The four categories of Alphaville [Marian Gold posting from Moonbase]

[humanracer]

Dear listmembers, and welcome, Outsider,thanx a lot, your lineup brings back many good or at least funny memories! Here's are a few remarks from my side.


Fallen Angel; we rehearsed the song for the very first tour in '95 and included it for the first two gigs in Breslau and Leipzig. I then stopped playing it. It sounded close to the original and to me that works nicely on record but not on stage.


I also had problems singing it, quite a challenge, especially in Leipzig, a gig that turned into a nightmare. The band scheduled after us was called "And One". They had lots of fans from the right wing scene, the venue was filled with nasty looking skinheads. When we ended the show, our fans left the front rows for the Nazis, who immediately stormed forward and started to scream "...And One, And One...!". Problem was that our road manager Andy, a non German speaking Englishman understood "...add on, add on!" and called us back on stage... well, only me and Martin because I had the brilliant idea to start a possible encore with the delicate piano version of "If The Audience Was Listening". The Nazi guys lost it completely when they saw us returning and as we played our sweet lullaby against a wall of bottomless hatred and screaming faces, an endless rain of flying bottles and sputtering beer cans descended on us. We cut down the song as much as possible, then the rest of the band came to our rescue and we hammered the yelling down with a metal version of "Big In Japan"... there was even some cautious applause in the end and we somehow managed to escape the crowd.


Maybe the memory of that experience prevented me from playing "Fallen Angel" or any other "problematic" song ever again. Some years later we performed "Audience" in a Russian nightclub though. Another brilliant idea of mine...


So now lets talk about Lies; it's because someone considered it as one of the "lesser" songs of ours. BUT! I really like it. Let me explain... I wrote it several months before we got the record deal and in many aspects its lyrics proved to be a self-fulfilling prophecy. I kind of gripped what would happen later on when we became famous pop stars and with my song I turned it all into a big joke. Allowedly a megalomanic joke. I mean, at the time Lies originated, there was not the slightest hint we would become notable artists in the world of music. Lyrically it's a very playful song and so it is musically. And it is one of our most benign tunes. Listening to it, it feels as if my younger self way back in the past says Hello and gives me a warm embrace. As you see I have a very personal reason for liking the song. But there are others as well.


If you listen carefully to our music you may find that there are quite different categories of songs. It's almost as if we were not just one band but many unlike versions of it altogether housed under a common roof called Alphaville. In the past I tried to exemplify this with Dreamscapes. Compositional Dreamscapes presents a great variety of possible Alphavilles from all kinds of musical universes. Also the stories inside the booklet describe various possibilities of my beloved band's history. In Icecream Girl, the prospective singer trades his synthesizer for heroin. That prevents him from writing one of the band's signature songs and finishes the existence of Alphaville before it actually started. In Guest of Honour a girl named Marian is the fictitious protagonist of a musical called "Alphaville" that originated from the imagination of one Harvey who subsequently died in a car crash in Los Angeles. I admit, it was lots of fun to invent all these stories. - Once, one of our fans wrote that Alphaville's style was not having a style at all. I disagree profoundly. If you split Alphaville's body of work in, say, three or four categories, three or four complete bands, each of them with their own, distinctive style would emerge from the music.


First of all, there is the pop category. In there you find songs like Universal Daddy, A Miracle Healing, Red Rose, Ways, The Mysteries Of Love, Song for No One, I Die For You Today, Beethoven, Iron John, The One Thing, About a Heart, Inside Out, The Impossible Dream, Jerusalem, Summer In Berlin, Soul Messiah, Monkey In The Moon, Guardian Angel, Moonboy, Flame, Wishful Thinking, Call Me (When I Make It), What Is Love, Today, Danger In Your Paradise, Feathers & Tar, Phantoms and so on. Let us call this band Popville, although it is a ridiculous name they do not deserve.


Lies, our before mentioned song, to me does not belong into this catagory although it feels kind of pop (at least at the time of its release). It is rather in the domain of Burlesqueville. Here you find tunes like C Me Thru, For The Sake Of Love, The Things I Didn't Do, The II Girlz, Headlines, Sister Sun, Blauer Engel, Ariana, Call Me Down, Fools, Anyway, Middle Of The Riddle, Sensations, Bitch, The Jet Set, Big Yello Sun and Afternoons In Utopia. I would like to add that the name Burlesqueville is not at all meant to be snotty. They necessarily deal with serious subjects but in a more tongue-in-cheek style. Having said that Burlesqueville could easily contribute to Popville.


Next is Operaville.Here we have a band with a preference for huge orchestrated musical pieces. Early echoes of their style can be found in Montego Bay, To Germany With Love, A Victory Of Love or Traumtaenzer. Their ambition became more explicit with tracks like Lassie Come Home, Fantastic Dream, Euphoria, New Horizons, Pandora's Lullaby, Return To Paradise Part II, Heaven On Earth, Elegy, For A Million, Mysterion, Nostradamus, My Brothers In China, Imperial Youth, Tomorrow andOn The Beach. Operaville is a team with a relative small output. But they're bloody serious about it. No tongue-in-cheek here. Instead they are famous for overdrawing production budgets and deadlines and hassling fans with broken promises.


Now we turn to Theatreville. They don't write just songs but plots. Their music reflects moments of their stories, it represents personae, roles, protagonists, actors of a play or a musical. Theatreville don't have a specific style, their music has to fit to the respective storyline first off. Typical examples of their repertoire includes In The Mood, Carol Masters, Caroline, 20th Century, Fallen Angel, Ivory Tower, Oh Patti, Faith, Summer Rain, Ain't It Strange, Still Falls The Rain, All In The Golden Afternoon, Some People, Apollo, Dangerous Places, Spirit Of The Age, Dream Machine, Into The Dark, Vingt Milles Lieues Sous Les Mers, Crazyshow, The Opium Den, Like Thunder, Ascension Day, If The Audience was Listening, Script Of A Dead Poet, Welcome To The Sun, Cosmopolitician, Sweet Needles Of Success (12 Years), Here By Your Side and In Bubblegum. It is obvious that Theatreville are a very prolific unit. In my honest opinion they're producing the most original stuff and I actually consider them as an important creative source for their three other brothers. That is constituted in their nature as a group of producers/composers. Maybe we better call them Dreamville.


I did not incorporate each and every Alphaville song in my examination. Also some of you might have problems with several classifications of mine. Overall however, I think they generate at least three different bands, each of them in their own, symptomatic style. But there may be more. Just think of songs like Thunder & Lightning, Burning Wheels, Days Full Of Wonder or the "Lunapark"-versions of What Is Love, Today, And I Wonder and Because of You, just to name a few. Their creator would probably be Rockville. So if you want a band with style, just pick one of them and forget about the rest. If you want the whole, the playful, the limitless picture, that's Alphaville. Maybe not just a band, maybe much more: the stage of a theatre, a U.F.O., a laboratory, a multiverse, the stuff that dreams are made of...


A pleasant stay to all of you!


Marian Gold

[Omegaville]

Awesome! Interesting thought. It seems like my favourite 'ville' out of them is Theatreville

[Streetside Romeo]

It is particularly this multi-facetted, parallel-universes approach (or, more aptly, "soul") of Alphaville that makes this group so special and makes me stick with it for longer than I have with any other musical favorite of mine. Being consistent usually results from a lack of fantasy and an ardent desire for approval. Alphaville is definitely not suffering from either disease.
What for me makes them most endearing and magic is Theatreville and Operaville (and I would count the less pop-ish tunes from "Burlesqueville" as a part of the "Theatreville" program, as a vaudeville is a brand of theatre after all). And while these could never sustain a band over decades (financially and what concerns the awareness of wider audiences), Popville is thankfully there to foot the bill (and does so gracefully, most of the time) ;)

[Streetside Romeo]

What's the use of posting the link again when the content is already in the first post?