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interview with watergate
http://www.datatransmission.co.uk/v...px?featureID=79
Behind the scenes at Watergate
Written By: getdextrous
Imagine a club where you can party all night then watch the sun rise over the cityscape all morning. Imagine a club where the soundsystem belts out decibels with a clarity that you never thought possible. Imagine a club where even the ceiling is an integral piece of the party.
What you’re imagining is Watergate, the hottest of hotspots in Berlin. In the city which is the undeniable king of partying at this time of year, Watergate is the undeniable king of cool. Perched on a riverbank, Watergate draws a clued-up, party hungry and downright sexy crowd onto its techy housey dancefloors. I got the chance to head to a party at Watergate where M.A.N.D.Y. were rocking the place well into the next day. Playing on their home soil, they were nothing short of incredible, with the three other acts in the venue hot on their heels. The next morning, I caught up with Steffen and Uli – masterminds of Watergate – to get the lowdown on the club, the music and Berlin in general.
Hi guys – top night last night! I noticed that the crowd here were really into the music and the atmosphere: is this typical of a Berlin crowd?
Steffen: We try to be a very musical club. We try to focus not only on the “posh” things, but also on the music.
Uli: The philosophy was to create a club which is all about the music, and you go there because of the music.
Steffen: We tried lots of things: we tried hip-hop, drum and bass, urban, breaks … but in the end we found out that it is much better for the club when you go for one image, for one sound. In the beginning I thought it was better to place yourself in different genres, but later we figured out people wanted to go to a place where they could be sure of what they’d hear. They think they want to hear different things but really they don’t. In the beginning we did so many things wrong – people said things like “Your concept is not right”, but then when you have success everybody likes you.
Uli: Yeah, when you’re successful everybody is on your side. When we started out, people said that we were running a dead territory: that nobody came here, that we didn’t have a concept – we were only trying to focus on different kinds of music! But then when you focus on only one kind of music your recognition in that scene is so much better, you can try to be really good and specialised in that one thing. When you have too many interests you can’t specialise, and so you can only stay in the middle somewhere. That’s why we’re a specialised techno/house club - but not by our wish, things just got this way. We didn’t intend to go this way, but now we’re so deeply rooted in the scene. I would love to put on some other kinds of music some time, even if it wasn’t successful, but I can’t do it because it would interrupt our ongoing flow with music. If I put on a drum and bass night, people would come here not because of the artists but because of the club, and they’d leave here thinking it was strange because everybody had told them it was different.
What’s the current state of play on the music scene in Berlin these days?
Steffen: People think that Berlin is a musical Metropolis or something like that. That’s bullshit: it’s a techno capital, but everything else is in its Kindergarten here. Last week we had Herbaliser in a smaller club here, and I read in the newspaper that the journalist was so excited to go, but was wondering why it wasn’t crowded. I myself wasn’t wondering: all that kind of music doesn’t function here.
Uli: On the one side you’ve got the techno scene which is so huge with its two or three day parties, but if you try to bring in artists from other scenes it doesn’t have the same effect unless you only put on the superstars.
In UK clubs there are often 10 or 12 artists playing on the same night, here you have just one or two main artists. Is that intentional?
Uli: It is. Sometimes we have label nights with more artists, but usually I like to give artists long sets. Unlike the UK, we often have nights that run for 12 hours or more: it makes sense to have a build up, to have a culmination and then to bring it down again. If you have short sets, everyone hammers the hits and everyone ends up playing the same music. It becomes about being harder than the last guy, and being a show-off. But here it is perfect even for someone who comes in at 12 and leaves at 10: they should feel a constant development in the music.
Steffen: When you look back to the ‘80s, it was always one DJ. If the club was going well, the DJ might bring along a friend, but it was not like each night you had a different DJ, or a list of 20.
Uli: The more money that comes into the whole thing, the more promoters there are who want to make money. There is a competition going on where one promoter takes two big names, the next takes three big names, the next five… the next guy has to put even more names on his line-up not to musically improve it, but to make it bigger. Running a club should be different: a club should run from its reputation. We’re now in the lucky situation where we can bring music to people, and they are accepting what we are offering them.
Steffen: Bigger line-ups give the impression that there is more going on. You drive a big car, you look bigger. A city with skyscrapers looks important. People only look on the surface of things like this, they don’t look inside, and you can see a similar picture in the whole social environment.
Uli: The concept behind a night like the M.A.N.D.Y. night is to give them a residency where they play the whole night, and downstairs it’s their friends playing so the whole vibe is more like a family, it’s more familiar. This is the success behind the whole thing: when M.A.N.D.Y. play, they also party. They’re really close to the people, and you wouldn’t get this if they were high up in the club and you couldn’t see them. This is what it’s all about : the DJ shouldn’t be this superstar figure, they are normal people. They should interact with the dancefloor.
In Watergate it really feels like you’re pushing the boundaries of what clubs are doing. What are your plans to keep doing this as we go into the future?
Steffen: It’s very interesting that since we became successful, people have started copying us. I think that’s normal – you see it with shoes and clothes where every idea is sampled from one company to the next. They’ve already done it with our light system: nearly every week we get requests asking about where we got the stuff from and who installed it. There is already another club that’s copied us “one to one” on that. Even our name: in New York there’s a club with a monthly night called Watergate, and they even wrote in the press that the promoter had been to Berlin and wanted to bring the Berlin vibe home. So development becomes a must: we have to have new ideas to excite the people.
After 3 or 4 years, if you don’t excite the people then everything will go. There has to be a development, and you develop, develop, develop until one day you’ll probably end up sitting in your house and thinking about what you’re doing, and then think that you’re too old to develop anything anymore, and that you don’t care, because it’s just for what? You can’t bring something that will steadily function or work, you always have to accelerate.
Uli: You can copy the lights, but you have to have someone, art-wise, to make them look nice. You could copy them and make them look all colourful, but you have to fit them to the music and care for them. It’s not like buying a gold chain and showing it off: when we develop the club more and more we want to do so with new ideas. That way at least if people copy us, we know we’re having GOOD ideas. Good ideas can easily be something very simple – you just have to be sensible with what you do and not just think that because things are so expensive that you’ve got something really good. You have to have people who actually know and care about what they do: for example, we have a VJ sitting there the whole night, not just some sound to light transformer that just flashes all the time, because that would be boring. It’s like the old Roland 303: we try to push things to the extreme and do things with our lights that people don’t normally do, and it impresses people because they don’t expect things to be used in that way.
What kind of balance do you try to strike between established and emerging artists?
Uli: We have our residencies, and of course we do have to go with names as well, but we really try to keep our feet firmly in the underground. The old-school way of sending a CD and thinking that you could get booked because you’ve made a wonderful mix doesn’t work anymore – it’s become that you’ve got to have releases, you have to be on a label. There’s so much more to a DJ than just properly mixing: I always prefer a DJ that can fuck up a mix and still smile about it to themselves.
We also always try to bring a mix between international DJs and Berlin DJs. The local DJs bring a lot of local crowd, and they bring a different style of party. There’s a different style of party in each town.
The door policies here are different to what we’re used to back in England – it seems much more selective as to who you do and don’t let in. How do you think this affects the vibe in the club?
Steffen: Our club is not that big – our capacity is about 1000. We come from backgrounds in the underground, illegal parties where it was always very selective. Sure, we can’t be quite so familiar here, but we almost hide the club. You only see it because there’s a queue: some people have to run around and ask where the club is.
Uli: Yes, it all comes from back when the parties were illegal: then, people only came to the clubs because of the music. Now we have the situation of people coming just because we’re “Watergate”. Those people don’t bring the vibe where it’s all about the music, so the door selector might, for example, ask people if they know who’s playing. If they don’t, he might say that maybe they’re not right for here.
Steffen: We have one selector, at the front, who decides “yes” or “no”, and then we have bouncers – the bouncers themselves don’t talk. Imagine if you let everyone enter: in three months’ time, the club would be uninteresting for everybody. You’d have people just standing there looking around, you’d have guys going wild – all these things we don’t want to have. We want a party vibe, but a peaceful party vibe. Now that we’re more popular, it’s harder to get the right “Watergate vibe”, but still we have, for example, that if people bump into someone they’ll say “sorry”. We can only have that with a good selector, and it’s very difficult to find a selector who understands that idea.
Uli: Most people who get turned away take it very personally, but it’s not personal at all. It can depend – the vibe has to fit, the amount of girls and boys has to be in the right mixture, for example.
What makes the party vibe in Berlin is so exciting?
Steffen: Here, it’s a lot less about money. We didn’t open the club to become millionaires, that wasn’t our intention.
Uli: In most clubs in Berlin, people don’t open them to make money – there are other things that you can do to make money much more quickly. Most people that run clubs love the music, and they decide to make it their living. Lots of them struggle, and we’ve had hard times as well. When you go “international” money suddenly comes in, and for some people it becomes uninteresting because it’s not all about the music any more. But it’s not just in Berlin: when you look at UK clubs like fabric or The End, immediately when you see the bookings you can tell that they are run by people who are actually into the music. It all fits together and there are ideas behind it. Some other raves have strange mixtures: it becomes like name dropping.
How is the Berlin scene adapting to the recent popularity of live acts?
Steffen: Nearly each week we have a live act, sometimes two or three.
Uli: A live act only really represents one artist’s music, so we try to keep it around an hour.
Steffen: There are some live acts that can play for two hours, but some are only really good for half an hour. You have to find a programme that works.
Uli: Also, you have to work out if a “live” act is really LIVE: if you’ve got a band you’ve got some people doing something, whereas some “live” acts are just a guy only looking at his laptop and his controller, presenting an Ableton Live set because he isn’t capable of DJing. You have to check you’ve got a proper live act, not someone who’s trying to replace a DJ, who can’t DJ!
Steffen: Some people think that it makes the line-up look more interesting, and we can only really do it because we’ve got the image. Before, it was very important what line-up we offered as to how many people would turn up. Now we have more freedom in what we can present.
Uli: If you know that people are coming, you have more freedom to take risks. You can book acts that you wouldn’t dare booking if you were just depending on making people come. If you’re sure that a night is going to be crowded anyway, you can book a DJ which is less known. It gives you freedom.
For more information and line-up news, head to http://www.water-gate.de/
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