Guitar Nerds Anonymous

Ha! I once played a gig in a hip warehouse nightclub in Berlin with band fronted by two German brothers. The singer was sure that we'd only been booked because they thought thought we were a hip London band and decided that he was going to pretend to be English and not understand any German. It was excruciating. We arrived for soundcheck and the venue staff were like "Wilcommen!" and my mate... Olaf, feigned a blank expression and said "Sorry vee down't unterzdant tcherman". He had to keep it up until were on stage at 3am. Nightmare.

You actually used to get this with Germans in London quite a lot. They just did not want to be identified as to where they came from, quite often if they rather fancied their English skills, not always with justification, although you often got people who had adapted well to some superficial aspects of accent, such as tone of voice. I'm not very good at spotting accents and generally didn't notice it in people like that until quite some way into a conversation, but the giveaway was usually bad grammar and unidiomatic expression. What always surprised me was how annoyed some got when you asked them about where they were from or if they were from Germany. That Berlin example is rather cringeworthy and definitely worse than anything I've experienced in London. Fortunately, I haven't met anyone like that for some time.