
Fresh from performing at Soundcloud’s Kitchen Sessions (a website which has seen her songs played over 50,000 times), Janine Villforth is bringing her 6-piece band to English Theatre Berlin | International Performing Arts Center for the first time.
Hailing from Cologne, the 18-year-old songwriter cites influences ranging from Feist and Matt Corby right through to the old soul classics. Weaving thoughtful lyrics with catchy melodies, Janine Villforth is set to leave audiences mesmerized with a rich smoky voice far beyond her years.
Now based in Berlin, and currently recording a studio EP, here’s your chance to witness a star in the making!
Two extraordinary women: Rose Zimmer, the aptly nicknamed Red Queen of Sunnyside, Queens, is an unreconstructed Communist who savages neighbors, family, and political comrades with the ferocity of her personality and the absolutism of her beliefs. Her precocious and willful daughter, Miriam, equally passionate in her activism, flees Rose’s influence to embrace the dawning counterculture of Greenwich Village.
Ruth discovers a Hello Kitty lunchbox washed up on the shore of her beach home. Within it lies a diary that expresses the hopes and dreams of a young girl. She suspects it might have arrived on a drift of debris from the 2011 tsunami. With every turn of the page, she is sucked deeper into an enchanting mystery.
Two doctors risk everything to save the life of a hunted child in this majestic debut about love, loss, and the unexpected ties that bind us together. “On the morning after the Feds burned down her house and took her father, Havaa woke from dreams of sea anemones.” Havaa, eight years old, hides in the woods and watches the blaze until her neighbor, Akhmed, discovers her sitting in the snow. Akhmed knows getting involved means risking his life, and there is no safe place to hide a child in a village where informers will do anything for a loaf of bread, but for reasons of his own, he sneaks her through the forest to the one place he thinks she might be safe: an abandoned hospital where the sole remaining doctor, Sonja Rabina, treats the wounded. Though Sonja protests that her hospital is not an orphanage, Akhmed convinces her to keep Havaa for a trial, and over the course of five extraordinary days, Sonja’s world will shift on its axis and reveal the intricate pattern of connections that weaves together the pasts of these three unlikely companions and unexpectedly decides their fate.
In this mesmerizing debut, a young American discovers he may be heir to the unclaimed estate of an English World War I officer, which launches him on a quest across Europe to uncover the elusive truth. Just after graduating college, Tristan Campbell receives a letter delivered by special courier to his apartment in San Francisco. It contains the phone number of a Mr. J. F. Prichard of Twyning & Hooper, Solicitors, in London—and news that could change Tristan’s life forever. The Steady Running of the Hour is a literary novel about a young man’s quest to inherit a fortune from the 1920s. The book involves many historical settings, including the Battle of the Somme and the British 1924 Mount Everest Expedition.