From Germany with Love

Today, the sheet of the day in my Art of Vinyl Covers calendar showed the cover of Forever Young by German synth-pop band Alphaville.

Originally released in 1984, this was the first album which I purchased with my own money and on my own chosing. Until then, most music had been imposed provided to me by others in the form of mixtapes. At that time, a stationary cassette deck and my Walkman™️ were my primary means of listening to music (aside from the shared record player in our living room), and consequently I purchased the cassette release.

Big in Japan, the first single and arguably biggest hit¹ for the band was the track that hooked me, made me find out the artist and nag my dad to go to the music store with me. We went to Saturn in Cologne, which at that time claimed to have the largest record show on earth².

My favorite track on Forever Young always has been Summer in Berlin.

It’s a summer in Berlin
That’s when you’re longing
For a summer by the wall
It’s a summer by the wall
— Summer in Berlin

After that first love, I did not follow Alphaville very closely. I really liked the single Jerusalem from their second album Afternoons in Utopia, however the rest of their work did not excite me much. The classical reinterpretation of a large part of their body of work with the German Film Orchestra Babelsberg has an interesting twist (imagine real strings on a synth pop hit!), which was published both as a studio recording on Eternally Yours and live on A Night at the Philharmonie Berlin.

I totally despise the recent collab on Forever Young with David Guetta and Ava Max. Also, synth-pop has never made it to the top spot of my primary music interests. Nevertheless, the Forever Young album will always have a special place in my collection.