“Five years after me and three years after Blumfeld, they buy everything that sings in German and can lie loud enough,” complains Tom Liwa, adding the old Randy Newman saying: “It’s lonely up here.”
The song is called “Cover story against full-page ad” – a song about home, origins, the old rock star dreams and the cynicism of the music industry, which was created, says Liwa in his song collection “Songs”, “in a tour de force of brooding and grumbling”.
It was difficult to position yourself in the German music landscape during this time, he writes. Four years earlier, “Zeit” magazine had declared the Duisburg songwriter the great pop hope of the 90s, but a little later his band, the Flowerpornoes, broke up and Liwa seemed to settle into life as a househusband.
Blumfeld and Co. referred to Tom Liwa
The fact that things turned out differently was certainly due to the success of the Hamburg School, whose protagonists, such as Jochen Distelmeyer von Blumfeld, referred to Liwa. Great albums were released on the excellent little Moll label, in which Liwa understood like no other how to formulate feelings so casually and at the same time profoundly that you could believe that your best friend was explaining to you on a full moon night after consuming a famously wise herb what love and life are all about. The Flowerpornoes didn’t sing their way into the charts, but they definitely won their way into the hearts.
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At the end of the 1990s, Liwa, the least predictable German songwriter and one of the best anyway, continued alone on the winding path that other artists call a career. Albums like “A Love Only” and “Goldrausch” show that he – also a unique phenomenon in this respect – gets better and better with age.
He also repeatedly reactivated the Flowerpornoes, now something like Liwa’s Crazy Horse.