Meet Her at the Love Parade — Da Hool

“Meet Her at the Love Parade” has no vocal and barely changes for nine and a half minutes, yet it reached the top five in Germany and France. Da Hool released it in August 1997, just as the Berlin parade it was named after reached its peak.

Bottrop’s DJ Hooligan

Da Hool is Frank Tomiczek, born on 30 December 1968 in Bottrop, West Germany. He learned to DJ in his hometown and was a well-known name in Germany by 1990. Before Da Hool he released records as DJ Hooligan — “Rave Nation” (1994), “Sueño Futuro (Wake Up and Dream)” (1995), “System Ecstasy” (1996) — and a track named after his town, “B.O.T.T.R.O.P.”.

A record named after a parade

The Love Parade began in West Berlin in July 1989, started by Matthias Roeingh, better known as Dr. Motte, and Danielle de Picciotto; 150 people joined the first one. By 1996 it had outgrown the Kurfürstendamm and moved to the Straße des 17. Juni in the Tiergarten. The 1997 edition ran under the motto “Let the Sunshine in Your Heart”, and the organisers counted around a million people, though attendance figures from those years are unreliable.

Tomiczek’s track borrowed the parade’s name. Music Week called it a “synth-driven instrumental”: a long build of looped synth stabs, 9:30 in the original mix. Kosmo released it on 4 August 1997 as the lead single from his debut album, Here Comes Da Hool, which followed on 17 November.

Charts, remixes and a Björk-style video

It went to No. 1 in Iceland and on the UK Dance chart, No. 4 in Germany and France, No. 7 in Ireland and No. 9 on the Dutch Top 40. In Britain, Manifesto released it on 2 February 1998 with a Nalin & Kane remix, which peaked at No. 15 on the UK Singles Chart. It went gold in Belgium and Australia and silver in the UK. The video, directed by Nikolas Mann, drew heavily on Stéphane Sednaoui’s clip for Björk’s “Big Time Sensuality”.

The record kept coming back. The 2001 remixes, led by a Fergie mix, reached No. 11 in the UK in July 2001. A 2015 HI-LO edit with Oliver Heldens, “MHATLP”, followed; in 2022 Da Hool made “The Parade” with Joel Corry, and in 2024 he joined Dimitri Vegas & Like Mike and Maddix for a new version featuring Kiki Solvej. In 2018 Mixmag listed the original among the 15 best mid-90s trance tracks.

In the mix

The original mix is a long-form builder: the same few stabs, opening up slowly over nine minutes. It works as a peak-time tension record or as a late-night closer. For more German dance music from the same years, keep digging with “Night in Motion” by U96 and ATB.