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Alphaville: Krautrock Valhalla

Long before I read Goethe, Rilke, Schiller and Mann; long before I saw a Caspar David Friedrich or Anselm Kiefer painting; and with far more impact on my wee tortured soul than Bach and Beethoven combined (I draw the line at Wagner, it’s like being gang raped by an orchestra), Alphaville turned me into a rampant and committed Germanophile. OK, they did not quite have the sophistication of Kraftwerk who had studied under Stockhausen in Düsseldorf, but the keening emotion of Marian Gold’s (Hartwig Schierbaum) Mitteleuropan accent and the synth riffs caught me and held me fast. Their sequencer reached deep into my chromosomes and turned me queerer than a David Hockney swimming pool.

On your knees, peasants and give thanks to Germany for Nena (“99 Luftballons” in which the colour red features nowhere), Horst Jankowski (“A Walk in the Black Forest”), and Harold Faltermeyer (“Axel F”). David Bowie didn’t even get interesting until he’d done a lot of heroin in Berlin.

It was 1984, a time of big shoulder pads and even bigger hair. It was the era of synthpop virtuosi like Gary Numan, Human League, Eurhythmics, Soft Cell, Thomas Dolby, and somewhere out there on the border with punk, Devo. Alphaville, named for the Godard film – how arty, released their two juggernaut blitzkrieg singles “Big in Japan” and “Forever Young”. These were dark, passionate and yearning songs after the New Romantic fashion, and yet at the same time were taken up (ironically, inappropriately) by preppy proto-Yuppies as anthems that dealt with their two greatest ambitions in life. It was scorching cold music, it seethed with the German Romantic tradition. I was besotted. “Sounds like a Melody” strummed my nerves like steel strings with its peculiar and eerily beautiful hooks. In 2008 when I was finally able to experience “Summer in Berlin” I realised that the song was perfectly accurate in its description. Berlin in summer is indeed sticky, dusty, sweaty, throbbing and generally fabulous.