A Very Gay Thursday Night at the Astra

Sara and I showed up to the Astra Berlin on a Thursday evening with nothing but beer money and misplaced confidence—hardly the arsenal you’d want for navigating Berlin’s queerest crowd of the year. Tokio Hotel haircuts, couples making out in every direction, and the longest coat check queue I have ever seen in my life. One thing became immediately obvious: the two sisters from Canada are no longer the unknown indie-twee act they were a few years back. The mainstream got them. It got them completely.

Because some enthusiastic bouncer refused to let my Fritz Kola through the door—paid for, mine, I was thirsty—we ended up at the bar, beers in hand, catching the opening set from the American Astronautalis. His witty raps, his half-speech half-sermon delivery, and his perpetually flushed face—clenched and red like a man one blood pressure spike away from detonating—won over even the most stone-faced people in that room. Which is saying something. Sara went immediately to the merch table and bought his T-shirt. She’s decisive like that.

Tegan and Sara played a generous set mixing old catalog with the new Sainthood material, and in between songs told genuinely funny drug stories from their teenage years. The room nearly turned on Sara Quinn when she confessed to having dated a boy at the age of thirteen. You could feel the temperature drop. The dirty traitor. Les Mads filmed a video interview with the Quin sisters shortly after, which I’m convinced was the only thing that saved them from the mob. I spent the entire show standing and paid for it afterward—my legs hurt so badly I practically had to saw them off at the knee. Next time I’m bringing a folding chair. I mean it.