White Wristbands, Borrowed Access

We lifted a pair of white AAA wristbands by means I’m not going to detail and walked into the G-Shock party at the Admiralspalast like we’d always been on the list. The venue has a quality—grand pre-war architecture, slightly worn, the kind of building that absorbs whatever gets staged inside it—that makes even a branded corporate event feel like it’s happening in a real room.

The crowd was the full taxonomy of Berlin’s celebrity-adjacent scene: TV personalities, local famous faces, the working machinery of the media world doing its handshakes-and-air-kisses routine. I ended up in what passed for a VIP area, making conversation with women in green tops and watching two of the Ochsenknecht boys—sons of German actor Uwe Ochsenknecht, recognizable by their studied nonchalance—compete with us for the last vodka bottles. There was also a man who looked uncannily like Japanese designer Keiichi Nitta, which either reflects well on the party’s international reach or says something about how much I’d already drunk.

The performances were the actual reason to be there. Amanda Blank did her set half-dressed and completely in command of the room. Lady Sovereign—physically small, sonically enormous—reminded everyone present why she’d mattered. Patrice, the German-Jamaican musician and former MTV host, worked the crowd with the ease of someone who’s done it a thousand times. By the end there were gift bags, which felt like the universe validating the wristband situation.

The MTV Europe Music Awards were the following night. Two consecutive evenings of this, which seemed at the time like a gift and in retrospect was probably a medical risk.