Define Decadence, Darling

Cabaret, Bob Fosse's bit of occasionally entertaining bastardised Brecht, is one of the great unacknowledged sources for British popkultur. There's a wonderful anecdote in Deborah Curtis' Touching from a Distance where she and her new husband Ian sing a version of 'Deutschland Uber Alles' after walking down the aisle.



Just listening to the Radio 2 programme Berlin Sounds Decadent, on the rightly much-fetishised Berlin Period of David Bowie, Iggy Pop and Brian Eno and the presence of Berlin in anglophone pop. Now it would surprise you very little I'm sure to know that these albums are something I've always held as a total benchmark, a glimpse of a Trans-European, utterly modern world unashamedly sung in a Bromley accent. Listening to the programme (a better than standard R2 hagiography, great if like me you're obsessed with the albums enough to buy a jacket like Bowie wears on the Sukita photos for ''Heroes'', otherwise perhaps a little dry- though its rare one gets to hear Neu!, Neubauten, and John Foxx as a talking head given that much airtime) it's noticeable how America is non-existent, except as a shadowy presence: a place escaped from, making it's presence known only by the harnessing of disco to the Munich Machine that marks out the syncopated edges of those records.



The Berlin myth is all pervasive throughout. When listening to a particularly icily electronic Neue Deutsche Welle record one immediately thinks of not of the West where the record was almost always created, but of the eastern sector, an area generally thought to be so cut off from avant-pop that Eurythmics or someone might nearly start a riot when they played there: this in itself a somewhat mythical notion, bearing in mind that the future denizens of Raster-Noton were listening to Byrne-Eno in Karl-Marx-Stadt. Nonetheless, these are Eastern Bloc records, haunted by the huge boulevards (all the better for the tanks to drive down) and sheer open space of post-45 Warsaw and Berlin. My occasional contention about British pop- that only in the late 70s did it catch up with the formal extremism and occlusion of human warmth that the country's architects achieved in the late 50s- is supported by how seemingly everyone with something interesting to say in pop from around 1977-83 inhabited an East Berlin of the mind, barricading themselves into a synthesized plattenbau.



The funny thing is that the Berlin myth, post-reunification, still exists as forcefully as ever. Among a certain kind of art student, scenester or generally the more ambitious form of dosser, the horizon of BERLIN (by which is invariably meant the haunted east) is constant as a place of escape from the lumpen capitalism of London into somewhere more bracing, cold and sharp: a firm blast of the Berliner luft. Full disclosure: since my first visit in 2004 I've dreamt almost constantly of the tragic beauty of Karl-Marx-Allee ('the best place to celebrate the victory of capitalism over socialism', says the FT), the rotting tenements and DDR Modern of Friedrichshain, the weird (for a Londoner) combination of urbanist harshness and civic ease that makes the city so seductive. I was planning to move there for a quite a while, and I'm still slowly polishing up my German just in case. Berlin is for the Londoner a place of ominpresent techno (true, kind of: the city of Berghain, Ellen Allien & Bpitch Control, Rhythm & Sound, Get Physical), radical urbanism (an utter falsehood: the last 15 years of Berliner bauen have, bar odd exceptions, been even more conservative than London, thanks to a depressing Prussian imperial revival which is neo-Nazi if anything: the 'critical reconstruction' of favoured architects like Hans Kollhoff) and incredibly low rents (which is by London standards undoubtedly true, but you could always move to Middlesborough or something).



However Berlin doesn't seem to have infected London like it did 25 years ago, although the population turnover between the cities is probably heavier than it was then. The key point is that Berlin, despite a mild recovery, is still an economic failure, and as 1979 for postpunk or 1992 for rave proved, recessions are cultural accelerators. London's phantasmatic housing boom still keeps it in a mood of absurd positivity, endlessly repeating 'so far so good' until a crash that is unexpectedly long in coming.