A radio recording from the 80s left thousands of people around the world wondering for 17 years: What kind of song is that – and who sings it? A fascinating search for clues leads to a band from Kiel.
Actually, Darius always labeled his cassettes carefully – he even says: fussy. In the eighties he regularly recorded music from the radio. Every now and then he misses the introduction; then the search begins: What is the name of the song, who sings it? He calls these songs “Unknown Pleasures” and is happy when he finds their titles. This way he can label his cassettes correctly afterwards.
But he won’t find this one song again for decades. In 2007, his sister Lydia posted the recording on the Internet and asked for help with the search. A real hype arises. Thousands of people around the world come together online, collect ideas and systematically write to bands. Depeche Mode, Joy Division – or Alphaville? They record the rejections in shared tables.
A music cassette from the band FEX lies on a mixing console. At times it was assumed that the recording could come from Depeche Mode, Joy Division or Alphaville.
Die Swarm intelligence by radio nerds
Table of Contents
The searchers founded the forum “The Mysterious Song” on the Reddit platform. Here the search is becoming more and more like a science. There are posts that are clicked millions of times. They uncover amazing insights from radio nerds worldwide. For example, users discover a peculiarity in the frequency spectrum: in the optical breakdown there is a small notch at 10 kilohertz – and this is typical for the radio station NDR.
A fact that even with… NDR Nobody was on the radar, remembers Arne Maibaum. At the time, he moderated the Reddit forum. “It’s just crazy how people found this out. How they dug it out from the depths of such knowledge. It’s of course an absolute goosebumps moment.”
“That would of course be awesome”
At the NDR there is also someone who is enthusiastic about the search. Archivist Sönke Treu learns about the “Mysterious Song” from the newspaper. For him, the fascination is how unusual such an unidentifiable song is in the age of the Internet.
“And maybe everyone has the small hope that if I solve it now, that would of course be amazing,” he believes. He faithfully searches through them himself NDRdatabases and sends old transmission logs to Lydia – Darius’ sister, who initiated the search.
Setbacks, trolls and Freeloader
Lydia is now very active in the search community. “My children had already grown up for a long time at that time, but suddenly I had something similar to children again. That might sound completely stupid,” she says looking back. When they read the broadcast logs from NDR receives, she streams the evaluation for the community. At night, so that the American searchers can also take part.
But although many songs of the NDR-When lists from September 1984 appear on her brother Darius’ cassette, the mysterious song is not there. There are always such trails that come to nothing. Just like personal hostility from online trolls, which is why Darius and Lydia only want to be in public with their first names.
In the meantime, artists are getting in touch who claim to have written the song. But no one can credibly prove its authorship. Others simply upload the song to streaming platforms as their own.
FEX performs the song 40 years later
Then a user comes across a new lead: It’s this Hörfesta festival series from NDR. And in the festival archive he finds all the applications from all the bands that wanted to play there in the eighties. When he finally contacted the band FEX from Kiel, it quickly became clear: the artist had been found.
The three musicians Michael Hädrich, Ture Rückwardt and Norbert Ziermann are surprised that their song “Subways of Your Mind” has been searched for on the Internet for years. After all, they had broken up their band a year after Darius’ cassette recording and had not played together since then.
The FEX members Norbert Ziermann, Hans-Reimer Sievers, Michael Hädrich and Ture Rückwardt came back to the recording studio in January 2025 to re-record the song. Sievers is no longer part of the band.
The band will meet again in November 2024 and play the song live for the first time in 40 years. A new studio recording is also being made. Darius is also there in the accompanying music video: with headphones on, he puts his world-famous cassette into the player. And now, thanks to the online community, he can finally fill in the missing title and artist – 40 years after the recording.
