Once again I’m forced to consult the lyrics to see how well the song actually holds up against my theme.

On a crowded beach washed by the sun, he puts his headphones on.
His modern world revolves around the synthesizer's song.
Full of future thoughts and thrills, his senses slip away.
He's a European legacy, a culture for today.

I think it does. Synthesizers as signifiers of the future. In some quarters in those years guitars were considered passe.

I’ve linked to this live version with the interesting interview. Midge Ure is a Scot!

That’s the straight connection. Because there is no longer a direct train from Paris to Vienna. TEE was first-class only but now dapper German businessmen, like the ones Ralf Hütter portrays in the video below, can afford private jets. These days Ryanair shuttles the masses across the continent. Trains are just too slow. Thus the aspirational, futuristic vision Kraftwerk convey in this video is now laden with nostalgia.

And it’s just a train, we shouldn’t get too excited, right? Or is it? These words by Tony Judt resonate with the overal theme of this series. Somehow I agree with him that trains are special and mean more than you’d initally think:

If we lose the railways we shall not just have lost a valuable practical asset whose replacement or recovery would be intolerably expensive. We shall have acknowledged that we have forgotten how to live collectively. If we throw away the railway stations and the lines leading to them—as we began to do in the 1950s and 1960s—we shall be throwing away our memory of how to live the confident civic life. It is not by chance that Margaret Thatcher—who famously declared that “there is no such thing as Society. There are individual men and women, and there are families”—made a point of never traveling by train. If we cannot spend our collective resources on trains and travel contentedly in them it is not because we have joined gated communities and need nothing but private cars to move between them. It will be because we have become gated individuals who don’t know how to share public space to common advantage. The implications of such a loss would far transcend the demise of one system of transport among others. It would mean we had done with modern life.

Bring Back the Rails!

The Thin White Duke was Bowie’s final persona, a character who embodied the allure of evil, immaculately dressed in waistcoat and Oxford bags, crooning rather than rocking out, determinedly European.

The Internet’s crappy lyric sites can’t decide if it’s “canon” or “cannon”. Needham says “cannon” so I’ll accept that. The mood of the album, the song, the persona is not optimistic but it was something new and symbolic of the future. This new identity certainly inspired the next song in our list.

As a North American I always thought there was some thing that was Europe to which people felt they belonged. Through work I’ve had the opportunity to speak with quite a few Europeans however, and it’s clear Swedes, French, Germans, Austrians, Italians and British are as lodged in their own national culture as anyone else. Was it absurd to expect otherwise?

The most hopeful sign I ever saw was on a home exchange in Ireland. In the house we stayed at, in the room of one of the (many) kids, was a map of the EU, produced not long after Ireland gained entry. That kid was proud his country had officially joined the club, presumably after spending so long on the sidelines. Was he supposed to now be in the world envisioned by Kraftwerk, Ultravox and others?

I was going to embed all the songs in this post but I couldn’t get past the first one (“Station to Station” by Bowie) without the urge to comment and annotate. So I’ll do this over multiple postings for each song.

These are all great songs. Enjoy them as their theme becomes ever more curious and nostalgic.

“Station to Station” — David Bowie
“Trans Europe Express” — Kraftwerk
“New Europeans” — Ultravox
“Do the European” — J.J. Burnel
“Hallellujah Europa” — Jonah Lewie
“Eurovision” — Telex
“Europe After the Rain” — John Foxx

Please send suggestions to add to the list.

The Dutch Are Coming!

To give you an example. Imagine a record makes a net profit of 50.000 EUR. The production costs were 35.000 EUR, and you as an Angel invested 100 EUR. Your payout will be 100/35.000 x 50.000 or 142,8 EUR.

I submitted Fluorine. Let’s see how attentive their A&R department is. Rejection email will be blogged. See their faq for more details.

1) free via this web site at 160kbps:

• Bubbling Under
• Josephine
• Vox Populi
• Neu Birds

2) pay for higher quality at Bandcamp

• “Final Solution”, Pere Ubu
• “Little Johhny Jewel”, Television, live at The Earth Tavern, Portland OR, July 2, 1978
• 60s bubblegum (Ohio Express, 1910 Fruitgum Company, The Archies, Tommy James, etc.)
• The Sound
• Neu, Harmonia, La Dusseldorf, anything involving Dinger and/or Rother
• Girls Aloud