Twins Fever in Eastern Europe
“Love System” was a downright easygoing synthpop song, almost in British style, and already the third single from our album “A Wild Romance”. As already said, “Love System” was composed by Michael Gerlach, the keyboarder of our live band, on a 12 voice synthesizer, the legendary “Oberheim OBX-a” and afterwards “Twins compatibly” arranged by Ronny. With her catchy voice, singer Mandy Parkin contributed the female chorus to this song. Even if the chorus of “Love System” maybe didn’t exactly compare to “Ballet Dancer” or “Face To Face”, the song was extremely successful in Germany and with the help of our appearance at the “Musikladen” it climbed to number 27 of the Media Control Charts. At the end, the single was pressed in an edition of almost 100,000 records and the further sales of our LP/CD “A Wild Romance” strongly benefited from it, too.
In late summer 1984 we started doing shows in various Eastern European countries. Fans from the GDR, Poland and Hungary had repeatedly asked for a while now whether we couldn’t play there, too. In the GDR, this request was rejected “for political reasons”, just as expected. Of course, we only unofficially got to know the reason: We sang in English (in other words: the world language of the class enemy) and our looks were also not suitable to bring the socialism in the land of Honecker forwards, as the way we dressed and behaved was much too decadent. So our meanwhile numerous fans on the other side of this “anti fascistic protective barrier” still had to do without Twins live shows in East Berlin, Magdeburg or Dresden. Nevertheless there were some other opportunities for fans from the GDR to see us “in person” and these opportunities were well used.
With the help of our lyricist Tim Dowdall who also was working for a big Hungarian concert agency, we were for example brought to Poland, where we were booked as “special guests” at the renowned Zopot festival. Although only a stone’s throw from Berlin, the journey there was adventurous and time-consuming: after we had crossed the border from West to East Berlin and passed through the GDR-controls we reached the airport Schönefeld south of Berlin. Then we flew to Warsaw with the Polish airline “Lot” and from there we went by coach through the beautiful North West Pomerania, always heading north, following a seemingly endless country road filled wit potholes. Finally we reached Zopot, a seaside resort which was only a few kilometres north and thereby in the immediate vicinity of the former Hanse city Danzig (Gdingen).
As it is generally known, Danzig and its “Corridor” did not only play an important and very fateful role in the unstable German-Polish relation in the last century. On 1st September 1939, the second world war started there with the German invasion of Poland, when the battle training ship “Schleswig-Holstein” opened fire on the Westerplatte. By the way, I’ve never seen so many ancient horse-drawn carts in use again, as I did during this late summer trip on the bumpy, tree-lined avenues of Pomerelia. Harvesting time was about to end and this way of agricultural transport was obviously still indispensable there, although the automobile had been invented 90 years before. Even if this all looked picturesquely romantic, it also left a rather depressing impression. The Polish country people were dressed simply, or rather said poorly, and even the beautiful sunset behind endless fields we saw during this almost three-hour journey on the coach could not hide the fact that Poland obviously had significantly bigger problems than many other Eastern European countries at that time.
The still very young labour movement “Solidarnosc”, founded as an alternative trade union in summer 1980, got more and more popular. Turmoils which had come up in the population for a while were brutally suppressed by the Polish regime. Because of an obviously very poor harvest there were rumours of a coming famine and long queues in front of shops selling articles of daily use were the order of the day. Compared to Poland, the supply situation in the GDR which I knew quite well from lots of visits to friends in East Berlin almost seemed like that of a land of milk and honey. Therefore I got pretty angry when one of our roadies loudly complained about the quality of our steaks in the hotel restaurant in Zopot. The meat was too well done and not really hot, he grumbled. I rebuked him fiercely. Outside on the streets, people stood in line for hours to get the little that was left. We, however, sat in our luxury palace and dined with filet steaks and wine in a parallel universe. In view of this precarious situation of the country I had expected a little more respect and indulgence, and I clearly told him so.
The festival place was in the middle of a wood, so it was a real kind of forest stage. The weather remained perfect. During our show on the evening of the following day we played more than half an hour with our band and we were the only artists actually playing live. We were astonished about how many people there already knew us and all members of the band did their best. But when we had played “A Wild Romance”, the fourth song of our programme, there was a bit of a flurry. Directly after the last note of the song there was a complete power breakdown on stage and it only started working again after a seemingly endless minute. Luckily, most people of the audience didn’t really notice that. Most of them probably thought this gag was part of our show. After two encores and without any further power failures we left the stage and in front of the backstage rooms we were met by a couple of fans who had meanwhile sneaked past the barriers. Our show was so successful that we got mail from people everywhere in Poland shortly after. Lots of them sent us photos they had taken directly from the TV screens during the broadcast and even today “representatives” of our “official” Polish fan club come to some of our shows in Germany and talk to us about the old times.
After this first successful show in a country of the Eastern bloc we planned a tour through Hungary. You must know, single shows or let alone complete tours of Western artist in Hungary still were something very special at that time. In spite of the somewhat freer attitude of the Hungarian authorities towards their citizens, shows of artists from “capitalist states” needed explicit permissions by the state. Therefore the whole progress of such a tour had to be planned meticulously and submitted to the responsible authorities because nothing was allowed to be beyond their control. It proved to be very helpful that, in the run-up of the tour, our organiser Tim had managed to get us into a TV show in Budapest with a great line-up. This TV show supported the SOS Children’s Villages, a charitably organisation which still cares for the welfare of children all over the world. So Ronny and I flew to Budapest where we suddenly stood alone on a huge stage, playing between the bands “Icehouse” and “Spandau Ballet”, and were broadcast to the Hungarian TV screens at prime time on a rainy autumn evening. Self-confident as we were, we nevertheless did our show and Ronny even jumped down from the huge stage to get in touch with the audience, which was extremely well liked by them.
By the way, I had brought my wife to the trip, which led to an unbelievable mix-up that night. Next to the performances of the three mentioned bands, the huge charity programme in the hall filled with several thousands of people also featured the dance of a ballet group with a beautiful Hungarian ballerina. Sparsely dressed and flexible as the jaws of an anaconda swallowing a boar, this ballerina made provocative or rather extremely suggestive contortions on stage which were called “Modern Dance”. This way she caused quite a stir, not only with us but also with the audience in the hall which was partially still very young. I was not the only one who fascinatedly noticed that this ballerina remarkably resembled my wife. But my wife had been in the audience and not on stage, I knew that very well. After the show, when we – accompanied by my wife and a little late – entered the large ball room for the following night-time dinner with the notability and invited guests, we were at once applauded from all sides. A few people even rose from their seats and standing they applauded in our direction. We felt very honoured, but we also were a little confused because we had not expected so much applause and honour for our performance. Far from it! This wasn’t meant for the Twins at all
Hermann Gmeiner, the (meanwhile sadly deceased) patron of the event, stood up and made a beeline for my wife to compliment her in broken English in front of all people on her “fantastic and impressive performance” and her “extraordinary dancing skills”. We were so taken aback that we didn’t even dare to make it clear that this was a mix-up. To make matters worse, the “real” dancer and her entourage showed up in the banquet hall just after we had somewhat recovered from the shock after the second bottle of Tokaji wine and she looked questioningly into the now rather flabbergasted faces of most people there who alternately kept staring at her and my wife as if they were seeing a mirage.
Our next single which we released in Germany in September 1984 was called “The Game Of Chance”. We recorded the basic sound tracks and the vocals in the recording studio Funk in Neukölln and then we mixed it again in the Hansa studios in Köthener Str., close to the Berlin Wall. As always, the experienced Hubert Henle was our sound engineer. At that time, Tom Müller was the studio boss of the Hansa studios, a real warhorse of many successful German kitschy hit productions, whom I recently met again during a steamboat trip of the Meisel publishing company. We chatted about the “eighties” and so I could comparatively well recall the following anecdote with him:
There always was a green bottle of methylated spirits standing on the huge “Solid-State”-automation desk in the Hansa mixing room. These spirits were usually used for removing felt tip pen markings of channel positions from the desk after a change of tape so that it could be written on again. One day, I think it was during the “Iko”-recording, Tom, keeping a straight face, entered the mixing room during a short production break, said something like “what you’re doing sounds great” and suddenly added: “Gosh! I’m so thirsty”. Then he grabbed the bottle of spirits before our very eyes and emptied it in one gulp, seemingly death-defying. Highly alarmed, I was already about to pick up the phone to call the ambulance, not knowing that this jester had secretly replaced the spirits in the bottle with tap water shortly before and now played the hero to play a trick on us.
Back to “The Game Of Chance”. This song was a “typical Twins-like” thing. Instead of playing it save and staying on the road to success we had once taken, we wanted to reinvent the wheel, experimented and simply changed our style a little, again. We wanted to be more “progressive”- not only because we wanted to give the right answer to all the critics who had always thought us “too poppy”, but also because we were really taken with the new songs of Depeche Mode which had incidentally been produced in the same studio a few months before. However, although “The Game Of Chance” was really well done and although we still successfully play the song live today, this small change of style proved to be counterproductive for us at that time. So the sales of the single stayed below the general expectations. By the way, on the back of the single cover you can see a very good photo of our live band during that time. The people, including those at our record company, probably would rather have liked getting a second “Ballet Dancer” than breaking new musical Twins ground with us.
What is more, in the wake of international and national “electronic pop” getting more and more popular in Germany, a new project had been founded at the Hansa and due to the sensational success of the first single, this project now obviously got all the attention of our record company. Dieter Bohlen with “Modern Talking”. As already mentioned before, Dieter had been rather unsuccessful so far, but now he had started to let his artist Thomas Anders sing in English and composed a song called “You're my Heart, You’re My Soul”. Then a girl from the promotion department, at that time the girlfriend of “fella”, to be precise, invented the band name “Modern Talking” and the dish was cooked. From that day on, this dish, which in its ingenious simplicity was each time only slightly varied, was ruthlessly but consistently and, above all, very successfully served to the German and international audience over and over again for many years.
The year 1985 started like the year 1984 had ended, with lots of stress and work. The studio costs for our productions had meanwhile become enormously high and in the long run we wanted to do something against it. Considering the fact that the Berlin Senate sponsored “producing business” – which also included recording studios – with a considerable investment subsidy (this meant that at the end of the year, you got back 25% of each production-relevant investment from the state, in cash) and in view of the expectation that we would get into the highest German tax class in the following year of 1985, I had the idea of founding a music production company, complete with recording studio in autumn 1984 and Ronny also started to build up his own studio soon after.
Read in the next chapter:
my studio stress, the 4th Twins LP “Until The End Of Time”, back in the charts with “Love In The Dark”, the plagiarism lawsuit, the large tour through Hungary
Author
