We Are Toten Herzen
Page 16
Terence Pearl
"The usual reactions. That I'm mad, that I'm making it up. That you can see anything anywhere if you want to. But what I think is important is that the band are provoked into coming out into public scrutiny and speaking up for themselves. We're just not getting that."
Jonathan Knight
"I agree. It's what I call the complicity of silence. Back in the seventies there was a whirlwind of gossip, rumour, the wildest stories about what the band did and didn't do and yet they hardly ever came out in public and say that's all rubbish. They knew it was great publicity and the more extreme it became the more records it sold. They allowed a vacuum to develop and people filled it with whatever preconceived notion they had. In the press the silence was evidence of guilt, in the public the lack of denial was admittance, for the fans it was like a knowing look, a nod or a secret handshake."
Anna Parkinson
"A good publicist knows just how much to feed the press and then let them run the story in any direction they want. When it's done well the publicity can be enormous and cost you nothing. Madonna, for example, was the arch exponent of this. Someone like Michael Jackson, on the other hand, was eventually consumed by adverse publicity. It reached a stage where he and the people around him were no longer sowing those initial seeds and they lost control of their own message and stories."
Mark Lawson
"It's a risky tactic played by politicians now, at their peril some might say. Do you think that's what happened in 1977 when Toten Herzen were allegedly murdered? In terms of publicity, was that, to use a phrase, a botched job?"
Anna Parkinson
"Well they obviously didn't recover from it, so something must have gone wrong somewhere. Whoever was responsible doesn't seem to have been identified."
Mark Lawson
"Lance Beauly, Rob Wallet, the band's spokesman now, interviewed you when he was investigating the publicity stunt from 1977. Do you think he was getting close to what really happened back then?"
Lance Beauly
"He must have found something."
Wallet heard Elaine turn up the television volume.