The alphabet according to Mark Reeder

D as in Die Unbekannten:
Thrown together in June 1981 for a German Unity concert in legendary Berlin club SO36. I had previously performed with Adrian Wright from The Human League and future Bad Seeds and Die Haut drummer Thomas Wydler at the mammoth last night of the Exxcess Club, and I was asked if I would be willing to play again. I called my friend Alistair Gray to see if he could sing, and he instantly crooned “Strangers in the Night” in the telephone and I said, “Great! We have a gig next week, come round and I will show you how to play bass.” We hurried out a couple of tunes and even wrote one of the songs in the bar across the road while waiting for the sound check. When the show started, I nervously hit the wrong button on our MFB drum machine and the whole thing just fell apart. The debut gig was a complete disaster. We weren’t anything like avantgarde, just incompetent. For our second EP, Dangerous Moonlight, Adrian gave us a prototype Roland 606 to test for him, and test it we did. We immediately ran into the studio and used it to record “Don’t Tell Me Stories” long before the drum machine was even allowed to be available in the shops. Although we wanted to mix dance and soul with synths, our sound was always very depressive and people would tell us how they cried lis- tening to our music. Was it really that bad? We called it depridisco. People today call it darkwave. Apparently, Die Unbekannten have since become known as darkwave pioneers and godfa- thers of goth. In 1984 we decided to change our sound, style and our band name to Shark Vegas, after Bernard Sumner asked us to go on tour with New Order.

F as in Five Point One:
Multichannel surround sound. I love it. I have always been fascinated by the idea of three dimensional wrap-around sound. It is the natural way we hear. Many audio purists think it’s rubbish or just a momentary fashion trend, but people said that originally about stereo, too. I decided to make my Five Point One remix album in 5.1 not because it was easy, but because it was hard.

G as in German Democratic Republic:
It was like Disneyland for me—a parallel world on the other side of the Berlin Wall that smelled of two-stroke engines, coal and cabbage. Forbidden and unknown. Very similar in many aspects to the West but also entirely different. A strange mir- ror world. It reminded me of my early childhood in many ways and things I was familiar with from my parents’ generation, like aluminum spoons or enamel plates. No one could tell me anything about it though and being a curious kind of fellow, I wanted to know more about it . . . much, much more. I wanted to delve deep into their underground music scene. I was hooked with my first visit there a few days after arriving in Berlin in 1978. It was a bit like being beamed down into a scene from Star Trek that was like The Great Escape. But it was also a fucking serious place and you felt one wrong move could have you on a cattle car on the way to a Siberian salt mine. My first encounter with a punky looking kid formed the basis for a Stasi file on me. In good faith I asked him about the East Berlin underground scene. I meant the musical underground of course, but to the East Germans it meant political underground. He said there wasn’t one. We exchanged addresses and I heard nothing for months. Then I got a card inviting me over for a meeting at the Palast der Republik, the East German parliament. I was being vetted by a small group of people who were devotees of the sort of subcultural music that was considered dan- gerous in the GDR. Who was I? What did I want? Who did I work for? These were the questions the KGB were asking the Stasi and the same questions were probably being asked by these kids too. After years of monitoring my activities and especially after I had helped to organize the first secret Toten Hosen gig in East Berlin in 1982—disguised as a blues mass church service—the Stasi classified me as a subversive element out to corrupt their youth. I knew music was a weapon the authorities couldn’t really deal with, as it was constantly changing and we could always be one step ahead. Beyond East Berlin, the GDR was shabby, quaint, naive and innocent. It was an exhilarating thrill to travel about in forbidden places and do things you shouldn’t. I also liked the fact that it was untouched by gory advertising.

I as in Intershop:
The most alluring and fraudulent supermarket chain in East Germany. Designed to glean hard western currency from the population of both East and West, it also enticed Westerners to break the law. In Berlin, Westerners could go to the Intershop, which was a prefab shed-like construction directly on the platform of Friedrichstraße underground station. This part of the station was the transfer point between the S- & U-Bahn systems into the West of the city and therefore inaccessible to East Germans. Here you could buy very cheap, duty free alcohol and name brand cigarettes. But there was a catch: Because the GDR was not an officially recognized country, the usual duty free rules didn’t apply. So people were compelled to smuggle stuff back into West Berlin. You would see scores of people frantically sticking cigarettes in their socks and down their underpants in a feeble attempt not to pay tax duty if collared by the West Berlin customs, who would be lying in wait for anyone coming from East Berlin.

J as in Japan:
Great eighties art rock band—like an eighties version of Roxy Music. I always thought Gentlemen Take Polaroids was a very cool album. They had fashion mag style, big hair and shoulder pads. Towards their end they started to become a bit too  bland and much too muso for my taste. It was like they were trying too hard to outdo themselves.