Helena Hauff: All That She Wants

Hauff's managed to make that particular desire a reality for herself. She quit going to university in her early twenties because she was more interested in buying and playing records and hanging out, despite having the chops to sign up for courses in Fine Art and, later, Systematic Music Science. "I had really horrible nightmares when I stopped. Like, 'What am I doing? I've lost it completely. I actually had a scholarship. I'm just lazy and stupid, that's basically it'," she says. "But now I'm really happy that I stopped, I'm enjoying life a lot."

Her obsession with music eventually led her into production, which she explains with typical dry humour: "[I thought] there's so many people out there who produce music, how hard can it be?!" After finding the limitless possibilities of Cubase a bit overwhelming, she settled on analogue equipment. "I had a friend with a studio with a lot of machines and I went there a couple of times and played with them, and then I thought, 'That's my way to go: that's what I need to make music with'. He had a couple of 303s and he sold one to me. Everyone was saying, 'You don't need a 303, the only thing it can do is acid'. And I was like, 'Yeah but that's exactly what I want.'"

She was first introduced to dance music at cult Hamburg venue Golden Pudel, which prides itself on being resolutely underground and DIY with a totally open approach to bookings and how DJs play music. "I must have been seventeen," she recalls. "I went with my best friend but she wasn't into music at all. I mean, I wasn't into music, I didn't know anything about club music, didn't know any names – didn't know how it worked. But I was quite a bit more open-minded than she was and we ended up there. She wanted to leave after half an hour and go to some kind of crazy, horrible place on the Reeperbahn. I said, 'I really like this place, why do we have to go?' She wanted to eat a kebab as well, I was like 'Ohhhhh why? It's like two o' clock in the morning. Why do you have to eat? Can't we just drink?!' I liked it and I came back." A young Hauff would go on to develop her DJ skills at the Pudel, hosting her own night there and embodying its counter-cultural ethos. Visiting the club was a rite of passage for her, as one memory clearly shows: "I was seventeen, I remember dancing next to the DJ and bumping into the decks and the needle was jumping and I didn't realise what I was doing. I feel so ashamed about that now! So when it happens to me, I'm not angry."