Love Parade '92: The sound of the family

In an exclusive extract from new book Pop Grenade Matthew Collin (author of the brilliant Altered State) recalls the Berlin Love Parade of 1992, as the city's techno scene was taking shape – and reveals how it was inspired by the UK's Summer of Love

And then the skies opened and the rain came down… lightning flashed like a celestial strobe and thunderclaps crashed off the walls, hammering out a counterpoint to the crackle of snare drums from the sound systems as our disorderly procession of trucks pulled into Wittenbergplatz… as the deluge raged harder, arms reached upwards to embrace the downpour like a benediction from above, slashing geometric patterns out of the clouds of white mist rolling low overhead from the fog machines on the trucks, screaming in rapture as dirty blurts of electronic bass and the vicious screech of a synthesiser tore out of the speakers yet again, the anthem of the moment, 'Der Klang Der Familie' – the sound of the family.

July 1992, Berlin: "There is a sense of lawlessness, a millennial party being played out at top speed," I wrote in a report that I filed shortly afterwards – a sense that anything was possible in this city hurtling into its future, where the old rules had ceased to exist and new ones were yet to be written.

At the time, the Love Parade was a relatively obscure German phenomenon which that year attracted around 15,000 hardline technoheads – a figure that seemed phenomenal to us then, yet tiny in comparison with the 1.5 million ravers who would join the party seven years later.

The Love Parade at the start of the 90s was still a gathering of the clans from across the recently reunited reunited country to revel in the sheer exuberance of their own existence, to show off their extravagant beauty in all its polymorphous perversity, out there on Berlin's upmarket retail drag, the Kurfürstendamm. To give the Saturday shoppers a little jolt of surprise, certainly, but also to stake a claim on the urban landscape not just as a place for buying and selling, but as the forum for a carnival: our carnival, with its youthful innocence that could not, and did not, last.

I arrived in Berlin that year to help run the first British soundsystem truck in the parade, backed by Daniel Miller's recently launched NovaMute record label. Compared to the other floats, ours was a somewhat rickety, low-budget affair, a little blue lorry that jerked and jolted its way down the Ku'Damm. "For a lot of people, drugs work!" declaimed a voice from the swaying speaker stack as our crew of British and German, black and white, hardcore boys in techno T-shirts and girls in skin-tight shorts bounced on the boards until they were close to cracking.

The parade felt raw and delightfully ramshackle, as if everything had been lashed together at the last minute by a bunch of random urban freaks on a come-down from the previous night's party. In later years, Love Parade floats would become lavish productions, but in 1992, some weren't even really floats at all.

I remember a sleek white limousine with blissed-out ravers sprawled wasted over its long bonnet, and a flame-haired female fire-breather in shocking orange showering sparks as she paraded in front of a multicoloured Manila 'jeepney'; an eccentric gent in full military dress driving what looked like a motorised wheelchair, and another man – for reasons that perhaps only made sense to himself –
pushing a shopping trolley along, wearing just his boots and underpants, while others skimmed through the crowd on rollerskates and bicycles… There was none of the crush and hustle that would typify the parade's later years; there was still space for the twisted imaginations of cultural outcasts to run riot along the city's main consumer thoroughfare at the height of a Saturday afternoon.

Among the bigger trucks, the Planet club's vehicle was tricked out as a huge pink cartoon rabbit with its floppy bunny ears lolling down over the cab. And then there was Tanith's truck … Tanith was an ex-punk turned hardcore techno DJ, the gaunt ringleader of a gang of wilful outcasts on a brain-scrambling journey to the outer limits, and he had an immaculate sense of punk-rock theatre.

In 1992 his float resembled Martin Sheen's patrol boat on its doped-out pyrotechnic voyage through the spooked jungle waterways of Apocalypse Now, but with weapons-grade techno blasting out instead of the Rolling Stones. "It's decked out like a tank, all camouflage and netting, with the DJ as a demented military commandant leading the troops from his gun turret," I wrote at the time. "As the bass drum powerdrills, his comrades set off smoking orange flares. But just when it all starts to look frighteningly militaristic, one of the stormtroopers in combat gear turns to display the peace sign painted on the back of his uniform."

The stormtroopers of peace: a vision of early Berlin techno distilled to its essence… The next year, Tanith went even further, arriving at the Love Parade with a decommissioned Soviet tank that he had somehow obtained. There is an iconic photograph of him from that time: standing high and mighty on top of the Russian behemoth, swathed in camouflage and raising aloft a voodoo skull as if invoking the spirits to put his mutant crew under the spell of his music.

"For a lot of people, drugs work!" the voice from our sound system repeated, over and over again. The freaks were already out, cutting loose outside the department stores and the supermarkets. Buffed muscle boys, stripped to the waist to show off their gym-toned chests, pranced and twirled behind us while a long-hair in a fractal shirt vogued like a hippie fairy… one man skipped along in a chemical warfare suit and gas mask, while another lay prone in the very middle of the road, naked apart from his underwear, staring intently at the cosmos inside his head…

There was no shortage of utopian rhetoric swirling in the ether at that time – considering the amount of MDMA that was percolating through most people's nervous systems, it's hardly surprising. Further out than most however was the perennial idealist who invented the Love Parade in 1989, just a few months before the Berlin Wall came down: Matthias Roeingh, better known as Dr Motte, a Berlin-born DJ who played in a punk band in the early 80s and then went on to run some of the city's first acid house clubs.

Acid house, for Motte, was an escape hatch from the walled city of the 80s into realms of consciousness where, with the right chemical assistance, dreamers could slip the bonds of reality and float freely. "It was like discovering a new territory," he explained later. "There was a wall in Berlin and then suddenly there is a door in that wall, and you can look behind… it was incredible. It opened up our minds and we discovered ourselves."

Motte's own inspiration came from a trip to Britain during 1988's acid house 'Summer of Love'. "Friends of mine told me about underground parties they went to in London, Manchester and Sheffield, where police came and stopped the parties and took the soundsystem but people were still dancing outside in the streets with ghettoblasters, having a street party," he told me, his eyes glittering with nostalgic fervour. "Ah, street party! It was immediately in my mind, how can we do that here? A spontaneous street party – how?"

Late one night in 1989, Motte came up with the most monumental prank of his life, one which would help to define the decade that would follow and even help to transform the image of the entire city, although he could hardly have known this at the time. Motte decided to hold a demonstration for happiness and unity in t he heart of his still-divided metropolis, a protest against nothing but rather for all that he believed was right and good: a ravers' promenade, bringing his people out of the subterranean darkness and into the light – a Love Parade…

At the very beginning, he chose 'Friede, Freude, Eierkuchen' as the event's slogan, an ironically humorous German expression that means'Peace, Joy and Pancakes'. Motte claimed this meant that the event was a protest for peace and global understanding through music and equitable food distribution, and he applied for the event to be registered as a political demonstration, which meant he wouldn't have to pay for policing or the post-party clean-up. The authorities took him seriously and he got the permit, but some of Motte's allies at the time believed it was just a cheeky scam to get permission to hold a rave right in the heart of the city. "It was a trick, and I liked the idea because it was a typical Berlin anarchistic thing," said DJ Westbam.

The first ever Love Parade in 1989 saw around 150 ravers trip gaily down the Kurfürstendamm, waving their arms in the air in the acid house style of the time, some dressed in smiley T-shirts and bandanas, others in 80s casualwear or the monochrome shades of the post-punk era. "We started from Wittenbergplatz, we were standing there with our three little vans and loudspeakers and generators. And tape decks! We were using tape decks!" Motte recalled. "There was a fine rain, like British weather, raining but not exactly raining. We stood there and didn't know when to start. Then the police came and asked us: 'Do you want to start now?'" He laughed at the absurdity: officers of the law asking the techno insurgents when they wanted to start their shambolic little uprising. "We had no clue! Nobody had done it before."

Among the dancers that day was the nucleus of what would become the Berlin techno scene. "It was like a shiver down the back, an energy I had never felt before," Motte said. Westbam insists that there was, even then, a sense that this would become something important: "Even though it was just this handful of people, in a crazy way we felt that we were writing history. But would anybody on that day have said that in a few years there would be a million people? I don't think so. If you had told me the Wall would come down a few months later? No, no!"

This enthusiasm was still simmering when I talked to Tanith at the Love Parade in 1992. "The clubs were the first place East and West came together and people recognised they were not different," he told me, his voice full of optimism about the possibilities that had opened up.

A lot of the early participants still believe this was true: one of the Love Parade organisers, Jürgen Laarmann, insisted years later that he was convinced that techno played a significant role as a unifying force in post-Wall Berlin: "On the dancefloor, under the stroboscopes and lasers, that was the first place where reunification really worked, and where people were really equal," he said.

The Love Parade grew exponentially each year, and by 1996 it had to move away from the Kurfürstendamm because it had become too big to be constrained by the tight confines of the city-centre thoroughfare. But though this marked a clear break
with its subcultural past as an annual reclaiming of an urban consumer space, its new venue was laden with a different but equally powerful significance: the Strasse des 17. Juni, the street that Adolf Hitler had used for his Nazi parades; the same street which had been renamed after the failed uprising against the East German communist regime in 1953. But now it was the scene for a colossal rave. For the new, united Germany, the symbolism could not have been clearer: "It was a kind of reinvention of post-war Germany after the Wall came down," said Westbam. "It painted a completely different picture."

In terms of numbers, the parade peaked at the turn of the millennium, becoming a populist dayglo rave extravaganza as it drifted away from its subcultural roots in the shadow of the old Wall. It even sparked an annual techno counter-demonstration each year called the Fuck Parade, which was set up to protest against its lurid commercialisation.

Eventually, in a development that many considered the ultimate sell-out, the Love Parade name was bought by a fitness club chain, and in 2007, it moved out of Berlin to the Ruhr Valley. There it would m eet its end in a brutal, avoidable tragedy that left 21 people dead in a horrific stampede in Dortmund in July 2010. The Love Parade was finished, but during its Berlin years it had helped to create a new image of the city as a hedonist wonderland and one of Europe's creative capitals.

It's a perception that endures to this day, one that was built on the high ideals and crazy dreams of a group of young adventurers living through a unique moment in history that can never be repeated. As Dr Motte recalled years afterwards, the unimaginable suddenly became possible: "Everything was improvised then – everything. It was paradise, full-on, we could do anything, and no-one cared."

Matthew Collin's new book Pop Grenade: From Public Enemy to Pussy Riot – Dispatches from Musical Frontlines is published by Zero Books on May 29