![]() “That line about being big in Japan has been misinterpreted by all sorts of people who like the song. You can analyse it like this, but there’s something magical about every good song which is unexplainable. ![]() “It is very catchy and it is a very lucky coincidence of a few really good ideas: the intro, the bassline, and the refrain, it’s all very catchy and people can memorise the song quite easily. We had a studio in the basement and we had all this equipment that we needed like the Korg sequencer…”Īlphaville performing live in 2005. At this time we had a small home studio, we had moved from Berlin to a provincial town. He was responsible for some of the melody of the song, so it was a collaboration between the three of us. Marian: “Frank (Mertens) also played an important role. I thought this actually could fit with Big in Japan as well, and so we changed the rhythm and found two matching melodies for the song.” When we did a serious demo for the production we decided to go for this half-time rhythm because at that time I was a DJ in a small club and was playing Safety Dance by Men Without Hats. When the song first was written the drum rhythm was also double-time, so much faster than you know it. It’s a fictitious story about a pair of lovers that are trying to get away from the drugs but they never succeed, they imagine themselves in a kind of dreamland where they are drug-free, but they never succeed in getting there and it’s quite a tragic story.”īernhard: “Marian always had the basic musical ideas, this rhythm that goes through the whole song but then in the middle of the song the chord changes and goes in double-time. This song is about that drug scene in the late 70s. They lived in the heroin scene around the Berlin Zoo and I started to write about them. I had a couple of friends and we were living under very serious conditions in West Berlin at that time, basically living on the street and some of our friends were drug addicts. I created a lot of the verses for Big In Japan on my way to that dentist. I had an appointment with my dentist and I had this rhythm of the bassline in my mind as I was walking along. “At the same time, I was thinking about writing the lyric for the song. We created the bassline and I really liked it because we now had a device that could play polyphonic chords, but because of the two oscillators, this bassline gave you the imagination of chords. ![]() Marian: “We had this new Roland System 100M and it had two oscillators, a sequencer and an arpeggiator, which was inside this device. ![]() Songwriter(s): Bernhard Lloyd, Marian Gold, Frank Mertens It’s over to Marian and Bernhard for the full story… It might surprise people to learn that this 80s power anthem has quite a dark origin. Topping the charts in their homeland, it made a similar splash across Europe as well as cracking the Billboard Hot 100 across the pond. Of all Alphaville’s tracks, it’s Big In Japan which has been their most successful. Such is the album’s appeal that the band will soon be touring across Europe to celebrate Forever Young’s coral year. ![]() Backed by huge singles such as Big In Japan, Forever Young and Jet Set, the trio of Marian Gold, Bernhard Lloyd and Frank Mertens flew out the traps to launch a career which has endured to this day. This year marks the 35th anniversary of Forever Young, the debut album by German synth-rock masters Alphaville. “It’s a fictitious story about a pair of lovers that are trying to get away from the drugs…” Pic: Thomas Reutter A synth-rock anthem inspired by Berlin’s heroin scene, we learn all about a classic 80s track with a surprising origin ![]()
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