Wassermusik: Goodbye UK – and Thank You for the Music at HKW / 27.07.-18.08.2018

HKW’s Wassermusik festival returns this summer with another execellent programme including the Matthew Herbert Bigband & Chor der Kulturen, Little Axe & Adrian Sherwood, Orlando Julias and the Helliocentrics, Scritti Politi and many many more.

In 2018, Wassermusik takes the Brexit as an opportunity to pay homage to the extraordinary musical creativity that made the United Kingdom the world’s leading pop nation, alongside the US, in terms of music as well as thought, fashion, style and other concepts. Entitled Goodbye UK – and Thank You for the Music, the festival traces the “Britishness” of pop music and investigates its mode of action.

The program not only focuses on some particularly British-sounding artists of the past six decades of music history, but above all non-British musicians who say goodbye to the United Kingdom, some more, some less gratefully. Another thematic strand concerns the history of immigration, largely unknown in Germany, which brought musicians in droves to the postwar UK without whom British pop music would probably not sound as we learned to love it. As always, the concerts will be supplemented by films, panel discussions and the Wassermarkt.

The past ten editions of Wassermusik dealt with themes ranging from Surf and Tiki (2008) and Deserts (2011), The New Pacific (2013) and Mother India (2015) to The Other Caribbean (2016) and in 2017, for its tenth year, celebrated itself. Wassermusik X invited the “best of” and artists the makers of Wassermusik had always wanted to engage but who were unable to take part for various reasons.

In 2018, the festival, curated by Detlef Diederichsen, will again be held on the popular HKW roof terrace unless the weather does not allow, then in the exhibition hall.