Live: JAN PLEWKA & MARCO SCHMEDTJE

In the organizer's words:

For many years, the duo Jan Plewka and Marco Schmedtje have been a guarantee for intense musical moments. With Zinoba, they had a band together from 2003 to 2005. With the now two-part series "Jan Plewka sings Rio Reiser", they created an extraordinary monument to the band Ton Steine Scherben and the songs of their late frontman Rio Reiser live and on record, complemented by a great live band and an audiovisual realization that is as much modern theater as it is a rousing live concert. This was followed by an approach to two other artists, Simon & Garfunkel, who are no less appreciated by both of them. With all these encounters with these great artists from the past, they also went on tour again and again, resulting in another program entitled "Between the Bars", in which the two now performed not only their finely chiselled, quiet and acoustically reduced, yet so urgently intense cover versions, but also their own songs from the Zinoba catalog, as well as the respective solo albums of Plewka and Schmedtje. Every now and then, another cover version was mixed into the programme, mostly songs that told of their youth and musical socialization. And so the idea for another cover album was born: "Between the 80's", a collection of highly successful songs - one might say classics - from that decade, completely reinterpreted in their very own way.

From "Smalltown Boy" to "Billy Jean", from "Wild Boys" to "The Power of Love", from "Hello" to "Material Girl", from "Africa" to "Ain't Nobody" - you only have to name the title and you immediately have the melody in your head. But then you hear these new versions - and literally discover a new song in between and behind them. "I just wanted to finally make an album with a few hits on it," laughs Marco, but Jan, who usually laughs just as much, remains very serious at this point: "These are all songs from our very personal past, there's a lot of emotion attached to these pieces. Our personal lists of potential songs for this record were correspondingly long." And Marco adds: "Of course, you then have to see whether a song works in our sound world. Some songs can be broken down perfectly to this minimalist arrangement of one guitar and two voices, but others simply lack too much."

It is remarkable that many songs not only took on a different vibe and a fresh, highly authentic atmosphere during the transformation into the Plewka/Schmedtje world, but also a completely new groove. "That was also an important part of the process of turning these songs into 'our' songs, not just copying them, but interpreting them in our own way. Or perhaps the way they were originally written before they were loaded with kitsch and pomp by the typical 80s sound aesthetic. If you reduce these songs to the maximum, you quickly realize how much substance there is in these compositions," says Marco. And this is also partly due to the content. Of course, there are the songs that, in their personal memories, primarily stand for long car rides with canned beer, for the first kiss at the bumper cars or, on the other hand, the first heartbreak - and generally for, as Jan says, "a very colorful youth in the 80s, which we paint again with golden brushes". But others, on the other hand, took on a completely different form of timelessness for her when she came to terms with them. "Just take 'Forever Young' by Alphaville, this supposedly cheesy song, which actually deals with nuclear war. I don't think many people are even aware of that."

The recordings as such were also intense for the two old hands, who have already recorded so many records together and separately. The entire album was recorded last winter in Marco Schmedtje's kitchen: a small room, reduced but high-quality recording technology, with the two musicians very close to each other both spatially and emotionally. A process that has only brought these two friends, who have already been closely connected through music for a very long time, even closer together. Now that this intimate and personal album is here, it's time to go out into the world again: "We want to take these songs on stage," explains Jan, "and we want to do it exactly like this: as a duo, with one guitar and both of our voices." There will be many a song surprise on these evenings that cannot yet be heard on this record. Just as they have surprised themselves time and again when recording these songs: "That I would ever record a Toto song with such dedication and enthusiasm is pretty much the last thing I would have expected myself," laughs Marco. The live evenings that will follow this album are also guaranteed to be full of laughter, not least because they unpack so many stories from their own youth that provide wonderful images to accompany the music. And you can already sense that, after their Ton Steine Scherben/Rio Reiser and Simon & Garfunkel cycles, these two accomplished musicians have found a new, wonderful playing field whose musical framework and the way in which they make these songs their own seem to know almost no bounds.