My 80s synthrock song Berlin Berlin: Premonitionary lyrics or just coincidence? | |
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In the early 80s I was heavily involved with music and recorded many of my own songs. I was also very interested in Berlin, having studied German and spent my year abroad there 1979-80. in 1984 I came up with a song called Berlin Berlin in which I tried to capture the drama and tragedy of divided Berlin. I re-recorded that and another song in Vienna in 2005. Re-reading the lyrics 20 years on, I noticed something strange about the second verse...My retro electronica song Berlin Berlin is fully in the style of the 80s with its heavy use of synthesisers. But it also has a rock overlay in form of some lead guitar riffs. I did the vocals myself, hoping that a better vocalist would be able to improve on mine if and when the song was ever used. But what about the subject matter? Was a pop song about German post-war history ever going to appeal to the 'kids on the street'? Well if Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark could write a hit song about the plane that dropped the atom bomb on Japan, why couldn't I write one about the Berlin Wall? The song presents three tableaux of Berlin in each of three verses. The first is about the construction of the wall on 13 August 1961: "Like a ghost on an August night on a street in East Berlin
The chorus proclaims a plaintive love theme set in the context of divided Berlin "Cold War machine is trying to break us up, but all I know is that my only love lies somewhere in East Berlin..." The second verse jumps twenty or so years to the mid-eighties and a night club in the West of the city. "Saw the stranger standing by the door in a club in West Berlin" Its hot, crowded and packed full of people. The narrator is anxious to get to someone in another part of the club "What could I do how could I get to you as the beat was screaming out?" And then comes the strange line: "I felt the heat of the dance fires burning and I saw you passing out." The final verse jumps back forty years to the end of the war. There are allusions to common experience of loved ones going missing and never returning. "Where did you go when the rain was over and the bells were ringing out?" The lead in to each chorus has the words: "It will not, it will not be long". I don't know why I wrote the words 'It will not be long' they just seemed right. Though I had no idea at the time, it would literally not be long before the Wall would come down, just five years, though I believed it would continue well into the next century. Coincidence? Most likely it was, but what about that strange line in the second verse? The bit about the 'dance fires burning' and 'I saw you passing out'? "Dance fires burning" just seemed like a good description of dancing in a night club, the heat and the feeling of being 'on fire', of being on a high with the music and the atmosphere. But 'passing out' is ambiguous. It could mean 'passing out' losing consciousness or 'passing out' exiting the club. When I re-read the line in 2005, something about it struck me as odd, but I wasn't quite sure what. And then a vague memory of an incident came into my mind. If I remembered correctly, there had been a terrorist bomb in a night club in West Berlin, but I couldn't remember the details or the year. A quick look on the BBC News website confirmed the event had actually happened. It was the Labelle disco bomb in which 2 American servicemen and one Turkish woman were killed and many others injured when a bomb exploded. It had been planted by Libyan agents acting in collusion with East German Stasi. The Libyan agents had brought the bomb over to West Berlin in the diplomatic bag. The German wife of one of the agents had taken the bomb into the Labelle disco in Schöneberg, not far from where I lived in 79/80, placed it next to the dance floor and left five minutes later. Read the full story on the BBC news website The date of the Labelle Disco bomb? Saturday 5 April, 1986, around two years after I had written Berlin Berlin. Premonitionary or just co-incidence? Or maybe a bit of both? I am going to use Berlin Berlin in a film project of my own. I am also promoting the song, along with my other composition In Silence, German title Vergehen, for use in other film projects. Read the article My German electronica-influenced song Vergehen / In Silence. Am I boring you? and listen to the MP3 sample.
If you've read this far, thank you. Very few people have contacted me to enquire about hearing the complete song, in fact the number of enquiries has been: 0. The number of clicks on the sample of the song after seven weeks online: 26. If you can offer any feedback or comments, constructive or otherwise, I would be overjoyed to hear from you. Please please contact 1810 pageviews since 2007-05-06 Keywords: Berlin songs, songs about Berlin, 80s style synthpop, Berlin MP3,
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