Recommendations of the Editorial team
“Was Konstantin Zobel already in your shop?” Asked a customer shortly after the opening of Villa Hansa record. A name like from the lively factory for Kurt-Tucholsky-Pseudonyms: Theobald Tiger, Ignaz Wrobel, Konstantin Zobel!
In January 2025 he actually appeared for the first time, and it was immediately clear: Konstantin Zobel is an event. He looks like a younger cousin by Neil Young, with “Harvest” hairstyle, wears a daring keeper hat and looks as deeply relaxed as if he had just got up from Sting’s guest yoga mat.
Pop culture tourist Zobel, now a regular customer, tells with the same enthusiasm of concerts in the USA (Willie Nelson, Bob Dylan) as well as from his regular pilgrimages to Solingen to the Laurel & Hardy Museum. At diamonds from Bad Nauheim’s best restaurant, the Greek myth, is his place of work. He is the owner of a guitar school, whose premises he calls “studio”.
He used to be a punk artist: Under the name Buddy Love, named after Jerry Lewis’s role in the film “The Crazy Professor” (1963), Zobel toured in the late eighties, early nine -nine through Germany, appeared in Rocko Schamoni’s Golden Pudel Club. He hugged together with the friends who were friends in the Garbagecan! Songs and opened concerts for them, also their Reunion spectacle on September 13, 2014 in the sold-out Berlin Club Lido.
In conversation about T.Rex and Queen
The most beautiful thing about the record store is the stories that enter the business with customers. Some are left away from the leash, others can only be guessed at, they have to be carefully asked. Anyone who wears a band shirt is experience -looking.
Horst came to Villa Hansa with a T. Rex body. How you can make yourself a fan is known. But what made Horst a fan? “There was the desired program ‘from the phone to the microphone’ on Südwestfunk. In 1971 ‘Hot Love’ ran at some point. I was eleven years old.”
In 1987 he founded the German Marc Bolan & T. Rex Fanclub on the occasion of Marc Bolan’s tenth death and published the fanzine “The Slider”, named after the third T. Rex album.
Horst and Thomas, who happen to be in the shop at the same time, find that they were at the same queen concert on February 2, 1979 in the Frankfurt Festhalle. The record of this show can be heard on “Live Killers” (1979). The fact that other songs were put together from several concerts and even made studio overdubs can be seen in the YouTube video “Live Killers 1979 Live vs. Overdubs”.
You could experience the magic of the synchronicity much more often if you take an example of Horst and Thomas and not only talk about strangers in comment columns. Tucholsky has the volatility of the
Connection chance formulates: “An eye waves, the soul sounds/ you have found, only for seconds/ two strange eyes, a short look/ brow, pupils, the eyelid/ what was that?
On the Ben-Folds-Album “Lonely Avenue” (2010) prayed by Nick Hornby, “From Above” says: “Sure we all have soulmates/ but we walk past them every day”, in order to then conclude: “Maybe that’s how books get written/ May songs get.”
And of course that is also very lucky.