SIDEBAR - THE LOVE PARADE

Every July, Berlin, Germany, as host of the annual Love Parade, becomes the temporary centre of the world of electronic dance music. Organized in 1989 by planetcom, a company affiliated with the defunct E-Werk club, the parade was registered with the city as a political demonstration for peace, joy, and pancakes and until 1997 was held on the Kurfurstendamm, West Berlin's main shopping street. The first Love Parade consisted of a couple of vans playing techno music for a crowd of about 300 fans, but the event soon grew into a festival that attracted corporate sponsorship, heavy coverage by MTV Europe, and many more spectators; in 1997 estimates of crowd size ranged from 750,000 to 1,500,000 people. Each year the city threatens to ban the Love Parade for environmental or safety reasons, but politicians have found it advantageous to support the event. Although the parade itself gets most of the media attention, the real point for the fans is the hundreds of parties in Berlin's clubs during the weekend, when nearly every major star of the electronic dance music world appears. Ed Ward