Currently Reading: Berlin, Techno & The Easyjet Set

"When exactly is Saturday? Almost all clubs open at midnight, so a clubbing Saturday is always Sunday already. The time before the clubs open needs filling—in bars, on the street if you really have to, or at home. If you go to a club before one o’clock on a Saturday night, you inevitably end up on an empty dance floor, a dance floor being played to by a DJ who knows full well no one wants to dance at this hour, and who therefore plays music that no one would dance to, if there was anyone there. But there isn’t. The people are outside. In the queue.

This is the case everywhere, but especially at Berghain. The queue snakes a long and orderly path over the sandy ground. Bordered at the very back by construction site fencing, then corralled into an S-shape by steel barriers near the door, it’s as if these people are queuing to get into another country. And in a sense, they are. A common assumption is that the time spent waiting outside the door of a club has something to do with the exclusivity that the club in question claims to possess. This belief is probably a distant echo of the anguished groans of all those who, at some point in the late ’70s, waited to be let into Studio 54 in New York, the most famous discotheque of the twentieth century. Here, the doorman’s reign of terror created that mixture of celebrity, money, beauty and youth to which some still aspire today. You were beckoned to come inside—or not, in which case you just had to stand there and watch. This could go on all night. There was no one forcing you to persevere except for the sheer appeal of gaining some ground in the attention economy which governs the nightlife of cities where fame, wealth and taste belong together."