Otpor activists, Slavija Square, Belgrade, Serbia, 2000 Photograph Igor Jeremic
of shock and awe at how the city looks, feels, smells and lives. I was no exception to that. I thought it was the most wonderful place I had ever been to in my life. I was staying with a friend on the Lower East Side and obviously the Manhattan that I experienced then doesn’t really exist any more. The waves of gentrification have crashed over the city sanitising all in their wake. It was a much more edgy and creative place back then, but also a lot grimmer and more risky. Chuck D must have been a great interview for you just starting out? Yeah, he enjoyed at that point taking on this combative and provocative role when communicating with white European journalists. It was as if he was kind of a preacher who was provoking you to rethink your attitudes, in the same way as he was doing in the music. So it was kind of like a performance in the way he was giving this non-musical drama to provoke you to think about issues that would then provoke your readers. But he took the British music press incredibly seriously because it was so vital at the time. And in turn the British music press really championed Public Enemy. I think they were initially surprised that these white middle class intellectuals from Britain had embraced them in such a way. From our point of view we were looking for something that fulfilled our hope that there would be a music that had some political vitality, but was also musically adventurous. We felt this is what we had been waiting for to shock the world out of its torpor. 152
Desert Storm Soundsystem, Mostar, Bosnia, 1996 Photograph Adrian Fisk
How did you end up writing about the Berlin Love Parade in 1992? I had been to Berlin once before in 1986 and was totally convinced to go back by my Croatian photographer friend Vanya Balogh. He did a lot of reports for i-D when I was editor there. One day he burst into the office waving these photos of all these freaks wearing gas masks, and other various pieces of industrial cast off clothing, and said he had seen the future. He said that we not only had to go there but also we had to run our own float at this Love Parade. So somehow we made this happen, and rented this little flat-bed truck and stuck some speakers on it and away we went. What was the Love Parade like then? When I talk about the Love Parade now people tend to think of the classic image of the 800,000 people, wearing fluorescent clothing and firing water pistols as they hang from lampposts. But when I first went it wasn’t like that at all. It was still a descendent of the Berlin scene before the fall of the wall, very much a part of that counter cultural scene. It had that feeling of being very raw and slightly ramshackle, with a genuine bunch of freaks. And of course it was much smaller. But we thought it was massive and couldn’t believe that you could get 15,000 in the street dancing to techno. The fall of the wall and the rise of Berlin techno is such a wonderful, dramatic and in some senses romantic story. So in the new book I really wanted to look at the Love Parade in hindsight. It started in the hope for a better future and ended in some
dismal industrial estate in the Ruhr with people getting killed in a stampede. That forever tainted its memory. But it did play a vital role in what appears to have become a suitable alternative culture in Berlin that still attracts people to move there. How did you get to follow the UK free party scene of the 1990s and the people behind Desert Storm? Because I’m from Nottingham, I knew the DIY Sound System, who were essentially house people rather than techno. But they were involved in these massive free parties in the early 1990s like Castlemorton and all that. And I actually did a story about them in I think it was 1991. It was about them and Tonka sound system. I knew about that scene then but got more interested in it when I was doing the research for Altered State and was interviewing people like Spiral Tribe. Through them I heard about this sound system called Desert Storm that at the time was based between Nottingham and Glasgow. I heard they had done these trips to Bosnia and I just thought this was really interesting. And it was around the same time that the British house scene was becoming very commercialised? Yes it had started to turn into this super club scene. It was increasingly about aspirational wealth and super star DJs getting huge amounts of money, and spending it on cocaine. I know it’s a cliché, but acid house really did change my life. It gave me the opportunity be a journalist. I felt this whole super club thing was tawdry