I kept practicing mixing the same records (Ellis Beggs and Howard - Big Bubbles No Troubles and Dennis Edwards - Don't Look Any Further) day in, day out for a few months. With time I extended my attempts to mix to other records but still mixed the two tracks at least for half an hour every day. to the point that I knew them by heart. From the beginning, I had a crush on electronic sounds and the reason is possibly the first track that I ever heard in Germany: Shake The Disease by Depeche Mode.
We had no access to pop music in Iran beyond Michael Jackson and Wham and hearing the refreshing sounds Depeche Mode used totally blew me away. In November 1989, slowly approaching my long-awaited 18th Birthday something happened that nobody, and I mean really nobody had seen coming: The sudden fall of the Berlin Wall. Living in West-Berlin had always a feeling of living on the edge of a huge, sharp knife.
Nowhere in the world were you so close to the Cold War as in Berlin. If things went south one day, Berlin was probably the first place to get vaporized by a nuclear warhead. The Iron Curtain seemed so solid that nobody even in their wildest dreams expected it to fall. And then suddenly things happened so fast and a sequence of lucky circumstances led to the historical opening of the borders of East Germany.
Families reunited for the first time after 28 years, strangers hugged each other on the streets of West-Berlin. Many tears of happiness were shed on the 9th of November 1989. For a few months, you could tell on the streets who was from the East. They had their own fashion if you want to call it that. When I turned 18 and finally was officially allowed to dj, the club was full of former “Ossies” as we called them and as a welcome gesture, we granted them a free beer if they showed us their ID. There was this fabulous atmosphere of „overcoming darkness“ and liberty in the city and we all enjoyed it very much.
What we didn’t enjoy that much was that the West-Berlin club culture rapidly died, you might even say overnight. Everybody was talking about illegal parties in weird locations in East Berlin, which was much more exciting than the good old West-Berlin business as usual.