Page 32 - Zone Magazine Issue 007

Like a lot of films there's also a partnering book. Is the book written by yourself did the book come before the film and is it more detailed?
Yes the B-Book is a little more detailed. It was originally going to be a collection of transcriptions taken from the interviews I gave while we were trying to find out which bits of my life were interesting. Hollow Skai, a journalist from Hamburg was given this task, but it soon emerged that it needed more to make it into a book, so I basically wrote the book to follow the film and fleshed it out with more details and a few extra stories that didn’t appear in the film simply because they weren’t filmed. I am not a writer, so it’s not going to win the Pulitzer Prize, and I only had three days in which to write the text in English, but I tried my best as I wanted people to be able to understand it and hopefully, be entertained.
There's a great cast for the film that includes yourself, "Nick Cave", "New Order" Westbam" German pop idol “Nena" and "Gudrun Gut" enhancing what is a captivating story.
How long the film production in the making and what was involved in pulling it all together?
The film from start to finish took about five years. First, Joerg Hoppe had to collect and view many rolls of Super8 and 16mm film and VHS tapes and select images he thought looked interesting and represented Berlin in the 80s. He viewed many private rolls of film and TV images. The private films were the most interesting, but unlike today, where you can film hours on end in high definition on your phone, a Super8 camera had only about 2-5 minutes of film in a cassette, so when you filmed back then, you were very selective and literally shot seconds. This meant we had a lot of little snippets of film. Just a load of fleeting images. Of course one of these doesn’t make a movie, but when they are all collected and stuck together you have a film. This was the idea. ]
Then when I came on board, with my own footage, TV shows and personal story, the images could then be sourced to represent the events I had experienced. Also being involved, I knew a lot of people who had filmed during that time too, like Knut Hofmeister, Manfred Jelinski & Joerg Buttgereit. Eventually, the pictures and the story started to gel together and once Klaus Maeck became the Director, he managed to complete the puzzle. During this process, Micha Adam and I had to start to renovate the music. This was also a lot of work. Joerg wanted the music to sound good in the cinema. As most of the songs were either on record or cassette, we needed to restore many of the records and take out the really bad clicks, crackles, pops and hiss .
Then we had to strip them down and rework selected frequencies so we could isolate certain instruments and the vocals to enhance them. Then rebuild the music back in stereo and in 5.1 surround. It took about three months for us to complete one track. Some were more difficult than others, such as Koma Kino by Joy Division which was originally a demo released as a flex- disc, or Sleeper in Metropolis by Anne Clark, took ages to do. The end result is that you get to hear them all in 5.1 surround for the first time and they all have a better dynamic range, while still being the same song, crackles and all. I also had to make the atmospheric score music for the scenes where we had no songs, or couldn’t obtain the license for a track we wanted to use. Not everyone was convinced about our film and therefore wouldn’t allow us to use their song in the film, so I had to reimagine the idea and make my own, such as the song I wrote called
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Mauerstadt. I tried to make the tracks sound as if they had come from various genres of the 80s by only using instruments of the period. Back then, we didn’t use so many instruments anyway, and that’s the way we kept it.
There's also a great sound track for the film released over 2 CDs. Tracks are featured from yourself, Westbam, Joy Division, Malaria to mention a few. Westbam feat Richard Butler "You Need The Drugs" really captures the essence of the film along with your own title "Grenzubergang". Other than the obvious features such as "Joy Division”, were all the tracks recorded specially for the film? Can you also tell us about CD2?
The soundtrack CD was compiled from almost all the songs used in the film. We didn’t include the Sex Pistols or Nena because we mainly wanted to feature the other, lesser well-known artists. Klaus Maeck compiled the CD1 and I compiled CD2. All the score tracks, such as Oranienstrasse or Koepenickerstrasse were all recorded especially for the film. As I mentioned, the songs were all reworked for the film, so the versions you hear on the soundtrack CD are actually unique to the movie soundtrack. Of course, as all the songs are not 4/4 beat tracks, they were very difficult to mix together like you would in a normal DJ set. Also, some of the artists didn’t want us to fade or lose their intros or outros either, which really made life difficult. So, I tried my best to merge the tracks rather than mix them in the traditional sense.
Watching the film It projects an image of living with no limits, form moment to moment with no boundaries and very radical ideas. This would have been quite a contrast to the “No sex please we're British” attitude at that time. Was this radical Berlin way of thinking a big attraction to the like's of "Nick Cave"," David Bowie" and "New Order" who all ventured to West Berlin as a creative discovery?
I don’t think they were initially aware of the kind of lifestyle people were living before they came here. Apart from the things we thought we knew from books or TV. It was only after being here a while did it become apparent what kind of people were living in the city. It was a city full of artists, draft dodgers (mainly pacifists, gay men, transvestites) and weirdos who didn’t fit in. Bowie realised he could find himself and be himself here and disappear, Nick also discovered himself here and Bernard found it therapeutic. The creativity and inspiration came from the historical surroundings, the atmosphere of the city and the people they met... plus cheap drink and drugs.
In the early stages of the film you’re quite heavily involved in promoting bands and namely the girl band "Malaria" who seemed to dislike "Joy Division”. You also started your own band produced by “Bernard Sumner" Can you tell us more about this?
I became friends with Gudrun Gut and Bettina Koester before they formed Malaria! Their band was called Mania D. Gudrun worked in a record shop called Zensor. She said she didn’t like Joy Division, but that was only after Ian had died and because almost every customer wanted a Joy Division record. When they formed Malaria! I became their sound engineer and manager and support band with my own band Die Unbekannten (The Unknown). In 1984, after a few years as Die Unbekannten, we expanded our line up and decided to change our name to
Shark Vegas, just before our European tour with New Order. I thought most people don’t know how to pronounce Die Unbekannten, so we will give them an easier name.
During a break on the tour, we went with Bernard Sumner to Conny Planks legendary studio near Cologne to mix You Hurt Me, it was a dreadful experience. The sound engineer had a slipped disc and had to lie on a camp bed in front of the mixing desk and shout out instructions to Bernard, while Conny Plank played table tennis in the yard. The end result was rubbish. Consequently, we ended up going to Manchester to do the final mixdown.
Its seems like part of the attraction to Berlin for artists in this period was that it was cheap to live there? Is this still the case as increasing lots of artists still flock to Berlin?
For a big capital city, Berlin is still the cheapest in Europe (even if the rents have gone up) and it attracts the same type of people, artists, musicians and anyone who feels outcast in their own town. It is also culturally colourful and is probably the last outpost of free thinking too. I think it is a great place to live and discover yourself.
Scottish Journalist “Muriel Gray" is featured in the film whilst covering a feature of West Berlin for the UK TV series "The Tube”. It seems there was some resistance to TV exposure for this undiscovered playground in West Berlin and initially from "blixa bargeld" also featured in the film. What affect would this exposure have on the scene there and the outside world?
Back then, Berlin was still seen as enemy territory. The scene I tried to portray in The Tube (ITV) and on Red Herrings (BBC) was of the Berlin I knew. I wanted the British public to see that Berlin was different to how they imagined it. I wanted to show the abstract, artistic approach to music and art that existed here and I wanted people to be inspired and I wanted to put my mates on British telly. Muriel had read something in the NME about the Berlin avant-garde scene and the squatters and as Britain was in a revolutionary mood itself, with the coalminers strikes, squatted housing and rise of heroin amongst the young, it somehow seemed fitting to come over and make a programme about Berlin and I wanted them to make a film about both sides of the city too and not just about West Berlin.
The Berlin scene undoubtedly had an impact on the outside world, even if at times, indirectly. Bernard Sumner probably wouldn’t have written Blue Monday if I hadn’t sent him tapes of the hi energy music I was listening to in the Metropol disco. If Martin Gore of Depeche Mode hadn’t lived here for a while, their sound almost certainly wouldn’t have changed the way it did. Their producer, Gareth Jones had just finished recording an album with Neubauten and this obviously inspired them to make People are people. Frank Tovey of Fad Gadget recorded Collapsing New People which was inspired by hanging out with Neubauten, the same goes for Nick Cave and the creation of The Bad Seeds, or the on-stage image of Malaria! Which was arguably stolen by Robert Palmer for his Addicted to love video, as it portrays five girls standing in front of a red backdrop, all dressed in black, with white faces and red lips.