GOETHES ERBEN doubled.This new formofmusicwas absorbed like in a sponge. As a result, groups such as Goethes Erben, but also Das Ich or Lacrimosa, had a very appreciative audience. I can certainly believe that. Another element is Bayreuth. That's where you come from. You had the club Die Etage in Bayreuth. Can you tell me more about that? You were a DJ there, and that's where you recorded your first albums. We recorded the first albums in the Etage Studios. We recorded the very first one directly in the Etage, and the others in the Etage Studios of Jochen Schoberth (the man behind Artwork, who also played on the first records of Goethes Erben, xk).The discotheque belonged to him then. I was a DJ there on Saturday nights, and Mindy was at the box office. (Mindy Kumbalek was a member of Goethes Erben from 1992 to 2014, xk.) Is this howyou met each other? That's how I met Mindy. I was a DJ and she was a visitor. She then lived near Würzburg, in Kitzingen. Her parents were Americans who had arrived here in the flow of American soldiers. They had nothing to do with the army, but those large military bases were a bit of a city in themselves. Her parents were in there. She was actually fromWisconsin. She was completely gothic at the time, and came to the Etage. That's how we got to know each other. I had turned away from Peter at that time, because Peter didn’t like this music too... Actually, the music wasn't the problem, it was the people that scared him. He had nothing to do with the goth scene at all, and then suddenly he only saw black. And the goths were dressed and painted much more strikingly at the time. He didn’t know how to handle that. That wasn't really his world. He then went his own musical way. He has made more commercial things. We didn't break up because of an argument, but just because he wanted to. He didn’t know how to handle that. Then there was no point in continuing. Then I, Mindy, and Conny R. re-founded Goethes Erben as a live band.We started performing in that line-up, and we also performed together in Belgium. That was in 1992, if I'm not mistaken... Indeed,and because we couldn't afford a lighting technician, we brought two hundred candles on candle stands, and that gave a very special flair to the concerts.We destroyed every stage with candle wax. (Laughs) Das Ich and their keyboardist Bruno Kramm were also present in Bayreuth. He helped you with the first recordings.What was his role? I played keyboards in another band at the time: Le Coup www.peek-a-boo-magazine.be - 20 - Sauvage. They were under contract with Bruno Kramm. They wrote ‘Nightmare Home’ and recorded it at his studio. I first gave the demo recordings of‘Der Spiegel’to StefanAckermann from Das Ich. It was something going against the grain, in which language was the central focus, and they absolutely loved that. They then played ‘Gottes Tod’. They had already written that back then. Then Bruno Kramm asked if I would like to release a cassette on his Danse Macabre label, and we did so. Peter and I went there to record ‘Das Ende’, ‘Stumme Zeugen’, ‘Der Weg’ and ‘Der Spiegel’, and that's how it happened. For ‘Leben im Niemandsland’, you collaborated with Vladimir Ivanoff, who also played a role on the later ‘Blue Album’. How did you decide to work with him, and how did the work go? We then played at Popkomm in Cologne. That was the international marketplace for the music business in Germany at the time. We played there together with Das Ich and another band.Vladimir Ivanoff was there. He then had great success with Le Mystère des Voix Bulgares. He was nominated for a Grammy. He saw us there by chance and thought that what we were doing there was fantastic. He asked us if we didn’t want to work together. At first he wanted to do this story of ‘Leben im Niemandsland’, practically based on the pieces from the trilogy.He helped us to arrange the pieces, for example with the violins. After this live CD, we told him that we would like to make a studio album together, and then we made something completely different, namely the ‘Blue album’. That was the complete opposite of‘Leben imNiemandsland’.There was no warmth, no feelings, everything came from computers, was ice cold, the voices… The highlight was then that we could invite Gitane Demone as a guest singer. She sung the voice of the mother for us. The interesting thing was that Gitane Demone didn’t understand German, and I had to keep explaining to her what these words meant. She tried to put her feelings into these words, but she didn’t quite know which word meant what.That has given this album a very special charm. On the record, you can't really hear that she barely understood German. I listen to it regularly. But it was an important record for you. You were a bit frustrated that it didn't have the success you hoped for. People were of course fixated on the way Goethes Erben should sound because of the first albums – the trilogy, and then the EP‘Die Brut’– and the ‘Blue Album’ was something completely different. There were only three pieces on the entire record: ‘Pascal’, ‘Blau’ and ‘Rebell’, and moreover ‘Blau’ was twenty minutes long, it was an epic. It was extremely cold, and dark and distant in a completely different way. It
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