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”.