DJ Paul Van Dyk Interview
Don’t Mention The Wall
Paul Van Dyk brought techno to East Berlin in
1991. He’s revered by BT and worshipped at
Renaissance. His emotional techno sound might
just save German trance. We meet the man on his
home territory and talk Berlin and breakdowns
with Germany’s answer to Sasha.
They call it Götterdämmerung. The twilight of
the gods. German techno bible “Front Page” has
just closed, while Sven Väth has quit Harthouse.
Jam and Spoon’s new album has left them publicly
ridiculed and Kid Paul has retired. Frankfurt
Beat has folded and Cosmic Baby lost the plot
years ago. Germany is no longer the techno
powerhouse it once was. But this is a country
with iron in its soul. What doesn’t kill it
makes it stronger.
It’s midday on Unter den Linden, the classical
tree-lined boulevard descending from the
Brandenburg Gate into the heart of old Berlin.
The sun is glancing off the grandiose
neo-classical buildings, many of which are still
blackened by the fires that raged after the
saturation bombing of 1945. You see, prior to
the night the Berlin Wall came down on November
9, 1989, this was the communist East… not a
regime keen on refurbishment. As if to prove the
point, Mark Reeder of Berlin trance label MFS
indicates a museum with an SS-20 nuclear missile
still pointed westwards.
We’re waiting, sipping expressos on the terrace
of the Einstein Café, discussing the future of
Berlin and German techno in general. We’re
waiting for an East German who, back in 1993,
released the classic “Visions Of Shiva” and
followed that up with the “45 RPM” and “Seven
Ways” long-players, as well as a selection of
stunning twelves, from his own “Forbidden Fruit”
to the recent collaboration with BT, “Flaming
June”. We’re waiting for the future of German
trance. We’re waiting for Paul Van Dyk.
Paul arrives in due course, his long frame bent
double to exit a taxi. He sits. We talk.
“I got into music seriously around the age of
eight or nine with The Smiths, New Order and the
whole Manchester guitar thing”, explains Paul,
looking into the sun and the past
simultaneously. “I saved up for months to buy an
English dictionary so that I could understand
what they were talking about. Even though I
lived in the GDR, I listened to a lot of West
Berlin radio, particularly Monica Deitl’s show.
The music on that show wasn’t really house
music, it was progressive electronic dance
music. It had the same emotion as The Smiths,
but without the lyrics. I was really into the
emotion and the intense feeling of the music. I
taped the show every week and immersed myself in
it. Maybe that’s why my house ears are not like
those of Derrick May or Marshall Jefferson”.
Maybe. Probably. Thankfully.
We are walking along back streets, away from the
Einstein into the East. Bullet holes are sprayed
across most of the buildings. Old women lean out
on window ledges half blown off in the race to
the Reichstag. This is where the advancing
Russians would roll their cannon into Frau
Gruber’s living room and blow it to kingdom
come. Leningrad 1. Berlin 0. They made quite a
mess.
“This is how the East has always been”, remarks
Paul. “But things have changed since the Wall
came down. That’s when I first started to make
techno. The first time I played out was in 1991
at Tresor. Before that I practised on these old,
communist turntables, with little wheels to
adjust the speed. Nobody has Technics, and I
couldn’t afford 12-inches, so I’d just play
about with compilations. You could say that time
was my apprenticeship”.
We pass a closed synagogue and the Jewish
Workers Centre, a half-open bomb site completely
covered in graffiti. Neither Jews nor workers
are present there these days, though. The place
seems to double as a slackers’ café and some
kind of hang-out for liberal artists and a fair
sprinkling of the city’s anarchists. A gay
skinhead passes us in the street. It’s 1pm and
he’s wired to the teeth. Time for a beer and
another question.
“I suppose”, Van Dyk concedes, “that being from
East Germany, it is cool to have made it as a
DJ. In this country, people still see Easterners
as second-class idiots. I’ve shown I can compete
with the best of them”.
We’re in the main square of the old eastern
state. Berlin’s imposing central art gallery
jostles for prominence with the parliament
building of the former GDR and the Stalinist
brutalism of the television tower. The TV tower
can be seen from anywhere in Berlin, which was
precisely the point behind its construction in
the Fifties. Propagation of the people’s
ideology and all that. Unfortunately, it looks
little better than an acid-induced golf ball on
a 500 metre-high tee. No one seems to have ever
been impressed by it, least of all the young Van
Dyk…
“The least said, the better”, implies Paul in
haltering English. “It’s hideous, but it’s as
much a part of the city as Ku-Damm or Love
Parade. Did you know that Love Parade is even
bigger than the Carnival in Rio these days? It’s
like Rio, only unfortunately more commercial and
with different music. Incredible!”
It’s nine o’clock or so. The last of the
daylight is falling on Berlin, backlighting
Prussian domes, myriad construction cranes and
crude eastern blocks with an egalitarian hue of
blood-red haze as Mark Reeder whisks us back
into the West in an outsized Mercedes so that
Paul can collect his records for another night
at E-Werk.
Mark is a rare breed among record industry
honchos. He’s a thinker. A man who appreciates
the weight of history.
“MFS was founded to offer opportunity to
talented people”, he explains as we pass the
smack addicts, rent boys and winos who litter a
grimy Zoo-S-Ban station. “I didn’t start this
label to drive a fucking Porsche. MFS doesn’t
license tracks from other labels, we create our
own scene, whether it’s deemed trendy or not.
They called our stuff trance back in 1993, they
call it epic house now. I don’t care what they
call it or what they think of it. We’ve always
created the music we loved…emotional techno.
Emotional techno! Now there’s a label for you”.
There’s techno with emotion in buckets at E-Werk
tonight. Van Dyk is playing to the cabaret crowd
of the Nineties – über-babes, chiselled gays,
errant businessmen, dwarfs, dykes and tourists.
He moves them with breaks and beats, offering
them the chance to lose their minds during an
eight-hour set of sheer indulgence. Sweat drips
onto a tiled dancefloor as beer-pumps endlessly
fuel the 2,000 revellers. A leather-masked Miss
Whiplash dishes out bottom marks to naughty
students.
Sometime after 9am, Van Dky turns to the English
journalist and thanks, as he apparently think he
should, the “influence and assistance” of
British DJs such as Dave Seaman, Sasha, Digweed
and co. His tact is pointless. None of the Brits
he names have ever produced anything as
accomplished as “Visions Of Shiva”. And that was
five years ago.
Van Dyk begins to talk about the day we have
spent walking through city streets. He opens his
heart to a town “with a certain flair…the only
place I could really live….my home”. He waxes
lyrical about the sun going down on Ku-Damm
About Berlin. About a future making music in
tandem with the development of Germany’s new
cultural (and soon to be official) capital.
Finally, strobes silhouette hundreds of E-Werk
party-goers as Van Dyk drops his mix of BT’s
“Flaming June” for the second time. Chemical
hostages or not, the floor raise their arms in a
subliminal signal, perhaps in salute to the
nascent optimism that Berlin’s, and in turn
Germany’s, current problems (musical, social,
whatever), will be overcome. Peaks follow
troughs. Van Dyk follows a fallow techno period.
But the obituary writers should scurry home.
This city, as history amply demonstrates, has
seen it all. And with Paul Van Dyk at the decks
it still rocks like no other.
Paul Van Dyk’s Top Five Berlin Locations
1. Savigny Square – “I live close by, and it’s
where all the best restaurants are”.
2. E-Werk – “It’s had its ups and downs, but
it’s still one of the best clubs in the world”.
3. Groupie De Luxe – “I always buy my clothes
here. A friend of mine owns it and it’s really
cool”.
4. Ku-Damm – “Even though it’s really touristy,
this is a special place. Very, very cool”.
5. Ernst Reuter Platz – “It’s near where I live.
It has a roundabout there which is populated by
rabbits, I keep one of them back at home you
know”.
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