The Picture by Hubert Kah

"The Picture" was formerly a German language single from would-be Alphaville band Hubert Kah  It was called "Wenn Der Mond Die Sonne Berührt" and appeared on their 1984 album Goldene Zeiten.  This was before they even attempted to expand their market out of Germany, but in 1985, it was included as an English language song on the soundtrack for Once Bitten, a rather forgettable screwball vampire comedy movie, which happens to be Jim Carrey's first leading role.

The movie itself is probably pretty terrible (I've never seen it); it's Rotten Tomatoes score is something pitiful like 18%.  Because it's Carrey's first leading role, it's become a bit of a cult classic, and the soundtrack is also a bit of a cult favorite, in part because of this song (it also has a a Real Life song, "Face to Face" on it.  The Remastered version of the soundtrack also has Hubert Kah's "Angel 07" in two versions, as well as two versions of the song I'm highlighting.)

Hubert Kah was never as well known in the Anglophone world as, say, Alphaville, even though they were a very similar type of band in every respect.  Curiously, when Iris (formerly Forgiving Iris) got together, their love of Hubert Kah was one of the things that brought them together in the first place, and they even delayed the release of their debut album while they went out of their way to secure the rights to cover this song.

As an aside, I notice that I never featured an Iris song here.  That's a major disconnect (no pun intended) because they were absolutely one of the hottest synthpop acts at the very end of the 90s, and their debut album (1999) Disconnect is still one of my favorites.  The remix album, Reconnect is also a real winner.  Sadly, they seem to be out of print on Amazon, and therefore extremely pricey.  It's a real shame that they seem to be a little hard to get at a decent price, because it really is phenomenal music.  I've got at least four or five tracks from the first album alone that I'd love to feature here.

Sadly, the band broke up after one album.  They still put stuff out; the singer retained the name and got another instrumentalist.  They've got some good stuff too—some real good stuff, even—but they didn't ever really manage to capture the magic of the first album again.

Anyway, I'd heard of Hubert Kah already because of their other song, "So Many People" which I'd happened to stumble across on an early internet radio station.  It was Iris' cover version that made me aware of this song (which doesn't appear on any of their albums, by the way; at least not in English).  Finally I investigated a few other of their minor hits: "Limousine," "Angel 07", etc.  I'm still not a Hubert Kah fanatic; I've got all of four of their songs (admittedly in multiple versions).  Here's the 12" version of the song, remixed by François Kevorkian of later Depeche Mode production fame.  Keep in mind that remixes in those days weren't very dramatic; they were usually just longer and maybe rearranged the existing elements a bit, so it sounds very much like the original version except longer and with a more dramatic introduction.

So Many People by Hubert Kah

Well, it looks like I made a mistake with my last post. Although I had thought "Cold War in the Brainbox" was out well before the 80s ended, it was actually released in 1990. So, rather than trying to fight the trend, I've decided to make a slight scope change to this blog.

See, the 80s as a time-bound chronological unit are easy enough to demarcate, but as a pop-culture unit, it's not quite so simple, because musicians aren't thoughtful enough to hold onto their ideas and release them all at the same time. To whit; the 80s synthpop movement really started probably with some early Ultravox. "Hiroshima Mon Amour" from 1977 is considered by many to be the first true synthpop song, and their Systems of Romance from 1978 the first synthpop album. That certainly fits under the aegis of "80s synthpop" regardless of the release date. Excluding Gary Numan's classic The Pleasure Principle or his Tubeway Army work because they had a late 1979 release also seems like a quixotic endeavor. So, I'm not going to worry about going slightly before time if the songs I'm talking about are clearly part of the same movement of 80s synthpop as the main thrust of this blog.

At the same time, the 80s continued as a musical block a little bit beyond the actual 80s as well... it was probably sometime after the explosive releases of Nirvana's "Smell Like a Teen Spirit" and Pearl Jam's "Jeremy" in 1991 and 1992 that brought alternative rock into the mainstream in a much bigger way than any previous efforts had managed to do, and simultaneously changed the course of record labels everywhere, thrusting synthpop into a mostly underground role for years to come. That's odd that it was grunge that did that, if you think about it. U2 and R.E.M. were certainly no slouches before then, and had had massively successful alternative rock album releases of their own (The Joshua Tree and Green respectively) yet somehow managed to do so without substantially changing the landscape of popular music. But somehow the grunge releases spelled the death knell for 80s synthpop as we knew it.

In any case, other than waxing long-winded on the wisdom of holding looser boundaries to the 80s as a musical block, I'm also here to provide you with a rather obscure (at least to American audiences) track by Germans Hubert Kah from 1989. I was lucky to be familiar (at least a little bit) with some of the musical scenes outside of the US, so I heard a few of the Continent's hits that were never aired, released, or really even known about here in North America. Hubert Kah were one such group, that I always thought sounded very similar to their fellow countrymen, the slightly more universally successful Alphaville.