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The Beatles – Komm, gib’ mir Deine Hand.mp3
The Beatles – Sie liebt Dich.mp3
The Fabs recorded their first record in Germany. Backing Tony Sheridan on his Bert Kaempfert-produced LP, they sang on a couple of songs (Ain’t She Sweet and My Bonnie) and recorded a self-penned instrumental, Cry For A Shadow, on which George Harrison got a writing credit alongside John Lennon (it was intended to be a parody of The Shadows). And, of course, in St Pauli the boys really grew up. And yet, they did not seem to have much of a sentimental attachment to the country that gave them their first international break. A mini-tour of three cities — Munich, Essen and Hamburg — in 1966 was the extent of their concerts there (with typical teutonic subtlety, the sponsors, teen mag Bravo, called it a “Blitz” tour). And the Beatles really did not want to record any of their songs in German, or any other language.

The idea to do so originated with the group’s German label, Odeon, whose executives thought that German-language singles would sell even better than the orginals in their country. The Beatles resisted the instruction to record in German, going as far as not turning up to the booked session in the EMI Pathe Marconi studio in Paris in January 1964. A stern George Martin (who himself thought the idea was stupid) had to remindhis truant boys of their professional obligations before they gathered in the studio the following day, January 29. Komm gib mir eine Hand was quickly recorded to the backing track sent from London, but the instrumentation of the German She Loves You had to be re-recorded because the tape with the original track had been lost. It took 14 takes to record the song. Once they were done, with a little time to kill, the Beatles started work on a new song written by Paul called Can’t Buy Me Love.

The lyrics for the two German songs had been written by singer and TV personality Camillo Felgen under the pseudonym J. Nicolas. Two other non-Beatles are credited: one Montogue on Sie liebt Dich, and a H. Hellmer on the German version of I Want To Hold Your Hand. These credits have long puzzled Beatles historian. It appears that both Heinz Hellmer and Jean Montague (incorrectly spelled on the credits) were additional pseudonyms employed by Felgen, I would guess as a tax dodge.

These credits appeared on the German single release and the US album Something New, on which the German songs incongruously turned up. Subsequent releases, such as Beatles Rarities and Past Masters, credit only Lennon-McCartney.
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Cindy & Bert – Der Hund von Baskerville.mp3
We previously encountered husband-and-wife duo Cindy & Bert in the 1973 installment of the nostalgia series Stepping Back, with a typically horrible Schlager. The pair epitomised square. My grandmother thought Cindy & Bert were delightful. They reminded us of the nice young couple who rented the apartment on the top floor of her house and always paid the rent on time. So Oma would have been shocked to discover that Cindy & Bert’s catalogue included a cover version of Black Sabbath’s Paranoid (it need no pointing out that my grandmother would not have been a big Sabbath fan even if — especially if — she knew who they were). The cover photo of the 1970 single, which is not bad, is entirely misleading. Did I mention that Cindy & Bert were considered squares?
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Howard Carpendale – Du hast mich.mp3
Daisy Clan – Glory Be.mp3
In German Schlager history, Howard Carpendale wrote a particularly successful chapter. Unable to hack it in his home country South Africa as an Elvis impersonator, the former shotput champion moved to Germany, learned to speak the language with just enough of a touch of an accent (as I’ve noted before, German audiences really got off on foreign accents; in entertainment, not in shops, pubs or public transport), and became the leading romantic singer of the 1970s and ’80s Schlager scene, selling some 25 million records. None of those 25 million records soiled my collection, I am pleased to say, for I always thought he was a bit of a drip. His first breakthrough came with the standard Schlager Das Mädchen von Seite 1 (The girl from the front page). The flip side, however, was entire unschlagerish, a rocker called Du hast mich (You Have Me), a cover of the song Glory Be by German psychedelic rockers Daisy Clan which sounds like a heavy fuzz-guitared, organ-hammering Santana number. Thanks to my friend Sky, I can’t consider Carpendale as a drip any longer. The dude actually knew how to rock.

Glory Be was the b-side of Daisy Clan’s 1970 single Love Needs Love, apparently the group’s final English-language single (their final release in 1972 was appropriately titled Es geht vorrüber, which could be translated as “It passes on”). The Daisy Clan apparently were Schlager singer Michael Holm and songwriter Joachim Haider, going by the name of Alfie Khan. Holm had his first chart entry in 1962, but did not really break through until late 1969 with his version of the Sir Douglas Quintett’s Mendocino. It seems that his Schlager success put paid to his career as a psychedelic rock musician; Holm enjoyed a long string of Schlager hits (he featured HERE and HERE). Just to prove that not all Schlagersingers are naff fools with bad hair, Holm also collaborated with the eternally cool Giorgio Moroder in a project named, unappetisingly, Spinach. Holm has even been nominated for Grammys three times as part of the ambient music outfit Cusco.

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Dusty Springfield – Auf Dich nur wart’ immerzu.mp3
Like her contemporaries Petula Clark and Sandie Shaw, Dusty Springfield did a fair number of German recordings. Auf Dich nur wart’ ich ich immerzu (I’m always waiting for you only) was her German version of I Only Want To Be With You, released as a single in July 1964 with a German rendering of Wishin’ And Hopin’ as the b-side. Like most other songs transcribed from English to German, it was not a hit. It was quite usual for the original performer of a French or Italian song to score big successes with their German versions of these — singers such as Mireille Mathieu and Salvatore Adamo made a career of that — but English pop translations rarely impressed the record-buying public. I suspect the reason for that was two-fold. Firstly, pop sounds better in English, its own language; secondly, the German listener could differentiate between a Gilbert Bécaud’s heavy accent interpreting the lyrics and English-language singers not knowing what they were phonetically singing.
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Marvin Gaye – Wie schön das ist.mp3
Marvin Gaye – Sympatica
Motown had their stars record many versions of their songs in Spanish, Italian, French and German. Curious Germany Volume 2 included German covers by the Supremes and by the Temptations. Marvin chipped in with this take on How Sweet It Is (To Be Loved By You). The vocals were usually sung from phonetic lyric sheets, and most international stars who recorded in German did not pay meticulous attention to the standards of their pronunciation. I have no idea whether Marvin Gaye was a polyglot or whether he just gave more of a shit, but he did a better job of it than most of his peers. Wie schön das ist was the b-side of a song Gaye recorded exclusively in German, Sympatica, which was written by Schlager composers Jonny Bartels (not to be confused with singer Johnny Bartel) and Kurt Feltz. So here we have one instance of Motown going Schlager, sort of.
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Katja Ebstein – A Hard Day’s Night.mp3
Katja Ebstein had a reputation as one of Germany’s more sophisticated Schlager stars. When she represented West Germany in the Eurovision Song Contest in 1980, her song was titled Theater. It got nowhere. Ten years earlier the singer born in Poland as Karin Witkiewicz did somewhat better, coming third with the rather good Wunder gibt es immer wieder, and repeating the trick the following year with the ecological number Diese Welt (see, it wasn’t only Marvin Gaye who was concerned). The international exposure helped her maintain an international career, recording in French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, English and even Japanese.

Ebstein’s rather peculiar version of A Hard Day’s Night preceded her breakthrough by a year; she was still something of a leftist activist (she still is; in the 1980s she was arrested for taking part in a blockade of a US nuclear arms depot; in 2003 she demonstrated against the invasion of Iraq). Released in 1969 on the Katja album (the legend Twen on the cover advertises a youth magazine which promoted the LP), the Beatles cover was the set’s only English-language track. In her hands, the hard day was suffered not by her but by a unspecified him, and the whole shebang includes a strong hint of a Harrison-style eastern vibe.  File under “Interesting Beatles Covers”.

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Johnny Cash – Viel zu spät.mp3
Johnny Cash – Wo ist zu Hause, Mama.mp3
Cash’s 1965 German version of I Walk The Line also featured in the second volume of this series. In 1959, Cash recorded two other German versions of his songs, though neither was released until 1978. Viel zu spät (Much too late) is a take on the murder ballad I Got Stripes; Wo Ist Zu Hause, Mama (Where is home, mom) is the allemanic version of Five Feet High and Rising. Both, it seems, were intended to be released as a single, but I can find no record of their release. Cash’s relationship with Germany went back to the early 1950s, when he was stationed as a GI in Bavaria (it was a local girl who damaged his hearing when she stick a pencil in his ear). And it was there that Cash started to become serious about music.

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Radi Radenkovic – Bin i Radi bin i König.mp3
Here’s an example of an idiosyncratic accent helping to create celebrity on the football pitch and in the pop charts. Yugoslav Petar “Radi” Radenkovic was the goalkeeper for the München 1860 football team, which won the German championship in 1966 (the last team playing in blue shirts to do so). The goalkeeper was something of a humorous character on the pitch who had the entertaining tendency to run outside his penalty area to dribble around opponents., He was hugely popular. As one does, he recorded a single to celebrate his celebrity. This frankly quite awful ditty fuses Radenkovic’s guttural Serbian accent with the thick Bavarian dialect which has the rest of Germany (or Prussia, as a Bavarian might counter) amused at its sheer yokelness. The song — literally: “Am I Radi am I king” — does little to suggest that Radenkovic’s parents were in fact fairly successful musicians.

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More Curious German

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Theme – Sesamstrasse.mp3
Theme – Sesame Street.mp3
Sesame Street – Rubber Ducky.mp3
Sesamstrasse – Quitsche-entchen.mp3
I cannot overstate the importance of Sesamstrasse, as it was known in Germany, in my development. For the first few years, German TV did no more than to synchronise the US original, with Gordon, Susan and Bob speaking German. Mr Hooper was renamed (with phonetically sensitivity) Herr Huber. Big Bird became Bibo, Grover became Grobi, Cookie Monster (apart from Ernie and Oscar the Grouch, my favourite) Krümelmonster.

Not being a pre-schooler, I had no need for the lessons in numeracy or the alphabet, fun as they often were. The entertainment value of most skits was great, of course, and I can still delight in watching clips like the original Manah Manah (redone to diminished effect on The Muppet Show) or Bob’s Fairy Tales, which clearly were written with a nod and a wink at the watching Moms. But the great impression Sesame Street made on me was the presentation of the inner city, idealised to communicate the possibility of harmony and equality between races, ethnicities and classes. Just the reasons why the right-wing Bavarian government under the thoroughly ghastly Fanz-Josef Strauss considered Sesame Street undesirable (or, as they euphemistically put, as not appropriately reflecting social realities) and banned it from their aiwaves. Susan, Gordon, Bob and Oscar the Grouch — whom I dressed up as for a costume party in early ’73 — shaped my outlook just as surely as did later Günter Wallraff’s undercover exposé of the Bild newspaper or Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath.

Apart from the US and German themes of the show, I’m posting the US and German versions of Ernie’s classic Rubber Ducky.

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Bay City Rollers – Mañana.mp3
There were two versions of the Bay City Rollers: the incarnation on millions of barely pubescent girl’s bedroom walls, and a rather more ripened version without future frontman Leslie McKeown and hard-living axeman Stuart “Woody” Wood. I’m not inclined to argue forcefully that BCR v1.0 was musically superior to BCR v2.0 (though much more so than v.2.3), but I still enjoy Mañana a lot, with its tribal drums and catchy singalong chorus. Or perhaps I like it because I had been looking for the song, released in 1972, for absolute ages, and can’t commit myself to disappointment. I remember making up football-related lyrics on our schoolground in 1974, with the chant relating to a Hannover 96 player called Damjanoff. I might have had a career as terrace chant lyricist…

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The Les Humphries Singers – Mama Loo.mp3
I have no idea what a Mama Loo is, and I am much less disposed to engage in speculation. I do know that Mama Loo gets Les and his multi-national and multi-ethnic singers rockin’ and rollin’and rockin’ and reelin’ in a most joyful manner, borrowing more than a little from the Beach Boys’ hit Barbara-Ann. English-born Humphries’ outfit seems to have been inspired by the Edwin Hawkins Singers (of Oh Happy Day fame) with a reference to the free-love hippiedom of Hair. Add to the recipe a set of catchy songs that fused the sound (and sometimes lyrics) of gospel with pop, and you get the Les Humphries Singers. Whatever a Mama Loo is, I rather like the energy of this song. Impressive lead vocals too by, I think, John Lawton. See the video, in which the cameraman unsubtly goes for a close-up of Liz Mitchell’s breasts.

Some of Les’ singers went on to greater things. Liz Mitchell became one of two Boney M members to actually sing on their records; English-born John Lawton (a founder member of German prog-rockers Lucifer’s Friends) became lead singer of Uriah Heep; and Jürgen Drews became a successful Schlager singer. My grandmother, who financed my earlier record-collecting endeavours and lived her pop fandom through me, did not like these hippies. The Les Humphries Singers with their long hair, racial integration (to her all black people were Afghanis, it seems) and likely sexual promiscuity failed to embody her old-fashioned German values. But that was not even the worst of problem she had with them. She forcefully objected to their dancing, calling them Hopskrähen (jumping crows; hmmm, sounds like the basis for a name a 1990s rock band might adopt).

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Cindy & Bert – Immer wieder Sonntags.mp3
Jürgen Marcus – Ein Festival der Liebe.mp3
I remember seeing both of these Schlager horrors (oh, but the first one is a horror which even nostalgia cannot mitigate; the second at least has an interesting interlude) on the ZDF Hitparade, the hugely popular monthly show that featured only German Schlager acts (look at Cindy & Bert on the Hitparade; Bert doesn’t look like he wants to be there). Cindy & Bert were a husband-and-wife duo of whom my dear grandmother was very fond, perhaps because they looked a lot like the very nice couple that rented the top floor flat of her beautiful house (her affection for the couple ceased when they moved out, having left the place in a bit of a mess. We later learnt that the husband had cheated on his lovely wife, behaviour of which Oma did not approve, obviously). What my grandmother had missed about Cindy & Bert was that the apparently very square couple had just a couple of years earlier recorded a rather incongruously heavy cover of Black Sabbath’s Paranoid. It’s fair to say that my granny was not a great Sabbath fan. The Paranoid cover will feature in the next installment of German curiosities.

I should imagine that my grandmother was also slightly troubled by the length of Jürgen Marcus’ hair. But otherwise he was a “very nice boy”. We can safely say that Jürgen’s big bowtie did not come from the wardrobe of Ozzie Osbourne. But Oma clearly forgave the singer his luxurious mane, because he was an amiable young man performing nice songs, flashing luxuriant smiles and mugging genially, even if he looks rather glum on the cover of the single which proclaims a festival of love (but how much of a grin would you muster while wearing Bozo the Clown’s oversized comedy bowtie). For a generation of mothers, he was a perfect, albeit hirsute, prospective son-in-law. What that generation of mothers didn’t know was that Jürgen wouldn’t be interested in their daughters. A few years ago, the singer revealed that he is gay. This video clip from the Disco ’73 show must be seen just for the lack of rhythmic coordination among the audience in the backrow.

Marcus was produced by Jack White, who as Horst Nußbaum had been a professional football player, at one time plying his trade with Dutch giants PSV Eindhoven. He retired from professional football in 1966, but continued to play for the amateur team of Berlin club Tennis-Borussia. In December 1976, by now a famous record producer, he turned out for the club’s first team in a German cup game against 1.FC Köln. His side lost 1-5 to the eventual cup winner. In the interim, he had produced a string of big German hits, including the German football team’s 1974 World Cup song (which I intend to inflict upon the reader in the next installment). Later he also produced Paul Anka, Engelbert Humperdinck, Laura Branagan (including her US top 10 hits Self Control and Gloria) and — of course — David Hasselhoff.

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Albert Hammond – It Never Rains In Southern California.mp3
I once noted that in nostalgia, the sun always shines, except when bad weather is an essential constituent in happy memories. Albert Hammond Sr’s hit sums up my memories of a sunny 1973, whose run of good weather was disrupted only by cold winter mornings when I walked to school in the dark and snow, which I found terribly exciting, by playing in central heated indoor coziness while outside it rained, a dark and cold Christmas and zooming down a hill in the park on my sled. But for the most part, the sun put in overtime in 1973, or so my memory tells me. My friends, brother and I played a lot outdoors. Our suburban block was our kingdom. But we were warned of hazards such as traffic and bad men who might want to abduct us, the latter known in the local patois as Mitschnacker. We were on alert.

A Mitschnacker yesterday (actually, it's Chelsea midfielder Frank Lampard)

One day, a dude dressed in black with a funky hat and a drooping moustache — an exotic look in our kingdom — came walking down our street. One of us (it might have been me) approached him and asked: “Excuse me, are you a Mitschnacker?” As he suppressed a laugh, he answered affirmatively and made a grabbing motion at us. We scrammed, but on reflection decided that he probably wasn’t a Mitschnacker. A couple of years later, a man exposed himself to us as we were walking to school. Rather than being alert to the dangers of a sex offender, we laughed at the strange man who took out his willy, because willies were very funny to us. We didn’t even conceive of the idea that the joker could be a Mitschnacker.

Traffic was very light in our area, so we paid little attention to it. That’s how my little brother got hit by a car and broke his thigh, just a few days before his fifth birthday in early summer. His present had already been bought: a slide, to go with the set of swings and sandbox we already had in our garden. With his whole leg in plaster, he obviously couldn’t make good use of his present for a while. The rest of us, however, had excellent fun with it.

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Gilbert O’Sullivan – Get Down.mp3
Officially, the song is supposed to be about Gilbert’s dog which required reprimanding for jumping on his furniture. It’s clear that the song is not about a disobedient dog, but about a woman who bothers him for amorous attention, presumably after a drunken one-night stand (would you sing to a dog a verse like this: “Once upon a time I drank a little wine/Was as happy as could be, happy as could be/Now I’m just like a cat on a hot tin roof/Baby what do you think you’re doin’ to me”?). And then Gilbert feigns surprise when he is alone again, naturally. Ah, the days when a singer could enjoy hits with songs that demeaned women… Using dogs as metaphors for women couldn’t happen today, of course, at an age when pop music invariably treats women with highest respect.

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Ireen Sheer – Goodbye Mama.mp3
Like Get Down and the next song, Goodbye Mama was one of the big German hits of the summer of 1973, during which my family went on holiday to Denmark (during which it rained a lot, though I have fond memories of not being bored indoors. Though I most probably was).

Ireen Sheer was born in England, growing up in Romford. She struggled to get her career going, until her record company came up with the bright idea that Ireen could record in German, since her mother was from Düsseldorf and Ireen had some knowledge of the language. The plan worked: in 1973 Sheer enjoyed her first German hit with a typically sentimental Schlager that in its title identified the singer as English and in sound evokes Greece, like so many songs of the time (including Cindy & Bert’s hit above). I don’t remember any other songs by Sheer, but apparently she has maintained a fairly successful career to this day.

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Cliff Richard – Power To All Our Friends.mp3
I never really liked Cliff Richard. Even as I liked this song at the time, I didn’t realise that it was sung by Cliff. Obviously I hadn’t watched that year’s Eurovision Song Contest, at which this was Britain’s offering. To me, it was just one of those tunes that always cropped up on the radio. I think I might have been doing Cliff a decades-long injustice. Sure, he is hyper-square, has an annoying grin, issues trite Christmas songs and has that Peter Pan of Pop shit going on. Sure, his music is not of consistently quite-good standard (the born-again Christian singer has disowned his best song, Devil Woman). But he seems to be a very nice man who, I’ve read, does a lot of fine charitable work. I’d love to read a full, candid biography of the man. In the meantime, I think this apologia for Cliff will do.

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Reinhard Mey – Gute Nacht, Freunde.mp3
I really enjoyed Sky Nonhoff’s musical memoir Kleine Philosphie der Passionen: Schallplatten (dtv, 2000), but then, in an aside, he viciously attacked Gute Nacht, Freunde. Eventually I could forgive Nonhoff for his unkindness towards one of my mother’s singles. Mey is one of Germany’s veteran Liedermacher, singer-songwriters whose worthy lyrics and music repudiate the banality of the pop industry, much like their chanson counterparts in France. I think the melody is quite lovely. The lyrics are very adult. A guest is thanking his hosts for their hospitality and unconditional friendship. There aren’t many good songs about friendship; this one probably helped many people articulate their gratitude to good friends, like an eloquent Hallmark card.

It being 1973, the protagonist is having a smoke while he is formulating his appreciative farewell speech. The third verse is particularly nice as Mey gives thanks for “the freedom that is your eternal guest, and that you never question what’s in it for you. Perhaps it’s because from outside the light in your windows seems to glows more warmly”. Yeah, Schatzi, we’ll definitely invite him again.

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The Sweet – Ballroom Blitz.mp3
As noted in 1972, I had no idea that the guys doing this song were the same group that sang Poppa Joe, the single I loved so much. And that even though Ballroom Blitz, like Blockbuster before that, was ubiquitous. Only a few months later, when Teenage Rampage became a hit, did I make the association. The Sweet were massive in West-Germany, more so than in Britain; only one Sweet single did better in the UK than it did in West Germany, and that was Love Is Like Oxygen, released in 1978 at the end of the group’s run in the charts (it reached #9 in the UK, and #10 in Germany). Ballroom Blitz was the fifth in The Sweet’s run of six consecutive German #1s, which started in 1972 with Little Willy (the follow-up to #3 hit Poppa Joe) and ended with Teenage Rampage in 1974. The run was broken by the song that is perhaps  the group’s best, The Six Teens.

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More Stepping Back