For his book, Coming to Berlin, Paul Hanford talks to musician and film-maker Mark Reeder about his early years in West Berlin…
A cold night in Schöneberg, 1979. Gaslit streetlamps flicker shadows over over old tenement buildings, some of which have remained dilapidated for over thirty years. Within this drizzly sepia, a lone car is approaching an address. Inside the car is a hitcher, a young man driven by curiosity. Everywhere he’s been so far, people have scratched their head and asked him: “why Berlin?” From Hamburg to Munich, people have wondered why would you want to step foot anywhere near this ugly, walled-in city, where the air is cold and the sky is thick with the smokebelch of coal.
The hitcher is reminded by sophisticates, anarchists and anyone with an opinion from Cologne to Düsseldorf that Berlin is no longer the capital; that, divided in two, Berlin is a discarded ruin left over from a time nobody wants to mention, one hundred kilometres into communist East Germany, while West Berlin is a forgotten outpost way behind enemy lines, reachable on land only via a single, long strip of road ominously nicknamed The Iron Corridor: a place with cold weather and coal skies.
Along that very strip of road, earlier that day, the hitcher recalls how the car radio transmitted indecipherable fragments of voices, not too dissimilar from the experimental tape cut-ups of Musique concrète — but far more likely to be coded transmissions meant for passing covert information. This is the height of the Cold War, after all. Wherever the hitcher travels, music guides his curiosity. Exotic, hard to locate sounds, travel guides in the form of vinyl long players have led him to West Germany, and now leave a trail of sonic breadcrumbs region to region. Otherworldly music: Can in Cologne, Faust and Cluster in Saxony, Neu! in Düsseldorf, Amon Düül and Popol Vuh in Munich.
Music that despite the disparate tools used, from tape experiments and electronically generated sounds to guitars and drums, and regardless of the even more disparate operators of these tools spread across a nation, are somehow connected through a desire to start from scratch and walk into the unfamiliar. And now, this quest has led him to this walled in, broken city that nobody has a good word to say about, and where there is absolutely no — as he gets told and told and told — economic miracle. Hometown friends of his play in the band Joy Division and have heard these sounds too; there are touches of this influence in the music they’re making: namely repetitive motorik beats and a droning expansiveness unusual to drab punk Britain.
Into the gaslamps and drizzle. The car stops, the hitcher, who despite the miles travelled and the vinyl discovered, is still a lanky and unfilled-out youth, steps out and walks up the steps to Winterfeldstrasse 24. Mark Reeder has spent the better part of his time around records, thumbing through the vinyl in Manchester’s Virgin Records so frequently that it only seemed logical, when the vacancy arose, to give the kid a job.
In the UK, punk had happened and the older staff didn’t know their Buzzcocks from their X-Ray Specs, and didn’t want to either. This was a time where Robert Plant would use Melody Maker to attack punk – “it’s not musical, they can’t play their instruments,” said the Led Zeppelin frontman, possibly from the band’s private jet. The older guard in Virgin Records agreed with Plant and it wasn’t long before they quit the shop. But Reeder stayed.
In the evenings he might have been playing in The Frantic Elevators, a band he formed with the young Mick Hucknall, but during the day he was behind the counter in Lever Street dispensing vinyl. If you wanted something special, something the press hadn’t even cottoned onto, Mark was the man. Tony Wilson of Factory Records knew this.…