The best German songs of all time: Ideal – “Blue Eyes”

Of course, Ideal was a stroke of luck for German pop music – very different artistic identities came together in the band, which was active in the early 1980s, and created music that nobody could have dreamed up. Annette Humpe, Ernst Ulrich Deuker, Effjott Krüger and Hansi Behrendt simply summed up Berlin in the early 1980s – with a rugged new wave punk big city sound whose coolly ironic, serene arrogance captured the attitude towards life in the walled city.

Humpe had already been there for a while after she had fled the small-town oppression of Herdecke to let off steam artistically in Berlin after studying music in Cologne – initially together with her sister Inga as neon babies, which were also an event.

coolness and solitude

But with Ideal she made the big hit. The chopped, gnashing guitar riffs, the jittery drums, the jazzy bass, plus Humpe’s cheap organ sounds – the naked realism of “Wir stehn auf Berlin”, “Eiszeit” and “Luxus” sounds like sweating concrete and bare lightbulbs in basements .

The great “Blaue Augen”, which was already part of the Neonbabies’ repertoire, takes the tension between coolness and loneliness, which is in many of Ideal’s songs, to the extreme: “Ideal and TV/ Leaves me completely cold/ And the whole thing Scene/ It’s hanging from my neck/ I stay cool – no feeling.”

Ideal don’t have much in common with the protagonists of the commercially successful phase of the Neue Deutsche Welle that followed, but they paved the way for it because there is an authentic German expression in this music that one could not have imagined until then. Come to Hagen, become a pop star: from now on everything was possible.

Read more: The best German songs of all time

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