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Scumeck Sabottka

Season 5 · Episode 7

"I regret that I never did promote a concert by Throbbing Gristle”, says Scumeck Sabottka, a West-German left-field music fan who over the course of the decades became one of Europe’s biggest and most progressive concert promoters. Staging concerts and tours by Kraftwerk, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Nick Cave, LCD Soundsystem, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Robbie Williams, and many more, Sabottka eventually became respected for his massive engagement against a corrupt secondary ticket market by introducing a new, personalized concert ticketing system that doesn’t allow re-selling at exorbitant prices. Born in the Ruhr area in the mid-sixties and now based in Berlin, Sabottka is also engaged in a personal fight against the forgetting of the nuclear disaster of Chernobyl in 1986. Sabottka: “Look at Chernobyl and Fukushima: It is incomprehensible how fast people tend to forget that the use of atomic energy ranks among the biggest threats to the human race. In his STRRR episode, Scumeck Sabottka talks about personal video hightlights he has found on the Internet, among them Lou Reed’s last interview, a haunting confrontation between Hunter S. Thompson and a Hell’s Angel and a deeply moving French TV interview with Robbie Williams.

Interview + 2nd Camera: Max Dax, DOP + editing: Lucia Lux, Photo: Lucia Lux, Animations: TOPE, Introduction: Craig Holiday Haynes