Alphaville

Alphaville embody the frustrated ego of the utterly untalented. They should have been drowned at birth

(Morrissey, Smash Hits)

Berlin's Alphaville play a simplistic, irritating synthetic rock (…) The pretension of the melodramatic Marian Gold only adds to the absurdity of the band

(Trouser Press)

The singer looks like he's been dressed by Klingons with a vague awareness of Billy Idol

(Melody Maker)

These are some of the comments found in the English-language music press of the time, regarding the 1984 debut that took German synth-pop to the top of the charts all over Europe. Decades on, despite the immortality achieved by its most celebrated songs, the band still carries an ambivalent reputation: a pop success that has become an iconic shorthand for the Eighties era and all its excesses. An evergreen, sure, but a hollow, cartoonish, entirely manufactured one.

And yet, "Forever Young" can be told as a very different story. That of a homespun project which, starting out from the squats of West Berlin, went on to conquer the charts on both sides of the English Channel. The story of three young men with no musical experience who saw in synthesizers and sequencers the chance to fulfil their dream: to write and record music as grand as the music they'd grown up with. And, having persistently and with a bit of luck made their way into a recording studio, they found a team of producers ready to deploy serious resources to bring their vision to life. Incredible but true: in 1980s Germany, this too could happen – a band picks up the phone to ask a record label for a contract, and without even having sent over a demo, gets the reply: "Sure, come see us tomorrow!"

Big In Japan

Between the late Seventies and early Eighties, West Berlin was seen by young West Germans as a land of possibility. Subsidies, cheap rents, and for those who couldn't afford even that, plenty of squatted or squattable housing; plus music, drugs, and a certain ease in scraping together "odd jobs" to fund one habit or another.

Marian Gold, born Hartwig Schierbaum, had been scraping by in Berlin for a while when a friend introduced him to Bernd Lloyd (Bernhard Gössling), who owned a couple of keyboards and had recently started tinkering with them. Marian was part of a collective, or rather a commune, that had long nursed the idea of making music, and Bernd was more than happy to join the fold. It's 1980.

The following year the "Nelson Community" moved to Münster, in the Rhineland, and internal relations within the group began to fray. Soon after came the turning point: the Nelson Community broke up, and Frank Mertens (stage name of Frank Sogartz, a former schoolmate of Bernd's) joined forces with Gold and Lloyd to launch a new musical project.

"None of us could really play," Gold would later admit. Even though Berlin at the time was Europe's punk capital, it wasn't a spirit of rebellion that pushed the three of them to try their hand at music, but the possibilities offered by electronic instruments. Thanks to keyboards, sequencers and drum machines, composing became possible even for those who entirely lacked conventional instrumental technique. It was a matter of trial and error, one key at a time, trying to translate musical visions into combinations of buttons. Until just a few years earlier, symphonic grandeur had been the preserve of bands with imposing resources and great performing skill. But with the arrival of polyphonic synthesizers, now even a trio of penniless dreamers could drape themselves in the most overflowing grandiloquence.

The trio's reference points were varied. Bernd was a devotee of Kraftwerk and all the most romantic, futuristic wave: Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark, Ultravox, Gary Numan, Simple Minds... Frank's outlook was more oblique, but equally drawn to the fusion of synthetic and symphonic: pioneer Klaus Schulze ranked among his favourites alongside the playful Pyrolator, while Bach and Dvořák were significant listening, as were minimalists Soft Verdict and Virginia Astley. A few years older, Marian had formed his tastes in the first half of the Seventies, and having never considered playing an instrument, had put his time to good use absorbing sounds and atmospheres instead: Genesis and Pink Floyd, Roxy Music, Queen, Alan Parsons. But among his reference points also crop up names less remembered today: the progressive pop of David Essex and Brian Protheroe, the soft-rock of Peter Skellern, the radiant Renaissance/minimal synth hybrid of Bavarians Luna Set (squarely in Zolo territory).

What united all three, predictably, was David Bowie. During his Berlin years, Marian Gold repeatedly tried to meet him, hanging around Kreuzberg's SO36 in the hope that the Thin White Duke might pass through too. Even though personal contact never happened, the musical connection is plain to hear, both in Gold's histrionic vocals and in the enveloping textures woven by Lloyd and Mertens.

Even though a few of the earliest songs were written in German, Gold soon felt more at ease with English: "Lyrics in German can be really beautiful; if I knew how to write them I would, but I'm a prisoner of the Sixties," he would put it simply in a 1983 interview. "Forever Young" was the first track to take shape, and for a while it also served as the band's name; the first single to be released, however, was "Big In Japan". It's January 1984, and by then the trio had changed its name: after weighing up the title of Leó Szilárd's science-fiction collection "The Voice Of The Dolphins", they settled instead on the title of Jean-Luc Godard's classic sci-fi/noir.

Ushered in by synthetic orchestral hits and chimes with an Oriental flavour, the future hit lays bare the epic scope of its sound right from the title. But it's precisely in the chosen phrase – "big in Japan" being used mockingly to describe those artists, utterly unknown at home, who boast huge success in the Land of the Rising Sun – that the bittersweet soul lies, which is somewhat the miracle of the song, and of the album that contains it. Contrary to what a first reading might suggest, beneath the seemingly carefree lyrics Marian Gold buried a story of light and shadow. The larger than life vision of the "Eastern sea so blue" that radiates through the chorus is countered by the cold, urban landscape of the verses, the "Winter cityside" that, verse after verse, edges ever closer to a real scenario: the squalid Berlin of the drug culture centred around the Zoo, which Gold experienced firsthand in the very early Eighties, when, by the singer's own account, dependence on tranquillisers and the company he kept would easily have led him to heroin, had his sister not stepped in to get him into rehab.

Neon on my naked skin, passing silhouettes

Of strange illuminated mannequins

Shall I stay here at the zoo

Or shall I go and change my point of view

For other ugly scenes

The seemingly nonsense contrast between Asian openings and metropolitan greyness thus reveals, in backlit relief, a more empathetic narrative: the story of a couple trapped in drug addiction, dreaming of a redemption that she herself cannot bring herself to believe in.

It's unlikely that listeners en masse will grasp the lyric's unspoken subtext: then again, they don't need to, in order to feel the evocative power of the atmospheres and of Gold's performance, who channels into every vocal inflection the searing intensity of the imagined situation, turning the song into a hymn to the light sung from the depths of darkness.

Beyond Lloyd and Mertens' architecture, the effectiveness of the arrangements owes much to the producers' inventiveness. After trying to beef up the sound with overdubbed guitar power chords recorded without the band's consent (who, once back in the studio, would insist they stay buried in the mix everywhere except in the coda), Britain's Colin Pearson and Germany's Wolfgang Loos doubled down on the grandeur by recording an extremely costly thirty-two-voice choir for the chorus. Once again, the group deemed the result excessive, but rather than throw the money spent down the drain, Pearson and Loos came up with a clever workaround: by running the choir through a reverb and keeping only the reverb's output, they created a pad easily mistaken for yet another synthesizer, but with a texture that was at once warm and spectral.

Shortly after release, the track shoots to number one in Germany, Sweden and Switzerland, and hits the top ten pretty much everywhere from the UK to South Africa. Coming out of nowhere, Alphaville are the sensation of the moment across Europe.

Sounds Like A Melody

The romantic interplay between glory and desolation underpins many other tracks on the debut album — perhaps all of them. It's there in the alternation between minimal textures and classical flourishes ("To Germany With Love" closes with a blatant Mozartian nod), it's there in the melancholy-drenched weave of the already-dated string synthesizers that pepper tracks like "A Victory Of Love", "Summer In Berlin", and even the sprightly "In The Mood". But it's also there in the harmonic choices of the compositions, which, for all their simplicity, show just how well Mertens and Lloyd command their own expressive tools. Minor keys clearly dominate, bringing with them all their inherent theatricality. "Fallen Angel" and "Summer In Berlin", however, play the major-key chorus card, using the shift in mode as a springboard to soar upward and tear open the narrow horizon of the verse. On other occasions the shifts are subtler, yet equally geared toward tension and chiaroscuro: an unexpected seventh in "Lies", or a major chord standing in for a minor one in the chord progressions of "A Victory Of Love" and "To Germany With Love".

For the second single, though, something more is needed. Hinting at glimmers of light isn't enough: the producers insist — to pave the way for the announced blockbuster "Forever Young", they first need an upbeat track. The band's drawer doesn't yet hold one, but Lloyd has a minor-key sketch in the works that might just lend itself to being reworked. "Sounds Like A Melody" is born in a single day. Gold hates it; Pearson and Loos are thrilled. As Pearson would explain: "I'd been looking for a new new romantic band for a long time. That was basically why I was at the label. Up to that point the company had been very much oriented toward Schlager [easy-listening sentimental pop popular in German-speaking countries, ed.], but I was a fan of Howard Jones, Paul Young, Human League... I wanted to find something similar for the German market too!"

For Colin Pearson, the success of the Alphaville operation is a personal matter. To give "Sounds Like A Melody" the emphasis it needed, he had Wolfgang Loos write a string arrangement "in the style of Elton John" (his own words), later recorded by the Deutsche Oper Berlin orchestra. During the recording session, the classical musicians struggled to play Loos's offbeat figures in time, so the team resorted to painstaking digital correction, realigning each orchestral part so the bow strokes would land with the necessary sharpness. That, however, wasn't the only piece of studio trickery used on the single. To let Marian Gold's backing vocals reach pitches beyond even his considerable range, Loos dug up a trick used by Earth, Wind & Fire: while recording Gold's counter-melodies, the backing tape was played at a deliberately slowed-down speed; speeding the recording back up to normal, the pitch of the voice came out raised.

The single is released in May '84. Once again, the track climbs many charts (in Italy it's number one for two weeks): everything is now set for the release of the killer single and the LP...

Forever Young

The self-titled album and single both hit stores at the end of September, just a week apart. Introducing the LP is the eerie hand-drawn cover art by designer Ulf Meyer zu Küingdorf, a silvery, textured face with sci-fi, almost cyberpunk overtones.

The opening track, "A Victory Of Love", seems from the very start to translate the artwork's suggestions into musical terms: drizzling synths materializing across the stereo field, arpeggiators and pads somewhere between Bach-like and futuristic, a robotic bassline that still retains a distant trace of humanity. And then the voice, deeper and more pensive than ever: "Waiting/ For a change in the weather/ I'm waiting/ For a shift in the air". There's a sense of looming threat, of apocalypse at the door — and the crescendo that follows only sharpens the tension. Echoes, whooshes, electronic drums (the featured guest is Curt Cress of jazz-rock outfit Passport). Prechorus. The rhythm grows more urgent. The explosive chorus is followed by forty liberating seconds of symphonic-electronic interplay. For music that's quintessentially eighties, it sounds a great deal like what was fashionable ten years earlier. You could see that as a flaw, but perhaps it's actually its real strength.

The mood swings of "Summer In Berlin" give way to the already-familiar "Big In Japan", whose closing gong yields to the orchestral pulses of "To Germany With Love" (interwoven with a quote from Trans Europe Express), to the constant interplay of its double, funk-tinged bassline, and to the majestic breakdown of synchronized percussion and synths. It's a track that, like others, makes full use of the potential of the then-recent MIDI technology — the digital communication protocol, still in use today, that makes electronic instruments interoperable and allows them to receive triggers from a single centralized clock (the one used by the band was the German-made Src Friend-chip).

A few years ago, Bernd Lloyd revealed on a fan forum the makeup of the synth arsenal used on the album, spanning a good decade of electronic music history: from the legendary duophonic Arp Odyssey (1972) to the modular Roland System-100M (1979), by way of the portable analog Korg Ms-10 and Ms-20 (1977 and 1978 respectively).

In the polyphonic realm, the Roland Jupiter 8 (1981) undoubtedly steals the show, but it's backed up by the paraphonic string machines (able to play several notes at once, provided you give up their attack) already produced in the early Seventies by Hohner and Solina. The crown jewel is the brand-new PPG Wave 2.3 (1984), a pioneering wavetable-type digital synthesizer with 12-bit resolution and the additional Waveterm module, which doubled as a sampler. Also essential to the sound's construction were sequencers for programming note sequences (Mfb, Korg Sq-10), drum machines (the analog Roland Tr-80 and the Linn Lm-1, the first to use digital samples of acoustic percussion), and the ubiquitous Simmons Drums, whose iconic hexagonal pads were popularized by so many artists of the era.

Not bad at all for a band that, again according to Lloyd, only a few years earlier had to make do with a Rhodes electric piano and a Roland System 100-M borrowed from a friend!

“Fallen Angel,” at once mysterious and playful, precedes the album's showpiece in the tracklist. “Forever Young” is Alphaville's most famous song, and the one that will probably never stop being played and covered (by Laura Branigan, Jay-Z, Tangerine Dream, Angel Olsen, Imagine Dragons, One Direction...). And yet, although it topped the charts in Sweden, in Germany it stalled at number four and in Britain it never got past number ninety-eight (the album, on the other hand, hit number one in Sweden, Norway and Italy). To date on Spotify it has racked up around three hundred and ninety million streams – more than any track by its inspirations Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark, Ultravox, Human League and Gary Numan, and just a hair behind “Enjoy The Silence” by Depeche Mode.

And to think it was meant to be a dance track. The idea for the song – the newly-formed trio's first – came to Bernd Lloyd after listening to “Torch” by Soft Cell, with its jagged beat, and it was in that dancefloor guise that it had won over the Wea label. But when it came time to finalize the track, the sixteenth-note rhythmic pattern turned out not to work. The band members and producers spent a couple of days puzzling over how to reinvent what was clearly the band's real ace in the hole, but the winning idea came from outsider Andreas Budde, the album's co-producer, who nonetheless only rarely set foot in the studio. Away with everything – the beat, the sequencers, the arpeggiators, the driving basslines. The song's DNA was that of a ballad. So a ballad it would be.

Extremely simple in its harmonic construction, yet carefully studied in the layering of its synthetic parts, the song's ‘eternal youth’ hinges on its closing atmosphere and on the meticulous perfection of the vocal performance. Pearson devoted dozens upon dozens of takes to Gold's vocal: the pitching, the attacks, even the English pronunciation had to be flawless. There was even debate over the second vowel of the lyric: should “dance” be pronounced with a sort of open “e” ([dæns]) or with a long “a” ([dɑːns])? Both forms are correct, but the former sounds more American, while the latter is more British. In the end the British variant won out, deemed more desirable given a possible (though never realized) breakthrough across the Channel.

“Forever Young” shares with only a handful of other pop songs – “The Final Countdown,” “Don't Stop Believin',” what else? – the quality of sounding complete and definitive in absolutely any social setting it's played in. It's the perfect last-dance song for a wedding, but it also has the right gravitas for a christening, a graduation or a funeral. The lyrics are oblique, undeniably epic, in some ways sci-fi, yet its key lines express aspirations and questions that are instantly easy to identify with.

So many adventures given up today

So many songs we forgot to play

So many dreams swinging out of the blue

Oh let it come true

From “Are you gonna drop the bomb or not?” to “The music's for the sad man,” down to the title-drop in the chorus, there are plenty of lines made unforgettable by their sheer force. What the song is actually about as a whole is hard to pin down, but the feeling it conveys is unmistakable: an impossible surge beyond the limits and fears that crush happiness. A combination of ecstasy and melodrama, naivety and resignation. Once again, opposites touching one another.

Three more songs close out the album: they're perhaps the lightest of the bunch, but that yin-and-yang coexistence of ambivalent emotions runs through them too. “In The Mood” combines a bright offbeat groove with a hyper-dramatic Andalusian cadence (the same one heard in “Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood”, in “Sultans Of Swing” or in the verse of “Happy Together”). “Lies” is a space-age rockabilly number that shows few dark undertones (so much so – though this is clearly just a suggestion prompted by its place in the tracklist – that it almost seems steeped in them), while “The Jet Set” is a major-key four-chord song that closes the record on a triumphant note, not before giving plenty of room to those same string machines that, across pretty much the whole LP, serve as the objective correlative of its melancholy.

The album has since gone triple platinum in Germany, but at the time other domestic phenomena were occupying the top spots on the sales chart. 1984 was the year of Nena's “?” and her international breakthrough with the LP “99 Luftballons,” of yet more Deutschrock hits from Peter Maffay and BAP, and above all of Herbert Grönemeyer's “4630 Bochum,” which with 79 weeks on the chart and 2.75 million copies sold still ranks today as the third best-selling album in German history (the top spot belongs to another Grönemeyer title: “Mensch,” from 2002).

As for Alphaville, though, that success was never repeated, neither with the following “Afternoons In Utopia” (1986) nor with later releases. Even more sci-fi and flashy than the debut, the second album marked the departure of the reserved Frank Mertens, who was never comfortable with media exposure, and the arrival of keyboardist and guitarist Ricky Echolette (Wolfgang Neuhaus). A concept album built around utopian themes, the record involved a whole host of collaborators and had little of the debut's dramatic charge: amid bold key changes and musical-theatre-style passages, it at times edges toward the synthetic progressive pop of names like Nik Kershaw or Thomas Dolby (though sadly without matching their class). On the jazz-inflected “The Breathtaking Blue” (1989), the producer's chair was occupied by none other than Klaus Schulze (and among the guitarists was Manuel Gottsching), but the album failed to crack the top ten even at home.

Things went no better for “Prostitute” (1994), which is nonetheless regarded by Gold and many fans as the band's most accomplished album, thanks in no small part to its remarkable variety. “Salvation” (1997) was the last with Bernd Lloyd, and Ricky Echolette too left during production; Marian Gold has nevertheless kept the band's name going and, alongside a tour and a double symphonic album, in 2022 launched his own video-podcast on YouTube, in which he revisits the stories behind many of his key songs. Much of the reconstruction in this article draws on those accounts, and on the even more thorough documentary “Never Grow Up – The Story Of Forever Young,” also available on YouTube.

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02/10/2022