Rockmaster Scott & The Dynamic 3 - Request Line

I'm an electro boy at heart, it's my first true love. Such a misunderstood word that too, as it's been misused and abused for years now. But we all know what electro I'm taking about. The kind make out of 808s, made popular in the 80s, and made by people whose names start with words like "Grand Master" and end with words like "Tronix" or "and the b-boy massive". So far I've heard very little electro in Berlin, apart from the Club Transmediale night in Maria back in February where Claro Intelecto, Andy Scott and Pendle Coven were mixing modern electro elements into deep techno during their excellent live performances.

But apart from that, electro seems a bit short on the ground here. But last Thursday night my cowbell related hunger was finally sated when I stumbled across the best club night I've ever been to in ages, a club/project called Rap History. For a while now they've been running monthly shows where they concentrate on a specific year of the history of rap music. I believe they started on 1979, the next night was 1980 etc, and last Thursday night I was lucky enough to make it down to their 1984 night, where who else but the king of electro himself, The Egyptian Lover, was invited down to DJ, work the mic and fiddle with an 808.

Before the music started there was a showing of the classic (a word I'll probably be using a lot during this post!) hip-hop breakdance movie (and the East Coast's answer to Breakin') Beat Street. The club itself had posters up all around the place of classic 80s hip-hop/rap/electro (it was all pretty blurry back then) artists, and for the cheap sum of 5 Euro you could buy a little box set for each year which came with a mix CD of tracks from that year and a neatly constructed fanzine with articles about all the major acts of that year (all in English so I was able to read it!). These guys really put a lot of attention into the night! Lots of people there were dressed up in old school costume, chains, white gloves, Adidas runners (oh hang on, we all still wear Adidas runners today!) The support DJs, were trying to stick to their rule of only playing tracks released that year , although there may have been some slight deviation. We were treated to such gems as Aleem - Release Yourself (a personal favourite of mine!), CDIII - Summer Jam, The Fay Boys - Can You Feel It, Whodini - Friends, Mr. Groove - One Way, The Beat Box Boys - Eat Em Up, Dough E Fresh - Just Have Fun, and a whole load of other amazingly Fr-Fr-Fr-Fresh b-boy related jams that I couldn't train spot. It was like all my electro Christmases had come at once, and then The Egyptian Lover came on an rocked the place, with a live show that just about beat his Dublin one I supported him at in June '07.

An amazing night which left me grinning like a big eejit, my own gripe was the tendency of Germans to stand around right in front of the stage and not dance, what's with that? Admittedly it wasn't all of them. Oh, and running this on a Thursday night is definitely going to affect my Friday work attendance! You can get a short 1983 DJ mix from one of the residents here: http://www.raphistory.net/. Unfortunately my camera's out of juice and the charger is still in Ireland (I'll be getting my stuff shipped over any day now, of course they've been saying that for the past three months, argh!) but here's a crappy camera phone video to keep you going: The Egyptian Lover apparently likes girls