September at the Racetrack

There’s something genuinely strange about watching the Foo Fighters play where horses usually run. Hoppegarten—Berlin’s oldest racetrack, tucked out in the eastern suburbs, thirty minutes from the city center—hosted the third edition of Lollapalooza Berlin in September 2017, and the setting was one of those things that worked precisely because it had no obvious reason to.

The lineup was built around three headliners who each had something exclusive to offer: the Foo Fighters and Mumford & Sons both made this their only German show of the year, which in festival terms is a real card to play. The xx were coming off I See You and an almost entirely sold-out German tour, and chose Lollapalooza as their single festival appearance—a meaningful gesture from a band that had grown from cult bedroom-pop project to something stadium-adjacent. On the domestic side, Marteria played his first Berlin show in two years, AnnenMayKantereit were at the peak of their early momentum, and the Beatsteaks, who are essentially Berlin’s house band at this point, returned for a second go.

What Lollapalooza has figured out, at least in Berlin, is that the experience around the stages matters as much as what’s on them. The racetrack grounds gave the whole thing room to breathe—the kind of physical scale that lets a festival feel like a city-within-a-city rather than a crowded queue. Whether it lived up to that promise depends on which day you caught and who you were with. For me, a festival is always mostly about the between-sets hours anyway. The headliners are context. Everything else is the actual story.