Love Parade's tragic final chapter

The deaths of 19 people in a crowd panic at Love Parade in Duisburg on the weekend was truly, nightmarishly awful. But what is really incredible is that it took uniquely bad organisation and policing decisions – expecting 1.5 million people to file through a single tunnel – for such a disaster to occur, and that in the previous 20 years the parade had actually gone without major incident.

I love techno, but attending Love Parade once, in Berlin in 1995, was enough for me. By that time it had already grown from a tiny protest/art happening that began in 1989 to a sea of a million gurning ravemonkeys in deely boppers surging through the streets in an undifferentiated mass, soundtracked by the thud of lowest common denominator German "Schranz" techno. There I witnessed the grim sight of ambulances trying to push through the crowd, surrounded by Day-Glo-clad idiots who, rather than moving aside, stood with bovine blankness, waving their glowsticks in time to the sound of the sirens.

It was vile, as far removed from the freedom and fun of acid house as one could imagine, and showed precisely why the mega-rave/superclub era of the 90s had to end, allowing dance music to return to its club roots, as indeed it would in the UK. But it was essentially trouble-free, and unless you have witnessed Germans raving, it's difficult to comprehend how techno is so indelibly etched into the national psyche. Thus, despite various protests and enforced relocations, Love Parade continued to grow until it looked set to become a global fixture, resembling a more banal, mechanised version of the Notting Hill or Rio carnivals.

Techno and drugs will probably unfairly cop a lot of blame for this weekend's horrors. Love Parade's previous lack of incident has shown that even under the influence of dodgy Czech pills, human instinct for collective self-preservation is reassuringly strong. But it seems this is the end of Love Parade, and if it does result in a wider reassessment of huge dance events, maybe that wouldn't be such a bad thing either. After all, underground music stays underground for a reason; show it off too publicly, bring too many people to the party, and the joyful inclusiveness of the dancefloor turns into something horribly mindless. This party should have ended a long time ago, but it's a tragedy, in the truest sense of the word, that it had to end like this.