MoonPaper 3/92

"After an all-night drinking bout, I went to the studio and wrote a song based on a vague idea and recorded it live. I took the tape home with me and there it disappeared. A further attempt to write a song with the same title failed, and so I was left with the only thing that had survived from this composition and have titled the album such. It only later occurred to me, that So long Celeste, when referring to the fate of the song, sounds like an oracle."

Marian Gold is otherwise somewhat more careful, when archiving his song ideas, and therefore, his long-standing desire to do a musical solo project did indeed result in a completed album. And even though other developments have in the meantime caught up with the idea behind the solo project: "Which originally consisted of various wishes. One of these was to finally play live. But the way it looks now, we'll start touring next year with Alphaville."

But before this small time bomb has a chance to detonate it will be Alphaville's First tour since the band was founded - Marian Gold again addresses the current subject. "I regularly wrote on my own songs between productions of Alphaville albums and other projects like the 'Songlines'-cycle and activities apart from music, which from the beginning weren't conceived as being within the Alphaville context. The teamwork with Ricky and Bernhard necessarily precludes the willingness to compromise. And with these songs, which transport very personal thoughts. I didn't want to make any compromises".

In the last three years alone, Marian Gold has collected around Fifty songs for the solo project. In the long history of pop, there were a great many spilled pearls, "which had drowned in the vast sea of record releases. I simply want to show, that there are plenty of brilliant songs, which audiences failed to notice, or which have been forgotten." A venture which could easily Filled up dozens of sides of vinyl. "And that's what I intended to do at one point; an album with only cover versions. And that idea is still on my list." On So Long Celeste Marian Gold has brought attention to four songs from other writers. Besides a bow to Mott The Hooples' "Roll Away The Stone", with rocky guitar runs, multi-voiced voluptuous backing choirs, razor-sharp keyboard accents and a driving drum program which give a glamorous finishing touch to the song, the choice fell on three other obscure titles. "The Shape of Things to Come" was originally from The Headboys, who were very successful with it in the early Eighties. "One Step Behind You" from Furniture was commercially less successful, but such considerations didn't count at all, when it came to the selection. Number four of the cover versions is "Peace on Earth" from the Boom Operators, a Berlin band, who are mainly known on the dance floor sector, as well as for Film and theatre music, and with whom Marian Gold has sporadically been working together with over the last few years. After the demo versions were completed in the Alphaville-owned Lunapark Studio, pre-production began, alternatingly, within the four walls of both musicians' home studios, who contributed to the genesis of the songs: Rainer Bloss, a classically trained pianist, who has worked with such musicians such as Klaus Schulze. contributed not only keyboard parts, but collaborated also as an arranger and co-writer on several songs, as did Andreas Schwarz-Ruszczynski, whose biography includes bands such as UKW and The Other Ones.

"I had very concrete ideas about how the songs should sound in the end". Marian Gold refers to the publishing touch on So long Celeste. "and it was a real coincidence, that I met Kid & Jon." These two remix and producer specialists, indigenous to British dance circles, had collaborated last year on the Alphaville anthology, First Harvest as well as bringing "Big In Japan" back in the club and dance floor charts with their remix. "I discovered a kind of spiritual affinity between the two of them and myself, something which doesn't happen very often to me with people I haven t known for a long time - they put my ideas into practice. The result of what came out of this could be described as a rhythm 'n' blues artifact which has been translated into the language of machines."

See: So Long Celeste