In this video I present some of my best photographs of Berlin from around 1982 up to 2018 against the backdrop of a song I first created and recorded in 1985, in association with some other musicians.
The song is in the style of the 1980s and has overtones of bands like Vienna, Heaven 17 and The Human League. The influence of David Bowie can also be heard. It is a history lesson in a pop song, telling the story of the division and the reunification of Berlin – die Teilung und die Wiedervereinigung von Berlin. The lyrics allude to the devastation of World War 2, the construction of the Wall – die Mauer – in 1961 and look into the future to the fall of the Berlin Wall – die Wende.
The original song was written and recorded as a demo in 1985, along with my other song ‘Vergehen’, which means ‘passing’ with an English version ‘In Silence’ but as the original sound quality wasn’t very good, I re-recorded both songs in Vienna in 2005. I finally waited another 13 years before finally releasing them as part of my Aidan O’Rourke Productions YouTube channel.
Some of the words seem premonitionary. Before each chorus, we hear ‘it will not be long’. In reality it was not long after I wrote the song before the Wall came down – almost exactly four years. But there is another shocking event that the words seem to predict. I will write about this in more detail on my Patreon blog.
The photographs were taken on a wide variety of different cameras at different times in Berlin. I lived there from 1979 to 1980 but sadly I have very few photos from that period. When I returned in 1982 I started to take photos, including the wide panorama of Potsdamer Platz that can be seen at the very beginning.
Other images were taken on black and white film and on colour negative and slide film. Some of the slides lay forgotten in an old briefcase until I scanned them when compiling the slide show video in late 2018. The video presents a total of 75 photos and videoclips – enough to fill a book, though the video is five minutes long and the lyrics amount to just 324 words (excluding repeated choruses at the end).
Berlin Berlin is set for release on YouTube and on iTunes in early 2019.