The Lightning Seeds on stage in Berlin's Treptower Park. Photograph: Sheila Pulham
Berlin doesn't host a World Cup game until Brazil-Croatia on Tuesday, and the home team don't play there until a week after that, when they'll be taking on Ecuador in the Olympiastadion.
But in the meantime the German capital is making an excellent fist of providing congenial venues for ticketless fans to watch the games. The fan mile with its six giant screens, which I wrote about here yesterday, has received a lot of publicity and big crowds. A better kept secret is Pop Kick 06, a football and music festival being held in Treptower Park in the east of the city. For an entry fee of three or 7.5 euros (depending on who's playing) you get to see all the games on a screen in a huge field, and between matches there are hour-long concerts by the likes of the Berlin reggae outfit Seeed and electropoppers MIA (not to be confused with the British-Sri Lankan rapper M.I.A.). On your way in you can also admire (for free) the enormous Soviet War Memorial.
If you don't want to watch the matches with hordes of boorish England fans Pop Kick 06 is a good tip. Today, for example, a well-behaved and largely German crowd sat good-naturedly through England's lacklustre opener and was rewarded with an hour's worth of revitalising summer jollity by the Lightning Seeds, rounded off of course by a singalong rendition of Football's Coming Home. Not bad for two quid.
