Not all can strike the Berghain bargain

It is "the most controversial subject in dance music", if we are to take at least one clubber's word for it: the door policy at Berghain, the premier techno club in Berlin. Lots of clubs are difficult to get into but few manufacture quite the same atmosphere of threat as Berghain.

The entry process is creepy. A cattle pen funnels you in pairs towards the door, where the bouncers loom.

One is short, brown-haired, nondescript. The next is 7 feet tall, bald, with a sloping forehead and wearing a stevedore cap and jackboots, like a cartoon of evil.

And the last guy you can't even see until you step, blinking, into the spotlight. His name, appropriately, is Sven, and he sits on a chair behind the first two, dark and hulking. He's difficult to look at for more than a second because of the tattoo of barbed wire crawling over his face.

Then the selection begins. The bouncers do one of two things: 1. Wave you inside.2. Tell you to leave and never return.

At peak hours (4-10am), depending on the night, when the queue can stretch hundreds of metres and two hours into the distance, as many as 50 per cent of eager clubgoers are turned away.

But how do Sven and his friends choose? The only consensus among Berlin's clubbers is that it has nothing to do with how good-looking, stylish or "cool" you are.

Most nights the club has a very mixed crowd and it's exactly this variety that the bouncers are trying, it appears, to maintain. In the interests of keeping the club a mix of men and women, stylish and laid-back, open to foreigners but with a German underground feel, Berghain engages in explicit social engineering to keep its reputation as the world's best club.

When I went there recently, Shovel-jaw yelled something. My non-German-speaking girlfriend, guessing, held up two fingers. "Zwei," she said. Looking bored, Shovel-jaw waved us through. We were in!

Suddenly I was staring into the chest of another gigantic figure shouting orders in German and my girlfriend was being asked to approach a desk. Getting confused, we turned and bumped into each other, lost in a maze of heads and tattoos and metal gates.

Eventually, I found myself before a blond man in a T-shirt, guarding a door. "Um," I said, my voice breaking, "I don't know where I'm going."

He said something in German.

"I'm really sorry, I don't speak German," I said. "Is this the door to the club?" The door was marked "Private".

He pointed to the sign and raised an eyebrow. Trying to look casual but dignified, I excused myself, took my girlfriend's hand and went the right way. The bouncer looked at a friend. "Them?" he said, loudly, in English. "Really?" And they both shook their heads, sadly.

But if arbitrariness and abject fear aren't part of your definition of "intimidating", let's hear who are the world's scariest bouncers and where can we find them?