With its rigid beat and dry, monotone vocals, the song sounds like a synth-pop hit you would have heard in a dance club in the Eighties. (Or at least on an Eighties Spotify station.) Close your eyes and you can imagine a music video: awkwardly lip-synching musicians, exploding lightbulbs, foggy streets. It’s
That’s because, right now, no one knows anything about it: who wrote it, who sang it, or even when it came out. And for about a dozen years, a dedicated gaggle of music obsessives from around the world has been searching for any information about these three minutes of music. Throughout this quest, which intensified this summer, thousands of man-hours have been devoted to unearthing anything at all about what these zealous investigators are calling “the most mysterious song on the Internet.”
The hunt embodies every conversation anyone has ever had with a devoted music nerd happy to share every morsel of information about an obscure song — in this case, one supposedly taped off European radio about 35 years ago. It’s the story of people longing for community in the digital era. But it’s also become something bigger. “Everything about this song is mysterious, from the creation to the lyrics to where it played on the radio, ” says amateur song detective “Mkll, ” who prefers to be identified only by his internet handle. “It’s not often that songs of this age are dug up, and the fact that a search has been happening for over a decade on the Internet really made this case unique.” Even if the case is never solved, it has briefly returned the pre-Google mystique to music, set to a
Lost Pieces Of Music History That We're Dying To See Released
If we are to believe the somewhat furtive people involved, we may know where the story starts. Between 1982 and 1984, Darius S. (who asked to use an abbreviation for this article for the sake of privacy) says he was a teenage music fan in the town of Wilhelmshaven on the north coast of Germany; like many in the pre-streaming era, he would record songs he heard on the radio onto a cassette deck. One of his go-to programs was
(“Music for Young People”) on the German public-radio station NDR 1. One of those tapes, which Darius calls “cassette 4, ” includes then-new songs from 1984 by XTC, the Cure, and one of 25 cuts Darius deemed his “unknown pleasures” — songs he liked, but knew little about.
Darius isn’t certain that he taped the bleak but compelling tune off that particular broadcast, since the cassettes sometimes include tracks from different sources. But he knows he didn’t record an intro by a DJ or anything else that would identify it. “It was just one of many songs I recorded and didn’t know the artist, ” he says. “I believe I didn’t hear an announcement. Maybe I heard it partially and missed the artist’s name. Everything is possible.” Combining the release dates of the other known songs on the tape and the fact that the Technics tape deck he says he owned at the time was manufactured in 1984, he’s fairly certain he made the recording that year.
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For over two decades, Darius held onto his tapes. But in 2007, his sister Lydia H. (who has also requested anonymity) needed to know who was behind the song. “All the years of passively searching for the lyrics on the internet hadn’t brought any results, so I thought, it’s time to become more active and reach out for a bigger audience, ” she says. Calling herself “Anton Riedel” (and alternately going by “bluuue”), she posted a digitized snippet of the song — one minute and 14 seconds, thinking this would help avoid copyright hassles — on a German site devoted to Eighties synth-pop as well as a Canadian music site, spiritofradio.ca, which enables fans to upload obscure songs for identification purposes. (In some ways, it’s a crowdsourced version of Shazam.) “I had just found out about newsgroups and Usenet, ” she says, “and somehow got the idea this could be the place where people could help.” (A 2007 upload of the clip from bluuue is still available on the site.)
That portion of the song bounced around on the web — Nicolás Zúñiga of Dead Wax, an indie label that specializes in synth-pop and post-punkbands, was among those who heard it and were entranced by it — but no one stepped forward to claim credit or supply any useful background about its origins or creators. That same portion was uploaded to YouTube at least as early as 2011 but received fewer than 10, 000 views.
This April, though, the mystery and the song gained traction — and more listeners — by way of a 16-year-old student in São Paulo, Brazil. Even though he was born decades after the birth of post-punk, Gabriel da Silva Vieira can hardly get enough of the genre and bands like the Sisters of Mercy and Fields of the Nephilim. “Guitar, synths and gothic vocals are something that always interested me, ” he says. On Dead Wax’s YouTube channel, he heard the segment of the song and became equally fascinated with its unknown backstory. “I really liked the song, ” Vieira says, “so I started searching intensively until I found something relevant.”
Upload Your Music Here
Vieira uploaded bluuue’s clip of the song onto his own YouTube channel anda handful of Reddit communities, with the hope that someone would be able to identify it. With that, the hunt went viral. The song became a subject of an episode of the YouTube series
, which has been viewed over 390, 000 times since July. Then, in July, came sonic paydirt: A Reddit user posted the entire song, which is just under three minutes long. The full song had apparently leaked out when Lydia says she received an email from someone asking for the full track; after uploading it using Lycos, she was still concerned about the legalities and quickly removed the link after the fan of the song downloaded it.
On Reddit and Discord (a popular chat-room site for gamers), several thousand users got in on the pursuit, posting theories and possible contact info, and dissecting the song in ways that would rival the most dedicated Dylanologists. Based on the singer’s accent, is the band from Germany or, perhaps, Poland or Austria? Is it even a band, or a one-man-group operation? Is the unknown singer intoning, “hear the young and restless dreaming” or “here you’re under arrest for screaming”? Is the song a comment on the Cold War? Is the song called “Like the Wind, ” after its not entirely decipherable opening line? Or is that voice singing “Locked Away”?
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One obvious source for information, the DJ who may have played it on the show Darius says he taped, is himself baffled. British-born Paul Baskerville, who still works at NDR, has no memory of the track and isn’t even sure he played it on his show. If he did, it
Be sitting in his collection of 10, 000 vinyl records, which includes the music he spun on-air. But, he adds, “If you’re a collector, you know most of what you have.”
Baskerville does recall playing tapes from underground Eastern rock bands, some mailed to him from over the Berlin Wall. Yet he’s not convinced the musicians heard on the tape are even Teutonic. “It sounds like the bad English that Germans might sing, ” he says, “but it could be Polish or Russian. If [Eastern European musicians] sing in English, it can sound a bit austere and severe.” But he says that the typed-out-playlists from the period have long been trashed, and a fellow NDR DJ who could have played the song died three years ago.
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Along with former record store workers and other radio station employees in Germany, Baskerville has been contacted by the “Mysterious Song” crowd. The names of these potential sources all appear on a detailed spreadsheet set up to keep track of leads: Deine Lakaien has been “ruled out” but someone claims to recognize it as “the B-side of a demo tape.” Another song detective lamented they’d been unable to reach out to a particular company that “managed in-store music for Whole Foods in 2003, where one YouTuber said they were ‘100 percent sure’ the song was played.” Phonebook-thick guides to Eighties New Wave records have been scrutinized. Others have scoured GEMA, a German music database, and have come up empty. Someone else transcribed it into sheet music, seemingly for the hell of it.
False leads have been rampant. Was it an early track or outtake from Joy Division or Depeche Mode? (No.) Other obscure, supposedly German or European bands — Mental Alchemy! Isurks! — have been floated but not confirmed. (A supposed friend of Isurks posted that the song is called “Check It In” and dates back to 1982, and that the lead singer is dead.) There are also many false leads generated by trolls: Hopes were raised when one poster said he knew the band and its name, but those dreams turned to despair when the
Vieira uploaded bluuue’s clip of the song onto his own YouTube channel anda handful of Reddit communities, with the hope that someone would be able to identify it. With that, the hunt went viral. The song became a subject of an episode of the YouTube series
, which has been viewed over 390, 000 times since July. Then, in July, came sonic paydirt: A Reddit user posted the entire song, which is just under three minutes long. The full song had apparently leaked out when Lydia says she received an email from someone asking for the full track; after uploading it using Lycos, she was still concerned about the legalities and quickly removed the link after the fan of the song downloaded it.
On Reddit and Discord (a popular chat-room site for gamers), several thousand users got in on the pursuit, posting theories and possible contact info, and dissecting the song in ways that would rival the most dedicated Dylanologists. Based on the singer’s accent, is the band from Germany or, perhaps, Poland or Austria? Is it even a band, or a one-man-group operation? Is the unknown singer intoning, “hear the young and restless dreaming” or “here you’re under arrest for screaming”? Is the song a comment on the Cold War? Is the song called “Like the Wind, ” after its not entirely decipherable opening line? Or is that voice singing “Locked Away”?
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One obvious source for information, the DJ who may have played it on the show Darius says he taped, is himself baffled. British-born Paul Baskerville, who still works at NDR, has no memory of the track and isn’t even sure he played it on his show. If he did, it
Be sitting in his collection of 10, 000 vinyl records, which includes the music he spun on-air. But, he adds, “If you’re a collector, you know most of what you have.”
Baskerville does recall playing tapes from underground Eastern rock bands, some mailed to him from over the Berlin Wall. Yet he’s not convinced the musicians heard on the tape are even Teutonic. “It sounds like the bad English that Germans might sing, ” he says, “but it could be Polish or Russian. If [Eastern European musicians] sing in English, it can sound a bit austere and severe.” But he says that the typed-out-playlists from the period have long been trashed, and a fellow NDR DJ who could have played the song died three years ago.
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Along with former record store workers and other radio station employees in Germany, Baskerville has been contacted by the “Mysterious Song” crowd. The names of these potential sources all appear on a detailed spreadsheet set up to keep track of leads: Deine Lakaien has been “ruled out” but someone claims to recognize it as “the B-side of a demo tape.” Another song detective lamented they’d been unable to reach out to a particular company that “managed in-store music for Whole Foods in 2003, where one YouTuber said they were ‘100 percent sure’ the song was played.” Phonebook-thick guides to Eighties New Wave records have been scrutinized. Others have scoured GEMA, a German music database, and have come up empty. Someone else transcribed it into sheet music, seemingly for the hell of it.
False leads have been rampant. Was it an early track or outtake from Joy Division or Depeche Mode? (No.) Other obscure, supposedly German or European bands — Mental Alchemy! Isurks! — have been floated but not confirmed. (A supposed friend of Isurks posted that the song is called “Check It In” and dates back to 1982, and that the lead singer is dead.) There are also many false leads generated by trolls: Hopes were raised when one poster said he knew the band and its name, but those dreams turned to despair when the
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