Mark Scheibe opens the white coffered door. He almost disappears in the closet, stretches, rummages in pillows, blankets, sheets. At some point he found it, his new record, pulls it out from behind the laundry on the top shelf. Orange with bold black lettering and a fine black frame – a record cover like a Veuve Clicquot label: “Champagne for everyone” is written on it.
The musician says he could well imagine his new album as the accompaniment to a nice dinner; before, after or instead of Billie Holiday and Frank Sinatra. “My passion for music and the idea for my new record come from this sound, from this rich, full, happy sound,” says the artist. “It’s about love, self-discovery and the gesture of generosity.”
Carsten van Ryssen
There’s the record: “Champagne for All” is hiding in the closet.
“Champagne for everyone”. You only know how magnanimous and generous this album title actually is when you hear Mark Scheibe say: “Funnily enough, I’m not drinking any alcohol at the moment” – he currently only serves the fine sparkling wine to the others. There have always been times when he has abstained from alcohol. “In my phase of life now I just don’t need it, I get into my feelings easily, I can let go and enjoy a clear head more than the intoxication that doesn’t happen on its own.” And: “I no longer live so wildly and wild as it was 20 years ago.”
Carsten van Ryssen
So that there is always something romantic around: artificial roses on the piano in the conference room.
But the bon vivant has retained a bit of decadence and confusion. For a year he has been living in the Hotel Art Nouveau in the most beautiful part of Charlottenburg. Located not far from Olivaer Platz, the hotel’s 22 rooms extend over the second and fourth floors of the magnificent Gründerzeit building, in whose ornate stairwell a historic, open elevator still runs behind cast-iron bars. “When I come home here after a performance or a concert tour, when I get my mail and have a coffee in the breakfast room,” says Scheibe, “then it always feels a bit like vacation.”
Carsten van Ryssen
Room service hadn’t arrived yet: Scheiss slightly rumpled bed.
But the subscription to the Sunday feeling definitely has its price. There is not much that Mark Scheibe calls his own in the small suite number 21: suitcase, folding bike, artificial roses – that’s all he has with him. “I got the bouquet of 50 long-stemmed fake roses two years ago, so that there’s always something romantic around when I’m shooting a music video,” says Scheibe. “And I found the old suitcase on Ebay so that I can pack my things up quickly.” Because when the composer and singer is away for a long time, for example on a tour or visiting one of his two friends, then his room definitely gets on other guests forgive.
When the musician is on tour, his suite is given to other guests
“This is a small house, and the hotelier can’t afford vacant rooms.” In any case, if the worst comes to the worst, Scheibe’s things disappear in said closet, the one with the hotel duvets and pillows in it. He has housed some of his own furniture, private items and memorabilia with his girlfriends, one of whom lives in Berlin and the other in Bremen. “Especially when I visit my loved ones, I realize again that I much prefer being a guest to being the head of the house.”
Mark Scheibe simply didn’t learn how to live. He never had time to really put down roots anywhere. When he left home at the age of 18, he and his mother had already moved fifteen times – before he finally ended up in Art Nouveau a year ago, Mark Scheibe had lived in his 30th apartment. “Somehow things don’t really work out with me and the fixed abode,” he says now. He quickly throws up new rooms, no longer feels comfortable in his own walls – “I simply have no talent for living.”
Carsten van Ryssen
From A to B: the folding bike is one of the things that Scheibe brought with him.
Life in the hotel, on the other hand, currently suits him perfectly. He enjoys the quiet in his suite, and he can practice and work in a larger conference room, which also has a piano. “And if I do want company, then I just go into the breakfast room, talk to the staff or get to know other guests.” A group of Swiss psychiatrists at a conference in Berlin, a yoga troupe from Freiburg – have already had some strange encounters he made over coffee and croissants in the hotel’s breakfast room.
Carsten van Ryssen
A new melody, a new song: the composer and singer likes to retreat to his suite to work.
And yet there is also a melancholy that comes with life in a hotel. In conversation, the musician has to think of his father, who took his own life when Mark Scheibe was just 17 years old. His daughter asks about her grandfather early on and with great curiosity. “I told her about his great sadness, about the loneliness, about why he didn’t want to live anymore,” says Scheibe, quoting his daughter’s sad but beautiful reply: “Maybe he was homesick, but didn’t even know where he lived .”
Carsten van Ryssen
Impeccable: The musician smoothes his shirts with the hotel iron.
Basically, says Scheibe, it’s a similar longing that characterizes him and his music. “Being homesick without knowing where home is – I think that describes my attitude towards life a bit,” he says. “But I know that I am at home in my life and that my life keeps giving me places where I feel comfortable. And right now this hotel is one of them.
Incidentally, in order to be able to live there permanently without becoming completely impoverished, Mark Scheibe has agreed on a special deal with the hotelier. Basically, he pays an average rent for the Charlottenburg area. The artist writes a weekly column for the Art Nouveau website and has also shot a ten-minute film at the hotel, with operatic singing and a bizarre staging. “And recently I gave a small concert in the conference room, of course there was champagne,” says Mark Scheibe. “It’s said to have tasted fantastic.”
The Musician’s Column can be read on the hotel website.