The idea that Toten Herzen, a band renowned for encouraging their supporters to sacrifice animals, should set an example to anyone is astonishing, but when the Mirror contacted Starbucks UK head office to see if they would follow Toten Herzen's example and pay their own Vampires' Tax no one was available for comment.
PART 2: REBIRTH
12 (May)
Dee noticed Rob Wallet staring intensely at his laptop screen, probably on one of his crazed webshopping runs that filled the Rotterdam office with parcels sent from god knows where. His room was a growing museum to the seventies filled with board games, a football with black and white hexagonal panels he'd always wanted as a boy and children's annuals that even she had been too old to read when they were first published. She crept in and continued a closer look at the poster of Johan Cruyff. Rene had threatened to rip down the image of the ex-Ajax (and Feyenoord) player and replace it with one of Ove Kindvall. Elsewhere Matchbox cars sat alongside old jigsaw puzzles and videos were arranged alongside DVDs of old British tv shows: Van der Valk, The Persuaders, Arthur C Clarke's Mysterious World, recordings of Jeux sans Frontieres and On the Buses. Programmes familiar to Dee, but all of which had passed her by; when she was awake in the seventies television was off the air for the night.
"Van der Valk, Johan Cruyff," she said. "You're an honorary Dutchman aren't you."
"Funny coincidence, isn't it," he said without looking up from the screen.
She came up behind him. "End now you hef yer liddel houshe inderpoldersh. What are you buying now?"
"I've just bought Tournament Golf. A board game I had when I was a kid. Haven't seen that one for decades."
"Lovely. We can throw water over you if you want a real golfing experience when you play it." Dee picked up a packet of Top Trumps. "How many of these have you got now?"
"Ten."
"Anything interesting online?"
"Usual filth, extremity, hyperbole, Serbian racism versus Croat nationalism, trolls, perverts and intolerant weirdos. And that's only the Guardian's Comment is Free section."
"Why do you bother reading it? It doesn't make any difference."
Wallet paused and sat back into Dee's stomach. "Well, actually it does. There's a chance, minuscule, but a chance nevertheless, that something will be said on one of these sites that we do need to be aware of."
"Like what?"
"Well, if I knew that I wouldn't need to visit all these websites. I don't know. Imagine all this in 1976? You might have found out about Lenny Harper and saved yourself a lot of trouble." Wallet was scanning through a Twitter feed, endlessly scrolling down for more and more messages, most of it abbreviations, hash tags, symbols and truncated gibberish. "Look, look at this one... All the shit surrounding TH only makes me want to meet them even more."
"Who's that,"
"RavensWish." Wallet clicked on the name to see the user profile. "B Turkington. Toten Herzen follower. Out on a mission to meet the band who cannot be found."
"That's all we need," said Dee. "Another Rob Wallet. Set up an account. Keep the wolves at the door. We don't want any more surprises like you." Dee strolled over to the window seat with a Beano annual from 1979 and looked out across the flat endless farmland topped off by the perfect horizontal line of the horizon.
"I've got four thousand subscribers to my blog, you know," said Wallet.
"Good for you," said Dee holding the annual in front of her as if it was radioactive. She didn't care; she was wondering if Dennis the Menace's giant snowball was going to flatten Minnie the Minx. "Are they the ones sending you all this shit from the seventies?"
"Shit, what shit? Before I met you lot I had fifty seven subscribers. They're only interested in me because of who I know."
"And not what you know obviously. And you a professional journalist. Fifty seven subscribers, eh? And you're expected to promote us. You couldn't even promote yourself to your own profession." Biffo the Bear! Still hadn't been shot by trappers.
"I'm a writer not a," he stopped before he talked himself out of a job. "Why did Susan agree to me representing the band? She's not an idiot, she must have known it was a big deal for me."
"You're an interface," said Dee. "You know, like when the shit hits the fan?"
"Yeah."
"You're the fan."
"Great."
"Do you ever read anything worthwhile on there?" she asked wondering what Lord Snooty was up to these days.
"Sometimes, but common sense on the internet these days is hard to find."
"You rely on it too much. Anyone would think the world would stop if the internet disappeared."
"Do you never look at anything on here? What about book buying, all those books of yours, where do they come from?"
"That's about all I use it for. Rene checks the results, Susan emails and chats with people. Elaine, she's more interested in how it works than actually using it. Oh no, I tell a lie," Dee jumped off the window sill and rushed over to Wallet's laptop. "She saw an old video of us performing live on Youtube the other day. Go to Youtube."
Wallet searched for 'Toten Herzen live' and found Newcastle Trocadero 1975, a washed out televised clip of the band performing Blood on the Inside. "Do you remember that?" he said.
"Yeah that's it. Susan broke three strings that night. Wonder where they found this?"
"Someone must have taped it when it was rebroadcast," said Wallet. His attention had been caught by another playlist item, but he kept quiet.
"We only appeared on tv when we did something wrong. I thought the Old Grey Whistle Test performance might be on here." Dee noticed the same playlist item and stopped talking.
"You've seen it too?" Wallet asked. Dee threw the annual onto the bed, ran out of the room and within seconds came back with Susan followed by Rene and Elaine.
"There," said Dee pointing to the thumbnail image of the band's logo and the title Toten Herzen Give Me Your Heart new single.
There was a moment's silence. The temperature in the room started to increase.
"Fucking click on it, Rob," said Rene leaning against the table where the laptop was sitting.
Wallet clicked the thumbnail and the band stood listening for four minutes and eight seconds until the logo, no video just the logo, was replaced by a mosaic of smaller images and titles. The song sounded like Toten Herzen, but it wasn't Toten Herzen. Susan's guitars could be heard playing, but they were distorted, flattened, almost secondary to the layering of autotuned vocals. And the vocals weren't Dee's vocals. The music was Toten Herzen's, but the lyrics and voice belonged to someone else. The drums sounded like Rene, but they were in the background, floating, occasionally making themselves heard, but only as a token rhythmic element like a digital clock. The bass guitar was merely a dim pulse and unrelated to Susan's playing; Toten's signature bass and lead guitar driven arrangements had been pulled apart. The composite was a modern rendition, stripped of its native energy and replaced with machine-made regularity and precision that washed the speakers clean. It was a sterile facsimile, a well dressed fake.
Susan spoke. "Who put that there?"
"Username is Generus." Wallet clicked on the name. Generus had a channel made up of videos and tracks scooped up from all over Youtube. The profile was blank. No indication of who Generus might be, no suggestion of where they could be located or how to track them down for questioning. How had they come by this track? Who had done it? Why had they fucked it up beyond all recognition? Why hadn't an original Toten Herzen song been remixed? Why a discarded backing track from 1976 with someone else's voice pasted all over the top of it? Wallet was encased by the four members of the band trying to click on links, grabbing at the laptop's keypad. Uploaded two days ago and already 11943 views, 3474 likes, 4 dislikes. Wallet scrolled back to the top of the screen to hide the comments. The initial confusion was transforming into a growing rage with one point of focus: Jan Moencker.
"I'm not going to fuck you guys. His very words," said Susan. "He sat on our fuckin
g chair in our fucking house, drinking our fucking beer and eating our fucking food and he said to my face I'm not going to fuck you guys."
"Where is he now," said Elaine looking at Wallet for an answer.
"He'll be back in Berlin," said Wallet. "Can I say something?"
"Uh oh!" said Dee.
"I don't know, Rob," said Susan straightening herself in expectation. "You seem to know him better than us and you know all about this social media shit and Youtube shit and uploading shit. Is there something you want to say?"
"Look, before you tear my head off, I had nothing to do with this. Let me finish. Give him a chance to explain, don't just go flying out the window and killing the first poor sod you come across."
"Was that my intention?" said Susan. "Fly out the window and kill someone. I was thinking much closer to home."
"Hang on," said Rene pushing Susan away from the table towards the door.
Susan softened and breathed out heavily. She picked up a box containing an Airfix kit. On the cover was a painting of a Spitfire and inside the various separate bits and pieces. Until it was all put together this was nothing, not a toy, not a plane, not a Spitfire. Its components were not the finished item until it was all constructed in one way according to a specific set of instructions. She replaced it carefully on the shelf next to a small plastic trophy. She shook her head. "Is all this supposed to be your life?"
"Earliest things I can remember," said Wallet.
"What if someone told you it was worth fuck all? What if someone came in here and replaced it all with what they thought should be in here?"
"I'd take it all back out again and tell them to mind their own fucking business."
"That's the right answer, Rob." She placed the trophy on the table in front of him. "You win a prize."
Susan left the room followed by Rene, still keeping an eye on her. Elaine was the next to go, but couldn't leave without saying something.
"Don't tip him off," she said to Wallet. "He needs to answer to us, not you."
"Mm, not a happy bunch," said Dee massaging Wallet's shoulders. "We opened a can of worms there, didn't we."
RavensWish - omg new @totenherzen track released #givemeyourheart rocks cant wait to see the vid dee vincent sounds a bit weird what they do to her voice?
13 (May)
He wondered when the call would come. Marco Jongbloed knew it would be made only after Toten Herzen's first incarnation, but not this long after. He had almost given up on the idea. In the years since The Plan was drawn up he'd been married, had kids, built and sold a business and grown old. He could deal with the first four events, but growing old, that was the killer. That sucked.
But no use grumbling now, the call had come and he was off, maybe not so quick out of the starting blocks, but quick enough. He left the low open fire to crackle alone in the lounge; the landscaped gardens outside peered in wondering what the fuss was. Into the hall, long and slender, bare wood, white walls, nothing to interfere with the Giacomettis or the line of sketches by Klimt. He bounded up the stairs and along the top of the open well of the geometric stainless steel dining room below. Through a partition door he entered the original part of the house with its crooked timbers that were even more ancient than his sixty three year old bones, mullioned windows like compound eyes, low ceiling intent on making him crouch before he was ready to crouch. One day he would scuttle through this part of the house like a hermit, but not yet. He was still in his slender steely years, not ready for the crook and beams of his twilight.
The room he eventually found himself in was a box room. A repository of cardboard waste, files, shelves crammed with old books and magazines - cars, bikes, photography, old music periodicals and newspapers - yellowed, some of them on the verge of powdery disintegration. On the floor were bigger boxes full of old telephones, prototype mobile handsets when batteries were almost as big as televisions. He couldn't even remember what some of the other gadgets were. Cables: straight, coiled, caked in dust . . . what the hell were they doing here? What possible purpose could they serve other than to strangle someone? The box he thought he was looking for offered no prize. It was a jumbled pile of scrapbooks with cuttings of Toten Herzen headlines, articles, stories, reports, the whole dreadful story played out in big bold letters and hazy pointillist photographs. Jongbloed allowed himself to search through the pile a little more slowly, but the procession of portraits and images like a ghostly roll call eventually forced him back to the quest.
The Plan. Where is it?
The shelves around him were bending with old business files and, in one corner, a bust of Beethoven. But no Plan. A crate next to a discarded bass guitar contained musical manuscripts, a foot pedal, two old microphones, part of a microphone stand and the handle that should have been on the case to carry the discarded bass guitar. But no Plan. The old cabinet with shoe boxes of music tapes, was actually empty. So, no Plan there either. He took a stack of books off an armchair, put them inside the cabinet and sat down. Jongbloed, surrounded by detritus and junk, exhaled. And the thing was, the annoying fact about all this, there was an absence of memories. Hardly anything he had rummaged through was here for nostalgic reasons. There were no keepsakes, no mementos, no treasures. It was the room of what never became. The room of lost opportunity.
Had events turned out slightly different, Marco Jongbloed would probably have been sat amongst framed platinum discs, gold discs, silver discs, photos of famous people, photos of crowds, of arenas; photos on the road, on the tour bus, on the floor of a hotel. But there was none of that. Instead he had deals, purchases, investment meetings and apart from keeping the receipts they didn't really come with memorabilia. No one ever became misty eyed over that meeting in Groningen in '84; there were no fond memories of the licensing agreement of '89; no need to get out the Macallan and tell stories of the programme of expansion in '95. It didn't work like that. Business was business and show business wasn't real business. Show business, when it worked out, left you with an indelible tidemark and bad skin, a house full of reminders and an autobiography people would read. Business, when it worked out, just made you rich. The only positive side to all this unwanted, unwarranted rubbish was the certainty that The Plan had never been thrown out. One last look around gave no clues, but then he remembered.
The Plan wasn't in here, because it wasn't junk. It had never been discarded, was never rendered obsolete. It was still a live document, a work in progress. It was in his library. Jongbloed upped and left, scurrying back to the extension, to the white walled modernity. The library was at the opposite end of the house facing the woodland that screened the house from the North Sea coast. He could hear the waves when the doors were open. Without any effort he scanned the books and there, at the end of a line of encyclopedias was a comb bound document, A3 in size and folded in half. He took it down and with barely contained excitement flicked through the pages. And it was all still there: the chapters; the section summaries; processes, methodology, protocols, rules and guidelines; ambitions, aspirations, targets, time-lines and diagrams; maps, drawings sketched by hand, drawings produced by computer, plans, elevations, isometric angles, exploded views; specifications, descriptions, details. . . . All of it, all intact, all complete. Perfect in its construction, simple in its ambition. After thirty five years of dormancy, ready to be revived.
14 (May)
As late night conference calls go this was one of the more complex and fraught that Jan Moencker had been involved in. At one end of the line in Rotterdam was Rob Wallet struggling to communicate the shitstorm blowing around him and in the malevolent atmosphere illustrate how unhappy the band were with the remix and the not insignificant fact that Moencker had sent it to Sony without their prior approval (and the colossal fact that someone had leaked it online for the whole world to judge). On another phone line, in a small recording studio in Berlin, was Martin Lundqvist who had carried out the remix and was casually justifying the 'muted lead guitars,' and the over-autotuned voc
als, and the distant drums, and the excessive reverb, and the absence of any serious bass, in addition to the left right panning of the intro, and the flat mix and out of context vocal fills, and the omission of Dee's voice in favour of some unknown singer. In short, an unholy mess, to paraphrase Wallet.
"It will appeal to a wider demographic," pleaded Lundqvist.
"It sounds like something Lady Gaga would play around with," said Wallet.
"Lady Gaga's big," said Lundqvist.
"Rob, there's no harm in reaching out to that audience if you can catch some of it," said Moencker. "Beg, steal, borrow an existing fan base to get you going."
"We don't want to catch part of that fucking audience, Jan," said Wallet. "We have an audience. They're called rock fans. Not pop fans. Toten Herzen are not a fucking pop group."
"Rob," said Lundqvist, "at the moment Toten Herzen are not anything. They're four memories from a different era. They might not be interested in earning any money, but some of us have bills to pay and that means getting the music out there in a form that sells?"
"Country and western sells, Martin. Why not just mix in a slide guitar and some harmonica?"
"I don't know why you're so upset, Rob," said Moencker who was running out of fingernails to chew. "The suits at Sony were impressed. They liked it after one hearing, straight back on the phone wanting to take it further. They want to meet you and here we are yelling at one another because you don't like the sound of the guitars."
We Are Toten Herzen (TotenUniverse Book 1) Page 7