Silly (East German band)

[Evariste Euler Gauss]

Nice to find a song you like by a band you'd never heard of before. Just discovered this song ("Halloween in Ostberlin") by a band from the GDR called Silly:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tOzj6yoIh70

when watching a documentary about the GDR. The song is from 1993, rather 1980s in style, but that's no bad thing of course. Apparently the band, formed in the late 1970s, was inactive from 1996 until 2010, following the untimely death of their singer from cancer.

[treibeis]

Silly (East German band)

I've heard of them, but only because the current singer, Anna Loos, is a well-known actress, who's married to the equally well-known actor Jan Josef Liefers. I know a few people with a crush on Anna Loos, although she does little for me personally.

I wouldn't switch the radio off if Silly came on, but I wouldn't turn it on espcially to listen to them.

[WOM]

Silly (East German band)

That's a bit 'hit and miss' as a radio-listening strategy, though.

[treibeis]

Silly (East German band)

WOM wrote: That's a bit 'hit and miss' as a radio-listening strategy, though.

Ah, you're unfamiliar with German radio scheduling, though, at least in this neck of the woods.

They have (fairly) regular 'music marathons' (usually Bank Holiday weekends), where they announce in advance which record is going to be played when.

I'm sure people have been late for their own wedding because they knew 'Winds of Change' would be on at 14:53 hrs. on the Saturday and just couldn't bear to miss it.

[Toby Gymshorts]

Silly (East German band)

See, I love Winds of Change, if only for the bizarre way Klaus Meine sings the words 'Down to Gorky Park'; which to my ears sounds like he's singing 'Down to Gonky Ponk'.

If that's not a good enough reason to love it, I don't know what is.

[Evariste Euler Gauss]

Silly (East German band)

Winds of Change is the archetype of the jaw-droppingly politically naïve dreamy ballad, isn't it? Even the flower power era of the late '60s would have struggled to produce a song with quite that excess of naïve optimism.

[G-Man]

Silly (East German band)

East German rock was pretty awful, it must be said. The biggest names in the '70s and early '80s were the Puhdys and City, both rather prog-rockish in style. I'm sure they'd have liked to be subversive, but they weren't.

Get your prog-beard beard on with Puhdys' "Sturmvogel", live in '77

And City's "Am Fenster"

I bought LPs by both on visits to the DDR, of course. I didn't listen much to them at all.

One outfit, Karat, was allowed to tour West Germany. They had a hit in the DDR with an earnest ballad called "Über sieben Brücken mußt du geh'n". It could have been a hit in the West, too, but the Schlager-Rock mammoth that is Peter Maffay did a terrible cover of it, and scored a massive hit.

[G-Man]

Silly (East German band)

On the subject, I cannot abide by Nina Hagen, who was styled to be a Schlager singer in East Germany. But I like how she used the limelight given to to her to thoroughly take the piss out of the genre and subvert the expectations of her as a Schlager singer. Her vocal performance on "Du hast den Farbfilm vergessen" is dripping with scorn for the material she was expected to sing.

The song was written by her and the band, so the tune is a satire, and the pretty bad lyrics -- "You forgot the colour photo film" -- nevertheless a rather clever stab at the regime, in as far as colour photo film was very difficult to get hold of. The censors obviously had no problem with her reference to not being able to take colour photos on the nudist beach