We present an extract from Berghain Nights, the new book by musicologist Liam Cagney.
Liam Cagney is residing in a Berlin squat when one night he finds himself at Berghain. Fascinated by the strange techno and even stranger dance floor, he sets out to explore Berlin's unique club culture in all its intensity. Blending essay and memoir, Berghain Nights is the result, the first major literary exploration of Berlin’s club scene.
What happens when at a young age, the age of dinosaur toys, you're exposed to the most virulent psychedelia? When, alongside cartoons like The Animals of Farthing Wood, your television shows kaleidoscopic lights and electronic beats? When, as at school you’re mastering your abcs, elsewhere you’re overhearing talk about lsd?
What happens?
I suppose I’m what happens.
Donegal, where I grew up, is a Gaelic idyll, a patchwork of bog and forest and beach at the furthest extremity of Europe. My Donegal ancestors were disinherited Irish peasants who clung to the sea. Displacement is my birthright. The memory of the Great Famine, too, lived on in my skinny limbs, and when as a boy I worked with my father and siblings on the bog stacking turf, as the wind whistled across the barren plains, I sometimes wondered about the silent dead multitudes buried under the spongy brown surface.
In rural Ireland, the people are the landscape. Those who fish become fishermen and those who farm become farmers. Those living by mountains become mountains and those who reside in thatched cottages become thatched cottages. This woman is a bale of hay, that boy, a fishing rod. The landscape has a moral character.
Enter me.
As a child, I used to stare at things a long time without saying anything. I stared, while kicking football, at the grid of grey concrete off which our ball ricocheted. I stared, while working on the bog, at the glistening moisture of the bog hole. I stared at visitors to our family home. And this threatened our common integrity. Staring too long at a jellyfish made you become a jellyfish. Staring too long at something repulsive and alien made you become repulsive and alien. Because your eyes ushered into your community an unsavoury queerness.
When in youth you’re shy and maligned, you internalize what you’re called. Name-calling becomes your insidious narrative, a horrid inescapable mirror reflection. You become the name as others became the landscape. Before long, because of such name-calling, which caught on at school through a clownish English classmate, I came to dread Narin Beach, on whose white sands I was made to feel freakish. Introverted, I retreated into drawing pictures.
Through the lens of our era's cynicism, the video for the Prodigy’s 'Out of Space’ probably looks naff and naive. But at the time it heralded techno-utopianism.
At school in Mrs Naughton’s class, a friend and I had devised an ambitious project. We agreed to draw and catalogue every monster in the entire universe. As well as comics like X-Force and arcade games like Bubble Bobble, our inspiration came from kids’ tv shows like Sesame Street, with the furry Mr Snuffleupagus, and The Magic Roundabout, with the zany Zebedee. I noticed that my teenage siblings, too, were absorbed in these shows, but in the videos they watched, The Magic Roundabout theme was hopped up over hyper-electronic beats.
Here, boyhood morphs into psychedelia.
I remember one Saturday morning, when my sister and I were sat on the living-room carpet watching The Chart Show on itv, how a video came on for a new track called 'On’ by an artist called Aphex Twin. My brother had already told me about him (even though I was only seven). The Aphex Twin video showed a beach like Narin Beach. Aphex Twin himself had long hair and resembled my brother. Aphex Twin, my brother had said, was born in Ireland and built his own electronic musical instruments and practised lucid dreaming to create his futuristic music. Maybe he, too, like me, was a species of alien, I thought.
The music video delighted me. It had all the strangeness of a dream. As we watched, the beach transformed into a surreal tableau. Clocks swirled; seaweed came alive and vomited up more seaweed; a deep-sea diver in a huge old-fashioned diving suit ambled about like a spaceman exploring an alien planet. Watching over it all was a towering cardboard figure, the long-haired Richard James himself, the artist as Fionn mac Cumhaill. At the time I didn’t reflect on it, but the immediacy of Aphex Twin’s ‘On’ was, I now see, its seaside psychedelia.
Picked up in rural Ireland, by my bullied eyes and ears, rave videos' pastoral vision romanticized and re-enchanted the world around me.
These childhood events happen before my mind's eye as if I were watching them in a theatre. In our family bungalow, I see myself dressed in red pyjamas. And, stealing into the living room on a Monday night, I am surprised to see an alien. He is dressed head to toe in white. A ski mask and goggles cover his face, and, stooping forward, he less walks than jitters. The alien jitters up and down a leafy country lane in time to explosive electronic music, to a chipmunkish voice screaming, I’ll take your brain to another dimension! A jittering febrile alien on a leafy lane, like the leafy lane in Cashelgolan, just down the road from us.
The alien is on our small tv screen. But although he's an alien, I’m not scared – quite the opposite. Looking around at my teenage siblings, who are absorbed in the music (the video for 'Out of Space’ by the Prodigy), I conclude that this alien is cool – that this alien is a friend of some kind; that, even if I’m being bullied as a Klingon, there does exist a space for such bizarre beings. I feel seen.
Through the lens of our era’s cynicism, the video for the Prodigy’s ‘Out of Space’ probably looks naff and naive. But at the time it heralded techno-utopianism. Some will consider ridiculous the idea that the Prodigy and Aphex Twin could ever be a form of pastoral – that rave was about anything other than people getting mashed in urban warehouses. But in signal transmissions, what matters is less source than receiver. Picked up in rural Ireland, by my bullied eyes and ears, rave videos’ pastoral vision romanticized and re-enchanted the world around me.
Initiatives like Mixmag’s Blackout have brought a sorely overdue celebration of electronic dance music’s African-American sources. Historically, what’s important to understand about the Prodigy is their specificity: not from elite metropolitan London but from a rural backwater in Essex; mixed-race and working class and steeped in underground hip-hop. Melding sped-up breakbeats and rapping, dub reggae samples, acid house arpeggios and uk synthpop melodies, not to mention joyous silly dancing, it was this that rural Irish kids like me related to. I don’t think I’d ever seen long-haired boys dancing before.
My brother and sisters, all a year apart, were immediately swept up in the Prodigy's quasi-carnival. They followed the Prodigy’s first tour around Ireland, from Castlebar in the west, where the gig was abandoned because of a riot, to Dublin in the east, where my thirteen-year-old sister, as she later told me, was thrown face-first into a cauldron of deranged swivel-eyed dancers. And now here is this seven-year-old boy in red pyjamas, watching androgynous men dancing before yellow and purple skies, then jumping up on the sofa and bouncing up and down on the cushions in a little child-rave of his own.
These days, it pains me to watch the ‘Out of Space’ video’s opening. By the seaside, over lush synthesizer chords, Keith Flint and Maxim Reality stand on a car roof, goofing about. In those carefree scenes there’s wrenching nostalgia: nostalgia for my beachside childhood, nostalgia for those years and that family home forever gone, a loss embodied in rave’s golden child Keith Flint, smiling with flowing locks, my beautiful dancing kin, now dead, lost to depression and suicide. The day I heard the news of Flint’s suicide, I felt devastated. I grieved not only for him but for my youth, replaced by a world where there’s nothing to feel but cynicism, no options but normativity and consumerism, no future but nature’s conflagration.
And suddenly, in this theatre, the red curtain drops. As it does so, as in some Gaelic folktale, there occurs a freakish reversal. For that youthful boy becomes wizened and old, and at the same time, my adult form becomes boyish. The aged becomes youthful and the youthful becomes aged, a reciprocal process of becoming. The new music has aged; the new age has aged.
Wordsworth famously said that the child is the father of the man. The genderedness of that statement aside, I realize now that that child I was then, drenched like a sponge in psychedelia, gave birth to the person I became, this alien exiled in east Berlin. It was heavenly to experience as a child that rave era, when the faery beings seemed to hold out once more a hand of radiance. In psychedelia, I found a home.
Berghain Nights is published by Reaktion Books
