Book review: Finger on the pulsing beats

Liam Cagney mixes interviews with DJs and club owners, past and present, as he charts the evolution of Berlin’s club scene

Liam Cagney’s 'Berghain Nights' is named after the monolith at the centre of Berlin’s clubbing scene.  Picture: Thomas Margraf

• Berghain Nights: A Journey Through Techno and Berlin Club Culture 
• Liam Cagney 
• Reaktion Books, £15.99 hb 

In March 2024, Germany added Berlin’s techno scene to the country’s national registry of ‘intangible culture’ — a designation that gives clubs access to government funding and support.

It acts as a boost at a time when soaring rents have triggered what locals call a “clubbing crisis”. 

A report earlier this year by a non-profit representing Berlin’s clubs found that one in two venues was at risk of closure within 12 months. 

It cites as chief concerns rapidly rising rents, gentrification, and changing demographics.

Liam Cagney’s Berghain Nights is named after the monolith at the centre of Berlin’s clubbing scene. 

A converted Soviet-designed power station, its fathomless corridors and experiential intensity are like an immersive artwork, he writes — while it’s filled with gay clones and butch queens like emissaries from the future. 

But Cagney ultimately ends up pondering whether the book might inadvertently be a Berghain obituary, published to coincide with the club’s expiration. 

Indeed, he finds himself being kicked out of his apartment around the same time as he is surveying a “stinker” of an experience at Berghain, where “despite cosplaying in their pricey off-the-rack designer fetishwear, [the crowd] were clean-cut”.

This sense of decline is playing out on a wider scale. 

The website Resident Advisor published a feature in late summer claiming 2020s mainstream clubbing is an algorithm-smoothed spectacle that rewards mediocrity, lamenting “dead crowds, Ibiza VIP platforms, Euro-washed afro house”.

Cagney first encountered techno music in Donegal, his beanie-hatted older brother exposing him to rave and ambient music. 

He was disillusioned, depressed, and lost, with no stable job and few remaining prospects — the bureaucratic life of a civil servant beckons like a prison sentence, he writes — by the time he arrives for a long summer break in Berlin. 

A friend convinces him to write about Berghain where “it’s not the hedonism but the music that comes first”.

Cagney quickly sets out his MO: It wouldn’t be a pseudo-objective report typed up to fence off a tranche of academic dominion but rather gonzo music writing, oozing out my being on the page.

Warning: References and quotes by Georges Bataille, Audre Lorde, and William S Burroughs abound. 

It’s not quite a coming-of-age story, but Cagney’s own dance of self-discovery is the book’s beating heart.

It begins with him in a state of panic, tripping on mushrooms in Berghain after being ditched by some acquaintances. But on the dance floor, he finds composure, relief, and joy.

Cagney mixes interviews with DJs and club owners, past and present, as he charts the evolution of Berlin’s club scene. 

Venues such as KitKat Club and Tresor, and DJs like Ellen Allien and Function, might be familiar only to those who have made the pilgrimage to Berlin for a debauched weekend, but Cagney’s writing remains inclusive and engaging.

His conversations with producers, he writes, “informed how I felt about my own journey. Everything is always beginning and ending. Everything is cyclical.”

A bugged-out night with a girlfriend unfolds like a horror movie, viewed through parted fingers, yet his frank grappling with sexuality — “I’ve always felt alien to myself” — brings moments of insight.

He speaks with others about how Berghain opened them up sexually. 

There are tales of hours-long queues and the outlandish outfits required to convince the bouncers — pseudo-celebrities among a certain cohort — of admittance, “although you want to be unique as you dance in the abandoned industrial units, you also want to fit in”.

Cagney delves into the wider creative ecosystem around the club — exhibitions, art, the leather-fetish scene — crafting a wide-ranging, pulsing narrative set to a relentless beat.