»Like It's 1999« | No Underground
On a blazing hot Wednesday 25 years ago, Markus „Fels“ Fesl and I headed to Maria am Ostbahnhof for our weekly dance-improv session with Chilly Gonzales and Raz Ohara. We were celebrating the release party of our first record as „No Underground“: Free Transform. Now, a quarter of a century later, the album, originally released on Arne Gesemann's Noisolution, is finally available again on all digital platforms as Lovelab Release 002.
On the roof of a former post office administration building, a four-story structure that had been converted into a club, the word „Pop“ glowed in neon letters. On the second floor, the legendary feminist band Lassie Singers held their „Slut Bar“ every Wednesday. Downstairs, on a worn-out sofa at the edge of the dance floor, the four of us, Nightline City Cruisers (NCC), named after the German railway's night train, played eight-hour jam sessions until the early morning hours for a swirling hall full of frenzied dancers. We initially received 200, later 400 Marks for band fees, a hundred each – and Peaches, her first live performance right after arriving in town.
Joints were rolling one after another as Raz belted out his Prince-esque vocals onto the dance floor, and Gonzales (then still under the name „Wolf“) seemed to play for his life with a synthesizer module with classic keyboard sounds. As P-Funk and Paul McCartney disciples, Fels grooved grimly on the bass, while I played loops from the seventies on first-generation Pioneer C-DJ players, controlling the mix (getting louder and louder, above all). From time to time, I roared lower-pitched vocals into the microphone with my VT-1 effects unit. The energy was electrifying. For a year, cannabinoid-induced euphoria drove us to musical extremes – every Wednesday. As if there were no tomorrow.
Free Transform is an eclectic mix of jazzed-up groove tracks, simple pop songs with Sixties quotes, and rudimentary hip-hop – a hybrid of my late-night stoner compositions, tracks by Fels, guest appearances by Chilly Gonzales and Sebastian Schoenian, and recordings by the philosopher band „Wohnung“ with Sandra Klein (keys), Reimund Spitzer (guitar), Töns Wiethüchter (drums), Fels, and myself – one of the nuclei of the Berlin living room scene.
The Berlin living room scene, with its illegal parties in private apartments, was celebrated in the press as a cozy alternative to the mainstream techno sound. In reality, however, it was the musically untamed bastard child of techno, born from the same anarchic attitude that characterized the Berlin underground and the Maria sessions. It was an enjoyable alternative to the late-capitalist disillusionment of Generation X, which manifested itself in West German discourse pop and the apocalyptic pop exegesis of the then-Köln Spex magazine. It was a time when Berlin became a vibrant cultural metropolis thanks to countless vacant properties, low rents, and largely absent authorities. While the underground was declared a fig leaf for the mainstream by West German thinkers, the city brimmed with unbridled creativity.
And we were in the middle of it all. The single „City Boy,“ a recording by the band Wohnung, was in heavy rotation on German radio. We played live in the newly opened MTV studios in Berlin, while our trash video featuring Ecstasy chocolate, a Gonzales cameo, and a police intervention was immediately pulled by MTV's London headquarters. With Fels on guitar and bass and me on vocals, PC tower, and CD players, No Underground eventually went on a Germany-wide improvisation tour, initially with Chilly Gonzales on keys – ironically, to completely empty halls – and later with Johannes „Jojo“ Büld on Moog Prodigy, Rhodes, Hammond, and electronics. At the peak, we played an endless house-dance set for a thousand dancing and euphorically screaming people at Chemnitz's Atomino, surrounded by excited fans who followed us all the way to the 5-star hotel where Jan Kummer from Atomino had booked two suites for us.
The live recordings made during the tour formed the basis for an album that I still consider one of the best I've had the chance to work on. It was a groovy mix of dance, electronica, pop, and hip-hop, lyrically strong and musical at the same time, full of depth, desire, and darkness, despair, and spirituality, crowned by the bizarrely suicidal music video for „Donna“ by Oliver Päßler, which we shot illegally with Lia Baron as the lead actress in the cemetery on Prenzlauer Allee.
Twenty years later, the video for „Truck Drivin’ Devil“ followed, a melancholic, dreamy love song – and the only German-language track No Underground has ever released. This album is now finally available again under the title Golden Child (Lovelab 003).
They were wild and productive years. And resounding success was within reach.
Tim Ra