Many have written about Berghain; many have failed, stymied by the impossibility of describing it. But the Irish writer and musician Liam Cagney has a secret weapon: a deep familiarity with both the clubs and the music, yes, but also a PhD in musicology. His latest publication, Berghain Nights, brings us into Cagney’s multifarious experiences at Tresor, KitKat and smaller parties in the scene, but also dives deep into the history of techno, from Kraftwerk to Detroit House to Rrose – Cagney even digs up old Rik Davis Facebook comments. There’s sex and drugs here, but also something more: a deep and sincere love for the culture of clubbing and, especially, the music. We caught up with Cagney to see how he set about putting the ineffable into words.
You’re trained as a musicologist, but you say in the introduction that Berghain Nights couldn’t be musicology – not “a pseudo-objective report” – but instead “gonzo music writing”. What does that mean?
I’m Irish, so I identify very strongly with this literary tradition that we happen to have in Ireland. That for me has linked up with post-colonialism and how minority voices in clubs are fabulating themselves – making themselves fabulous. Which then relates to telling tales and fables. I spent a long time working on writing, and I ended up in musicology almost by accident really – I never really feel like I fit in there. Although, I am good at doing research. So Berghain Nights is a musicology book in the sense that I’ve done a lot of that original research, but it doesn’t read like one. I’d be appalled to think that some of my academic peers are actually going to read this, where I’ve talked so openly about myself.
Do you think that for a book like this, it’s particularly important to not pretend to be an objective observer?
I like being around non-normative people, because I feel like I’m flowing out of myself… And they’re flowing in
Berghain reflects you back to yourself when you go in, so it’s different for everybody who goes there. I didn’t want my book to be objective. I wanted it to be really specific to one person, because clubbing and what you experience there is a very personal thing, and I don’t speak for anybody else. But I thought, if I can go really far into one person’s experience and that one person just happens to be me, maybe I can get at something that wouldn’t be accessible through a generalist survey.
In fact, you have this really lovely turn of phrase where you call yourself an “alien ethnographer”. We’re following you, but the you that we’re following doesn’t quite fit in with other people.
Have you ever watched any videos of Samuel Beckett on YouTube? There aren’t very many, but you can see him talking in one, he’s dressed all in black, and he has a big shock of white hair and he’s got glasses. And it occurred to me when I was watching it that he’s literally one of his own characters.
I believe in the value of delirium, whether it’s in the club or on the page, and I like to read things that take that approach, like Maurice Blanchot or Clarice Lispector. There are types of truths that aren’t accessible when you’re approaching things in a daylight, everyday, normative sense. And when I say alien ethnographer, I say that in earnest. I’m not actually speaking metaphorically. I don’t really feel like I’m a person a lot of the time. Going to these non-normative places made me ask myself, why do I feel so at home in such an alien place? That is the main journey traced out in the book. It’s about trying to explore what the clubs are, but it’s also about letting the clubs and techno go into me and explore who I am.
You say that your project is to take clubbing seriously, to put the music first and the hedonism second. Why is that important?
It’s way too easy to write off clubbing as a cultural practice, especially by using the tropes that particularly came in in the 1990s. Ecstasy, hedonism, lots of people just being completely out of their minds. And the music is just some dull repetitive beat that’s the lowest common denominator. I feel like we’re at the end of that narrative arc, and there’s a bit of a void. And of course, for queer communities, it’s always been something else. It’s been about community building and literally creating queer space, something that doesn’t exist very much elsewhere. But I don’t think it’s enough to write about something. I think you have to be advocating for it. Just in the same way as it’s not okay to just go to the club and just be consuming the experience, you have to think to yourself, “What am I actually contributing to?” Everybody who’s in the club is contributing to what it is, so you have to ask yourself, “What am I bringing, what am I doing?” And if I’m writing about this, then I want to advocate for the fact that we should take this seriously.
It’s way too easy to write off clubbing as a cultural practice,
You write very interestingly about the relationship between commercialisation and techno. Do you think that that has fundamentally changed the scene, at Berghain or elsewhere?
That was already happening way back. There’s a club I mention in the book called E-Werk, which in a lot of ways was a precursor to Berghain. The MTV Video Music Awards were held there at one time and there was a bit of a celebrity set around it. But the real commercialisation happened in Berlin around the turn of the century. There were a lot of really talented DJs who kind of got left behind a bit because they couldn’t make the transition into what was becoming more commercial.
I went to this talk with Mike Banks from Underground Resistance, a civic representative from Detroit, and Mark Ernestus and Dimitri Hegemann. At the end of it, a punk type stood up and started denouncing Hegemann. She just started shouting at him in front of this whole auditorium for mentioning the word economy – the nightlife economy. It’s a dirty word, but there’s always that tension between commerce and culture. You need people who’ve got vision. Berghain is successful because the person running it is so good from a business point of view.
The pandemic increased the consumerist kind of approach, I think, especially with the youngest generation. Of course, new generations are always discovering the scene, and it might take them a while to find the music they like, and initially they might just buy into the trends. But the TikTok thing is pretty bad, because it does change the vibe of the dance floor. You can go onto TikTok and there are videos of how to dance at Berghain, and it’s like learning the Macarena.
One of the things that’s interesting about the book is the role nostalgia plays in the mythologisation of the Berlin club scene. Everyone always thinks it was better 10 years ago. Is it true that everything was better before?
We’re really spoiled in Berlin by the nightlife here. It’s still great. But we need more young people going to smaller clubs, smaller parties. We need fewer people just buying into the big brand-name clubs – KitKat, Tresor, Berghain, because I read about it online, or I watched a TikTok about it. I’m hardly helping by publishing a book with the name Berghain in the title, but anyway (laughs).
You mount a defence of sorts of the line at Berghain, or at least the door policy…
Yes. I think generally they do a really good job. Not always, of course. And, God, it’s just such a mixture of humiliation and resentment and incredulity when you get rejected, especially if you’re somebody who goes there so much and you almost feel like it’s your local pub. They have a really hard job, but you can see the good work they do. If you go in on a Sunday night and the bouncers have done a good job, there’s a really good mesh. They really need to know what they’re doing. As a queer person, I like being around queer people on the dance floor. I like being around, like I said, non-normative people, because I kind of feel like I’m flowing out of myself in a way. And they’re flowing in. The club is entering me, the people are entering me. And that’s something facilitated by the door.
Why do you think that it’s important to talk about the music itself?
There’s loads of great writing about clubbing, but it’s always funny to me when I read somebody’s account of their clubbing experience and they don’t even mention who the DJ was. And fair enough – a lot of people, including myself, go there for the first time and they don’t know who the DJ is, they’re too busy having fun. That’s okay. But for the majority of people who go there a lot, the DJ is really important, the people who are making the music are really important, and I wanted to make sure that was in the book alongside the salacious stuff.
What do you think makes techno different from other kinds of music?
I believe in the value of delirium, whether it’s in the club or on the page
This is my vision of techno. I like music that has no major/minor, diatonic harmony, no modal scales, no song form, no recognisable music elements at all. It’s music that is doing everything it can to escape actually being music. Music that’s born from the desire to not be music, maybe. Because it’s totally inscrutable, but it’s also somehow familiar, and that corresponds to something in me that has no name or that is inscrutable, opaque. And through that encounter with music, with techno, I’m able to go into this kind of neuter, non-binary, non-everyday self.
Berghain Nights ends on quite a low note, with a bad clubbing experience. Why did you decide to finish like that?
I thought I was leaving Berlin at that point. That was a hard year. It was brilliant, in the sense that I was going clubbing so much. I had so many amazing Sunday nights in Berghain, because I was still freelancing. But my freelance thing was getting eroded, eroded, eroded. So suddenly I was financially in trouble, and it ended at that point. Berghain was also changing a lot. People I knew felt like it was less queer. They replaced the sound system – and made it worse. So that was a natural end point. And I wanted to deflate the trope of the male traveller reaching the top of the mountain. I don’t buy into that so much.
You ask in the book, “How can one represent the club experience without ruining it?” Do you think you’ve figured out an answer?
I definitely don’t have the answer. I’ve tried to write in a kind of oblique way at times, about the dance floor. To write in a way that doesn’t hide its artifice. That’s delirious, or exaggerated, or hallucinatory. And I did go deep into myself, but I didn’t want to make it all about myself. I’m just benefitting from the people who created these places. I’m a writer. I spent a long time learning to write. I’ve been going clubbing my whole life. To the extent that I do feel like I’m an inheritor of it, and I’m somebody who legitimately can claim to be part of it.
- Berghain Nights is out Oct 1 from Reaktion Books. Berlin launch Oct 2, 19:30 at Lettrétage.
