Exiled To The Night: Why Utopian Clubs Keep Dying Out

Can any democratic society live up to its claims of freedom and equality when it forces masses of people into clubs, just to express themselves?

A few days ago, I watched Radical Living's video about the endangered Berlin club scene. In the comment section, I saw someone had made a comment to the effect that the club scene here will always survive, even if it has to move to the edges of the city.

That's certainly the theory that many people here seem to be working on, but experience tells me that they are probably living in la-la land. The theory that the Berlin club scene will always find a way to survive - to pull in the 'market' and meet its 'demands' because it makes so goddamned much money - rests on the presumption that the club scene is nothing but an industry.

If it's an industry, so the theory goes, it should function just as well on the outskirts of town, alongside all of the other factories churning out mass-produced crap. Right? Erm, nope. Wrong.

Let's get one thing straight:

Clubbing isn't just an industry. It's a culture, too.

The industry side of the club scene may be the part of it that's gained acceptance from the capitalist system, but that isn't all there is to it, not by a long shot. As has been suggested by writers like Matthew Collin, nightclubs have almost always emerged from thriving countercultures, or subcultures, at the very least, which lay hidden below the surface of mainstream society.

The clubs (and some of their music and fashion) have been the only aspects of that scene that has been allowed to break out of the underground to gain legitimacy, the same way that an iceberg juts above sea level. But below the surface, there is almost always something of far greater gravity and weight lurking, be it here in present day Berlin, London in the 1990's, or New York in the 1970's.

That something is culture, urban culture, and it can consist of a wide array of non-clubby things, like magazines, fanzines, websites, blogs. Artists, decorators, street artists, photographers. Ethnic minorities, women and sexual 'deviants'. Anarchists, pacifists, squatters and all manner of radical activists. Every era of the nightclub has seen people who have been left out or exiled by the system, wielding just as much influence on its culture as the musicians and fashionistas do.

Underground clubs & parties are just a meeting point: a crossroads for any soul that cannot travel on society's beaten paths. They harbour many of the city's more vulnerable, and necessary, subcultures.

There could be no better example of this than modern-day Berlin. Go to hippy spaces like Johnny Knueppel Sisyphos, or politically-charged nights like Room for Resistance and Bass Down Borders, and you’ll see that in addition to the visible minorities, there’s a minority of free thinking, self sustaining, emotionally open collectivists whose needs aren’t being served by the "every man for himself" status quo. As the system becomes more dogmatic and narrow in its focus, in Germany and abroad, so too does the club scene here diversify. Coincidence? I doubt it.

But let's move on to a tangible example of a scene that's been here, before: London. 

Reviewing the period of  1997-2010 that I spent in London, I realise that there were four main stages that the underground club scene went through, as it was regulated to death by the authorities. And at least three of these are evident in Berlin today. Without further preamble, here they are...

"The drugs were just tools used to lengthen, deepen, and intensify these reunions; a way to get the most out of them. Living our whole lives from Friday to Monday, everything was compressed."

1. Criminalisation of the rave scene forces a large part of the community into semi-legal, affordable clubs. 

Just as in Berlin, London's 1990's-2000's club scene was built upon a plethora of semi-legal clubs that were legit versions of the illegal rave scene. And, at first, they were the preserve of young, broke, well educated, mainly white - but also racially mixed - masses. Basically, in-between people that weren't well represented anywhere, except for in self-made venues such as these.

You could get in to Heaven on Thursday night for 3 pounds, or the Fridge on Friday for 5 pounds, and you could smuggle in your own drinks a lot of the time. Even if you wanted to buy alcoholic drinks on site, canned beers were offered at nearly pub prices. That's very similar to Berlin, these days.

These semi legal places flourished in neglected areas like Dalston, Tottenham, Old Street, Brixton and deeper in South London, where the club scene's presence was tolerated due to the economic 'black hole' surrounding them... a black hole created by the government's uneven attention to the urban landscapes that was, itself, driven by racism and elitism.

Examples of sound systems that had a toehold in London's clubs, as well as in the leaky but gleaming, drafty and spacious, free party scene were Immersion, Shtonka, Restless Natives, Big Sexy Festy, Crossbones, Tribe of Munt, Liberator, Twisted...

Here in Berlin, too, the club scene is set in neglected, immigrant heavy, ex-GDR areas. And as long as the authorities ignore those areas, the scene flourishes... but when their buddies start investing in them, the clubs mysteriously succumb to 'clubsterben'...  German for "club death." (Given the conscious nature of the phenomenon, though, maybe "clubmord" - "club murder" - would be a better term for it.)

2. Mainstream businessmen start buying into the club scene, using advertising clout to draw the masses away from the semi-legal clubs.

Just like Berlin now, London from 1999 to 2005 was awash in tourists who were curious about the hush-hush clubbing scene, but unwilling to take the risk of going to a club with unspecified attractions and atmosphere; unspecified, because it was usually sub-legal or extended the boundaries of what a club was allowed to be. It wasn't unusual for club spaces to morph into a bedroom, living room, cinema, massage parlour, ball pit, garden, cuddle puddle, live drawing gallery. Surprise was key.

Examples of big business-style clubs in London included: the SE1 Club, Heaven, Fabric, Home. "Clubbers and party animals owe [Fabric's founder] Reilly big time," wrote Sennheiser magazine about the venue. Well, clubbers and party animals were certainly made to feel like some sort of debt was being paid off when partying there, I can tell you that for a fact.

Free parties also suffered because of this, and became more bare-bones. Ketamine abuse was at least partly to blame, as it was spreading / being allowed to spread by authorities, depending on who you asked. Whether the death of the free party and semi legal club scenes made people want to abuse ketamine or the other way around is a discussion for another article, but it drained a lot of the remaining strength and beauty out of both scenes.

3. At the same time, gentrification steps up the pace, resulting in the closure of the semi legal clubs. 

In London, this happened more aggressively from 2005 onward, but it was always happening around the city. Examples included: Tyssen Street, 4 Aces, George Robey, Goldsmiths Tavern, Electrowerkz, Imperial Gardens, Megatripolis, Return to the Source, Escape from Samsara, Pendragon, The Rocket, 414, Garage, Whirlygig, Adrenaline Village, Eurobeat 2000, Raindance, Trenz, The Pleasure Rooms, Madam JoJo's, maybe I've missed a few... hazy memories, but exhilarating.

None of these venues was ever re-opened, despite the vague certainty that many of us had that they, and we, would endure. The grassroots, artistic, radical cultures based around them became too scattered, and exhausted by the never-ending hunt for cheap flats. Gentrification disrupted the community and alienated its member base... permanently.

The presence of such unsecured spaces degrades terrifyingly fast, even to the individuals who created them, not to mention to the rest of the city, in its cultural memory. New clubs have opened in London, but they have almost no relation to the old ones that 'made' the scene. Only the underground parties in the UK carry on the legacy that these defunct clubs used to represent.

Fighting the good fight in London (2013)

4. Eventually, even the new, expensive clubs are targeted by the authorities, who have never really accepted the underlying culture...

...partly because they have always felt threatened by it.

Clubs, at their best, are akin to temporary autonomous zones. People there are getting a sense of peace, pleasure and creative fulfilment, relating and sharing - all without any tax, without any authorities checking out the premises and getting a cut of the action, themselves. That's as seditious as it gets in our pay-to-play, free market, surveiled to death reality. It's also a step away from having a free party, which is a step away from total anarchy at its very fucking best. The seditious shadow of the anti Criminal Justice Bill riots skulks in every techno and house mix in London, just as the spectres of May Day and Mainzer Strasse haunt every street party and radical club night in Berlin.

Having classified clubs as an industry, councils in London now began treating the relationship with it as a straight-up transaction, where more money spent equalled more freedoms granted. Meanwhile, steady increases in rents meant that more money was needed each year to safeguard the freedoms that these clubs already had.

After all, to the Greater London Authority, these clubbers weren't participants in a culture: they were consumers, greedy for an experience that went above and beyond the perfectly satisfactory and fair norms that the mainstream culture had made available to them. Except, those norms weren't satisfactory and fair; they hadn't ever been. That was why so many people went to underground clubs & parties, in the first place.  

The same sense of exile from the mainstream exists in Berlin’s club scene, which seems semi-permanently set in the (very) dirty 1930's. Back in those swinging days, Berlin clubs played host to every kind of pansexual exploration, from drag queens to lesbian cabaret singers smashing out lusciously camp hits. The same basic traditions carry on in today's scene, albeit with an updated soundtrack.

Yet the fact is, alternative sexualities only ever became such a defining part of Berlin's clubbing spectacle because they were seen as weird by the mainstream, which relegated them to the realms of a fringe act. Self-expression may seem like "entertainment" to someone with the basic freedom to be themselves within 'the system' but, to many Berliners, these spectacles are deadly serious. The club scene is their main avenue to self-realisation.

The fact that thousands of people here still depend upon the scene as much as they did in the 1930's tells us that the cultural atmosphere hasn't changed all that drastically in the past nine decades. The draconian raids on a number of gay sex clubs, recently, and the closure of Kit Kat Club (just announced today) would seem to back that up.

Summing it all up.

At present, Berlin is vacillating between stages 2 and 3, with elements of stage 4 already emerging; see also the Alternative fur Deutschland's proposals to crackdown on that legal, and very expensive, bastion of Berlin techno, Berghain. 

The example of London (and virtually every city in Europe) suggests that Berlin's club scene will not survive in any recognisable shape after 'traditional' gentrification has happened here - after the landscape has been altered to suit the tastes of a handful of wealthy speculators. That kind of transformation amounts to a paradigm shift: away from the democratic model that we are told we have, where everybody gets a say in urban culture and planning, toward one where almost nobody gets a say unless they're filthy rich.  If you think that techno clubs are the only "Berlin" thing that'll be undermined by that paradigm shift, think again. As the London example shows us, they are only the beginning. 

It turns out, if you give the people the utopia that they envision during the night, they'll no longer hunger for it - work overtime, take out loans, go into debt to attain it - during the day. That's one kind of competition that free market capitalism just can't bear, it seems. 

The time to act is now; the way to act is to pressure the government to treat this 'industry' like the endangered culture that it is.

When moving rave culture above ground, it either has to be brought in as a new culture, complete with the same rights and freedoms as any other, or else the free and equal members of the scene will end up being squeezed and devalued, shuffled along, like the sheepish punters in Fabric's queue. Treat the club scene like an industry and you treat an entire, excluded section of the population as if they themselves are products to be sorted, labelled and packaged right alongside their music.

Action needs to be taken now, at all levels, to secure Berlin's club culture, or it will be regulated to extinction just like London's was. And a huge amount of Berlin's cultural autonomy will be lost... not just to the clubbers, but to anyone who wants to play a part in shaping the urban landscape and the cultures that define it.

So, to answer the title question, utopian clubs keep on dying out because they represent an array of minority worldviews that are necessarily at odds with the mainstream's "business as usual". The fact that Berlin's clubs are constantly under attack is the very reason why they should be protected by law.

"Even at the best party – in a club, at a rave - that I go to, I know there is nothing there that I can take away, expand on, and explore beyond the end of the party.  I know that, if I approach that thing that looks like a gateway from a distance, it will turn out to be really just a mirror, life-sized, reflecting me as I am and not as I could be."

Last revised 13.01.2020