It is "the most controversial subject in dance music", if we are to take at least [URL="http://www.residentadvisor.net/forum-read.aspx?id=47657&page=1#p27"]one clubber's word for it[/URL]: the door policy at Berghain, the premier techno club in [URL="http://www.guardian.co.uk/travel/berlin"]Berlin[/URL]. Certainly, while lots of clubs are difficult to get into, few others manufacture quite the same atmosphere of pants-wetting threat as Berghain.
The whole entry process is creepy. A winding cattle pen funnels you in pairs towards the door, where the bouncers loom, radiating all the approachability of an IED. One is short, brown-haired, nondescript. The next is 7ft tall, bald, with a sloping forehead, wearing a stevedore cap and jackboots, like a cartoon of evil. And the last guy you can't even see until you step, blinking, into the spotlight. His name, appropriately, is Sven, and he sits on a chair behind the first two, dark and hulking, long hair flowing, bullets of metal stuck into him at various points. He's difficult to look at for more than a second because of the tattoo of barbed wire crawling over his face. (Here's a video of Sven in [I]artiste[/I] mode, looking [video=youtube;VJle26E-Lsg]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VJle26E-Lsg[/video], I can assure you, than he does in a dark corner of an old power station at 4am.)
Then the selection process begins. The bouncers take a look at your face and do one of two things:
- Wave you inside.
- Tell you to leave and never return.
At peak hours – 4-10am, depending on the night, when the queue can stretch hundreds of metres and two hours into the distance – as many as 50% of eager club-goers are turned away. But how do Sven and his friends choose? No English-speakers? No girls in groups of more than three? No plaid shirts? The only consensus among Berlin's clubbers is that it has nothing to do with how good-looking, stylish or "cool" you are.
"Getting turned away from Berghain happens to everyone," says Felix of the Circus hotel's restaurant, Fabisch, which also employs a former Berghain doorman. The club has its roots in the gay scene but most nights has a very mixed crowd – and it's exactly this variety that the bouncers are trying, it appears, to maintain. In the interests of keeping the club a mix of gay and straight, men and women, stylish and laid-back, open to foreigners but with a German underground feel, Berghain engages in explicit social engineering to keep its reputation as the world's best club.
When I went a few weeks ago, two girls in front of me with chic facial studs were denied entry for no apparent reason. As I shuffled into the spotlight, hastily removing the H&M earflap cap that in Berlin brands me thoroughly as a tourist, Shovel-jaw yelled something. My non-German-speaking girlfriend, guessing, held up two fingers. "Zwei," she said. Looking bored, Shovel-jaw waved us through. We were in!
Suddenly I was staring into the chest of another gigantic figure shouting orders in German, and my girlfriend was being asked to approach a desk. Getting confused, we both turned and bumped into each other, lost in a maze of heads and tattoos and metal gates. Eventually, like a bumper car pushed into a corner, I found myself before a blond man in a T-shirt, guarding a door.
"Um," I said, my voice breaking like the fast-food employee in The Simpsons. "I don't know where I'm going."
He said something in German.
"I'm really sorry, I don't speak German," I said. "Is this the door to the club?"
The door was marked "Private". He pointed to the sign and raised an eyebrow. As I got my bearings, I realised I'd somehow managed to walk into a corner on the direct opposite side of the room from the ticket booth and door leading to the coat check. Trying to look casual but dignified, I excused myself, took my girlfriend's hand and went the right way.
The bouncer looked at a friend. "Them?" he said, loudly, in English. "Really?" They both shook their heads, sadly.
But if humiliation, arbitrariness and abject fear aren't part of your definition of "intimidating", let's hear what is – who are the world's scariest bouncers and where can we find them?
[SIZE=1]http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/musicblog/2010/mar/29/berghain-berlin-clubs-door-policy[/SIZE]