Page 31 - Zone Magazine Issue 007

The film " B-Movie: Lust & Sound in West-Berlin” documents your rollercoaster musical & media journey from your arrival in West Berlin in 1979 through to 1989.
Throughout the film you take us through a unique journey of time of hedonism, Punk Rock, New Wave to the outrageous night life and development and death of this era. For those who haven't seen the film yet can you tell us about your original motivation to visit Berlin when this was a part of the world that was in turmoil with political unrest and “still resembled a bomb site from the 2nd world war”?
Berlin was virtually an unknown place back then. If anything, people only knew of a mythical Berlin such as portrayed in Christopher Isherwood books, but that was a Berlin before the war, it was either that, or the cold war city of Funeral in Berlin, The Quiller Memorandum or The spy who came in from the cold, these were really the only images we had. The only reports you ever saw on TV or read in the newspapers about modern day Berlin were either negative, or cold war stories. They had to be, as no one really wanted to report anything positive about Germany. In most people’s minds the Krauts were still the enemy. In reality, we didn’t really know much about Berlin and most people even had no idea that it was stuck in the middle of communist East Germany. So, apart from it being the place where World War 2 had ended it was off the map and out of people’s minds. I think Bowie had gone there simply because he realised it was a forgotten back-water and far away from prying eyes. Besides, most people seriously believed this would be the flashpoint where the third world war would begin, because of the potential for armed conflict which might be sparked by some small incident between the four powers who governed the city (British, American, French and Soviet Union) and faced each other off on a daily basis. Media reports on Berlin were certainly very few and far between.
I vaguely recall a TV programme I saw in the mid-70s about art & architecture in Berlin where the presenter went to both sides of the city, but that was it. Sometime in the early 70s, I had also discovered what would later become known as Krautrock. German bands making psychedelic, trippy and quite frankly weird music, most of it with lots of electronics. Early experimental Kraftwerk and Tangerine Dream, Can, Cluster, Faust, Neu, Amon Duul, Popol Vu, The Cosmic Jokers, Guru Guru and Klaus Schulze, that sort of thing. I became fascinated by this alternative and strange style of music, because almost no one was making this kind of unconventional sound in Britain. Everything was geared towards making hits and selling records in America. Besides, synths were just too expensive. Back then, before punk, the kind of electronic music I listened to was stuff like the Dr Who theme by Delia Derbyshire, or her band White Noise, or Tonto’s Expanding Headband and Walter Carlos. In my teens,
I listened to a lot of progressive rock like Hendrix or Pink Floyd too, but I also got into rougher stuff like Iggy & the Stooges, the Pink Fairies or Todd Rundgren and almost any band that used a synthesizer I found exciting, especially Hawkwind or Gong and the magnificent Frankenstein by Edgar Winter. The only alternative to all this, was commercial rock or commercial pop-trash and there was loads of that.
Berlin was a place we never associated with music until Lou Reed made an album called Berlin - even though he’d never actually been there (we didn’t know that at the time) - but just the idea of Berlin which he conjured up, was enough to intrigue me and my mates. It was so much different from Lisa Minelli’s Cabaret or the Blue Angel. Then Bowie went to Berlin and returned with a fascinating new record, Low. I thought it was an amazing album, very dark and desperate, especially the instrumental tracks like Warsawa and through it, I guess I became even more curious. What had happened there? It
sounded exciting. I wanted to go to Germany too and hopefully buy loads of unknown Krautrock records. But then along came The Sex Pistols and changed everything.
The music suddenly spoke to us. Immediately, I found I could totally relate to this sound of music. Somehow it had a really profound impact on us all. It was full of energy and attitude and it represented what we had all been feeling. Our frustration and anger was represented in short stabs of aggressive music. I was very lucky, I had a job. Although I had originally trained as an advertising designer, I hated that job and went to work in the small Virgin Record shop in Manchester, while most of my mates were unemployed with zero job prospects. I remember reading an article in The Sun about a disgusting new band from London called the Sex Pistols. Then I discovered we had a couple of copies of Anarchy in the UK in our shop. I played it at every opportunity. It didn’t go down too well with our mainly hippy clientele. Excited, I took a copy to a party that Saturday night and for a moment, hi-jacked the record player from the likes of Bad Company to let my mates hear this amazing new record. It had only been playing for about 30 seconds when big Wrangler-clad hippy came over to the record player and said “what’s this shit?” and the put his cigarette out on the record while it was playing! After the Pistols appeared on TV and caused the Nation to question the attitude of this rebellious Punk-Rock music, we became the only shop in Manchester selling punk records, so I experienced this musical explosion first hand and became immersed in the Manchester punk scene. Punk just gave us a way to express our feelings. The rebelliousness of the music and its hard, social commentary, pissed off the traditional music establishment. People questioned punk in the papers and on the telly.
The provocative images of punks wearing swastikas, without doubt sent the wrong signals however. It was merely a fashion statement intended to shock and piss off our parent’s generation who had all been involved in winning the war against Nazi Germany. But it backfired. The notion that Britain had won the war was like a farce to us, especially so when you had to do your homework in a freezing room lit by candlelight. At least none of the working classes seemed to be reaping the benefits of this victory, because practically everyone was either unemployed or on strike. After the surge of popular music and fashion in the swinging sixties, it appeared that everyone was scraping the barrel in the seventies. The contradiction that Germany had lost the war was offset by the fact it was now a thriving industrial nation with almost no unemployment.
There was a sudden rise of the British right wing, all claiming that immigrants had stolen our jobs and were ruining our culture (while dancing to ska music) naturally because some Punks flirted with Nazi imagery, they also thought the Punks were Nazis too, so to counter this negative image, the Punks created the Rock Against Racism movement and in a show of solidarity, Reggae bands started to appear on the line up at almost every punk concert. These were exciting times. But as Punk became more and more popular, I saw it was also starting to lose its grip. Serious bands like Joy Division were struggling to get gigs, while parody punk by Jilted John and Plastique Bertrand were racing up the charts. Politically too, things were looking pretty grim, after years of strikes and misery, the spectre of Margret Thatcher was also looming upon the horizon. So I decided to leave.
West Berlin took a hold over you, you were living as a squatter with resistance from the police. So what was so infectious about the place that held you there and it becoming a permanent fixture?
Firstly, Berlin had a flair about it that immediately captivated me. The atmosphere was so different to anywhere I had been. For some reason, I instantly felt at home. I guess that is probably one of the reasons I have stayed. I feel
at home here. I also discovered it was incredibly cheap to live here too. Everything was subsidised by the West German Government. To get to Berlin, you had three options, air, road or rail. There was no cheap air travel back then and as I missed my train connection, I ended up hitching a lift with a hippy student. We arrived late in the night, a dismal, rainy night. From my initial perceptions of the city, it really did resemble a scene from The spy who came in from the cold. I had no idea what to expect. I didn’t know anyone in Berlin and I couldn’t speak German. From my balcony window I could see a huge red bricked building. It was like being in Manchester. The next morning however, the weather was lovely and the city looked quite beautiful. A mixture of blue skies, bullet riddled and renovated ruins, surrounded by lots of trees. The flat I was allowed to stay in was in a beautiful old housing block doomed to demolition. It had survived the bombing of world war two virtually intact and now it was being threatened to be pulled down by a wrecking ball. I couldn’t believe it. I was given a skeleton key to a huge, 6 room apartment, with a balcony, parquet flooring, stucco decoration and a white marble bathroom. Why on earth did they want to tear this building down to build cheap, concrete flats? I was told I could stay there for free until the demolition party arrived.
Months later, the cops came eventually after the whole house had become occupied and then the battles began. After a few days wandering about the centre of West Berlin in the search of record shops, I decided to visit the East part of the city. People I met in the West kept telling me I couldn’t go there, but I knew you could. I had no idea what to expect there either, but what I discovered was a true revelation. It was like a scene from a Star Trek episode. Once I crossed the border at Checkpoint Charlie, it was as if I had been beamed down into another world, stuck in the 1950s. Uniforms everywhere, lightweight aluminium monopoly money, ersatz coffee, but this was real Orwellian socialism. I needed to find out more.
The story and supporting footage in the film really captivates the period almost like it was recorded yesterday. Quoting words from the film "If you can remember the 80's you wasn't there" How was all the information documented for the story? Had you made a journal throughout the 80's in anticipation for something like this?
No, absolutely not. It all came together by chance. The film was originally Heiko Lange and Joerg Hoppe’s idea. Joerg had been the manager of Extrabreit during the 80s and in the 90s was involved with the development of many German TV music programmes. He also has a TV production company. During a discussion one day, they realised that there weren’t any music documentaries about West Berlin in the 80s. So they set about compiling images of West Berlin from all kinds of sources and formats, Super8, VHS, Beta, U-Matic etc. They didn’t want to make a traditional “talking heads” documentary where old people are seen reminiscing about the past, they wanted the images to speak for themselves.
After Joerg had heard my album Five Point One, I met up with him to discuss the possible restoration of the original 80s music to make the songs sound good in the cinema and if I could also make them in surround sound. Joerg explained that he wanted to make a collage of images, made up from original 80s footage with a soundtrack of alternative 80s music. Although Joerg knew me mainly from my 90s trance activities, he knew virtually nothing about my 80s past. In passing, I told him that I had also made a few TV shows for British Telly, which were unseen in Germany. I thought there might be a few images of 80s West Berlin that he could use.IgavehimaboxofVHStapesandafew days later he called me and said “what is that material you gave me?” (I thought, crikey! what did I give him?) He was so excited. He had never seen this footage. Suddenly, their original idea had been thrown overboard and I became the
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