The second wave of Hamburg school presented new bands developing the original guitar based indie sound. Sometimes they changed their crudeness for a more melodic style. But still using cryptic lyrics that are hard to understand what they want to explain. First of those bands named should be Die Sterne. I remember when some of their funk and soul influenced songs were part of the sound of a summer in the early 90's.
Tocotronic were those band that brought post-grunge like Dinosaur Jr. into this genre. Over the years they established as pioneers of Hamburg school. I liked them and I also was impressed by their live appearances.
Tom Liwa and Flowerpornoes brought melancholia into this guitar based sound. Formed in Duisburg in 1985 they sung on their first albums in English and started years later after they moved to Hamburg singing in their native language. Their musical cosmos spreads from psychedelia, alternative rock to folk.
For the rest of the week our worker's council sent me for a further training in labour law and communication and collaboration to Hamburg. So I had the idea to create some posts about the so called Hamburg school. It is a synonym for musical movement started at the end of the 80's until the mid 90's. Developed by new wave the bands combined elements of indie-rock, punk, grunge and pop and became an important part of German youth culture and made a new self-conception in using German language in popular music.
At the end of the 1980s, a German-language music scene was created in Hamburg, whose bands had no record contracts and did not release it anything. Only with the founding of the label L'age d'or in October 1988 this kind of music got a platform. One of the first acts that were signed was Huah! Formed by Frank Möller they made their very own thing between punk, hip-hop and soul. Sadly they never got the critical acclaim they should have.
Another band from Hamburg that never made great success was Kolossale Jugend. Named after Young Marble Giant's epic album Colossal Youth. This was guitar based indie rock, as it was so intense and reluctant at that time only American or British groups got it.
Another label that released bands from this genre was Alfred Hilsberg's What's So Funny About. Blumfeld's first albums were released on this label. Blumfeld are probably the ones that got success in these days. Their sound, originally strongly influenced by guitar feedback, turned into a more pop-oriented sound after the band was reshaped in the mid-1990s. The most important feature is the interleaved German lyrics, partly performed in voice vocals by the singer Jochen Distelmeyer, which combine their own emotional worlds with social criticism in pictorial language.
After yesterday's post I was in the mood to check out some old German music again that had the spirit of John Lydon and the post punk era. One of those bands that appeared in the late 80s was Kolossale Jugend a band that was close to the so called Hamburg school that brought Germany a very new and rough sound in independent music. Named by a song from Young Marble Giants (Colossal Youth) they made a fantastic combination of post punk mixed with a bit of grunge and experimental pop. Their texts were often cryptic – half crazy, half brilliantly – however, the note which the band sound like was unequivocal. They freely rocked after the motto: According to and indirectly. They had an attitude by controlling their rage, always remained far away of every market compatibility. Their play was full of pressure and rousing. This is a song from their album Heile, Heile Bouches released in 1989 and it was a highlight for me in these times.
Just two months ago I have written in this series about the so-called Hamburg school. And Dirk has rightly asked, why I have mentioned Tocotronic with no word in this connection. The reason is easy: Tocotronic are worth to be written it only about them. They released their first record nearly 20 years ago and I have to agree to Dirk that this one is a masterpiece.
They are angry young men of the German Indie pop, the model boys of the so-called Hamburg school - Tocotronic count to the most important German tape of the 90s.
In the end of 1993 the Hamburg punk musicians Jan Müller (bass guitar), Arne Zank (percussion) and the guitarist incurred from Freiburg and singer Dirk von Lowtzow found Tocotronic (named after a Gameboy precursor) and begin with it a pop phenomenon of nearly British magnitude. The Hamburg music scene numb at that time in selfreference celebrates the first concerts the volume like a revelation: The unconventional hairstyles, the corduroys, sportjacket-style, the politeness of the announcements are appreciated and admired.
The tape publishes published by the author Rock-O-Tronic a single whose title line "I Would want part of A youth movement being" short time later on house walls and in a Blumfeld song finds again. Over Blumfeld head Jochen Distelmeyer originates the contact with the label L'Age D'Or which takes over the distribution of the single and accompanying T-shirts.
In the beginning of '95 the debut album appears 'Digitally Is better' and puts a landmark in the German-speaking Indie pop history: Trashy Post-Grunge à la Dinosaur Jr., moving-melancholy snapshots of the youth everyday life provide with identification-donating texts, partly punkiges Sloganeering, partly. The pop-intellectual press cheers at the expression of a new generation and this time the generation sees also in such a way: A 2-week club tour carries the name Tocotronic about the town borders of Hamburg in the consciousness of young, furious people.
For me her political statements were far less important than her music. About the years away the tape has developed steadily and has added to her formerly guitar-oriented sound a melancholy mark.
Let me take you back 20 years ago to German rock music. The Hamburg school is a loose music movement which originated in the end of the 1980s and reached her commercial high point middle him of 1990s. She went back to traditions of the new German wave and connected them with elements of Indie rock, punk, Grunge and pop. It was and is with it an important part of the German youth culture and brought a new self-image for the use of the German in the pop music with itself. In the beginning purely from Hamburg based bands like Cpt. Kirk &., Kolossale Jugend, Blumfeld , Die Goldenen Zitronen or Huah! carried, the Hamburg school is not simply a „storage tank of similarly sounding music“. It's distinguishes herself above all by German-speaking lyrics to which often a high intellectual claim is portioned out and which are connected extensively with society criticism, left political setting and postal-modern theories. In the middle of the 1990s became in particular of three bands very successful: Blumfeld, Die Sterne and Tocotronic. By the success of the Hamburg school also attained a lot of German-speaking guitar bands a higher fame whose attempts were not necessarily to be compared in music and text to the Hamburg school. However, with the establishment of a national, German-speaking indie-pop scene and the concept „Hamburg school“ became less important bit by bit. But this will be a story to be told another time.
So let me introduce some band from the 'Hamburg School' that made German ears listen to some new sounds:
And if I talk about the so called 'Hamburg School' this story would not be complete without any word about Bernd Begemann from Bad Salzuflen who was still a member of the scene. He did a lot of good things all over the years and I was glad to see him live last year in a very very small bar in Stuttgart.
