UNIVERSAL DADDY CONTROVERSY

>Marian, is it true that you hate Universal Daddy ?!?
>why ?!?!?
>i heard this from a fan who talked to you about the song but i find it
>hard to believe that you hate something that you created yourself...

Dear Adi!
UNIDAD [Universal Daddy - editor] is not the only of my hate-songs. Another popular one was, for a long time, SLAM [Sounds Like A Melody - editor]. After the huge and unexpected success of BIJ [Big in Japan - editor] in 1984, we planned to release FY [Forever Young - editor] as the next single. But at that time suddenly our record company changed its mind. They sent two emissaires from Hamburg to Münster to convince us to write an additional song which would be published in between BIJ and FY. A song in a hitsingle-format. I think, I speak for the rest of the band (Bernhard and Frank) when I say that we weren´t very much excited about this plan. On the other hand, we had claimed in many interviews before (except Frank, who never talked) that we saw the pop-media mainly from a "singles-perspective". Singles are pure commercial objects. They only make sense when they sell. And pop-musicians we were!

However, my deepest belief was (and still is) that writing music only for the sake of commercial success is the worst deal you can do, a dead end street (14 years later we wrote a song about that subject called "Dangerous Places"). But here we were, young and unexperienced, with a million-seller at our back. - We decided to take the whole enterprise aas a kind of game that we had started and were now about to fulfill. We had invented the rules and the record company only took us at the word. That was the creation of SLAM. It took us one afternoon to write and another day (or two) to arrange it. I never forget the moment when we played the nearly finished "product" to the record representatives. They danced in bizarre steps through our studio, giggling words like "great" or "yeah" and I could see those dollar-signs printed out in the look of their eyes. I felt kind of ...abused. From that very moment on I started to hate the song.

- Ten years later, I was putting the live-set together and had a long discussion with Martin (Lister) whether we should play SLAM yes or no (...to play or not to play). After I told him the whole story he said: Listen, I understand your point but the song is really good (and you´re an idiot not to play it). Well, we rehearsed SLAM a couple of times with the band and that changed my mind completely. It felt great to play and sing the song together with the boys. Still I have to say that there is a deep truth hidden in the chorus line: When we wrote SLAM, we entered "forbidden territory" ...for a while.

- A couple of months later, we rehearsed UNIDAD and I still hated it.
But that´s another story.

Marian Gold

FIRST DEMO TAPE

>As you know I´m writing on a biography about AV.
>But there is a problem...I don´t know what song that was on their first
>demo-tape..(you know, the tape they sent to the labels and so)
>Is there anyone who knows this?? Marian maybe???

Hey Christina!
In 1983 Frank and I hitchhiked from Münster to Berlin hoping to get somebody (a publisher or a record company) interested in our music. We presented a tape with several songs to a couple people (one of them was Colin Pearson, our producer to be). As far as I remember the tape started with "Blauer Engel" and ended with "Forever Young". Furthermore it contained "Traumtänzer", "Leben Ohne Ende", "Into The Dark", "Summer In Berlin" and probably "The Jet Set" (all in the DS-Format). There may have been some more tracks but I can´t recall them. It´s all so damn long ago.

Love
Marian Gold
 

[december 2000]