Nowhere beats the German capital for hedonism – which is one reason the price of real estate is rocketing. Can the club scene survive? As its home venue is closed down, we hit legendary party Cocktail d’Amore
It is 1am on a Saturday and the crowd outside
Berlin LGBTQ+ club night Cocktail d’Amore stretches from the door of its venue, Griessmuehle, along the side of the Neukölln Ship Canal and out on to the road. It takes the best part of five minutes to walk from one end of the queue to the other, and these are just the early birds: Cocktail d’Amore opened its doors an hour ago, and will go on continuously for the next 56 hours, ending at 8am on Monday.
You can see why Cocktail d’Amore is such a draw. From a distance, Griessmuehle looks more like a wonderland than you might expect a converted grain mill to look: a haze of multicoloured lights glowing on the canal. Inside, Cocktail d’Amore feels like a Platonic ideal of what a club night should be. The sound system is immaculate, the
music fantastic. While I’m there, at least, it leans towards the kind of sinuous mid-tempo sound that Andy Weatherall jokingly described as “drug-chug”; the late DJ was so enamoured of playing the room at Cocktail d’Amore dubbed the Cosmic Hole that he wrote a track inspired by the experience, Into the Cosmic Hole.