Helmut Geier, or DJ Hell to his followers, understands something about his craft that most of his contemporaries are loath to admit. Not only is Geier unafraid to say it, he even included it in the liner notes of his 1998 release Munich Machine.
To be a DJ, he says, 'you don't need to know f*** about music.
You only have to pose with some instruments or studio equipment and everybody [gets excited].'
Despite his highly contentious views, no one's denying Geier has excited club-goers since launching Munich's electroclash scene in the mid-1990s. In 30-odd years of DJing, Geier has spun punk, new wave, electro and house. He even played hip hop when it was hopping but not yet hip.
DJ Hell says that while the sound he'll bring to Volar tomorrow night will sit somewhere between Chicago acid house and Detroit minimalism, it will also be firmly rooted in German trance.
Thin as a razor strop, Geier (right), 45, was heroin-chic before Kate Moss could fill a size zero. Couture is his admitted passion, along with cars and women, as a recent Berlin exhibition showed. The retrospective of the record label he founded, International Deejay Gigolos, mostly comprised images of him aping Andy Warhol in photos taken with androgynous models cat-fighting while clad in latex. Record covers, a collection of hotel do-not-disturb signs and his vintage Ford Mustang.
If it sounds like what you'd expect from an international deejay gigolo, Geier says he's just having fun. He says he despises the image of many of today's top ranked DJs - the kind who turn up five minutes before a gig starts and demand special drinks, for instance, on their rider. Geier doesn't see himself being that way.