Original subtitles

We are just a small country, so what can we do?

As my father used to say, figure it out for yourself. So that's what we did.

And as a result we did things that ended up influencing the whole planet.

Belgium. The battlefield of Europe.

The place where, in 1815, Napoleon would meet his defeat.

The battle at Waterloo would become the foundation of modern Europe.

And although this battle would prove to be historical, ...

Napoleon was hardly the first to seek rule over the territory that would later become ....

Belgium.

To conquer Europe, one had to go through Belgium.

And to keep the warring nations apart a buffer had to be created.

And so, in 1830, Belgium was founded.

A country for people that had been ruled and conquered so often,

That they didn't really care who was in charge, anymore.

They'd just do as they had always done.

Work the land. Work hard. And then ...

... party harder.

The fairs would only come once a year.

And everyone would go to the fair. Young and old.

This was the one opportunity to dance and to meet girls or boys.

Because back then, there was nothing else.

Tent alongside tent would fill-up.

Where Belgians would be found stomping and hopping, twisting and swinging, ...

... until money and beer ran out.

Young and old took the stage and found their first love, their first drink, their first night out.

And so, the dancer would find himself at the center of the action.

It was the people and the party that mattered.

There was no orchestra. This was just an organ playing.

You might've had a grammophone, but in a roomful of people it would hardly be playing loud enough.

So, if you wanted to play music at a decent volume,

you'd have no other choice than to look for an organ.

For the first time music was mechanical.

It was predictable. You could set your watch to it.

That's what it really is. A mechanical clock, a sequencer.

That's the kettledrum and these are the drums.

Little holes play little notes.

Ten metres of cardboard weighs about 3 to 4 kilos. And that's just one song.

Your walls will be full with songbooks. The tracknames written on each side.

You then pick one out and feed it into the machine.

I'm a "Carton Jockey".

Instead of spinning records like a DJ, I play cardboard to make music.

The very first DJ. Spinning cardboard tracks in the 1920s.

World War II. Again another army moves through Belgium.

Once more, the wheels of conquest traveled throught the kingdom's roads.

Motion under Belgium's rainy skies.

In the wake of the great war's destruction, new hope was found.

The Belgians, industrious as ever, set to rebuilding their nation.

Roads created space for even more movement.

The current plan aims at creating a network of approximately 1000 km of highways.

780 km of secondary roads.

200 km of which are already in use or nearly finished.

Useful constructions that aren't contested by anyone.

And all along the concrete veins appeared new bars.

Snack shops. And even discotheques.

It was hard to believe. Each of these roads had a bar.

Post-war industry gave the Belgians prosperity.

And prosperity allowed for the creation of social security.

Those who had worked for decades, suddenly had money to spend.

As the state decided to turn out some well-earned pensions to the retired.

If you receive a pension, you have money to spend.

You don't have to grow your own lettuce. You buy them in a shop.

Afterwards, if you still have some cash left, you're not going to sit around at home all day.

You'll want to do something. Which means there is a new market.

How can we get these people to spend their money? That's the point, after all.

Before long people would travel to the roads instead of just along them.

Everybody wanted to be part of the new place to party.

"In de 14 Billekens"

You had the "Willem Tell", "De Blauwe Engel" and many more.

These bars were all packed.

And all these people were dancing and swinging, marching and waltzing.

And I couldn't believe my eyes.

In total we must have built 600 to 700 organs for these "roadbars".

And at times, these were all playing simultaneously.

All night long. Until the break of dawn.

It still boggles my mind.

The beer tap went open and was not closed until the keg was empty.

They'd put on a new keg and then opened tap again.

They wanted beer. And they'd have it.

I built "drinking organs". Definitely not church organs.

Meanwhile, in a less festive area of the world, conflict went on between Palestinians and Israelis.

Oil prices sky-rocketed. And in order to diminish their thirst for oil ...

Western European countries introduced traffic-free sundays.

That's when we received our first blow.

You weren't allowed to drive on Sundays.

As if the rising oil-prices hadn't been hard enough for Belgium's party industry.

The government decided to tackle the nation's thirst for beer.

The alcohol tests killed our business.

People became afraid of drinking.

And because they didn't drink, they were reluctant to dance.

And because they didn't dance anymore, they no longer went to the organs.

The end had come for the dance-organs.

But decades earlier, another Belgian had paved the way for a new party to begin.

In 1907 a non-flammable plastic was invented by Belgian chemist Dr. Leo Baekeland.

Bakelite.

This was the first plastic malleable enough to shape in any form.

Bakelite was the first compound to be used as the basis for recorded sounds.

And so a Belgian would ultimately give birth to the record.

In 1958, while Belgium was busy constructing the largest mirrorballs in the world, ...

American inventors were perfecting the vinyl record.

Giving birth to the 45. The stereophonic 7 inch.

I'll play something for you.

With this format a new sound slowly conquered Belgium's nightlife.

Soul music had arrived on the European continent.

Ostend club The Groove, became the premier place for these new sounds to be experienced.

The Groove had American and English records before anyone else.

I thought that I knew a lot about music back then.

But then I went to The Groove and didn't know a single record.

We were shocked by this new music. We had no idea what it was.

We were listening to the music with our mouths wide open.

It sounded like something from another world.

This music was completely new to us.

Back then, we weren't used to many things.

And then I got hooked.

I realised there was much more music than what I could find in the local shops.

The Groove's sound would prove to be contagious.

And slowly a subculture of music lovers would emerge.

All looking for their own sound, with its distinct rhythm.

It would eventually become known as the Popcorn scene.

"Popcorn" is not a music genre. It's the name of a club.

And because it was known for this kind of music, we called this music Popcorn.

It was the temple of Popcorn music.

In this single club in Vrasene, the whole of Belgium gathered.

Walloons, Flemish, but also Dutch, Germans, French.

They all came to Vrasene.

A thousand people gathering on a Sunday afternoon. Together at the Popcorn in Vrasene.

Vrasene, where the hell is that?

It was far away from everything. In the fields.

I rember that it took us a few hours to find the place.

In between the cows and corn nobody would've ever found it.

Were it not, once again, thanks to Belgium's roads.

And all along the roadside you could see the local farmers.

They were sitting on little chairs armed with coffee and beer.

They were watching the people that went to the Popcorn.

Normally a club opens at 9 pm. But the Popcorn opened at 11 am.

These were parties in the afternoon.

Gigantic binge-drinking parties where everyone drank straight from the bottle.

It was fashionable to drink Tuborg beer.

There were trucks filled with Tuborg. Mountains of Tuborg crates.

And everything was gone in a day. Unbelievable.

30° of alcohol, little man.

You could do anything in the Popcorn. Everything was allowed.

People could go wild anywhere. But there it was just that little more wild.

People would visit the drugstore on Saturdays to buy all kinds of medication to party on.

I used to drink a lot of Captagon with Heineken.

You put some Captagon in a bottle of Heineken. You shake it up and drink it.

It gave you an infernal boost.

Regular people didn't approve, though.

There were not only girls dancing with boys. Boys also danced with boys.

That was unthinkable in any other Belgian club.

If you danced with another guy, you'd get thrown out.

But in the Popcorn it was all fine. Come on in, you're welcome.

It's as if the people shared a big secret.

You had The Groove, The Versailles and then The Popcorn in 1971.

And then you had clubs in Antwerp and Brussels.

That's a good thing. There was a growing audience.

An audience that grew immensely.

Soul, Jazz, Ska. But also Rhythm 'n' Blues and Doo-Wop.

Even Broadway musical songs were played. Or even Cha-cha and Latin Music.

The most important thing was the rhythm. The tempo.

80% of the records weren't played at the intended speed.

If you slow it down, the voice changes completely.

We'll slow it down from 45 rpm to 33 rpm + 8.

And this is true Popcorn.

"Comin' Home Baby" by Mel Tormé is a Popcorn classic.

Very special records. To us, these are all special records.

DJ's didn't make a lot of money.

Every penny we earned was invested in new records.

They'd experiment a lot with songs that no one had ever heard before.

You really had to dig for records. The one who dug the deepest ...

I started going to the US in '74.

New York, Philadelphia, Chicago. In all the basements.

To try and find better and rarer records than anybody else could have.

Gigantic basements that had millions of records to choose from.

I was like: "How will I ever get through all of these?"

There was one place ... It was just pallets.

The guy had 3 dogs that had been there for 3 years. Shitting and pissing on everything.

I was picking up records and scraping the shit off. To get to the records underneath.

But the Belgian boys must have done the same.

It was music that nobody really wanted in America. There were no collectors for this kind of music.

It was considered as worthless. Only the crazy Belgians would buy it.

I've got 75,000 records here, but there's no good ones.

Where have they all gone? Have you had someone through here recently?

We had some boys from Belgium a few weeks ago and they took about 2,000 records.

Fucking bastards!

Suddenly everyone started to look for those records.

Unfortunately this led to higher prices.

"I'd Think It Over" by Sam Fletcher is a classic. Hard to find.

It was always very expensive.

In mint condition it's easily worth 300 to 350 euros. Sometimes even more.

Those aren't the most expensive ones.

Some will cost you 500 to 600 euro. Even 1000.

At some point, some people started making bootlegs.

Illegally copied records.

I made some 10" records. Like this 78 rpm.

I put two tracks on each side.

Back then I paid about 75 cents per record. To have them pressed.

It cost me nothing.

And I'd sell them for about 50 euros.

A good way to make a living.

The more entrepreneurial minds of the kingdom ...

... set out to earn money off the increasing demands of the DJs.

All over Belgium, import-stores appeared.

Stores that catered exclusively to the trendsetters of the nation's nightlife.

There must have been hundreds of record stores in Belgium.

Belgium was the "the" country to find records.

Containers full of American overstock records arrived through the port of Antwerp.

They opened the containers and said: "15 cents per record!"

You could take everything you wanted at 15 cents a piece.

Unbelievable And this was in the 70s.

It was crazy.

In Belgium we accept everything. We're really open to importation.

A record store could sell 10 or 20 imported records. Maybe 100, at most.

But if you were to record your own version, you might as well sell a million copies.

"Why Can't We Live Together", those guys sold 1.5 million copies of that record.

When the train is coming through, you better get on board.

This is the "Moskow Diskow" train that arrives.

There's a groove in the machine.

That's better.

What if we make a song about a club on a train? Sure, that's a good idea. How do we do it?

Let's give it the rhythm of a train. That's a good idea.

We make the sound, program the sequencer, change the speed and off we go with the tempo.

A lot of songs were born this way. As a simple idea.

I've always been interested in these special sounds.

The ones we can only create with a synthesizer.

Slowly but surely the Disco Era arrived.

And then everything just exploded.

Pop producers all wanted to add a little synthesizer.

To follow the evolution of modern music.

The sound of "Brasilia Carnaval" is full of oscillators. It went through here and created this sound ...

I programmed the sounds.

Eventually it became so blatantly commercial that everybody had enough of it.

And so, suddenly, there was Punk.

There were rough sounds all over the planet.

For example, The Sex Pistols. And I could name many more.

But we were the first to do it with electronic sounds.

Searing drones, rumbling synths and echoing cries for the apocalypse.

Jean-Michel Jarre is great. But hardly rough.

Kraftwerk is incredible. Even dark and mathematically perfect, but still not rough.

There is no punk in it. No rebellion.

A lot of robots, but no rebels.

But that's exactly what we did have. This rebellion in dance music.

I really felt very strongly, that all those Russian missiles were pointed at us.

There was a dark vibe to the 80s. It was really tangible.

The Cold War was very real.

That dark feeling seeped into the sound of many bands at the time.

The futuristic chrome of the previous decades had crumbled to rust.

The prosperity of the early 70s was all but consumed.

They were called New Wavers, Cold Wavers, Electro Wavers, and so on.

But it was all black to me. Just plain darkness.

And the music sounded black. Dark, obscure, amazing.

A band like Front 242 couldn't have been anything other than Belgian.

To just do your own thing and not minding at all what the accepted ways of doing things are.

Nothing more than dry, harsh sequencing.

The homegrown electronic sounds were programmed, sequenced, harsh and repetitive.

By mixing the darkest wavetracks with obscure songs from the fringes of the pop music establishment

ecclectic DJ’s gave Belgium a sound unlike any other on the planet.

It was quite particular. We didn't really have a name for it.

We called it the music of DJ TC in the Carrerra.

Or the music of Jean-Claude in the Mirano.

The Ancienne Belgique was the Valhalla of Antwerp.

People queued up until the corner. Sometimes from both sides of the block.

The people had to... Two bouncers guarding the door.

Some were allowed in. Others weren't.

It was very hard to get in.

That was special in itself. To say that you managed to get in.

Many people just wanted in to see if all the wild rumours about it were true.

The AB was mythical thanks to its unique style.

There was no other club with the same musical mix. Where you'd hear Au Pairs, Max Berlin.

It was simply very avant-garde for that time.

Absolute "Belgitude".

That's Belgian eclecticism.

Belgium is a country looking for a cultural identity.

And by sampling from different cultures it created a culture of its own.

A patchwork of very different things.

I dare you to play "Bela Lugosi's Dead" to a packed club.

It's not an easy thing to pull off.

They were the first to play Steve Reich. The first to play Klaus Schulze.

That's incredibly abstract music to play in a club.

The best known DJ at the time was Ronnie.

I had a view on the entire dancefloor.

I asked to turn off all the lights and turn on the strobes at a certain time.

So people knew something would happen. But they didn't know what.

And that's when I played "Elle et Moi".

I spent seven months looking for "Elle et moi" by Max Berlin.

You just couldn't find it. So I started saving money and asking everone.

I have 120 euros. Who can sell me that record?

It was simply impossible to find.

I could spend two years looking for a certain record.

And when I did find it I would party for a week.

After a week the needle would almost cut through the record from playing it so often.

Every day, you just went shopping in every record store.

You'd search every store to find the rarest records.

I didn't care if it took me 5 or 6 hours.

Often the owner would close the door.

And I would have to shout to say that I was still in there.

Just to say that, for a day, I would become part of the furniture.

The countless record stores provided fertile soil for the DJs to discover unlikely treasures.

Liasions Dangereuses. For the people that are super cool.

In '85-'86 there was a popular show in Antwerp. Every Thursday on Radio SIS.

It was called "Liaisons Dangereuses".

I remember when we started the show.

Other channels thought we were crazy. This wasn't music that could be played on the radio.

"Liaisons Dangereuses", the show that brings alternative club music to your radio since 1983.

We just wanted to do something different.

We were sick of hearing Depeche Mode and all those bands over and over again.

That was the only way to get musical satisfaction from the radio.

Radio SIS on Thursday night. 8pm until 10pm.

Our music for two hours. And then we had to wait for the next week.

Our old and outdated colleagues at other stations try to make relevant youth programs.

Let them mess about in their ivory towers of schlagers and crooners.

We know what young listeners want. Fun is the game, New Beat is the name.

If all goes well, we should have Leo Kant on the line.

Leo? - Hello.

Tell me, what do you think about this New Beat wave raging through Belgium?

Well, it popped-up overnight. Some new sounds and then they call it New Beat.

But what exactly is it? This New Beat?

The very first New Beat record according to many. "Flesh" by A Split Second.

If you played the record on 33 rpm + 8 it sounded completely different.

The bass deepened and now you could dance to it. Suddenly, you could really hear everything.

I don't know if you can hear it, but the bassline is much more pronounced.

Suddenly DJ's purposely started to play these records at the wrong speed.

And even producers started to record this way, because it was such an interesting sound.

We interpreted the records our way.

Clever independent labels sensed that producing records for the initial avantgarde scene ...

... could bring in new profits.

The sound ruling the discotheques was repackaged, re-released and then named.

New Beat was born.

They re-released the records, because the original version had no success.

They re-released the same tracks, but at a slower speed.

And that's how New Beat came to be.

We didn't want to miss the train. So we started to produce ourselves.

All of us weren't going to wait for the next big thing from the UK or the US.

We'll do it ourselves.

As Popcorn elitists had done before with Soul music ...

... the new breed of record spinners returned to their nature of redefining musical history.

Here are some more notes on tracks.

I'm trying to figure out what I wrote down here.

This is the sequencer. And that's the Prophet 3000.

I did everything in my little basement.

Programming drum patterns. Putting sequences in the Atari.

We create everything at home and we just go to the studio to mix the record.

Let's see where I can find a sample.

I had to be really well-prepared.

In my chaotic life I just wrote it down. A karimba from the TX7 on this or that track.

What exactly is New Beat?

It's more a synthesized sound than a genre.

Maybe a genre, but one created by producers rather than musicians.

Don't you think it's a pity?

It allows me to go crazy, right?

And then you had the Boccaccio, that made the scene explode all over the place.

Everyone wanted to be there. This place was special and unique.

It was almost like a religion.

People specifically went there on Sundays to hear this type of music.

It only existed in Belgium.

It was like a mass for electronic music.

Boccaccio set out to become the holy temple for the New Beat underground.

On Sundays you'd stand in line for three hours. No way to get in.

At 5 o'clock in the morning.

Sometimes we'd arrive at 8 in the morning and still it was filled beyond capacity.

The first time I went to Boccaccio during the New Beat craze,

... they were playing this track.

And I just froze at the entrance.

The music grabbed me so hard, I just started to cry.

Hearing this still give me shivers. It's just so intense.

You entered a dark inferno. Or a slowed-down movie.

It was cramped and eerie.

But that's what the DJ was looking for. This uncomfortably, grisly atmosphere.

And the tempo was psychedelic. It was like a drug.

You could listen to that all night long without getting tired or needing drugs.

That same beat all night. That's absolutely hallucinogenic.

New Beat and House music. Ride on, youth!

I can really let off some steam here.

You just feel as one. As if we're all one spirit.

Boccaccio was a very glamorous club.

Nice lights, beautiful glass dance floor. The DJ box was at the top.

Mirrors everywhere.

It had a discotheque vibe. Which made it even more weird.

Walking in, you expect to hear Donna Summer. "I Feel Love" or something like that.

For me, coming from New York.

And then you just hear the darkest, the most evil sounding music I'd ever heard before.

If you've never seen a laser before, you'll feel quite impressed.

Incredibly loud music. Levels bursting through the roof.

They played really loud. It was barely tolerable.

Later on it's going to be packed full of 3000 French, Dutch and Belgian kids. All going mad.

About 3000 to 4000 people dancing.

It was all exhilarating. If a record like "I Sit on Acid" was played, ...

The hairs on your arms would rise.

There was such atmosphere that everyone would dance like there was no tomorrow.

They all looked like dancing robots.

I never saw anything like it. Not before, not after.

People dressed explicitly in a New Beat style.

It's all in fashion now. The crucifix, Jesus, ... It's fashionable to mix it all up.

You arrive at the party with a killer look. And that's it.

People really notice you. Rather in a place like this.

If you wear this in a small town you'll get suspicious looks.

But here it's okay. We're all dressed-up.

People used to put Volkswagen or Mercedes signs on their jackets.

Smileys, gadgets, yellow hair. All those things.

People went out in disguise.

You had to mind where you parked your VW or someone might steal your logo.

It was unimaginable with any scene before or after.

You wanted to be noticed. Perhaps you were but a mason.

But, going to a New Beat party, you were a star.

We are all stars in New Beat.

Extravagance and abundance became an escape.

The unique electronics of New Beat, with its fashion sense and dancing style ...

... offered a way out of the dreary decade.

Luckily there was a reel-to-reel player at Boccaccio. At 4 in the morning we would come with new work.

We put it on the reel-to-reel, pressed play and watched the audience.

If they didn't jump high enough, we'd just go back to the studio.

Some more high-hats. Increase the volume of the crashes.

Smoothening a sound.

Some more distortion.

Does it sound good? Change the bassline a bit. We did this all the time.

Then back to Boccaccio, at 7 o'clock. We asked Olivier to play the tape again.

And off they went. So it was finally right.

Here you go, Renaat. Master this.

Give them a round of applause. Morton, Sherman & Bellucci.

We sold 60,000 copies of "Move Your Ass".

But they never played it on the radio. Even if it was the number 1 record.

It's not real music. Drum machines aren't real.

It plays by pushing on a button. This couldn't be good music.

The media didn't pay us any attention. We should really thank them for it.

The radio wouldn't play it, so you had to go out to a club to hear it.

You'd have a test pressing, as was my personal experience.

You give it to the DJ who plays it once. You leave your record with him.

You come back a few weeks later and he plays the track again.

It's still unreleased.

The first notes play.

The crowd rushes to the dancefloor. Girls dancing and screaming.

And then you know. Wow, I made it!

If the DJ played a track ten times on a night, you knew that it was a hit.

The kids that went to those clubs only listened to that kind of music.

They didn't want to hear anything else.

When Madonna released "La Isla Bonita", she was kicked-off of the first spot.

And this by New Beat groups that came out of nowhere.

An awful lot of records were sold. 10,000 to 15,000 copies with ease.

And the next, and the one after that. Every week. Like it was nothing.

When I came here to Brussels in 1988, the whole place was crazy.

In every shop I would see T-shirts with New Beat smiley faces. Everywhere.

Every bar you went into, they were playing New Beat.

Some designers had developed a shirt with tombstone pictures of grannies on it.

A Belgian grandmother.

A gravestone's effigy on a shirt.

Grandmothers and badges. We have the entire collection.

It seems that there now are some imitators.

The porcelain effigies are disappearing from graveyards everywhere.

People actually thought that the shirt's picture was ripped off a gravestone.

The result was that kids everywhere started doing just that.

It was as if the whole country had fallen in love with it.

The popcharts, the top 10 in Belgium at that time, had 6 or 7 New Beat records in it.

There was a record store called USA Import. One in Brussels and one Antwerp.

They had people queueing up every Thursday. The day that new records were released.

They ripped the records from each others hands as they wanted the tracks they'd heard at Boccaccio.

At the Gaité or the 55. They really needed those records.

I was in a record store one day, when a salesman appeared.

He had a case full of records. Apparently all New Beat.

And the store owner said he'd take them all.

It was madness. People bought anything with their eyes closed.

If the cover said it was New Beat people would buy it.

I looked at how it was produced.

It turned out quite easy to be made. To add certain elements together.

That's how I ended up producing one New Beat record after the other.

The New Beat movement was still considered underground.

But its success was stretching and pushing the very definition of the word.

A lot of money was going around. There really was no recession.

Those were the golden days. We'd go into the studio at 8pm.

And the record had to be finished by 6 am.

While Belgium's days were grey the nights were all but dark.

The dance floors lit up with lasers and sweat.

Studios bathed in flickering screens of newly discovered creativity.

That's how we did it. Some samples here and there.

It's probably not our best track, but we released it and the sold 30,000 copies.

Just like that.

We had to act fast, because we knew it wouldn't last. It was much too unreal.

I may have made two or three good tracks. All the rest were fillers, really.

The scene was about to get its breakthrough anthem.

I was talking to Peter Vanderhallen, the owner of the Confetti's club.

And he said: "You have all the equipment. Why don't you make some New Beat?"

I went home and turned on my synthesizers. I played around a bit with the music.

Three hours later I drove back with my tape of "This Is the Sound of C".

That's when we created a group with an entirely fabricated image.

I wanted to give New Beat a face, an image.

Peter was already working as a waiter in the club.

And he always stood out.

People wanted to order their drinks from him, because he was so funny and weird.

Now here's today's leading Beat song: "Confetti's"!

It's really nothing more than a playback show, then.

I think that depends on who is on stage. - It's a "visual" playback show.

Let's clearly mention the visual aspect. It seems very important to me.

As much as Confetti's was a hit with the masses ...

... the group was reviled by the original New Beat fanatics, ...

... who saw it as a sign that mass-market commercialisation of their beloved scene had begun.

We are now driving to "Diamonds" in Halle.

Don't you guys have anything to say?

As it was all playback it was easy to travel between clubs with your group.

The DJ needed just your record. You just needed a microphone.

It didn't even need to be plugged in.

It was all really easy. In and out.

Money in the pocket. Off to the next place.

How much do The Erotic Dissidents charge for a performance like this?

1000 euros.

And how long is he performance? - 20 minutes.

It was all artificial. There was no pure talent involved.

The biggest talent you could have in a New Beat band was your presence.

The attitude that you gave to a certain song.

It allowed me to flirt with girls in New Beat clubs.

Hi there, honey. I'll put you in my New Beat band.

It's a great way to pick up girls.

There was serious money to be made. And other musicians started to notice.

Returning from skiing I saw my answering machine filled with messages from Rocco.

I asked him to use his machinery like he had done for New Beat music.

Instead of ...

Please do ...

I remember recording it all in 10 minutes.

As soon as it appeared on television, it was an immediate success.

Eventually, a New Beat record was released almost every day.

Yet, they all kept selling.

It was a sudden explosion.

Who has kidnapped me?

Even the grim kidnapping of the country's former prime-minister ...

... was turned into nothing more than a commercial novelty.

Who has kidnapped me?

My coat was torn. My pipe. As a result I was left in shirt and underwear.

I'm VDB. I am the prime-minister.

You shall not perish.

There was too much of it. Too much of too much.

That was the turning point.

For two years Belgium danced along the New Beat parade.

And then it came to an end. Finally.

New Beat is dead! - Are you certain of it?

New Beat is dead. - Doesn't it still live just a little bit?

No, New Beat is dead! It's dead!

I think a music scene always goes up and down.

Always going up and then it goes down.

It goes through shifts and changes.

When New Beat was eventually on its way down, something else was coming up.

From New Beat's grave, however, knowledge and experience were reaped.

And the original trendsetters had evolved into something new.

As it turned out, New Beat had been just a phase.

An infantile playground for something much bigger.

Good evening. Have you ever heard of IPEM?

IPEM is a musical laboratory.

The Institute for Psycho-Accoustics and Electronic Music.

One of the few Belgian institutions with a worldwide reputation.

You create a sound. And make it to your liking.

You give it the colour you intend. And then use it in a composition.

The first element is the sinus-wave.

Later on we'll add other sounds.

Most of all, some noise.

Your choice of synthesizer is very important.

Not everything sounds good.

I mostly remember it as playing with those boxes and machines.

Let me demonstrate the importance of sound in techno music.

This is pretty useless. But with just a turn of the right knob ...

The sounds it produced. It's just madness.

What can we do with this machine? I start here and then send the sound through there.

Then it passes through a filter and an amplifier and it comes out here again.

You need some noise and some white noise. It passes through a sequencer and filter and so on.

You connect the VCO to the VCF. And the VCF to the VCA.

By now everyone knows what VCF and VCA means.

Every laptop has some emulations.

These are three oscillators which can disrupt each other in a chaotic way.

This results in rhythmic and sound patterns that you wouldn't have thought of yourself.

Who are these Flemish wonderboys that make tons of money abroad?

And what is the secret of their success?

When people talk about the Belgian sound, they probably don't mean Plaza's "Yo-Yo".

More likely they'll be talking about records like Lords of Acid's "I Sit on Acid".

That was a typical Belgian record of the time.

We rose higher every single day. Performing for clubs that were more than packed.

Even in Tokyo.

It still gives me goosebumps

I think it's often a forgotten part of the history.

Belgium's importance in electronic music throughout the 1990s.

And not just within the dawning international dance scene.

Belgium's techno producers instantly changed the face of Pop music worldwide.

That's when people really started to know about Belgium.

People just didn't expect music coming from Belgium. It's this uncool country in Europe.

What do they know about music?

Clearly a lot, as Belgian producers had found the perfect formula ...

... to claim the top charts everywhere.

The people here had a lot more experience making and listening to electronic music.

So they were primed to produce it.

Which is why there was a very distinctive wave of Belgian techno.

Because producers here already understood electronic music and how to make it.

We probably had the talent to create a certain sound.

Sounds that others wouldn't dare to use.

Often very aggressive sounds.

Although we came from an incredibly cool sound, most songs sounded like a march.

That's what a lot of people said. That this music is too cold, it's too robotic, it's...

It was kind of an aggressive sound, which I liked.

Coming from rock, I grew up listening to Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath.

So this was the dance music equivalent of that.

Which I thought was great. Just darker.

Everything in New York was about happy and uplifting. Here it was all about just... you know.

We had things like Olivier Abbeloos, "Quadrophonia".

This is a typically Belgian track.

It really has that Belgian sound.

An English breakbeat, a little New Wave. It's a mix of everything.

You can really hear the "melting pot".

And then the orchestral element.

Everyone's gone that way now. Trying to make the hardest record around.

Everyone is looking at Belgium. What's coming out next?

Well, I'll make that. Straight away.

Anything that comes into the shops. Within 2 weeks someone else from England has already made it.

The Dj's are playing it. It's a big influence.

The UK rave sound is completely based on hearing the Belgian riffs on those records.

I could insulate back then, if you put one of these records in a record shop,

... that's Belgian and that's Belgian.

The 4/4 beat, the hardcore Belgian 4/4 beat.

The strength of one bar, one riff. I think that's emphasized in hardcore techno.

For example, T99's "Anasthasia".

That scene exploded in Japan.

"T99" or "Quadrophonia", you know ...

Hold on, I think we blew the fuses.

Something others were afraid to do.

A thicker sound was a better sound.

It had to bite you, get to you.

It had to make you high without taking drugs.

It's hard to explain to kids today. Back then, this music was simply shocking.

You have no idea. It was like turning a completely new page.

I picked up a stack of R&S records. I started listening to them and they were all good.

I decided to send them some stuff.

I was making tracks in New York. But they were selling loads of them in Europe.

In my head "Energy Flash" always will be a Belgian record.

A week later he makes "Mentasm".

Release that shit! You sure?

You bet! Send it over or I'll come and get it.

I sent him the only copy that existed.

What if it got lost in the mail or got damaged somehow or whatever?

We wouldn't be able to recreate that track. The track would be gone.

Renaat had a great sensibility for bringing people together.

He gathered the right people in the right place at the right time.

R&S is the leading label.

I wanted to shock people. Make sure it doesn't sound like anything else.

Do what you have to do. You won't hear me meddle.

Even if i don't like it. You won't hear me.

The studio was at his place. In a tiny flat in Ghent.

20 square metres.

I never really knew what I was doing. I guess that's the punch line.

You're just a kid with a lot of love for the equipment and this music.

But what exactly am I doing? You just play with buttons.

Does it sound good? Record!

When coming home from the movies, we had to crawl over the sleeping bags.

For years we lived without any privacy.

Renaat was 36 or 37 years old. Just a little younger than I am now.

I couldn't imagine my home being invaded by a bunch of kids making weird noises.

I'd go crazy within the hour.

It's incredible what he suffered through out of love for music.

We had the privilege of being the first ones to do this.

It hadn't been done before. Everything was possible.

Everything we did was new.

And whenever I put on a Bonzai record, the whole place would go berserk.

This one is dedicated to my friend, Mr. Robert Armani.

When people really want to party, they come to Belgium.

Discos, dancings, clubs, ...

Whatever one liked to call them, they were all over the country.

Once more, concrete roads were the night's prime destination.

This really is the road of discotheques.

All these clubs suddenly began playing this new kind of music.

The megaclub idea was born in Belgium.

It's more than a way of partying. It's a youth culture with thousands of followers.

A subculture with it's own codes and conducts. Which are rarely understood by the outside world.

It's party time!

There was this whole group of consistent people that lived in their cars.

They showered at gas stations and camped on parking lots.

They went from one club to another.

They would gladly drive 1000 km every weekend.

Going from one club to the next. One club would close doors.

They'd go to the next one that opened.

In Belgium we went out on Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday.

And that was quite unique.

I remember going to a club on Thursday night.

Party until the early hours of the morning.

And then you'd go to another one. It just didn't stop.

People that would go out Thursday night and came home on Tuesday without sleeping.

And then it just started again on Wednesday. Going to other clubs in Brussels, Antwerp or Ghent.

People slept on Wednesday. You had the club, the afterclub, ...

Go to another one and another one.

The after-after club.

Then the club again, and then ...

Only in Belgium.

This is mainly because Belgium has no statutory closing time.

I closed when all the people had left.

I didn't have a planned closing time.

Where do you come from, Miss? - Arras, France.

We heard about this party in Frankfurt, so we drove here.

There's a wicked party tonight. We'll gladly drive the distance.

You could see the license plates: French, Dutch, English, ...

It was a gathering of all of Europe. It wasn't just Belgians there.

Ultimately, even in clubs like Extreme, people came for the music.

Here, people could hear a kind of music that they couldn't find anywhere else.

Electronic music did bring people together. It did connect more.

How can you explain such a thing? That's a good thing to point out.

In this movement there are no differences. It brought people closer together.

The hippie-feeling was definitely there. It thought we'd finally change the world.

The new youth. I'm not kidding. I really believed in it.

This generation will change the planet.

It was the XTC of course, I hadn't quite figured that out.

I hadn't understood, that is was just that.

We shouldn't be afraid to talk about all those drugs.

Amphetamines stimulate the nervous system.

This means that they have a stimulating and arousing effect.

But mainly they prevent fatigue.

XTC gave you an euphoric feeling, as did the music. So they really went well together.

They combined well together. At first.

Until the commercial channel did a report on XTC.

Dance temples, drug temples.

I was playing records at Café d'Anvers, when people came in that never went dancing.

But they'd heard about drugs on television and wanted to know where they could get some XTC.

There is no hard evidence for a connection between XTC and traffic accidents.

There are, however, many accidents that remain without clear cause.

We've been overtaken by the democratization of drugs.

This is MDMA.

I sell on average between 150 and 300 pills. And they cost about 20 euros a piece.

You kicked a dealer out and another one came in.

It was hard to manage. It had no end.

Parents are panicking.

Local authorities order the closure of clubs.

The police conducts raids.

We were considered to be the devil.

If things continue as they do, we'd rather see the Boccaccio gone.

We're open again, next week.

I'd prefer to see the Boccaccio move to Paris.

Other clubs are also being observed by police forces.

When I moved my club closer to Brussels, it was an immediate success.

Disturbance of the peace.

The mayor has, quite succesfully, done all he could to close us down.

A group of 150 policemen had the club surrounded.

They came at 8 in the morning. It was jam-packed.

They held hands and encircled the building.

And despite the whole show they put on, they found practically nothing.

At first view nothing too spectacular. A knife and something similar to hedge shears.

It was sensationalism instead of information.

When reading the newspapers, you'd see a new club being raided every week.

After Boccaccio, last Saturday, the Balmoral has now been raided.

This afternoon the police sealed the premises of megaclub the Globe.

The Mayor of Lokeren has decided to close down the Cherry Moon.

One of the most successful megaclubs in the region.

Three months ago, the Mayor of Affligem ordered the closure of Extreme.

The raids happened one after the other. During two, three years time.

Seven of the ten House clubs have been closed in barely six weeks time.

Boccaccio is closed. Balmoral is closed. Jerry's in Diest is closed. What's still left for us?

Today the building was torn down. Construction of a fast-food restaurant is planned on the site.

To me, it's an attack on our freedom. Why can't we go dancing on Sunday?

We don't all have the need to go for a walk in the woods on Sunday.

Or to go shopping.

Why not go out on Sundays to have a drink and party?

To simply have a party. To celebrate life.

It's part of Belgian nature.

But in order to gain control over a population that makes its own rules ...

... authority felt compelled to silence a movement at the top of its game.

To me it's the time between '85 and '95. Those are the years that the world was watching us.

It was made in Belgium. The best music was made by the Belgian producers.

Most of the labels were from Belgium.

I'm not going to call it the Golden Years, as that sounds too much like a veteran.

Belgium had some very interesting movements. Right now, it's all a bit saggy.

Before, they did their homework. Digged and searched.

Afterwards, they felt content of their place.

We're the best now. That's fine.

And we've been well overtaken.

A population silenced, divided and lost.

Until the power of Belgian random inventiveness rises again.