NDW - der Plan

The Neue Deutsche Welle could be quite silly and childish at times. You can see it in the work of the Wirtschaftswunder, and you can see it in this video for the Dusseldorf band der Plan, like a low-budget Devo.

The point of the silliness, as I understood it, was that these were desperate times in West Germany. Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher were ramping up the Cold War rhetoric and there was much discussion of battlefield nuclear weapons. Germany was the battlefield. There was a real sense of fear in the air, a conviction that conflict was becoming more, not less, likely. And one response was to laugh at it all, to see the whole thing as being absurd. Again the note of Dada was not far distant. This is very definitely intended as art-rock.

Der Plan's debut album, the very excellent Geri Regi, was released in 1980. This track, 'Wir Werden Immer Mehr', is from the following year. There's a short introduction but the music starts twenty seconds in:

NDW - the Wirtschaftswunder

Of all the Neue Deutsche Welle bands, my favourite were the Wirtschaftswunder, a gloriously chaotic band somewhere between the Residents and the early work of XTC - a kind of Neue Dada Welle, if you will.

The line-up was international, with members from Germany, Czechoslovakia and Canada, while the singer, Angelo Galizia, was from Italy, which might explain why they sounded a bit odd - that's not a German accent. As their career progressed, they got more professional and the production values improved, but I don't think they ever improved on their messy debut album, Salmobray (1981), from which this song, 'Analphabet', is taken. How can anyone resist a chorus that just lists the vowels?