German 'goth' pioneers Xmal Deutschland performed on beloved DJ John Peel's BBC 1 program 4x from 1982-1985; a full package of these recordings includes Autumn - band's 1st song sung in English; an ominous & transfixing presentation of danceable darkwave ft. ghostly chanting vocals, clashing cymbals, & propulsive post-punk riffs FFO labelmates Cocteau Twins, Clan of Xymox, Dead Can Dance. Guardian/Quietus/Louder support. "A necessary addition to any night creature’s music library", Treble.
You only need listen to the soul-devouring nocturnal visitation of Incubus Succubus, or the obliterating fury of Qual (“Meine Wiege ist deine Grab” – “my cradle is your grave”) to see that underestimating Xmal Deutschland was never a good idea. When the Hamburg band first walked into the BBC’s Maida Vale Studio in November 1982 to record their debut session for John Peel, it was natural they should feel a flash of awe as they were ushered through the labyrinthine building, on the brink of joining a radio lineage that included The Fall, David Bowie, Siouxsie And The Banshees and The Cure. Yet the band – at that point singer Anja Huwe, keyboardist Fiona Sangster, guitarist Manuela Rickers, drummer Manuela Zwingmann and bassist Wolfgang Ellerbrock – also quickly picked up on the old-school energy and hierarchies of the place, the entrenched divisions between tea ladies and the producers and sound engineers, the tensions between the old-school male rock’n’roll way of doing things and their band’s place in the modern world.
John Peel rarely came to the studio to meet the bands he had selected for the honour of a Peel Session, having no interest in pressing the showbiz flesh (For Lulu or otherwise). Instead, as Sangster recalls, Xmal Deutschland immediately found themselves up against producers and engineers who, regardless of the blessing inherent in Peel’s invitation, weren’t terribly impressed with the sight of this female-majority German band. “They communicated quite clearly that they didn’t think you were very good, that they didn’t like the music, and would you please hurry up,” says Sangster, bristling at the memory 43 years later.
Yet Xmal Deutschland had – in the jaded language of the old-fashioned male-dominated music industry – very much paid their dues by the time they arrived at Maida Vale. They formed in Hamburg in 1980 – “a tough city,” says singer Anja Huwe, a significantly grittier place than the artier musical enclaves of Cologne or Dusseldorf. They had endured – and thrived – in their canal-side rehearsal studio, against all the health-and-safety odds. The punks next-door had soundproofed their space with egg boxes; when somebody dropped a cigarette, the solvent went up in flames. “All dirty carpets and grotty sofas,” recalls Sangster. “It was filthy, it was damp, it was cold.” Zwingmann, meanwhile, recalls the dangerous swerving of their VW van as they raced for late-night ferries, burdened with equipment.
They had shown their own grit, too, by making the decision early on that they were not going to be channelled into the Neue Deutsche Welle, then a buzzword for young German bands. “If we’d stayed in Hamburg and gone down that path, our career would have been over in a year,” explains Huwe. “Because it was a very short-lived movement.” After releasing their first two singles on Hamburg imprint ZickZack, in 1983 they found the label that could match their questing, independent energy. “We recorded a tape in the rehearsal room and we took it to 4AD,” recalls Sangster. “We didn’t go anywhere else.” Fetish, their debut album for the label, followed. Like formidable, backcombed Groucho Marxes, they never wanted to belong to any club that would want them as a member. “We just didn’t want to give them the obvious sort of thing, and we always kept our distance from everyone,” says Huwe. “We were like a group on our own. We never went to a place like the Batcave – and they always invited us. Everyone wanted us to join, but we never went there because we were not interested. We went to exhibitions, we wrote books, saw films – you know, enjoyed our own company.”
This record, a fabulous chronological document of the four Peel sessions they recorded between November 1982 (five months before the release of their 1983 debut album Fetisch) and May 1985, is the sound of a band who knew the power of that company and who ultimately refused to be intimidated by the gruffly condescending gatekeepers of Maida Vale. They found a strength in defying their old-school attitudes. “We benefited from that because we sort of got into ‘fuck you’ mode”, says Sangster, much to Huwe and Zwingmann’s delight. “That might be part of the energy that you’re hearing.”
It’s an energy that transmits with a piercing clarity in these sixteen tracks, the constraints of time and space giving what Sangster calls “a certain urgency” to these sessions. “Listening back, you can tell it’s sort of like a hybrid between a live performance and a studio performance,” she says. “These are different versions, which is what makes them interesting.”
As Huwe and Sangster stress, a Peel session wasn’t the time for Xmal Deutschland to experiment – “you would choose one of the bangers!” they laugh. That’s clear from the opening full-pelt Incubus Succubus, its supernatural vortex immediately transporting the listener right into the room, to the dreamy expanses of closing track Autumn (from May 1985), their first song in English. In between arcs the remarkable career of a band in constant motion: “It’s a really interesting snapshot, as it were, of our evolution, these four Peel Sessions all together,” says Sangster. “You can see how we grew as a band.” It’s there in untethered experimentalism and proto-Mandinka howls of Reigen, from their second album Tocsin, or the new expansiveness that comes with Nachtschatten’s twinkling synths (not a million miles away from The Cure’s pop experiments) or the gorgeous melody of Der Wind. Here are the fierce hexes of their early work – the angel-devil showdown of Geheimnis, Qual’s scything B-side Sehnsucht, the tribal skitter of In Motion – mutating into a different kind of spellbinding. The studio atmosphere might have been oppressive, but this collection of Peel Sessions shows a band making the space their own. “It was so different compared to how we lived, because it was British, very conservative,” says Huwe. “But we jumped in there.” With this compilation, you can hear the ripples Xmal Deutschland made then still powerfully resonating down the years.
Tracklisting
1 Incubus Succubus (Peel Session) 4:52
2 Geheimnis (Peel Session) 3:12
3 Zinker (aka Stummes Kind) (Peel Session) 5:01
4 Qual (Peel Session) 3:31
5 Sehnsucht (Peel Session) 4:04
6 In Motion (Peel Session) 3:17
7 Reigen (Peel Session) 4:20
8 Vito (Peel Session) 4:16
9 Mondlicht (Peel Session) 4:57
10 Tag Für Tag (Peel Session) 4:18
11 Augen-Blick (Peel Session) 3:44
12 Nachtschatten (Peel Session) 3:24
13 Polarlicht (Peel Session) 3:39
14 Der Wind (Peel Session) 3:53
15 Jahr Um Jahr (Peel Session) 3:04
16 Autumn (Peel Session) 4:27