Gretchen’s Stable Future

It’s hard to say what the Prussian first guard of dragoons would have made of it, but SSC Group has converted the old regiment’s Berlin stable block into a live music venue.

The dragoons, who saw service in the Napoleonic wars and fought at Waterloo, had kept their nags there since 1854.

Partnering with Icon, a 400-capacity club just a 20-minute drive across the German capital, SSC’s converted the old building into a two-room venue called Gretchen. It has capacities of 200 and 800.

It opened a couple of weeks ago in the city’s now-trendy Kreuzberg district, locally known as X-Berg, a major cultural centre of a reunified Berlin.

So far, the lineup includes Of Montreal, Eskimo, a DJ set from Coldcut, Delfonic, Beardyman, Plaid, Cloud Boat, and James Yuill.

The Icon team will run the venue on a daily basis and handle its music programme, although SSC will provide much of the content from its own roster and by helping to market the venue to other agents and promoters.

In the last nine months SSC, which also has offices in Düsseldorf, and Basel, Switzerland, has expanded its live music empire by opening up in Berlin and hiring former Clockwork Management chief Paul Cheetham to help run it.

In its home base of Düsseldorf it’s just launched New Fall Festival, an all-seated gathering of new folk and acoustic based music to be held in the city’s Tonhalle and Robert Schumann Hall.