The most mysterious song on the internet

On March 18, 2007, a German woman named Lydia made public an audio file of a song whose performer she didn't know, posting it on the German forum best-of-80s, frequented mainly by fans of new wave and electronic pop, and on The Spirit Of Radio, a site tied to the Canadian rock station Cfny-Fm.

The only information Lydia was able to provide was that the track had been recorded onto cassette from a broadcast by the public radio and TV network Ndr (Norddeutscher Rundfunk), probably sometime between 1982 and 1984, by her brother Darius. The song is in English, though many agree from the accent that the singer is not a native speaker, suggesting the band could actually be German.

No one recognized the song, yet it began to spread across the internet. After a while, the search took on a life of its own: many people started looking for it even without any contact with Lydia, who in the meantime lost interest given the lack of results.

Over the years the track earned itself a reputation as the most mysterious song on the internet. The turning point came when the search landed on Reddit. On June 30, 2019, the subreddit TheMostMysteriousSong was created, gathering thousands of posts and building a fiercely dedicated community intent on tracking down information about the track.

Among the people contacted by the most active users was Paul Baskerville, a longtime Ndr disc jockey, who lent a hand by playing the track during his show "Nachtclub" on Ndr on July 21, 2019. That's how Lydia discovered just how much the search for the song had grown without her knowledge, and a few days later she became active again, joining the Reddit users.

Meanwhile, the community gained access to Ndr's archives, which held the complete list of every song broadcast at the time. Not all the artists could be traced, however: every so often the label "amateurband" would turn up, since the station also used to air amateur recordings. Users became convinced the track was one of these.

Another five years went by without any major breakthroughs — though the investigation never let up — and then suddenly, in 2024, a chain of events unfolded that led to the solution.

On May 26, 2024, a Reddit user, Ok-Horse2688, suggested looking into the participants of the Hörfest, an event they had discovered through a period article. The Hörfest was an event held during the Eighties and Nineties, dedicated exclusively to amateur German bands. The first edition took place on December 2 and 3, 1983, organized precisely by Ndr with the backing of the Hamburg Conservatory. From 1985 to 1991 the Hörfest also released albums featuring the finalist songs from each edition: unfortunately, Darius was certain that the timeframe in which he recorded the cassette didn't extend beyond 1984.

Through the publicly accessible Hamburg Archive, some users pieced together an extremely long list of bands (around nine hundred names) that took part in the Hörfest between 1983 and 1985, preliminary rounds included, and set about combing through it. For the record, here are the names of the users who made up the heart of the search team: Successful-Bread-347, purpledowithspats, LordElend, marijin1412, probablydoesntexist, johnnymetoo and stembe17.

On August 1, user snigelpasta contacted Peter Jack, a member of Twilight, an amateur band that had taken part in the 1984 edition of the Hörfest. Jack still had a lot of material from the event, which he showed the user. It emerged that that edition was held on September 14 and 15: at that point it became natural to connect this detail to the fact that, in the Ndr archives, on September 17, 1984, there's a block of several "amateurband" acts played back to back, close to some of the tracks that also appear on Darius's cassette (almost all of them British post-punk classics).

The search then kept circling around the Hörfest, until, in October, user marijin1412 discovered a band called Fex in a period article from the newspaper Nordwest-Zeitung. The band doesn't appear among the participants of Hörfest 1984, yet the user had a winning hunch: the name of one of its members, Michael Hädrich, matched that of a member of the Phret-Band, another amateur group that had instead taken part in Hörfest 1983.

In the article, Fex's music is described as "rock with pop and new wave influences": vague pointers, yet ones that matched the content of the mysterious song. Just to be thorough, the user tried to contact Hädrich through social media, and succeeded.

Intrigued, Hädrich confirms to him that he was indeed the keyboardist in both bands and sends him some vintage material, including a cassette demo simply titled "Fex," recorded in 1983, which features the object of the long, troubled investigation. It's called "Subways Of Your Mind" (not "Like The Wind," as many had taken to calling it, since those are the opening words of the lyrics). It's not the same version as the one on Darius's cassette, but there's no doubt that the song and the singer's voice are one and the same.

From there it's all downhill: Hädrich tracks down the other members of the band, namely Ture Rückwardt (vocals and guitar) and Norbert Ziermann (bass). The only one missing is drummer Hans-Reimer Sievers, with whom he's lost touch.

The three agree to make the demo cassette public, which contains two more of their songs ("Heart In Danger" and "Talking Hands"), which in the meantime they've hastily registered with Gema (the German equivalent of Italy's Siae), something they'd never thought to do until now, for obvious reasons.

On November 7th, the reunited three-quarters of Fex are welcomed into NDR's studios for an interview and show great enthusiasm: they had been completely unaware of the phenomenon that had built up around their song. For the occasion they perform it live in an acoustic version and pledge to re-record it in the studio.

However, not even they can figure out where the version on Darius's cassette came from: they do have a couple of live recordings of the track (one of which, made at the Roxy Paderborn venue on May 25, 1985, they've made public), but neither matches that version. Their theory is that their manager at the time sent NDR a recording of one of their concerts. What's certain is that it's a version dating back to 1984, since it features the sound of a Yamaha DX7 synthesizer, which Hädrich bought that year.

Meanwhile, a fourth song has surfaced, "Jenny," released on the compilation "Zeus Top Hits" (Elite Special, 1985).

About two days after the trio's appearance on NDR, Sievers is finally tracked down: he still has the electronic drum kit used back then, as well as the demo cassette and numerous photos of the band. Visibly moved, he said he was thrilled by the interest in their music and immediately got in touch with his old bandmates.

The song itself? It's a post-punk track with a baritone vocal: a great atmosphere, a highly effective melody, and, predictably, poor sound quality. The acoustic version played on the radio was undeniably moving, especially considering everything riding on that performance.

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