Stephan Remmler is celebrating his 75th birthday. Who could not love him? An appreciation.
Frankfurt – According to legend, Louis Spillmann, the boss of the record company PhonoGram, had a brilliant idea in 1979: He put Klaus Voormann, the legendary bassist, producer, designer and “fifth Beatle” to work as a talent scout for PhonoGram. The Neue Deutsche Welle was still an underground phenomenon. In the FRG the end of the 1970s was looking back on a musically grandiose decade – bands such as CAN, Kraftwerk, Faust, Harmonia, Tangerine Dream or Amon Düül had published masterpieces, even if they were celebrated mainly abroad.
Two and a half decades after the war, a new generation of young musicians had shown that contemporary pop music did not necessarily have to refer to Anglo-American blues scales, beat harmonies and English-language song lyrics in order to be heard internationally. But as at almost every turn of the decade, nothing is as old as yesterday’s merits. Disco, punk and new wave pushed the music, which in England was called “Krautrock”, out of the limelight.
Stephan Remmler: Discovered by Beatles friend Klaus Voormann
Nominally as a talent scout on the road, Klaus Voormann attended a trio concert in the provinces during these days of upheaval and offered them a record deal on site. Voormann, who was a close friend of the Beatles, had seen the pop world in the eye of the Beatlemania hurricane and, as a German, had an international view of the local music scene. With the ears of a well-traveled person, he was looking for an original local expression – an expression that is deliberately ignored in his own country.
And with the trio singer and mastermind Stephan Remmler, he had come across a like-minded lunatic, an extremely charismatic and at the same time philosophically brooding person who had a natural tendency to direct action. In football one would say: who had a move to the goal.
Stephan Remmler, the mischievous Dadaist
Stephan Remmler, who will be 75 on Monday (25.10.2021), embodied a new type of musician and singer at the beginning of the 1980s. He was an androgynous ascetic, a mischievous Dadaist, a man who knew that sometimes a few flashy braces, an extremely short haircut and a loud megaphone are enough to set yourself apart visually and acoustically and to memorize an entire country in a confrontational manner. Meanwhile, the Neue Deutsche Welle cannibalized itself in Dieter Heck’s “ZDF Hit Parade”. Outstanding bands like Palais Schaumburg, Malaria! or Einstürzende Neubauten, which had triggered the Neue Deutsche Welle in the first place, disappeared under the radar in view of the success of bands like Ideal, DÖF or Markus.
The few genuine, also commercially outstanding bands of the NDW included Fehlfarben, Deutsch Amerikanische Demokratie, Der Plan, Rheingold and Trio. In the struggle for meaning sovereignty and economic success, they stood for a new, commercially scalable path beyond Krautrock that music from Germany can take. Of course, in terms of attention economy, this path was drowned out by the more radio-friendly sound of Fräulein Menke, Nena or the Spider Murphy Gang.
Stefan Remmler: Again and again “There, there,”
How trio sounded before they released their world hit “Da da da I love you not you love me aha aha aha *” on the second edition of their debut album in 1982, can be heard on the first edition of their debut album. Drums, guitar, vocals, occasional use of megaphone and Casio keyboard. The band Trio, consisting of singer Stephan Remmler, guitarist Kralle Krawinkel and drummer Peter Behrens, had an enormous presence on stage with their heavily New Wave, Punk and Reggae-influenced songs and, thanks to Klaus Voormann’s straightforward, minimalist production, also on record , and Stephan Remmler sang with a natural authority that was second to none.
When “Da da da I don’t love you you don’t love me aha aha aha *” was published, the trio turned into the poster boys of the Neue Deutsche Welle overnight. The ingenious video for the song was made by Dieter Meier, who recorded their debut album in his Yello studio in the Red Factory Trio in Zurich. Meier’s video plays in the guest rooms of the artist restaurant EXIL in West Berlin, run by a member of the Viennese group, Oswald Wiener – the epicenter of the film, music, art and theater scene in the front city of West Berlin, the potion of a cosmopolitan avant-garde artist which world stars like David Bowie, Iggy Pop, Joseph Beuys, Hanna Schygulla and Rainer Werner Fassbinder lived out.
Stefan Remmler: Also successful as a soloist
Viewed from a strategic pop perspective, Stephan Remmler acted as the face, it-boy and front man of the trio with sleepwalking security, certainly also encouraged by the spin Doctor Voormann, who significantly influenced the appearance, presence and sound of the band as a producer.
A year and a half after the Neue Deutsche Welle began to ebb at the end of 1984, Stephan Remmler released his first self-titled solo album in 1986. With the songs “No Stars in Athens (3-4-5x in one month)”, “Everything has an end, only the sausage has two (Krause & Ruth)” and “Bird of the Night” Remmler celebrated three hits in a row in 1986, “Everything has an end” subsequently even developed into the ultimate carnival hit that is still popular today.
The rejection of many trio fans, but also many, especially male music colleagues, whom Stephan Remmler experienced with his solo debut, would be called a shit storm today. However, Stephan Remmler positioned himself with his extremely intelligently declined hit album at the same time as an extremely successful antipode or antithesis to the German chart mainstream – meanwhile, emo German rockers such as Herbert Grönemeyer, Klaus Lage or Marius Müller-Westernhagen have determined the German hit parade. With his decision to succeed as a solo artist, Remmler lost legions of fans, but he also gained legions.
Stefan Remmler always had an empathy for the stranded
Stephan Remmler once told me over dinner that he had found it the greatest recognition when he realized that his hits, thought of as a gang, had made it into many jukeboxes of decrepit beer drinks. The recognition ultimately consisted not only in the fact that the guests put pennies and marks into the jukeboxes, but above all in the fact that he reached the so-called “simple” people who, perhaps out of loneliness, hang out at a beer tulip evening after evening Cling onto corner pub. In his songs there is always a genuine empathy for the stranded, those who have been excluded from the system, the alcoholics and the losers of the cities – a real, but always self-deprecating, show of respect.
In fact, Remmler pulled out all the stops on his debut album, including popular brass music. In the song “Under a small blanket in the night (Das Kuschellied)” he used a sugar-sweet children’s choir, and for the song “Let me be with you again” he ordered the entire Vienna Police Orchestra into the studio.
In the mid-1980s the aesthetic fronts had hardened. Anyone who, as Stephan Remmler did, approached folk music and Schlager seriously and with full respect, got the concentrated hatred of the “serious” musicians. Unlike today, in the 1980s it was difficult to imagine hearing both Einstürzende Neubauten and Stephan Remmler.
Stephan Remmler had had its day as a hit guarantee at the beginning of the 1990s
In this sense, Stephan Remmler’s great merit is that he fearlessly devoted himself to the loose ends of a German-language song culture several times during his long career, which was suddenly and brutally interrupted by the cultural “cleansing” of the Nazis in the Third Reich. Remmler was almost forensically interested in the DNA of Bavarian beer tent music, but also in Freddie Quinn’s bizarre sea shanties, and tried to tie in with these narratives. By working his way through these narrative strands, he tied in with the musical tradition of German light music, which does not necessarily belong in the hands of a mafia-like Schlager clique.
With his albums “Lotto” (1988) and “Project F – In Search of the Treasure of Lost Feelings” (1991) Remmler failed in his attempt to translate the success formula of his debut album into a lasting success – even if both albums were full were filled with great (potential) jukebox hits. The star of the singer, who has repeatedly and with enormous commercial yields the courage to break convention, was on the decline. In terms of a career as a hit guarantee, Stephan Remmler had had its day at the beginning of the nineties.
Retreat to Lanzarote
I met Stephan Remmler in Hamburg in 1993 when he released his fourth solo album “Vamos” – in a sense his last, albeit unsuccessful, attempt to build on his own hits. He actually wanted to release a light, funny album under the title “BarbarellaMortadellaohneTeller”; the single “Please, Barbarella” was already released in early 1992. Due to the ongoing racist riots in East Germany, the tonality of the album no longer seemed appropriate to him.
He discarded the album, recorded new songs, threw others out, and possibly made wrong decisions at this point. “Vamos” flopped commercially, Stephan Remmler retired to his finca on Lanzarote in the following years. But no problem, because constant radio airplay as well as the occasional sale of synchronization rights for the use of trio music in international advertising clips reliably washed royalties into the cash register of a man who may not be entirely voluntary, not really spectacular, but in the end but stepped out of the limelight with dignity.
Stephan Remmler’s songs are time machines
Incidentally, on “Vamos” one of the most beautiful songs of 1993 was found with “Life loves him who loves a lot” to this day. Its lines “Life loves him who loves a lot / That was so, and it will stay that way / Those who give a lot in life get a lot in return / Those who bring happiness to others are very lucky themselves ”are still echoing. Above all, however, they reveal, as if under a magnifying glass, that Stephan Remmler was always looking for an empathic sense of life in his lyrics, which had to be poured into the simplest and for everyone understandable lines.
In the meantime, his records have accumulated so much dust, cracks and patina that when you play them they look like scratches in time – Stephan Remmler’s songs are, in the truest sense of the word, time machines that can transport us into an era At the beginning of 1979 the NATO double resolution stood and at the end of the fall of the wall and the beginning of neo-liberalism.
When Stephan Remmler celebrates his 75th birthday today, one may take this as an opportunity to rediscover an artist who has shaped a turbulent decade of German-language music like no other. At a time when, as a marginal figure in society, social media had not yet been used to distract oneself, Stephan Remmler comforted his listeners with songs to hold on to. It is hard to imagine a nicer, deeper expression of respect for one’s own audience. When Stephan Remmler let his “bird of the night” fly up to the moon “to see where your loved one is living now”, he spoke from the heart of all those who have been through the mean tricks of life – because “someone is always the loser , someone always has to lose ”- were thrown off course. A gentian on it. Oh wait! No, waiter, please make a double for me! And another beer, okay? Many thanks. (Max Dax)
