Our bands history – and that of of our band members – almost reads itself as a chronicle of the Berlin music scene. From Krautrock to Punk, and Jazz to Classical Music … you can tell, we’ve been around! With the 17 Hippies we started off playing “unplugged” – meaning unplugged – our line-up changing from three to twenty or so musicians. A few years later we “condensed” into what we are now, and for the past six years or more, we’ve been playing with the same thirteen people (with the exception of Danda, our new bass player) Our groove foundation is bass, banjo, guitar and ukulele (and sometimes accordion and tenor horn), and then we add cello, violins, clarinets, trumpet, and trombone … I guess you’ve got it: no percussion! Right from the start we mixed the music we heard on the streets of Berlin: traditional music from Eastern Europe, France and Western pop music to create our own “Berlin Style”. As we went a long, we found out, that we had started to write stuff too … with lyrics in German, English, and French.
On top of playing more than 1.500 gigs around the world we have written the score for a couple of movies (including the prize winning film HALBE TREPPE – Grill Point – by acclaimed German director Andreas Dresen, music for theatre; we’ve performed as a circus band, have joined up with other musicians to perform and record albums (with Les Hurlements d’Léo from Bordeaux to form HARDCORE TROBADORS), or with Marc Ribot for our “17 Hippies play Guitar” album.
For our 10th anniversary we produced our first DVD, showing all sorts of stuff we’ve done, places we’ve visited, and footage of a live concert in our hometown Berlin. And we found time to record a few albums, the latest – before El Dorado – being HEIMLICH (released in February 2007, playing in more than 20 countries from Japan, and China to the US and Canada, from Algeria, and Morocco, from Spain to Russia) … Our latest collaborations include playing with BOOM PAM from Tel Aviv, and with Johnny Kalsi from the DHOL FOUNDATION in London …
More info here