#WUNDERBAR Part Two – A Holiday Feeling in the City

WORM sat down with former WORM director and philosopher, proprietor and uomo universale, Hajo Doorn, to find out the origin myths and the early history of #Wunderbar. We start at the beginning, and as Hajo said, “only we know the only truth!” Part one was all about the founding of the bar. Part two is all about understanding how we got to the #Wunderbar you know and love.

As I said in part one, we needed to make #Wunderbar into a more professional, attractive bar. And this next point is important. We had to almost forget that #Wunderbar was part of WORM. We had to give it another kind of atmosphere with slightly different kinds of music we were known for. So in the beginning we played Michael Jackson and stuff like this, yes, we did, just to get people sitting here, and you know, if you see people sitting here… well: people go where people are. We also said to our volunteers, if you have meetings, have your meetings there. And make sure that people see it is an actual bar.

The making and decorating of the bar itself is another funny story. We had the place fixed, we had agreed on a total budget of about five thousand euros, and then we said to ourselves, okay: we do it as cheaply as possible, within a week. And the concept keywords we agreed on were, holiday feeling, and city. “City holiday feeling”, that sounded like something. The way it worked in this case was, we wouldn’t have discussions around the usual points like, do we like it, or, who prefers this colour over that colour, or which idea is best, or whatever… No. We have to be more concrete.

We had a discussion about a TV. I said, if you go to another country and you go to a bar, there is always a TV. So if we want to give a feeling of a holiday, we have to put in a TV. So I won that battle! [Laughs]. We were always battling, in the classic WORM way, about all the aspects of #Wunderbar. And then somebody came along, saying they had some “really ugly” lights, so I said, just bring them in. People were just bringing in stuff, all the time. And someone else said they were really good with wood and wanted to make benches like the ones you sit on in a bar in Austria. So we said, just fix it. And, because we only had five thousand euros, I had to go to Nieuwmansdorp and I bought the cheapest wood I could find; which unfortunately had splinters… It was horrible to work with. But it was cheap and this guy made the design of the actual bar and the benches.

Frank Zappa is an inspiration for me. The story about how he was connected to Ian Underwood, the sax player, is perfect. Zappa asked, what can you do that is fantastic, and Underwood said, I can play the saxophone and bass and stuff, and Zappa said, okay let’s hear it, and that was a working relationship for ten years. I was always asking people, what can you do that is fantastic? People were constantly bringing in ideas and when we needed a final decision, it was always measured against the idea, does it have enough of the “city holiday feeling”?