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[Lupita Calvi]

If anything, people only knew of a mythical Berlin such as portrayed in Christopher Isherwood books, but that was a Berlin before the war, it was either that, or the cold war city of Funeral in Berlin, The Quiller Memorandum or The spy who came in from the cold, these were really the only images we had.

Besides, most people seriously believed this would be the flashpoint where the third world war would begin, because of the potential for armed conflict which might be sparked by some small incident between the four powers who governed the city (British, American, French and Soviet Union) and faced each other off on a daily basis. Media reports on Berlin were certainly very few and far between.

I vaguely recall a TV programme I saw in the mid-70s about art & architecture in Berlin where the presenter went to both sides of the city, but that was it. Sometime in the early 70s, I had also discovered what would later become known as Krautrock. German bands making psychedelic, trippy and quite frankly weird music, most of it with lots of electronics. Early experimental Kraftwerk and Tangerine Dream, Can, Cluster, Faust, Neu, Amon Duul, Popol Vu, The Cosmic Jokers, Guru Guru and Klaus Schulze, that sort of thing.

What had happened there? It sounded exciting. I wanted to go to Germany too and hopefully buy loads of unknown Krautrock records. But then along came The Sex Pistols and changed everything. The music suddenly spoke to us. Immediately, I found I could totally relate to this sound of music. Somehow it had a really profound impact on us all. It was full of energy and attitude and it represented what we had all been feeling. Our frustration and anger was represented in short stabs of aggressive music.

I was very lucky, I had a job. Although I had originally trained as an advertising designer, I hated that job and went to work in the small Virgin Record shop in Manchester, while most of my mates were unemployed with zero job prospects. I remember reading an article in The Sun about a disgusting new band from London called the Sex Pistols. Then

The notion that Britain had won the war was like a farce to us, especially so when you had to do your homework in a freezing room lit by candlelight. At least none of the working classes seemed to be reaping the benefits of this victory, because practically everyone was either unemployed or on strike. After the surge of popular music and fashion in the swinging sixties, it appeared that everyone was scraping the barrel in the seventies. The contradiction that Germany had lost the war was offset by the fact it was now a thriving industrial nation with almost no unemployment.

naturally because some Punks flirted with Nazi imagery, they also thought the Punks were Nazis too, so to counter this negative image, the Punks created the Rock Against Racism movement and in a show of solidarity, Reggae bands started to appear on the line up at almost every punk concert. These were exciting times. But as Punk became more and more popular, I saw it was also starting to lose its grip. Serious bands like Joy Division were struggling to get gigs, while parody punk by Jilted John and Plastique Bertrand were racing up the charts. Politically too, things were looking pretty grim, after years of strikes and misery,

IUM: West Berlin took a hold over you, you were living as a squatter with resistance from the police. So what was so infectious about the place that held you there and it becoming a permanent fixture?

After Joerg had heard my album Five Point One, I met up with him to discuss the possible restoration of the original 80s music to make the songs sound good in the cinema and if I could also make them in surround sound. Joerg explained that he wanted to make a collage of images, made up from original 80s footage with a soundtrack of alternative 80s music. Although Joerg knew me mainly from my 90s trance activities, he knew virtually nothing about my 80s past. In passing, I told him that I had also made a few TV shows for British Telly, which were unseen in Germany.

a Brit who was also part of the Berlin avant-garde scene too. It was hard to remember those times in detail. It was simply my everyday life and I certainly never thought it would ever interest anyone. I had to make about five very long interviews before they could even start to match my story together with the images they had collected. Then Klaus Maeck came on board as the director, and there followed more interviews as the film was fine-tuned. Meanwhile, I had to restore all the songs we wanted to use and also write the score music, which I wanted to sound like it was from the 80s.

Then when I came on board, with my own footage, TV shows and personal story, the images could then be sourced to represent the events I had experienced. Also being involved, I knew a lot of people who had filmed during that time too, like Knut Hofmeister, Manfred Jelinski & Joerg Buttgereit. Eventually, the pictures and the story started to gel together and once Klaus Maeck became the Director, he managed to complete the puzzle.

During this process, Micha Adam and I had to start to renovate the music. This was also a lot of work. Joerg wanted the music to sound good in the cinema. As most of the songs were either on record or cassette, we needed to restore many of the records and take out the really bad clicks, crackles, pops and hiss.

It took about three months for us to complete one track. Some were more difficult than others, such as Koma Kino by Joy Division which was originally a demo released as a flex-disc, or Sleeper in Metropolis by Anne Clark, took ages to do. The end result is that you get to hear them all in 5.1 surround for the first time and they all have a better dynamic range, while still being the same song, crackles and all.

IUM: Its seems like part of the attraction to Berlin for artists in this period was that it was cheap to live there? Is this still the case as increasing lots of artists still flock to Berlin?

Muriel had read something in the NME about the Berlin avant-garde scene and the squatters and as Britain was in a revolutionary mood itself, with the coal-miners strikes, squatted housing and rise of heroin amongst the young, it somehow seemed fitting to come over and make a programme about Berlin and I wanted them to make a film about both sides of the city too and not just about West Berlin.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 Caf, 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.

It was the first indie label in East Germany. The idea was to provide a platform mainly for East Germans. However, none of them had any equipment or money, so I had to fall back on my friends in West Berlin to start me off with my first couple of releases. The sound I really wanted to release on MFS was actually more of a trippier style of hypnotic Trance inducing Techno music (people call it chill-out today) but

I first presented this idea to Cosmic Baby and he came up with his own version of my suggestion and I just let him and eventually the others, go with the flow. I created the sub-line for my label MFS Trance dance, which the media soon shortened to Trance.

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