For years my routine on Sunday mornings in Berlin was disciplined. I would wake to an alarm at 7.30am. Waiting for the kettle to boil, I would fix a salmon and mozzarella sandwich, wrap it in clingfilm and put it in my gym bag along with an orange, three protein bars and club-wear of shorts and vest. After cycling in the crisp morning air down into the district of Friedrichshain, I’d arrive at the nightclub ready for the day.
I moved to Berlin in 2016, prompted by the sense that I had exhausted Ireland and Ireland had exhausted me. In Dublin I had survived on a pittance as an adjunct lecturer in musicology. In Berlin I got by more easily freelancing, living flamboyantly alone on the 20th floor of an austere East Berlin tower block.
In Berlin I became a daytime clubber; Sunday morning was when I hit the club, when there was more room on the dance floor, and the sleep-deprived faces around you were fun and loose. As a thirtysomething clubber, I had more energy during the day to dance for hours sober, occasionally breaking to snack.
My club was Berghain, founded in 2004 in the ruin of a GDR power station. Part of the kick of being at Berghain was simply observing everything. Straight couples embracing in jeans and T-shirts. Gay men in groups with leather harnesses. Fashionistas and tartan punks and genderqueers. It felt like a city in miniature. But mostly I was there to dance to techno.
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When I would try to explain to people back in Ireland, they would find it odd. While my phone was pinging away from a WhatsApp groupchat discussing the hurling game on TV, I was lying back watching trippy laser lights flicker over the dance floor. My family back in Gweedore in Co Donegal gave up calling me on a Sunday – midweek was better.
For Berliners, clubbing on a Sunday isn’t unusual. The city’s generous opening hours date from 1949, when Heinz Zellermayer, a West Berlin hotelier, persuaded the American administration that removing the night-time curfew would affirm western democracy over the draconian closing times of the Soviet East. “Mayhem only comes when the bartender has to say ‘closing time,’” he argued. Zellermayer’s progressiveness won out, and since then, you can go out in Berlin any time you want.
Another Berlin party some of my friends preferred was Fandango, cofounded by Irish DJ and promoter Mark Gill. Fandango’s main Berlin base was on the shore of Plötzensee, a lake with a sandy beach in a remote city park. “For sustained clubbing experiences,” says Gill, “light, oxygen, space and less stimulating areas to chill can greatly affect the longevity, atmosphere and after-effects of your event on a clubber.”
Fandango starts at 6am on Sunday and runs on into the day and night. “There is a nice feeling to a 6am start,” says Gill. “We receive a blend of all-night clubbers seeking continuation, then secondly a wave of eager individuals keen to wake up early and go to a party.”
Across the sector in Berlin, people are creating new narratives about the club experience, its cultural richness, and the impact – positive and negative – it can have on wellbeing.
A promoter that stands out in this regard is Overflow, a series of “sensory rave spa” pop-up events around Berlin run by cognitive neuroscientist Aoife McGuinness and creative strategist Jessie Dymond..
The idea for Overflow originated at a warehouse rave in East Berlin years ago, when a friend playfully washed McGuinness’s feet in a sink: “And I was like, foot baths at the rave – this is genius!” It occurred to McGuinness that sometimes what people might benefit from most at a club, instead of substances, was “a foot bath or a little massage, or to smell some essential oil”.
Overflow started as an after party – for their first event in 2023, they brought over Irish harpist Róisín Berkeley – but has since expanded to run pop-ups at nightclubs and festivals offering sensory zones where people lie together on vibrating beds, with soft lighting and essential oils. They have also hosted a somatic rave – a workshop blending music with nervous system regulation through guided breathwork and somatic movement practices – and a sensory exploration workshop, which invited people to tune into the different senses – taste, touch, smell, sound – and reflect on how music affected them.
Earlier this year Overflow published its Rave Wellbeing Report. Drawing on a detailed literature review and interviews with 143 clubbers, the research explored how clubbing shapes the emotional and physical wellbeing of its participants. Sixty-five per cent of respondents said clubbing enhanced their overall quality of life; 61 per cent said it helped them express their true selves; and 50 per cent said they experienced personal growth or emotional release while clubbing.
It is clear from this research, and the other inventive work going on in the clubbing sector in Berlin, that the facile old narratives – clubs as places just for rowdy young people to get wrecked – are out of step with our times. In reality clubbing gives people of all types deep experiences of community and selfhood.
One thing I particularly like about Berlin club culture is that the dance floor can be all-ages. At Berghain on a Sunday evening, most people are in their 30s, 40s and 50s. One time I found myself dancing by an 86-year-old woman with long braided hair, brought by her grandson as a Mother’s Day gift. Another senior citizen I’ve danced beside at Berghain is Britt Kanja, a former model and club owner turned woman about town.
“Clubbing for me is dance,” she says. “Souls moving to the same rhythm, full of the joy of being one with it all through music.” To those holding on to the attitude that clubbing is solely the preserve of hedonistic youngsters, “it’s all in your mind,” she says. “If you want to keep your horizons narrow and stop having joy after a certain age, it’s up to you. Fortunately, I don’t have to move within the limits that others want to set for me.”
I have come to realise that, when dancing sober for hours to techno, what I am basically doing is meditating. I have created a whole routine around it. Dancing in the darkness, focused on the hypnotic techno, I close my eyes. Immersed in movement and sound, I feel my everyday self gradually dissolve. Later my senses and body feel refreshed. The whole experience usually makes waking up on Monday morning more pleasant, everyday stress having been washed away.
Wearing my musicologist’s hat, I understand the scientific reasons for this. Repeated cross-lateral bodily motion as we dance can link the two brain hemispheres via their connecting nerve bridge, the corpus callosum, which effects a sense of calm (as with binaural beats, which do the same thing). Cross-lateral movement when dancing also produces BDNF (brain-derived neurotrophic factor), stimulating brain activity. Also relevant is neural resonance theory (NRT), whereby, according to the neuroscience, listening or moving to music synchronises our brainwave frequencies with those of the music. This in turn creates a feeling of merging with the music, and with the people dancing around us.
A few years into my Berlin Sunday clubbing routine, I learned I was autistic. Becoming aware of my neurodivergence has helped me make sense of why I find clubbing so appealing. Within the safe space of the club, the darkness is immersive; the music, too, creates a calming multisensory environment, transporting me away from that everyday world in which I am always obliged to mask and give an account of myself. Nothing matters when I am dancing. Clubbing also helped me feel comfortable enough to break from some inherited societal hang-ups around gender and sex, which I also write about in the book.
These days, my Sunday routine has changed. I don’t go to Berghain so much, opting instead for more grassroots, less commercialised parties. Nor do I still live in the clouds in that East Berlin tower block, having moved north with my partner to a quieter district with lots of green space. My book, charting explorations of self-discovery, has its share of salacious moments. But now I’m more interested in dance as meditation.
Do I still go clubbing most weekends, though? Hell yeah. When people ask why, I tell them that, for me, it’s like yoga, gym and therapy rolled into one.
Berghain Nights: A Journey Through Techno and Berlin Club Culture by Liam Cagney is published by Reaktion Books on October 1st.
