Rarely has British culture been so desperately in need of an 80-metre herring-storage boat. Following the Jubilee flotilla and with the prospect of HMS Ocean being moored at Greenwich during the Olympics to ward off terrorists, the battle over what fills our public space is being fought on the Thames. Given the bunting, rooftop missiles and the sight of Gary Barlow everywhere, something is needed to cheer this country up – so thank heavens for the 2,500-tonne Motorschiff Stubnitz, built in the former East Germany.
The MS Stubnitz will dock in London in time for July's Bloc festival, featuring Ricardo Villalobos, Snoop Dogg, Orbital, Steve Reich and more. Previously held at the Butlins in Minehead, Somerset, this is the first time that Bloc has come to the capital, and it's being staged at the new London Pleasure Gardens, a 40,000 capacity site in the Royal Docks designed by Glastonbury's famous Shangri-La team. It seems like a good fit – not least because the Docklands' bustling industrial history is being obscured by gleaming luxury flats and Proctor & Gamble adverts telling us we have to clean Nelson's Column before the Olympics; the Stubnitz, on the other hand, is a reminder of a world that gentrification forgot.
Visiting the Stubnitz in Hamburg, the backdrop is different, in that Hamburg still has a shipping industry: as punters sip beers on the deck in the late afternoon heat, across the other side of the Elbe, giant steel frames are tended to by cranes, and huge multicoloured shipping containers are stacked along the riverside. Boarding it is like walking into the industrial zone in the Crystal Maze, metals discoloured with green, huge imposing pipes and rust-chipped paintwork, a warren of vertical ladders and mysterious shafts, indecipherable valves, dials and levers, bolts the size of your fist, ropes as thick as your arm, and words such as "Rundfunkzentrale" unselfconsciously engraved on time-worn metal plates.
As part of its wide-ranging cultural adventures, the Stubnitz has moored in the second busiest port in Europe for the Elbjazz festival. It has been running as a nomadic music venue ever since the demise of the DDR, and without Urs "Blo" Blaser, the charismatic Swiss sound artist who saved it from the scrap-heap, it wouldn't be here at all. When we finally find Blo's quarters (the Stubnitz has more than 100 rooms, and about as many corridors), the door is still marked "Kapitän", but he's not really the captain, he demurs – that's a nautical title he is not qualified for.
Blo and his motley crew welcome us warmly with beer and biscuits – it's hot, and there's barely a breeze through the open windows. The small office is covered in 1970s beige linoleum and layered with posters from concerts past. The Stubnitz has played host to more than 4,000 acts in the last two decades, performing in 20 different European ports: it's a bewilderingly varied list including Yat-Kha, Richie Hawtin, Merzbow, Lydia Lunch, Rammstein, Grandmaster Flash, Acid Mothers Temple, Battles and Atari Teenage Riot. "Progressive sounds" is as narrow as Blo is willing to go in defining his taste.
Wearing black jeans, a black shirt with epaulettes, and holding a cigarette between louche fingers, Blo carries the amused demeanour of someone who can't quite fathom what he's got himself into – and has been half-wondering for two decades. Before the Stubnitz, he was making industrial music, working as part of multidisciplinary art collectives in "various European metropoles. But we got tired of always moving, from one industrial space to another, always tearing down and building up." The solution came during unification, when the DDR fishing fleet was dismantled. "The Stubnitz as a cultural project is a child of the German reunion. East Germany had 250 seaworthy ships, and 40 of them were this size; but Stubnitz was the oldest – and the ugliest," he says fondly. It was to be sent to the scrapyard, while its newer and better looking companions would be sold off cheaply in the southern hemisphere.
"I was very naive, but I thought the next time this many seaworthy ships will be released for sale, it will be 500 years – and I decided that was reason enough. I knew nothing about boats. It was completely crazy really: I just knew I wanted to keep exploring new regions with cultural projects, and making new partnerships across the world, but with less work." He smiles – it wasn't really less work in the end. At the beginning, in 1991, he lived alone onboard for six months, scoping out the acoustics and trying to raise the scrap price of 250,000 marks with help from friends. Eventually he moved his family onboard – it certainly beats living on a house boat.
Then the Stubnitz's first ever cultural expedition, to St Petersburg, bankrupted the project: "economically, it was a catastrophe. We just didn't realise the running costs, that hiring a full crew would be so expensive." But you're still here now? "Yes, I was too stupid to leave," he laughs. What followed was several years of legal wrangling, with neither the money nor the papers to set sail again, until 1998. Since that turnaround, the boat has thrived, docking where it can, scraping together enough gigs, money and favours to keep the labyrinthine engines running, crewed by a mixture of trained, paid seamen, and volunteers inspired by Blo's cultural project. The two groups seem to be happily sharing beers at the end of the night. "It is extremely contradictory," Blo admits, "the systematics of sailing a ship and the cultural work, but they learn a lot from each other."
The ship itself is a similarly happy compromise. The internal architecture of the Stubnitz has been contorted into the shape of a venue with minimal changes: metal pipes are cladded with cushions to make bar benches; speaker stacks are propped up neatly under portholes. To their surprise, Blo's team keep finding new ways to annex more bits of the ship: nooks and crannies reclaimed to become another little space for visual projections.
In the Stubnitz's former life, far out in the Baltic or the south Pacific, the ship's huge hull – now the dancefloor – was full of fish and ice, the coiled pipes that cover the walls and ceiling keeping the herring cool. These refrigeration pipes have been vital to the sound engineering, Blo explains: "They break and diffuse the sound amazingly, and it's only metal. Metal acoustics are great, if you can avoid the reflections, which is exactly what happens here because of the pipes – it's a sound you can't reproduce digitally. It's about being extremely precise with all the frequencies."
It certainly works in practice. At the Elbjazz festival on Saturday night, green lights glow ominously around the dancefloor, like 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea after the power goes, and the Moog noises emanating from German electronic trio the Von Duesz swirl around the bows like unsettling undersea noises, accompanied by the clicks and static of radar. Punters hold on to rope barriers and feel the insistent kick drums through their feet and their sea legs. The whole hull feels like it's humming. All the while Blo is at the back of the room, headphones on, steering the sound desk with meticulous attention, more conductor than captain.
The next afternoon, gawping at the dials and maps and contraptions in the Stubnitz wheelhouse, I notice a CCCP makers' mark on the ship's gyroscope, and Blo explains how unique the ship's massive 1960s engine and navigational equipment is: there is no other plant of its size functioning. If something breaks, they repair it – there are no replacement parts. "In the past guests have wandered off from the dancefloor and started pressing buttons – they think it's a museum," he laughs. "It's a working ship! For 20 years we had nomoney to invest in it – normally with a ship this size you'd spend half a million euros every other year just to have it re-done. But they built these boats to last."
Bloc 2012 is at the London Pleasure Gardens, 6, 7 July.
