Easyjet Set

It's 8:00 a.m. Saturday and, while my body is aching for sleep, my mind tells me to keep on dancing. Bathed in the soft red light of the dance floor, everyone looks picture perfect and we're all in love.

Each of us may exist in our own private reality, far removed from the robotic pulse emanating from the PA, but we're all very much together. A unit. I've just exchanged intimate life stories with my brace of new best mates from the toilet queue. Yet I know I'll never see them again, despite emphatic promises to the contrary.

The clock ticks on. The swell on the dance floor rises and falls. It's time to slump in a corner for a twelfth and last beer. At the bar one guy looks especially grey and eager to keep an appointment with the toilet bowl. Elsewhere, in a not very secluded corner, a couple are having sex.

Now it’s midday. My legs, which now suddenly seem as if they are made entirely of custard, stumble to the cloakroom. I grab my coat and then - daylight! Hours spent lurking in the shadows of a murky ex-power station make adjusting to the intense blaze of searing sunlight unpleasant. I find the train and suddenly feel incredibly filthy, mingling with the hordes of perky, fresh-faced holidaymakers who - unlike me - don’t resemble an animated corpse.

My ears still pulse to the music, a vague throbbing echo from a party now disappearing along the train tracks. Lost in the memories of the night, I stumble into my flat, take two sips from a giant mug of coffee, and flake into bed.

And that is, more or less, my typical weekend in the seedy underbelly of Berlin's techno scene.

Techno and the Berlin Wall

Well, I exaggerate. Even my relatively robust constitution couldn’t suffer that amount of hammering every weekend. But on a relatively regular basis that’s what I choose to get up to.

As a product of the UK's mid-90s Britpop generation, I matured musically with the mistaken belief that music had to be made with guitars. But I moved to to Germany’s capital in 2005 and landed a promo job with an electro label, awakening my inner techno beast.

Of course, I am not the first to have had my eyes opened to the wild and wicked ways of Berlin's all-night, anything-goes techno marathons. It happened back in the 80s, too.

"Undoubtedly the fall of the Berlin Wall triggered the explosion in techno," says music producer and trance pioneer Mark Reeder, "without it there probably wouldn’t be a techno scene as we know it today."

As the Communist regime was toppled in the streets above, a different kind of revolution was happening in the city's underground clubs. Forget Scorpions' whiny ballad, Wind of Change. It was techno that struck the right sci-fi chord to provide a suitably revolutionary soundtrack to changing times. A massive influx of East German kids, brought up on a state-controlled diet of mediocre pop and rousing propaganda, flooded West Berlin desperate for new music and found techno - a sound they had never heard before and which had no tricky English lyrics to muddle through. Just find the beat and dance.

Sightseeing at the techno club

Roll on 20 years and the revolution is happening all over again with a new batch of clubbers - although this time around it's not the Germans who are taking techno to the next level.

Who, then? Well, the tourists, of course. Berlin's status as a techno heaven is well known internationally and, thanks to budget airlines, clubbers from all over Europe are dipping their toes into the dirty waters and contributing a substantial chunk of the 118 million euros ($159 million) the nightlife scene generates annually.

I've noticed the shift in the demographic myself, but journalist Tobias Rapp was quicker off the mark to publish a book about it: "Lost and Sound; Berlin, Techno and the Easyjet Set." Easyjet Set, which should win the Word Coinage of the Year award, describes the new generation of clubbing elite who book cheap flights with the specific aim of coming to Berlin to get wrecked.

"Sometime in 2003, I realized that standing in the queue in front of a club, you’re not standing there with Germans anymore," Rapp told me. "In the 90s, clubbing was a very German thing in Berlin. Then in the 2000s I thought, 'Wow, half of the people who wait in line with me here are not German.' It’s a very international scene, which it wasn’t before."

Does this tsunami of eager young tourists - mostly from Spain, Italy and France - add interesting flavor to Berlin’s patchwork club scene? Or does it just ruin it for the locals? The answer is, a little bit of both.

When it was just us locals, we made the party great. We understood the venue and what made it tick. But perhaps we did it too well. Now a venue like Berghain has super-club status internationally and is flooded with people who don’t bring anything, they expect something.

To an extent, the tourist influx has killed the chilled, easy atmosphere and replaced it with a mixture of freak-show curiosity and almost manic drug hunts.

On the other hand, the new faces and that newbie eagerness create a fresh kind of energy. But it has scared the super hip Berliners away, disgusted that their once credible secret location is now a top ten hit in every tourist book on the planet.

The flight of the locals

So have the Berlin crew ditched techno altogether? Of course not, they've simply done what they're best at - thrown a strop and found new places to party. While the Easyjet Set are giving themselves brain damage in iconic locations such as Berghain, Golden Gate or Tresor, discerning Berliners have shifted to...well, that would be telling.

Detroit techno DJ and honorary Berliner Jeff Mills thinks the casual clubbers are important for the development of the scene.

"These people coming from other countries to Berlin to party are the consumers that are going to carry this music because they have an interest outside of where they live," he says, "These are the ones that will remember it most and will be crucial to how the music is carried from generation to generation."

It’s highly likely that the current crop of top secret, makeshift clubs of which Berliners are so keenly possessive will in time be overrun with tourists. Even tourists can be picky and want to head off the beaten track.

And what then? Simple. The locals will find somewhere else to play and the cycle starts again. The nightlife here has always moved and developed and changed. And change - alongside techno - is something that is very much a core element to Berlin’s character.

And me? I'll keep abreast of the new movements, of course. But I refuse to relinquish my favorite corner of Berghain's Panorama Bar. After all, that’s where I die a little every other weekend.

Gavin Blackburn is a music journalist for Vice and Electronic Beats magazines and reports for DW's English Service.

Editor: Jennifer Abramsohn