More about: Death From Above 1979Maximo ParkLiam Gallagher

Midnight at the west end of the Reeperbahn, the seedy side of that infamous street, where the entertainment on offer is mostly scantily-clad. Slap-bang in the middle of this neon orgy is a joint called Molotow, however, arguably Hamburg’s best rock venue and home tonight to a venting singer.

“We’re the Wood Burning Savages, we’re from Northern Ireland, and Brexit’s a fucking joke,” says Paul Connolly, slightly randomly, before then tossing his guitar off stage. “Just wanted to put that out there.”

Politics permeates pretty much everything right now: US sport, Northern Irish rock, probably even strip clubs. And it’s certainly looming over Reeperbahn 2017, this being Germany’s election weekend. By Monday, a new anti-immigration party will win parliamentary seats, but that’s certainly not the mood in downtown Hamburg. As always, the organisers of this many-venued festival offer stages to an increasingly diverse array of international talent, and an appropriate highlight this year are mixed-up Middle Eastern flavours.

The other end of the Reeperbahn is the festival’s hectic heart and soul, and at the purpose-built club Mojo on Thursday evening a full-blown Arabic dance party kicks things off. 47Soul are an energetic collective from Jordan, representing Palestine, who belt out an electro/dabke crossover they call shamstep. “This music is about facing and challenging borders!” yelps their resident onstage rabble-rouser, before bursting into another mighty anthem. And we’re away.

A few metres further up there’s a more sedate slice of middle eastern life, and a sign of the festival’s ongoing evolution. There are notable developments to this year’s programme, including one spectacular, controversial new venue (which we’ll come back to), while cutting-edge art projects enliven unpromising side-streets.

The Tehran Thricolage is a collaboration between two Iranians – sound artist Mehdi Behboudi and poet Vahide Sistani – and a German video artist, Felix Lübbert. Art buffs and random passers-by don earphones while watching big-screen aerial images of downtown Tehran, traffic moving hypnotically along like something from a Pixar movie.

Those headphones also block out a much bigger but increasingly bewildered audience back on the main street, all staring at a bus. Noughties indie bigwigs Maximo Park were due to perform here about 30 minutes ago, and you do wonder if they arrived, realised that the N-Joy Reeperbus is indeed an actual bus, and stormed off. But no, Paul Smith and his magic hat eventually appear, and launch into recent single What Did We Do To You To Deserve This, which rails at the rich and powerful. They’re all at it.

This three-day event is a real switchback ride through eras, genres, and audience engagement techniques. At the comfily-chaired Imperial Theatre – which usually hosts theatrical whodunits – King Creosote holds court. Now happily shorn of hair, the Fife folky revels in lengthy between-song banter, introducing his non-existent band, encouraging setlist debate and asking the audience to cheer the first chord of one song so we can all pretend it was a massive hit. It works, too.

Over at the gritty old rock club Gruenspan – back in perv territory – the Welsh pop hopeful Betsy also makes quite an impression. She worked with Hot Chip’s Joe Goddard early on, but her current direction involves showing off a curious amount of bod, which – as the heckles suggest – rather distracts from her genuinely distinctive voice. “I walked up the Reeperbahn in this outfit earlier,” she admits, “never been here before,” to which a creepily-voiced punter deep in the throng hollers “COME AGAIN.” Perhaps he’s just digging the songs.
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During that awkward stroll she could well have stumbled into Liam Gallagher, who flies in for a quickly-full secret show. But much more interesting are another late addition, Canadian noise quasi-legends Death from Above 1979, who play a blistering late set at Molotow then tone it down (a bit) at local store Michelle Records next day, before hanging out and signing LPs for ages. Sound fellas.

And right at the front of the latter show is the aforementioned Irishman, Paul Connolly. Reeperbahn’s real raison d’etre is showcasing new bands, and he’s clearly delighted to be among such exalted company. So why the Brexit comment? “Because people ask us about it a lot, and it’s just terrible,” says the singer. “It’s really, really shit for us as musicians. You can’t throw a stone in Northern Ireland without hitting an EU-sponsored project.”

That Wood Burning Savages gig is bloody marvellous – Connolly is in that intriguing Northern Irish tradition (Feargal Sharkey, Tim Wheeler) of clean-cut singers fronting punky bands, and they swiftly win over the random smokers in Molotow’s backyard. Other new-to-us Euro hits this year: Manon Meurt, evocative Czech shoegazers; Cologne krautrockers Holygram, whose frontman lets rip late on by lifting his effects box and going handheld, the crazy maverick; and Ant Antic, makers of surprisingly jolly Austrian electro-pop.

That duo perform on a raised platform at Reeperbahn’s new Festival Village, which offers an oasis of calm, albeit in the shadow of Hamburg’s ominous 1930s anti-aircraft bunker, a chilling reminder of previous far-right parliamentarians. Thankfully another new innovation is the village’s fulldome, in which 360° short films float over and around you, momentarily alleviating modern life’s encroaching terrors.

The other major departure is that aforementioned venue, which hosts our final show of Reeperbahn 2017. The Elbphilharmonie is Hamburg’s grand new waterfront concert hall, which went wildly, contentiously over budget, but is now the city’s focal point.

Tickets for Elphie – as it’s nicknamed – are hard to get, partly because they’re reasonably priced: since the January opening there’s been an annoying spate of people leaving classical shows during the interval having gotten their Instagram fix. But that’ll pass, and there are no such issues on Reeperbahn’s Saturday night showcase here, which culminates in a performance that also feels important this weekend.

Dillon is a Brazil-born singer who moved to Germany as a child, now collaborates with the Berlin/New York-based producer Tamer Fahri Özgönenc, and packs out this extraordinary building. It’s as if the old Camden Crawl also borrowed the Royal Albert Hall.

Understandably, Dillon looks a bundle of nerves beforehand, but she absolutely nails it: a glorious 70-minute extravaganza of German/Brazilian Bjorkiness, with furious beats, beautiful horns, and a mighty wall of euphoric applause as she eventually exits. Take that, foreigner-phobes.

More about: Death From Above 1979Maximo ParkLiam Gallagher