| since 1996 marian gold has been on tour almost constantly. singapore, sao paulo, stockholm, salt lake city. if the city was interesting, really interesting they stayed for a day or two but mostly they moved on the next morning. for four years they were on tour, gold and his band, not incessantly but steadily. they played about 100 gigs each year. postcards arrived from the andes or argentina. yet it was never documented what it sounded like when alphaville played in front of an audience. "it meant an awful lot to me," marian gold says quietly in his berlin apartment. it is night and underneath the sloping roof: "we never used to play live in the early days. alphaville used to be this studio project of bernhard lloyd and myself. but at some stage i realised there was something missing. i have always wanted to be on stage." alphaville were the pioneers of e-pop. with their cd+graphics cd "the breathtaking blue" they were the first to release the forerunner of the dvd. the video for their song "middle of the riddle" (directed by the lauenstein brothers) from their video project "songlines" won an oscar under the name "balance" back in 1989, and 4 years after their first single "big in japan" was on top of the american billboard dance charts their song "forever young" re-entered the regular us charts. but sixteen years after their sensational debut record "forever young" and four years after starting to tour, to release a first live album now is much more than a simple surprise: it is a musicians dream come true. this dream had gone off to a dream start. the first record, the first number one and at least three songs for eternity. what others spent an entire career on alphaville achieved at a stroke. gold says: "back then it was pop art quite in the tradition of andy warhol. we had set out to make a record that sounded like a greatest hits album of a for decades renowned band. we worked experiences in that one imagined a star would have lived through, you know, like the jet set, drugs, fast life, pretty girls." it is part of the irony of the story that in 1984 girls all over the world disco danced to "big in japan", a downright drug hymn. naturally all the world hits, from "sounds like a melody" to "forever young" are featured on "stark naked and absolutely live", by popular demand so to speak. other songs, including more unknown masterpieces like "cosmopolitician" (originally released on gold's solo album "united") and a wonderfully dreamy version of alphaville's "flame" have be selected by gold for this live album because they show further facets of one of the most successful german pop bands. a year ago one could glimpse at all the uncharted beauty alphaville had produced but not dared to release over the years when gold finally and agaist better commercial judgement issued the monumental 8-cd-box "dreamscapes" that included 125 alphaville songs, most of them unreleased until then - only available via internet, promoted on their website www.alphaville.de. but it was an act of principle. "even our first album was born out of an anarchic idea. in this sense we were perfectly normal young men of the eighties that - with a lot of convidence - did exactly what they felt like," gold explains the "dreamscapes" venture, that shows a lot of parallels with the carefreeness of earlier days: unfinished demo versions, obscure b-sides, unreleased, experimental dance remixes, studies, finger exercises followed one another in staccato. looking at the history of the band it is therefore simply logical that "stark naked and absolutely live" has not turned out to be a classic live record that documents an alphaville gig from opener to encore. as gold says: "we are no machines although we live with them. where alphaville performs live there will be passion, surely some routine too, but there will always be moments of upmost intesity." for the live album gold has selected 12 of these moments out of hundreds of hours of live recordings. for the fans. as a documentation. for eternity. |