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VIDEO: British pop band unite with German trash orchestra

When British synth-pop duo Hurts teamed up with Germany’s most popular late night entertainer - they gave 'trash music' a new and brilliant meaning.

Published: 11 March 2016 11:42 CET

VIDEO: British pop band unite with German trash orchestra

Source: Youtube

It all started back in October, when Jan Böhmermann – Germany’s sardonic answer to Jimmy Kimmel – called on fans of his late night show to send in old electronic scrap.

Printers, hard drives, diskette drives, modems – whatever they used 20 years ago was what he was looking for.

From there, Geekchester was born, a nerd’s musical ensemble that formed its beats out of ancient technological devices.

From 16 floppy disk drives, three old scanners, two hard drives, a 24-pin and a 9-pin needle printer, an electric typewriter, a PC tower and a 56k modem, five German geeks managed to assemble an orchestra.

The PC tower became a bass drum. The scanners emit 1980s beeping noises. The internal mechanism of the hard drive clack against the plastic frame. And the printers splutter away as they attempt to print out paper.

Separately they might transport you to a grey office circa 1996, but placed together they result in something truly original.

This, as the video explains is “the wonderful world of German engineering”.

The next step was getting a suitably hip bunch of music nerds on board: enter multi-award-winning synth-pop group Hurts.

On Thursday the two forces combined to perform Hurts' song Wings off their 2015 album Surrender.

This isn't the first time Böhmermann has venture into English song performance. In 2015 he released a hilarious song about the then Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis, who had caused outrage in Germany by calling for Greece to cancel its debts to the EU.

Reporting by Raphael Warnke

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New songs mark sixth anniversary of French star Johnny Hallyday's death

Hallyday, blessed with a powerful husky voice and seemingly boundless energy, died in December 2017, aged 74, of lung cancer after a long music and acting career.

After an estimated 110 million records sold during his lifetime – making him one of the world’s best-selling singers -Hallyday’s success has continued unabated beyond his death.

Almost half of his current listeners on Spotify are under the age of 35, according to the streaming service, and a posthumous greatest hits collection of “France’s favourite rock’n’roller”, whose real name was Jean-Philippe Leo
Smet, sold more than half a million copies.

The two new songs, Un cri (A cry) and Grave-moi le coeur (Engrave my heart), are featured on two albums published by different labels which also contain already-known hits in remastered or symphonic versions.

Un cri was written in 2017 by guitarist and producer Maxim Nucci – better known as Yodelice – who worked with Hallyday during the singer’s final years.

At the time Hallyday had just learned that his cancer had returned, and he “felt the need to make music outside the framework of an album,” Yodelice told reporters this week.

Hallyday recorded a demo version of the song, accompanied only by an acoustic blues guitar, but never brought it to full production.

Sensing the fans’ unbroken love for Hallyday, Yodelice decided to finish the job.

He separated the voice track from the guitar which he felt was too tame, and arranged a rockier, full-band accompaniment.

“It felt like I was playing with my buddy,” he said.

The second song, Grave-moi le coeur, is to be published in December under the artistic responsibility of another of the singer’s close collaborators, the arranger Yvan Cassar.

Hallyday recorded the song – a French version of Elvis’s Love Me Tender – with a view to performing it at a 1996 show in Las Vegas.

But in the end he did not play it live, opting instead for the original English-language version, and did not include it in any album.

“This may sound crazy, but the song was on a rehearsal tape that had never been digitalised,” Cassar told AFP.

The new songs are unlikely to be the last of new Hallyday tunes to delight fans, a source with knowledge of his work said. “There’s still a huge mass of recordings out there spanning his whole career,” the source said.

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