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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

As always, I should emphasise that the songs featured in this series are intended to chart my musical autobiography; their inclusion might evoke fond memories or may be appreciated for other reasons, but I don’t necessarily endorse them.

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Katja Ebstein – Wunder gibt es immer wieder.mp3
Wunder gibt es immer wieder was certainly steeped in the musical sensibilities of the 1960s, the ass-end of which it probably was written in. The arrangement is at first cornily quirky, with a less than brilliantly considered Hammond keyboard line, but when the song hits the chorus, it goes into high drama. Compare the finger-snapping intro to the OTT climax. But it all works. There are few Schlager which I would describe as having merit exceeding that of the deceptive tinge of nostalgia (and we’ll meet a good few of songs along the way whose merit is strictly limited to the wistful yearning for innocent childhood days), but Wunder gibt es immer wieder is a pretty good song.

It was West Germany’s entry at the 1970 Eurovision Song Contest; it came third, while Ireland’s Dana won with the insipid All Kind Of Everything (which my Heino-loving grandmother really liked). Ebstein’s lyrics implore the lonely heart to persevere with hope, because, as the title promises, “miracles happen all the time”, the trick is to actually spot them when they occur. In other words, what Katja means is: “It would take a fucking miracle for anyone to fall for an oxygen waster like you.” No wonder bloody Dana won.

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Simon & Garfunkel – El Condor Pasa.mp3
The reference in this post’s introduction to an LP cover featuring El Condor Pasa was not to Simon & Garfunkel’s Bridge Over Troubled Water album. I seem to recall the cover showing not Little & Large but a white bird of some sort – not the vulture of the song’s title, for condors, pasa or not, are black – flying against a blue sky. I don’t recall who the artist was, and have no explanation why anyone in my family thought it a good idea to buy El Condor Pasa as performed by a knock-off random act that depicts white birds on their album covers, rather than the Bridge Over Troubled Water LP.

But I knew the S&G version. You couldn’t escape it on German radio in 1970. I won’t look it up, but I am quite certain that El Condor Pasda was the duo’s biggest hit in West Germany, much more successful than the immensely popular title song of their final studio album.

Plagiarism fans will know that Paul Simon lifted the melody of a Peruvian song whose roots go back to the 19th century. What Paul Simon didn’t realise was that the song had been copyrighted as written by Daniel Alomía Robles in 1913, based on an Andean folk tune. When Robles’ son sued for royalties, Paul Simon was contrite about what evidently was a genuine mistake. In the words of Robles Jr, “It was an almost friendly court case.” Which is nice.

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Peter Maffay – Du.mp3
The youngest of my three sisters, ten years my senior, was a big Udo Jürgens fan — until 1970, when the young, broody and pensive Romanian-born Peter Maffay burst on to the scene with his first hit, the rather overwrought Du. Almost 40 yeas later, she remains a loyal Maffay fan. It would be wrong to call Maffay a Schlager singer; his material lacks the genre’s sentimental banality, musically and lyrically. All the more shameful the hurtful abuse he received from the crowds when he supported the Rolling Stones on tour in 1982 (it didn’t help that Peter Wolf, of the J. Geils Band, rather viciously introduced Maffay as an exponent of Schlager).

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Mungo Jerry – In The Summertime.mp3
Mungo Jerry – Mighty Man.mp3
In The Summertime has acquired an unjust reputation for being a bit of a novelty number (and among some astonishingly ignorant people on the Internet with no will to bother with boring stuff like research the label of one-hit wonder). No matter how extravagant Ray Dorset’s luxurious afro and sideburns, and no matter how big a summer hit it was, In The Summertime is a perfect pop song. Unusually it draws from skiffle (though not as much as other Mungo Jerry songs), an artform that enjoyed brief popularity in Britain in the 1950s.

In The Summertime soundtracked the summer of 1970, and when Lady Rose became a hit a year later, my elder brother became a Mungo Jerry fan. Through him I was introduced to lesser known songs by the group, such as Summertime’s b-side, the fantastic Mighty Man, on which Dorset provides oral percussive effects, scats, hushes randomly, says “all right all right all right”, and whoops with delight at his mightiness, all to the backdrop of some serious boogie woogie piano and a mean harmonica. The name Mungo Jerry, incidentally, was taken from a feline character in TS Eliot Book Of Practical Cats (on which Andrew Bloody-Lloyd-Webber based his musical Cats).

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Christie – Yellow River.mp3
El Condor Pasa, In The Summertime and Yellow River were the trinity of 1970’s summer hits in Germany. I associate them with the inflatable plastic water pool my younger brother received on his birthday in June, my yellow bicycle, playing with plastic Cowboys and Indians, lots of sunshine (even though it probably rained much of the time), our holiday in Denmark during which we’d get our feet tarred at the beach… And it was the first of several summers I shared with my very first best friend, our new neighbours’ son Stefan, who was half a year older than I was and always acted as though the age difference was much greater. Before he arrived on the scene, all the kids on our block were much older than I was, and therefore beyond my reach for social interaction. For many years (in childhood terms) we were tight. Then, suddenly, we weren’t. Childhood friendships are a fickle thing — especially when parents are friends and suddenly not. A year or so after Stefan appeared on the scene, two bothers moved into our street, and our gang was born.

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Daliah Lavi – Oh, wann kommst Du.mp3
Daliah Lavi was (and still is) an Israeli singer and actress. She was exotically beautiful in the early ’70s and sung with a deep, soulful voice. She had dark hair and a dark complexion, like my mother and my friend Stefan’s mom. Therefore she embodied, to my unripe mind, the ideal stereotype of adult womanhood.

I vaguely recall seeing Lavi sing this song on the ZDF Hitparade, which for its time was an innovative monthly show dedicated to only German-language pop. Many artists appearing on the show were not Germans. Some enjoyed careers in other European countries (Salvatore Adamo, for example), others were active mostly or only in the German-speaking region. Uniformly they sang in heavy accents. That was not a disadvantage. On the contrary, in German entertainment few things guaranteed success as much as a thick accent. Some German singers, such as Drafi Deutscher, went as far as affecting a faint foreign accent. The wildly popular Dutch TV host Rudi Carell was asked once why he didn’t try and lose his Dutch accent, which sounded like the emission of fetid vowels through a corroded sausage-making machine. He replied that the heavy accent was a key to his success. Without it, he’d have been just another entertainer; the accent was his trademark, and the reason TV viewers responded to him. Of course they also responded to his compatriot Wim Thoelke, who had no discernible foreign accent.

But back to Oh, wann kommst Du (which translates as “Oh, when will you come?”). I still like it a lot. Lavi is in great voice (and accent), especially during the bridge (“Du kannst fragen, was Du nie fragst; alles sagen, was Du nie sagst…”) and during the chorus with the elongated Oh’s. I’d go as far as calling it Schlager’s finest moment, damning with faint praise though that may be. The English original by Olivia Newton-John was titled Would You Follow Me (if anyone has that, please e-mail me). Daliah Lavi, incidentally, appeared in a Bond movie, Casino Royale, as “The Detainer”.

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