[A] night book that I loved was Berghain Nights by Liam Cagney. It’s about all sorts of things: childhood in Donegal, the history of techno and Berlin clubs. I found it a really interesting book, an engaging trip with a companiable narrator. - Wendy Erskine, Irish Times: Books of the Year 2025Cagney speaks to scene titans such as Luke Slater, Eris Drew and Function and creates a compelling narrative, with music at its very core. The accompanying playlists on streaming platforms are essential. - Daryl Easlea, Record CollectorBerghain Nights is a love letter to the city that never sleeps . . . a trip in every sense . . . Berghain Nights reminds us that in times of ugly hegemony, beautiful subcultures thrive in the shadows. It’s a fascinating descent into psychic and physical underworld, and Liam Cagney is a worthy Virgil. This is a visionary book. - Peter Murphy, Irish TimesA great story, really well told – a thumping good read. - RTE Lyric FM, Best of Irish Books 2025Funny and moving. - Journal of MusicCagney traces [how] the Detroit school drew on the radical thought of Afrofuturists and artists like Sun Ra. Early practitioners such as Jeff Mills, who started the music collective Underground Resistance in Detroit, sought “to harness techno’s power of anonymity” to shock people out of the “false reality” of the normative mainstream, freeing them to accept their true desires and live authentically. - Yale ReviewBerghain Nights dives into Berlin’s techno mythology at a moment when the city’s club culture faces existential pressure from rising rents and rapid gentrification. Liam Cagney blends reportage, memoir, and clubland folklore as he roams Berghain’s vast, near-mythic interior, interviews DJs and promoters, and builds up a vivid scene where hedonism and self-discovery blur. From Donegal raves to mushroom-fuzzed epiphanies on the dancefloor, his journey mirrors the cyclical rise and decline of Berlin nightlife itself. The result is a personal and surprisingly tender portrait of a culture fighting to stay alive. - Irish Examiner, Top Ten Music Books of the YearBerghain Nights provides a personal history of the legendary Berlin club and the pounding techno played nightly within . . . Cagney relates the history of techno, from its emergence in deindustrializing Detroit to its explosion in a reunified Berlin, where it was performed in air-raid bunkers, abandoned depots, and the former East German power plant that today houses Berghain. - Robert Rubsam, New YorkerPart memoir, part cultural anthropology, part genealogy of techno—it can also be read as a manifesto for a new way of living, or, at the very least, as Cagney’s attempt to understand what drew him towards the life he has embraced. - Brooklyn RailThe Berlin nightclub Berghain occupies an almost mythical space in club culture. But it is real, still going and the subject of a creative exploration by Liam Cagney. - Una Mullally, The Irish TimesFascinated by Berghain’s strange techno and stranger goings-on, Cagney explores Berlin club culture in all its colour and intensity. A story of the most notorious club in the world that feeds millions into Berlin’s economy, and feeling at home in the most alien of environments. - The Bookseller: LGBTQ+ SpotlightLiam Cagney’s new book, Berghain Nights, which is part-memoir and part narrative non-fiction, explores Berlin’s nightlife scene, and especially its most famous club. It’s brought to life by interviews with some important scene heads, including Luke Slater, Eris Drew and Rrose. - Isaac Muk, HUCKA punishingly evocative odyssey of personal, political and aesthetic transformation through techno - this book made me ache all over for Berlin. - Lias Saoudi, Fat White Family/DeciusLiam Cagney doesn’t just write from the middle of the dance floor. He’s there in the queue, in the club toilets and in dark corners. Zooming between histories of techno, Berlin clubs and his childhood in rural Donegal, this no-holds-barred exploration of dance-floor life describes a site of transformation and repair. - Emma Warren, author of Dance Your Way Home: A Journey Through the DancefloorLiam Cagney's Berghain Nights is far beyond a hedonism manual or coolhunter's itinerary. In fact, it's a deeply felt protest in favour of the utopian impulses endangered by overexposure. His sense of club culture as a precious ecosystem as worthy of preservation as his beloved Grünewald and Donegal bogland, whose surreal, meditative elsewheres he spreads open, until they open across the floors of some of Berlin's most radical and radicalising venues. Cagney is a self-effacing, gentle, and meditative narrator, as comfortably uncomfortable in Kilclooney as he is surrounded by ketamine. He reminds us that club culture belongs to those nowhere people from black and white towns who just want to feel vivid for a moment. His precise, cerebral, and visceral language builds via a scrupulous but never studied attentiveness to a kind of prose Ganzfeld effect. Cagney is all about sensation, not sensationalism. As such, his sentences catch the ecstatic, teeming nothingness on the far side of the self and the far side of the DJ booth. Bracing, transporting, and phenomenally well-sourced, this combination of memoir, music journalism, and social history is a future classic of urban pastoral. - Tim MacGabhann, author of The Black PoolLet Liam Cagney take you on an intense and revelatory journey from Donegal to Berghain. It's a trip that takes in the history of techno, the thrill of nightlife and the freedom of the self. Candid and captivating, Berghain Nights is a deeply exciting book which made me think in new ways about clubbing as an experience. - Wendy Erskine, author of The BenefactorsAn immersive, fascinating whirl through a famous club, but also culture, psychogeography and the things that bind us together. Utterly gripping, often moving and a nostalgic re:up for anyone who has given up on clubbing or music. - Sinéad Gleeson, author of HagstoneAn engrossing, revealing journey through Berlin and techno history - Misha Honcharenko, author of Skin of Nocturnal AppleWith intimate photographs, mind-bending art, and curated playlists for each chapter, Cagney has crafted an experience that welcomes the weird, the queer, the othered—even if one has no prior exposure to techno or club culture. His love for the genre pulses from every page. - Gay and Lesbian Review
