Originally released in February 1999 as Jungs & Mädels 07.
www.discogs.com/release/2737764

Rarely did an indie rock album begin less pretentiously. The electric guitar from the flea market catches a radio wave, playing an old Schlager song by Peter Alexander. A bassline in fifths encircles the harmonic terrain, soon accompanied by a precarious drum beat. The guitar tells a story about melodies wanting to become a world hit. Then a break, and the mood goes determinedly ambiguous. The beat gets harder. The sound of the guitar will become lurkingly dangerous, somebody will speak a mysterious quote. But before that, the joking voices come together for a kind of refrain of a single word: “Hurra!”

What is there to celebrate? It’s the sheer joy of playing music together. Three friends—Rainer Heesch, Torben Widdermann and Henrik Lafrenz—had over the years become obsessed with the idea of “making it big” with music. After all their more or less unsuccessful projects, Soup De Nüll was the phoenix rising from the ashes of ambition...which the three had finally thrown overboard. And with Richard von der Schulenburg, the person quoting Khalil Gibran (1883 - 1931) from a book, they had found a congenial fourth member. Now the fun could begin. Hurra!

With the following track, Frau 7, the record really gets moving, but this naive Hurra already exposes the entire recipe for Soup De Nüll’s debut LP. It is this: the dialectic between an untamed lust for experimentation, and a wholly unflinching attitude. One does what one does with greatest possible determination, but is at the same time completely aware that it doesn’t buy a thing to take oneself at all seriously.

So it really gets moving, but this really-getting-moving is a bit like Serious Life. It starts with the first day of school, then it’s entering high school, then college, and finally the first day of  your first job. Probably it’s only actually serious just before you die, but then it’s almost over anyway.

So it really gets moving with Tribute to Ilse. That was the first song we invented as this band. There’s a recording, taped when we met with Richard for the first time. It took place in a rehearsal room someone had labelled “Sack” on the door, near what soon became Off Ya Tree studio, which was to be our musical home for the next few years. The recording is one half-hour take, and near the end the song is practically ready.

Some of the oldest recordings on Soup De Nüll were also made in this room, including Hurra and Frau 7. But the version of Tribute to Ilse presented here was recorded a little later, in the studio. The dilettantism of the early days had already given way to the wish to lay down a definitive version of this quintessential song. Which I think we have accomplished.

It goes on with the good-humoured Am Strand – note that the lyrics are already two words (!) this time. A giddy recording of Richard bitching about commercial radio makes the transition to the political song of the record, Equalizer. The sound and the agitprop are clearly influenced by Die Goldenen Zitronen. After all, we were circulating in the Hamburg scene at the time. And although we tried to stay above it all, to see things from our outsider perspective, we sometimes couldn’t help but be impressed with what our colleagues released. Contrary to the Zitronen, though, we hadn’t studied Marx and Adorno, merely occasionally skimmed the pages of the taz.  

Richard’s little sketch was being recorded at the outset of a crazy summer vacation, which would be too lengthy to describe here. The audio play at the end of the record, before it really ends (it ends about as many times as it really starts), was recorded with the same small tape recorder by Peter Imig, at the end of said vacation.

Richard’s challenging “those from the radio” was actually meant programmatically here. Because contrary to the Zitronen, we actually wanted to be played on the radio, to write a hit, a world hit at best. And we didn’t have the slightest doubt that a melody like that in Tribute to Ilse was fit for that. Plus, we wanted to make a video clip, showing Torben and Ilse Werner (who the song is dedicated to) holding hands and flying across the port of Hamburg.

With Föfne Di Concerto, side 1 begins once again (it’s the sixth song), as the “concert shall open”, so the title says. Punk rock in 5/4 time, one of our power moves. Kaiserwetter sounds a bit like all the other bands back then, whose songs sounded all the same, whereas ours all sounded different. Brühe is the opposite of Föfne Di Concerto. In 3/4 time we display manners and modesty, rounded up by a bit of reflectiveness.

And when the Schlager radio starts to play again, while side one closes with the preliminary epilogue Hurra II, this is of course a reminder of how everything began. And the listener rubs their eyes with astonishment about all that has happened in the last twenty minutes. And that is the trick of side one.

The trick of side two is that, after this wide variety of styles, it starts with something even much more differenter. A kind of canned disco beat, the guitar merely a ghost in a dub effect now, and a chrome-shiny synthesizer instead. Most of all though, a singer unheard until now for the first time recites a substantial amount of lyrics. Christian Huck wrote this song, sang it, and actually also produced it. How this came about I don’t even remember, but one day he showed up in the studio with a cheap drum machine and simply took control. That couldn’t have been so easy, as at the time we already worked by a well-established routine.

The story of this record is also the story of the tour we played to sell it. It was our first tour at all, so you could excuse the fact that the tour plan was a little frayed: on February 6th, 1999, we started at Bei Chez Heinz in Hannover, on the 12th we were at the Kühlhaus in Flensburg, and then on the 17th already back in our hometown Hamburg’s Golden Pudel Club. Unfortunately, the vinyl records we’d ordered hadn’t arrived in time for this important gig, so we had to start selling vouchers for them.

But in the meantime, Richard had made other plans and left the band. On our international tour, he would only accompany us up to the first of two concerts in Berlin (you had to play twice in big cities to make sure to reach all of the fans!). The second show in Berlin, with one band member suffering from a terrible cold, and sans Richard, who had kind of become the singer of the band, was a disaster.

But on the next day, all of that already didn’t matter anymore. Because we went abroad, how exciting, off to the Czech Republic, to our friends we had made in the aforementioned summer vacation. In Prague we also played two shows, and from the second one onwards, our joker Huckie joined us again. Of course he sang Der Weg Nach Vorn, but he had also brought a little maraca. Once on stage, he didn’t stop shaking that maraca.

We had a lot of fun, exchanged our viruses on the tour bus, and drank way too much hard liquor. Our friends from Tábor transcribed our sparse lyrics to Czech for us. The Czech version of Richard’s radio slogan was legendary. We felt that we were making an enormous contribution to international understanding. And our LP, once it had finally been delivered, sold like hotcakes.

Actually it should have become a CD, containing all of the songs sung by Richard. But we didn’t want to make a record that represented a band which had already ceased to exist, so only Flying Turtle remained of Richard’s songs. Everybody could and should contribute to the band somehow, and so one song by a singer who had left the band was ok.

The rest of side two with its many guest contributions may be explored by the if-so-inclined listener on their own, and by the time of arrival at the aforementioned summer vacation audio play, really everything will have been said. Durch und durch (through and through).