Punk photos of the eighties: Chaos days in the cadet C

"I feel nothing and everything is the same to me. How much longer?" Olaf Ballnus can remember exactly how he heard this song line of the Düsseldorf punk band KFC in his grubby brick red cadet C. "That was on the outskirts of Herne, the voice of singer Tommi Stumpff shot straight from the car radio into my brain."

Ballnus felt understood: "We were without perspective, bored and against it." He grew up in Wattenscheid, from the mid-seventies a district of Bochum. Ballnus had enough in 1982. He did not want to run after trends, did not fit in anywhere. So he drove out of the Ruhr area.

Punk gave Olaf Ballnus orientation, company and countless photo opportunities. The old cadet C had his buddy Wolfgang "Wölfi" Wendland, later singer of the band The Cashiers, knocked down for 100 marks. Ballnus steered him across the punk republic of the eighties: "It was like a liberation, all this 'If the Kids are United' thing, the cohesion, we were celebrating in the Berlin club SO36, traveling to chaos days and roaming the streets Traces of Christiane F. through the Gropiusstadt. "

Dead Pants Concert in front of 15 people

Olaf Ballnus had memorable concerts by the Californian band Black Flag, the British punks GBH or the Bremen Mimmis, with Campino he grilled a whole pig backstage. He always had his camera and published a selection of these moments in the illustrated book "Superreal Punk".

photo gallery

30 pictures

Ballnus slept in the cadet or occupied houses - in Berlin on Manteuffelstrasse, Görlitzer Straße or in the "Kuckuck", an occupied house and cultural center; in Bochum in Heusnerviertel, where the houses were demolished because a bypass was built. "That was all relatively open, you could go and ask: Do you have space? Sometimes it worked, sometimes it was said: 'Do not mind you!'"

The Berlin Hardcore Punks of the occupied houses looked relatively normal: "Lumberjack shirt, combat boots, jeans with Domestos stains, jacket, understatement." The styling of punks in the Ruhr area or in Hanover was often significantly more complex, says Ballnus: "Colorful hair, Iroquois, painted with white edding jackets, sometimes a broken Mercedes star on the shoulder - but often still live at home with nuts."

At the Marler Jugendzentrum Hagenbusch he saw the Toten Hosen play in front of 15 people. A friend mixed the sound. "That sounded pretty promising." But Ballnus lost sight of the band. "I fell in love with the singer of the Mimmis and went to their concerts more often - today you can hardly imagine that they used to play in a league with their pants and doctors." That he also photographed Chris Rea at the "Rock Palace" in the Bochum colliery, he preferred to keep to himself.

With "Wölfi" Wendland Ballnus opened the program cinema "Baluba" in Bochum-Langendreer. They organized long punk movie nights, films with titles such as "Nero and the whores of the Roman Empire", "Human killing", Derek Jarman's "Jubilee" or even silent films with piano accompaniment. After three months, the curtain fell again, the effort was not worth it.

The punk tracks fade

But they got to know so the punk scene really - the Velbert musicians of the band Hostages of Ayatollah, for example, the immortalized Ballnus' calling grandma Wilhelmine 1985 in her music video "Hello Neighbor". "Wölfi" and Ballnus wanted to shoot a documentary about the punk scene in Germany and drove for research with the Chaos Cadet throughout the Republic. "Olaf has survived that halfway mentally, I became part of the scene," says the cashier-singer.

Ballnus continued to travel across the country in 1985 for three months through India, and suffered a double culture shock - when he was there and when he came back: "Until then I always thought I was so different from all the others, but in the distance you notice fast How German you are, the trip made me totally outrageous. "

DISPLAY

Olaf Ballnus, Wotal Wilke Möhring:
Superreal punk

Olaf Ballnus; 108 pages; 25,00 Euro.

After his return, he said good bye to the punk scene, record collecting was somehow just another way of collecting stamps. Ballnus did the Abi at the evening grammar school from 1987, continued to drink for a while and studied photography, in Essen and Kiel.

Today at 56, he lives on the green outskirts of Hamburg and has a family. Ballnus is now a renowned photographer with movie stints, most recently making a documentary about the cashier, titled "Punk in the Age." Ballnus finds it a pity that many bands of that time are forgotten. The German drinker youth about: "A somewhat drunken Berlin band whose musicians lived in the Görlitzer in a squat house - a great group, from which no one speaks."

His punk past has not forgotten Olaf Ballnus - even if the punk tracks disappear gradually. Where Tommi Stumpff from the radio "How much longer?" roared into his cadet, is now the headquarters of a geriatric care service.