Page 35 - Zone Magazine Issue 007

You are also featured as a journalist / TV presenter in the film. How did this come about and how was it received amongst the sensitive West Berliners?
Again, that was pure chance. Chris Bohn who wrote for NME at the time, was approached to make the programme as he had just written a piece on the Berlin avant garde scene. He told them to contact me and I was then asked to put the programme together. Initially I toyed with the idea of putting my own band “die Unbekannten” on the show, but then opted against it, as I thought it would be seen as self- promotion and that was very uncool back then. So I just put the people I liked in the show instead. People were also very camera shy back then and it was always embarrassing to have a camera crew sniffing around the scene looking for images of drug takers or something similarly sinister. The shows I made for foreign television stations were never seen by Germans... until now.
Interestingly unlike some others at this time you took a keen interest East Berlin behind the wall. The film describes your experiences there and how you had an affection for easty kids who were deprived from the music you enjoyed. Its seems like there was a lot of red tape bureaucracy involved just to enter the east but not only did you visit the East you arranged a secret gig there for the band " Die Toten Hosen" Its sounds like it would have taken a secret covert operation to get this to happen, so did you manage this and what where the risks involved?
Almost as soon as I arrived in the West, I went to East Berlin. As I mentioned before, I found most West Berliners were reluctant about telling me how to cross over the border and would say it’s either impossible or why do you want to go there? Eventually I managed it. It was very exciting. Checkpoint Charlie looked a bit like an armed petrol station. The huge Control tower in the centre of the street housed silhouetted border guards, who trained their binoculars on your every move. This was very serious stuff. You couldn’t make funny comments, crack daft jokes or make sly remarks to these guys. They didn’t take any shit at all. The long, silent walk from West Berlin, over no- man’s land to the checkpoint seemed to take forever. Ever had that eerie feeling of being watched? Well crossing over the border, you knew it wasn’t merely a feeling. My first visit into communist East Berlin was utterly fascinating. It was like being beamed back in time, down onto a parallel world. I went over almost every day for the first month. I think I became addicted to the thrill of crossing the border, which certainly became more acute once I stated to smuggle music over. I desperately wanted to discover more, not only East Berlin but the other Eastern Block communist countries too. One day, I saw a lad with spikey hair and mauve drainpipe trousers, he was a real rarity in a State where almost all young people seemed to wear Wrangler jeans and jackets. I stopped him and asked him if he liked Punk music. We got talking, I asked him about the underground scene and if there were any gigs by Punk bands in East Berlin. He said “no, it’s forbidden”. So I gave him my address and asked him to send me a postcard if he heard of anything.
This was the only way to communicate, as making a telephone call to the West was very difficult and all calls were monitored. After a few months, I received a letter from a girl asking me to meet her on a particular day in the round cocktail bar of the Palast der Republik (The East German Parliament building). She was probably sent to sound me out. Through her I was introduced to the fledgling but secretive East Berlin Punk scene. Punk didn’t officially exist in the so-called Worker & Farmer’s State. One day, whilst sitting in a bar with some Eastie friends, a Wrangler–clad hippy looking bloke overheard our conversation and we got talking about music. He told us he had an electric guitar and that he played it in a Church at what was known as a
blues mass. Being part of the Church in East Germany was a form of silent protest, as the only religion was Communism. Electric guitars were almost impossible to find in East Berlin, you couldn’t just go to a shop, buy one and form a band. You needed official permission, even to own one. Which meant you had to appear before a commission, who would give you a permit to own and play... that is, if they thought you were good enough. After meeting this guy, the idea of playing a secret gig in East Berlin, in the church was born. It was quite thrilling. At first, I thought maybe I could play in the Church with my own band Die Unbekannten. I had performed a few months previously at a very secret gig in Czechoslovakia, but that had been so very difficult to organise and after some initial enquiries it was decided we couldn’t do it, so I asked Die Toten Hosen if they would be interested. We asked the priest if it would be possible and he said, it’s not a gig, it’s a religious service. It took many months to arrange and get the instruments and it was kept very secret.
On the day of the gig, we took the band over the border in small groups of three, so we wouldn’t attract attention or be recognised as a big group. If it all went wrong I was concerned more for my Eastie friends. The worst the East Gemans would do to me or the Hosen, would be to throw us out and ban us, whereas my friends had to live there and the consequences they would have to face would be much harsher. The idea of never being able to return to the East if we got caught actually really worried me. Regardless of the dangers, we all decided to go through with it. Of course, under such a totalitarian regime, you never know who in your circle of friends the informer. So we tried to keep the numbers down to a selected trusted few. That said, I think everyone expected the police to burst in at any moment. We managed to pull it off, which was also the incentive to perform another secret gig, five years later. By then, the Hosen had become very popular and quite legendary in East Germany for their previous daring performance.
Through the help of a US Army friend, we managed to smuggle the bands own instruments and a VHS camera into East Berlin for this second illegal gig which was disguised as a concert for starving Romanian orphans. This is the footage you see in B-Movie. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, I discovered from my STASI file that the young lad I had originally met, was in fact, a STASI informer.
In the movie there's a very dark period captured in West Berlin towards the end of the 80's. The Punk Rock and New Wave scene was dying rapidly over taken by more political unrest. Lots of the creative force and artists that had been involved had moved on or dispended. Can you describe this period for us?
By the second half of the 80s the experimental, avant garde scene had basically folded in on itself. It was no longer fresh, or exciting. The alternative music scene was moving away as technology opened up new ideas and sounds. Such as, sound sampling and new sounding digital synths. The focus was more on Frankie Goes to Hollywood or Prince than Neubauten. Many of the original avant-garde bands had already broken up and were involved in other projects. As I was interested in club music and synths, I spent a lot of time in dance clubs like UFO or Metropol. But the majority didn’t go to clubs like that and drowned their frustrations in alc and drugs. Some artists moved away from Berlin in an effort to escape. There was a bleak future ahead. Not for me, I always had thrills and excitement in the East and if it was boring in the West, I would simply go over the wall for adventure.
In the later stages of the film you take us through the new revolution of electronic music championed by the likes of the DJ "Westbam". This was the birth of what became "Techno & Trance". The technology used back then shown in the film and what was being created might seem prehistoric
now but it was very important at the time. Can you take us through what was happening then and how important it was for the people of Berlin?
The sound sampler changed our perception of music making. It provided a new creative platform. Even Neubauten used one on their Halber Mensch album and that in turn was quite revolutionary. Electronic dance music had been slowly evolving since the mid-seventies, but it was always so expensive and complicated to produce. With cheaper synths and samplers people could make new music and use it in a creative way. The way a DJ also performed had also changed with Hi-Energy disco music and that just kept evolving too. So by the late 80s and the birth of acid house, the seamless DJ set was the norm and a far cry from the track-for- track sets with each song compared by the DJ. By the time the Berlin Wall fell, we had already established a small techno scene and a techno club – The UFO. Spearheaded by local DJ heroes Monika Dietl, Westbam, Rokk and Tanith. It really didn’t matter how many people were involved at that time. We lived in our own little microcosm, fully apart from rock music and mainstream pop. Then the Wall came down and everything changed. The Eastie kids could choose for the first time in over 52 years, what kind of music they wanted to listen to. No longer did the State dictate to them what they could or could not hear. They chose techno. Fast, driving instrumental club music with no hard to understand lyrics. Finally they could also experiment with drugs too and the drug of choice became ecstasy. A fairly new drug that enhanced the feeling of euphoria and the sound of the music. Also, the former death-strip which ran between the East/West Border became our playground, these old derelict buildings, abandoned for 40 years, became the venues for excessive techno parties. The first love parade in July 1989, was a modest affair of just over a hundred and fifty people or so, the following July it had grown to many thousands already. This became a major attraction in the techno calander and by 1999 the love parade had swollen to over one and a half million.
Since you lived and breathed this period what is your opinion on the debate of the true origins of "Techno"? Did it originate from the USA or Germany?
For me personally, techno began in Germany. The Germans were making electronic music for years before anyone else. The DJ version as we know it, was created in the USA by artists who really wanted to make a dance version of Kraftwerk. Kraftwerk made an album in 1982 called Electric Café, initially it was to be called Technopop the name of one of the album tracks. The ideology of Techno and its lifestyle was created here in Berlin after the fall of the Berlin Wall, which certainly turned it into a popular movement.
Before we move on the 90's is there anything else you would like to tell us regarding the film? Maybe your band featured in the film or other bands? Your band management, the reference to your other films or anything else related to " B- Movie: Lust & Sound in West-Berlin” and a short incentive for people to watch it?
The film is not a nostalgic trip down memory lane. It serves to reveal and inspire. It’s not the usual documentary film where you see a bunch of old people claiming “it was all brilliant back then”. The film shows the 80s in a here and now sense. My narrative tells my story of the city as I experienced it. It is not a success story either, I don’t drive away into the sunset in a Porsche. It just tells a tale of West-Berlin during the cold war, as seen through my eyes. My life in the music business went from working in a record shop to managing a band to playing in one, to being a record label manager and back to making music again. I’m quite sure, none of this would have been possible for me if I had stayed in Manchester. My life would have been very different. I came to Berlin and became addicted
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