1. PROLOGUE / How it all started
by Niels Kaiser

1993.

i’ve been on the road for years with a 60s-Beat-Mod outfit called THE HANGOVERS. We were a pretty good band and well-known in some hotspots in Southern Germany. After 5 years, about a half-dozen self-produced 4-track tapes (our first one sold about 2000 copies at concerts) and 2 records later, we decided to throw in the towel. Late ’92, the band was plainly exhausted…it was too much work in the end, like driving endlessly and setting up our own equipment. The inspiration was…gone.
So i started my solo-demo debut HOMEWORK WITH A CAUSE, which in fact wasn’t a new kind of working things out- because my fellow bandmate Volker and i did many recordings of the HANGOVERS like that.

But in early 1993, i felt ready to do a ‘solo’-thing.

A few weeks later, i met Elke (who i knew for many years) again…or should i better say she was there to meet ME?
When she arrived in Freiburg ’84 she was definitively the ‘new kid in town’. Everybody had an eye on her. i didn’t see her much since then.

Now she was in search of a guitar player for some new project.
i thought ‘yeah, why not?’ Actually i missed the feeling of working with someone together again- and we were checking each other out. Elke had a very deep and dark kind of writing-style then, while mine was actually more at the sunny side of life, blending in feelings of humour and irony into serious, heartfelt stuff.

In those days, i listened to a whole lot of classic vintage records from the 60s and 70s then , including all that pioneer ‘Country-Rock’/West-Coast stuff like the Byrds, Neil Young, Gram Parsons and some hippie San Francisco Bands. Elke brought in favourites like Fleetwood Mac, Depeche Mode, Prince and Les RitaMitsuko (to name a few), to which i didn’t pay that much attention before. i didn’t like most Eighties music (with few exceptions like REM and the Cure).
The 80s were long gone and early 1993 it was something new in the air. A kind of hippie-revival spirit…

What would it sound like?
i grabbed a guitar and tried to figure out some chords to Elke, singing a melody.
It sounded great.

The recordings 1-8 are from SHEGOESBANG although we named us REVOLUTION #9 first (after the famous Beatles-‘Non-Song’;-)

1. REVOLUTION #9 (cassette) recorded 1993/1994, released 1994
Produced by Alex Perin at P&R Studios Freiburg

‘If you’d like to start a band, you gotta find some musicians first’ – well however, that’s not what Elke and I did. In the beginning, it was a duo-project. We were young and euphoric and immediately started to work on our own – on lyrics, melodies, Riffs etc. Many ideas went on our four-track tape recorder – but we decided to make a ‘real production’ in the studio. So we picked up a drummer, Julius, and i played the guitars and bass.
Our first producer was a legendary guy from Romania to whom we looked up as if he was a genius (he probably wasn’t)- although he was a very special guy- the kind you look up to when you were young. We let him do… including consuming a collection of drugs- and he recorded a fabulous version of our early signature song WONDERS amongst 3 other numbers including the artsy PUZZLES OF VENUS….for a huge amount of money, anyway. But we had our fun and thought ‘everything will just be alright, we’ll get a record contract with this and form a band which will blow everyone away!!’
It wasn’t like that. We were just so naive and in good faith. Nevertheless, it was OUR summer of Love:-)

The recordings earned some recognition in the local music scene and we even made a video of WONDERS- with a love-story rather no one understood. The song went to#4 in the Rookies-Charts of the year of Südwestfunk (SWR) and that was it.
We combined this session later with a very hastily done second one (which is not included here for good reason), done live in the Studio as a band in Switzerland, and sold these tape on our concerts.

With Julius and Hennes backing us, we had a band now- but we picked the wrong guys. They were good, but everytime i played a homemade demo with band arrangement, they couldn’t get it right. At least not what Elke and me had in mind. It sounded strained instead of easy. Our second drummer, Hans, was great, but also didn’t fit in- all in all it wasn’t what we were looking for.
A kind of disaster was right on its way: we had an offer to do a demo single at the famous HANSA Studio in Berlin, where BOWIE, IGGY POP and U2 did some of their famous work. Wow, the Hansa!! We were euphoric.
Our producer, percussionist of German Band PHILIPP BOA & THE VOODOOCULT suggested to do a more ‘polished’ -though meaningless- remake of WONDERS, which was already superior in its first version. We learned that a producer has so much influence on the overall feel of your music. ANYBODY and EVELYN (the beautiful, dreamy song with lyrics dedicated to a good friend of Elke’s) sounded pretty bleak, harsh and unfinished in comparison to our 4-track demos.
We should have done this by ourselves, but weren’t ready…

Finally, we had a second demo recording of 3 songs- which went nowhere.
Elke and me decided not to release it.