I know nothing about Populare Mechanik at all. I bought this 1981 single and, as far as I can tell, it was their only vinyl release. There were two cassette albums, and apparently this year Holger Hiller curated a compilation album, comprising tracks from those releases. And that's it.
So not a wildly successful band, then. But they were fantastic: mostly instrumental, with elements of dub, funk and free jazz. Happily, there's not much jazz on this track 'Schnarfer Schnitt (No. 1)'.
If yesterday's NDW selection was famous, this one's surely a staple in everyone's collection. Still worth another listen though.
Fehlfarben were from Dusseldorf and they were mainly a thrashy, punky sort of group. This song, however, was an oddity, almost a disco track - or at least a disco track as reimagined by Killing Joke. It's called 'Ein Jahr (Es Geht Voran)' and it's their best-known song. It's also, I think, far and away their best:
Now we come to the famous stuff. Palais Schaumburg were a Hamburg group who released three albums in the early 1980s and attracted some critical acclaim even in Britain. Their eponymous debut album in 1981 was co-produced by David Cunningham, which helped attract attention, as did the fact that one of the founder-members was Holger Hiller (though I think he'd left by this stage).
Anyway this is 'Wir Bauen Eine Neue Stadt', the first track from that album, also released as a single, and it's a fine piece of twisted white funk.
The group's name, incidentally, comes from what was then the official residence of the West German chancellor - the equivalent of an American band naming themselves the White House.
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:
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?
Grauzone were actually from Switzerland, but they were still considered part of the Neue Deutsche Welle. Well, it was a broad church. This is 'Film 2', the opening track on their eponymous debut album in 1981, and it's an excellent instrumental, slightly more upbeat that it sounds like it's going to be
It's also, in my opinion, the best track on the record, and therefore the best thing they released, since there was no second album. But I should acknowledge that some people prefer their hit single 'Eisbaer'.
The Neue Deutsche Welle of the early 1980s didn't travel very well. The aftermath of punk saw a massive explosion of bands in Germany, but few of them were heard much in Britain. Einsturzende Neubauten and X-Mal Deutschland, of course, and to a lesser extent die Krupps and DAF. And then there was Trio with wonderful 'Da Da Da'. Not much more than that, though.
Nonetheless, I liked a lot of this. So I thought I'd revisit some of the great tracks of my youth.
And I wanted to start with '49 Second Romance', the 1980 debut single by P1/E, a band fronted by Alexander Hacke, later to join Einsturzende Neubauten. They played at the first NDW gig I went to and were the best of the six acts on that day, so I bought their record and got Hacke to sign it (not pictured). It's a fantastic piece of deadpan electronica that's rooted in trashy 1960s pop - in live performances, Hacke had a tendency to slip in the chorus from Bobby Freeman's 'Do You Want to Dance', and it fitted perfectly.
Hacke returned to this song later in his career, and there was a 2004 remix, but the original version is still the best.
