Ting Tings in a Former Women’s Prison

The former women’s prison in Charlottenburg is exactly the kind of venue Berlin reaches for when it wants to remind you that it’s Berlin—a building that spent decades doing something grim, repurposed for something loud and electric instead. The Ting Tings played there in May 2009, a barely-announced show that got called a "secret gig" even after everyone already knew about it, and I was fully, embarrassingly obsessed with them at the time.

Katie White and Jules De Martino made this skeletal, propulsive thing—drums, guitar, loops, two people generating a sound bigger than the math suggested was possible. "That’s Not My Name" was already inescapable that year, which usually kills a song for me, but somehow didn’t. The irritation in White’s delivery. The way the chorus refuses to resolve into something satisfying. It sounded like being annoyed and exhilarated at the same time, which was a pretty accurate description of being alive in 2009. You kept finding new things to like about it even when you thought you’d exhausted it.

A former prison, a few hundred people, no corporate branding pretending to be a music moment—that was the right context for a band like that. Not a festival, not an arena. A room where you could actually feel the room respond.