RAINBIRDS - Through The Web Of Time - 40 Jahre Rainbirds
„Blue Print“ was a mega-hit and still is. Irritatingly good. That was in 1987, the war was cold and the sound of the RAINBIRDS was cool, Katharina Franck's voice like behind glass, so unreachably close. It was the years of "Glasnost," literally: transparency, when the wall in Berlin - the RAINBIRDS are not from Berlin but from West Berlin, Kreuzberg - became glassy. In the video for “Blue Print of my Lover,” Katharina kisses men made of snow.
It is exceptionally rare for a German pop band to be so in tune with their time. Women at that time liked to wear shoulder pads like little Michelin men, whereas Katharina Franck - her crystal-clear voice, the new-wave cool sound of the band, the highly emotional lyrics - demonstrated how unattainable vulnerability can be. Pop that refuses to be pop.
Not infrequently, the RAINBIRDS have been labeled an intellectual band. As if it were taboo for pop to think. And to think further, Ulrike Haage joined, the art-pop of the RAINBIRDS uncovered new acoustic realms of thought. With Haage's ambient soundscapes, Franck's crystalline singing style - the notes never roughened from below, never fall into vibrato, never feign sentimentality - the RAINBIRDS significantly shaped the Berlin electronic scene of the 90s. More secretly than openly, the RAINBIRDS charted their own paths.
Rodrigo Gonzáles went to DIE ÄRZTE, Michael Beckmann into the film industry, Francke and Haage into the world of art. And now, after they had never properly dissolved, they come together again. In the original lineup, carefully expanded:
_ Katharina Franck (voc)
_ Michael Beckmann (b)
_ Ulrike Haage (pi)
_ Werner Neumann (guit)
_ Dominique Ehlert (dr)
and as "guests"
_ Rodrigo González (DIE ÄRZTE)
_ Wolfgang Glum (founding member)
"These will be the best Rainbirds that ever existed," says Katharina Franck. And Ulrike Haage adds: "Playing this music live again feels like stepping into a dialogue with my former self, full of emotions and with all the musical experience that has accumulated until today. Everything falls into place."
Rodrigo Gonzáles has not gotten over the separation from the RAINBIRDS, 36 years ago: "With my performance in the original lineup, I want to leave that dark phase behind me and replace it with fun and joy in the music. It is my wish to close the circle and celebrate the music with the Rainbirds."
For Michael Beckmann, too, the story with the RAINBIRDS "never really felt finished," for him, too, a circle closes: "I am incredibly excited to be able to fly a round with the band again and share these songs with everyone who has accompanied us all these years."
And Wolfgang Glum, who - "in the spring of 1986 deep in Kreuzberg in a rehearsal cellar" - met Katharina Franck and Michael Beckmann, the original lineup of the RAINBIRDS, has a sense of what has accumulated over 40 years in "valuable experiences and formative events" in music that meets its time at eye level. Cool, but optimistic.
Hallo, ich bin Maya.
