Blond calls his own fans “Blondinators” and with his album PERLEN he relies on anthemic pop to dance, cuddle and drive away blokes. We met her for a chat.
Rhythmic clapping begins, the band on stage holds up cardboard boards with a few lines of text on them. Such assistance would no longer be necessary, everyone in the audience has long since noticed what is happening here now, euphoria, the singing of the visitors: inside swells: “It’s nice, it’s great to be Blondinator / The hearts are laughing and they Worries become small!”
Blond gave this hands-on miniature to their fans and gave them the name Blondinators at the same time. At concerts, however, the piece is performed and celebrated so enthusiastically by the people at the end that it also works as a gift to the band itself. Give and take in pop. Other acts simply divide the songs of their evening’s setlist with a dash (or even two). Above the line the regular program below the encores. The screenplay for a learned, but often little animated ritual. That’s how you do it, as a band and as an audience. However, Lotta Kummer, Nina Kummer and Johann Bonitz from Blond have little desire for such covers and prove to their followers that concert experiences should be customized much more. More personal, more staged, more lively. The chanting in the hall still swells: “IT’S BEAUTIFUL!!! IT IS GREAT!!! BLONDINATOR…”
It’s the mid-noughties. The sisters Lotta and Nina are on a farm at the weekend. Her parents have friends there. Johann is also there, who, because his parents are also acquainted with the Kummers, always felt like he belonged somehow. Kind of an extra sibling residing a few blocks away. On this day, he and the Kummer sisters discover the cherry trees in the yard for themselves. They climb into one and at first weren’t seen again. “We just sat in there for hours listening to Aggro Berlin and Die Sekte – and we giggled to death whenever another dirty word came up. If you know the acts, you know, of course, that it happened in quick succession. Well, that’s the foundation of the band Blond.” Nina Kummer laughs. Because the enormous fall of this founding myth is not determined by the dimensions of the cherry tree, but by the sexist Berlin rappers, whose misogynous work is miles away from the emancipated “Las Vegas glamour” (blonde self-description). But you can seldom choose the first imprint, you would do well to question it critically in the course of becoming aware of yourself. It’s obvious that this will still happen to the three climbing kids – in the cherry tree itself, however, there is only Johann’s portable MP3 player for the time being.
A bit later in the noughties, however, it’s clear that even garish banger empires like Aggro Berlin can show possibilities beyond whipping penises – quite simply through representation. Because the rapper Kitty Kat also published on the label, Nina remembers with her an offer of identification that she didn’t know from all the dudes, including Jonas Brothers and Tokio Hotel, because provo rap hadn’t turned out to be the core topic of the Chemnitz clique. Things got really serious for Nina with LaFee (“Have a cry”), her enthusiasm for LaFee can also be found in a song on the new record called “Through the Night”. He talks about how much self-empowerment comes with seeing other women in the limelight, not just feeling addressed by men as a fan, love interest or slut. However, Nina says in conversation that her crush on LaFee was “sold out”. It even found its way into the anthology These Girls, Too from Ventil Verlag.
But the love for LaFee is only one building block of the variable pop concept of the band Blond. Drummer Lotta, for example, became enthusiastic about Missy Elliott at an early age, one reason why she doesn’t limit herself to her instrument in the band, but also joins in on the vocals again and again. And role models naturally work across genders – even if Johann has no one in mind when it comes to becoming a musician, the topic is also important to him: “There was no blind person who would have been a role model for me. However, I am aware that I am fulfilling this role for others because I am on stage – and that means something to me. So that people can say: ‘It’s awesome how you pull this off!’”
On the street!
That’s right, if you carelessly wanted to shorten everything, it would be possible to describe this band only in somehow crass headlines: Blond, that’s the trio with the blind boy on bass, keyboards and so on! Blond, those are the sisters of Till and Felix Kummer from Kraftklub! Exactly. Such exclamation marks do draw attention, but which ones?
Fortunately, Blond managed to establish themselves as one of the most exciting German-language pop bands. In the long Covid rubble year 2022, their concerts are among the few that can always report “sold out” instead of “moderately attended”. A circumstance that the three of them have developed over almost a decade. This can be heard very well in “You must have been there“, the weekly podcast by Nina and Lotta. In addition to self-help and edifying nonsense, the sisters also repeatedly trace the history of their band in special episodes. For example, in which club they slept on the floor in 2017 – and how best to steal from the catering for the flat share at home. Blond may always seem like it fell from heaven and with the second album PERLEN will again create many first contacts with completely new listeners (read: Blondinators in spe), but represent a sustainably grown structure with a diligent history. Their epic hit ” Sanifair Millionaire” (nearly nine minutes long) tells of a life on the move. “Pissing for a Snickers” describes the phenomenon (not only) among touring musicians: inside, being rewarded with consumption coupons at rest stops for going to the toilet for a fee.
Blond have been on the road for a long time and have always used them at all the events and have created a select network, so you may have encountered them as feature guests at other acts, most recently at The dead crack whores in the trunk. Guests are also often heard on songs by Blond – for example, Distress, Leoniden, Mia MorganPower Plush or addeN. The latter sees itself involved in a PERLEN song that was previously released in 2022. An uplifting hymn against non-diverse line-ups at the big music festivals, culminating in the German Weather Girls refrain: “It’s raining men! Hallelujah, it’s raining men!”
To the point and for everyone
Regardless of such lines and the fact that the aforementioned Blondinator song on the record features mainly female voices, the band does not celebrate exclusionary feminism. “With our concerts and the band, we want to create a place where everyone feels comfortable,” says Nina Kummer. “It’s not about playing shows exclusively in front of FLINTA people. We prefer to set a framework in which everyone treats each other with respect. When guys are cool, they get it, have fun, and don’t take their shirts off in the mosh pit as a matter of course, and even care about how much space they’re taking up.”
This text first appeared in the Musikexpress issue 05/2023. Order here.