#Mark reeder full#
“Berlin was full of people like me,” Mark tells us, referring to the sea of draft dodgers, misfits, and artistic outlaws who wandered into the enclave of West Berlin. This slight young man soon took to wandering around Berlin wearing his favourite military uniforms, or a long black leather coat with wide lapels that made him look like a member of the Gestapo. “It was that moment of realisation that you’re in Berlin.” For someone who always felt like an outsider in Manchester, he sensed he might have found a home here. “This is like 10 o’clock in the morning,” Mark remembers. As he entered the Eckkneipe and asked if anyone spoke English, he was greeted by a very tall transgender woman with bright red hair and ‘horror show’ white make-up. Walking down Winterfeldtstraße in Schöneberg, he noticed a small bar that was open. On Mark’s first morning in Berlin, he went out to get some change so he could call his mum. In the end, some activist squatters from Kreuzberg moved in and saved the tenement from the wrecking ball by throwing Molotov cocktails at the police, some of them from Mark’s former balcony. He ended up staying for eight months without paying a pfennig in rent.
Coming from a council house in Manchester, Mark had never seen anything like it.
It had six rooms, parquet floorboards, four-metre-high ceilings, and a white marble bathroom.
#Mark reeder free#
The student who gave Mark a lift to Berlin offered him free accommodation – an apartment in a soon-to-be-torn-down building. As he passed glitzy Kurfürstendamm and entered war-scarred streets, this city felt strangely familiar. When 20-year-old Mark Reeder was travelling around West Germany in 1978, looking for obscure krautrock and synthesiser records by the likes of Tangerine Dream that he couldn’t find in the UK, he finally hitchhiked to the half-destroyed former capital that he describes in B-Movie as being “in a state of emergency.”Īs Mark approached West Berlin along a gloomy East German transit road, he had no idea what to expect apart from some clichéd images from Cold War spy movies. He believes it’s the same for young people coming to the city today. Mark is still in Berlin because, despite all the changes, it still inspires him to do his thing. It’s certainly never been about the money. It’s always been about simply doing your thing – no matter if a few collaborators get famous along the way. Mark was the one who suggested to Nick Cave that he move to Berlin from London (the singer arrived on his doorstep soon after) he brought Joy Division to play their only show in West Berlin shortly before his friend Ian Curtis died he signed Paul van Dyk to his label MFS and introduced the DJ prodigy to trance music he was among the small crowd of friends at the first Love Parade in 1989 before that, he staged illegal punk rock gigs in East Berlin, despite the Stasi watching his every move. In the same way he came to Berlin for a short visit in 1978 and somehow never left, he tends to just fall into things.īut if you think about it, Berlin might not be Berlin if it wasn’t for B-Movie’s humble protagonist. Mark has never courted fame, never cultured some grand narrative of his life. The film never received a cent in funding and was done for the hell of it a bunch of enthusiastic friends pooling resources to remember a time that was rapidly being forgotten. Despite all of this, the Mancunian sitting before me, in the same neighbourhood he has lived in for over three decades, never expected to become the figurehead of an era he struggles to even remember at times.
After Taiwan, Mark will DJ at the Sydney Opera House with New Order, for whom he recently remixed a track, ‘Singularity’, the video of which is composed of footage from B-Movie – Mark helped inspire the band’s electronic sound in the early 1980s after taking Bernard Sumner to some Berlin clubs.
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