Nina Hagen

Godmother of German punk, versatile diva, irreverent icon, a formidable singer capable of covering 4 octaves of vocal range, Nina Hagen – stage name of Catharina Hagen – is one of the most fascinating female figures in rock history. Her pen has been remarkably prolific, often penning lyrics while wandering the streets of Berlin. Feminist and protest songs that marked a generation.

Born in East Berlin on 11 March 1955 to singer and actress Eva-Maria Hagen, hugely popular in the former GDR, and writer Hans Oliva-Hagen, Nina had a troubled childhood: her parents divorced when she was two, and from then on she rarely saw her father, while her mother remarried nine years later to singer and political activist Wolf Biermann.

By the age of 17 Nina was already a successful singer: her song "Du hast den Farbfilm vergessen" ("You Forgot the Color Film") became hugely popular. The song, about a girl scolding her boyfriend for forgetting the color film for the camera, preventing the two of them from taking nice pictures on their holiday, plays as a subtle satire of the greyness of the German Democratic Republic.

When Wolf Biermann, her stepfather and a dissident intellectual of the GDR (blacklisted after taking a stand against the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia), was expatriated in 1976, Nina followed him to West Germany. She later moved to London, right as punk was exploding, and began hanging around the rising stars of that scene, such as the Sex Pistols and Vivienne Westwood. Back in West Germany, she adopted an eccentric, provocative style, charting with the pop band Automobil, and then, together with her Nina Hagen Band, recorded two albums titled "Nina Hagen Band" (1978) and "Unbehagen" (1979), which achieved considerable success both at home and abroad, fueling the legend around her persona. Driving their success were the exotic sounds of "African Reggae", the frantic rhythm of "Naturträne" (written by Hagen at age 13), and a new version of Lene Lovich's "Lucky Number".

After leaving her band, Nina Hagen moved to the United States, where she managed to crack the Billboard 200 with the 1982 album "NunSexMonkRock", powered by tracks like "Dr. Art" (a tribute to Graffiti artist Ivar Vics, her ex-boyfriend) and the single "Smack Jack", an intense autobiographical song about drug addiction written by her boyfriend at the time, Ferdinand Karmelk, who would die of AIDS in 1988. The brief relationship between the two produced a daughter, who was named Cosma Shiva in reference to her mother's two great passions, UFOs and Hinduism. This was followed the next year by the LP "Fearless", produced by Giorgio Moroder, which helped cement her uncompromising, passionate, playful and theatrical art-punk style.

In 1987 she would symbolically celebrate her marriage with the EP "Punk Wedding", and in 1989 she released the self-titled album "Nina Hagen" on Mercury. Although she never returned to the Billboard 200, Nina Hagen retained a devoted following in North America and kept scoring well in Europe into the early 1990s, for instance with 1993's "Revolution Ballroom", produced by Phil Manzanera.

Always independent and resistant to the logic of the music market, the German singer released an album of Hindu bhajans in 1999 ("Om Namah Shivay"), collaborated with the Leipzig Big Band on 2003's "Big Band Explosion", and experimented with religious-themed music on "Personal Jesus" (2010), which included a cover of the Depeche Mode hit of the same name, taking her into the German Top 20 for the first time in over 30 years. She also managed to return to the German charts after nine years with "Return Of The Mother" (Orbit/Virgin, 2000), which included a tribute ("Poetenclub") to Austrian singer Falco, who died in a car accident in 1998. Anti-establishment stances and support for civil rights would instead dominate 2022's "Unity", whose title track, made together with George Clinton, is a tribute to the Black Lives Matter movement. The album also features a cover of the folk classic "Sixteen Tons", a German-language reinterpretation of Bob Dylan's "Blowin' In The Wind", and original songs, including "United Women Of The World", co-written with Liz Mitchell of Boney M.