Live from Austin!

Food turned out to be less of a problem than in Berlin, oddly enough. There seemed to be lots of vegetarian restaurants, and we found a vegetarische imbiss at Schantzenstrasse and Susannenstrasse.

I also got the impression that people were more friendly than in Berlin. Then again, perhaps it was my imagination, a side effect of my becoming more used to Germany.

Josef had an original LP from the first release of Autobahn. The band look like big geeks in the photo, and the sleeve credits Conny Plank. (His name was removed from later editions.)

CD shopping was made more annoying by the fact that nowhere seems to take credit cards, not even big stores. If you don’t have an EC card with a PIN, forget it.

Stereotypes sometimes have an element of truth to them. While we were in Hamburg, Josef and Ute helped rothko to polish the text of her German scrapbooking site. The original text talks about the enthusiasm of TLC scrapbookers for the business. For our hosts, this proved to be the most difficult piece to translate, and it took a long time for them to come up with an acceptable German phrase for “enthusiastic”. Apparently the literal translation of the word would be viewed with great suspicion in a business context, particularly when said by an American.

This reminded me of my two favorite jokes about Germans:

1. Q: How many Germans does it take to change a light bulb?
   A: One, and he does it with ruthless efficiency.

2. Q: Why did the German cross the road?
   A: Because the traffic lights indicated that it was appropriate to do so.

We got to the airport for our return at around 06:30. The queue was very, very long. The airline official checked my passport and visa (permanent resident card). Then he asked for my driver’s license. After that, he wanted proof of employment. Fortunately my medical insurance card has IBM’s logo on it.

This is all the result of the US government decreeing that airlines should pay the cost of deporting people. Ironically, if you don’t have a visa at all then you’re OK as far as the airlines are concerned, because it means they’re not on the hook; it’s if you do have a visa that they have to triple-check everything, just in case the visa is fraudulent or you can’t continue to meet the terms of your residence.

Next, we had to queue for the metal detector. My passport was checked again. Then we walked through to the hallway beyond, and walked to the departure gate…where there was another security checkpoint, with another queue. My passport was checked a third time, and everything went through another round of metal detection, this time using a wand.

Just when I thought things couldn’t get more ridiculous, I realized that they were hand-searching the carry-on luggage of every single passenger. I cooperated with removing every single item from my bag, so they could be checked one by one.

The guard noticed the TRIO DVD and grinned. “Trashy,” he commented. It turned out that he had been a fan back in their early days, before they became famous, when they were playing obscure Hamburg clubs. Somehow this puts a more human feeling to the proceedings, and makes it all seem better.

When we got to Newark, we had to collect our luggage. We re-checked it, and it was scanned again. Then, we had to go through security, for what was my third round of metal detection and fourth round of passport checking.

At immigration, I was handed back my documents with a smile and “Welcome home”. Maybe I was fragile from the 8 hours on the plane and the repeated security screenings, but I felt genuinely touched. And not in a full-body-cavity-search kind of way.

It must have been late 1979 or early 1980 when it happened. I was flipping through the box of “Under £1″ 7″ singles in my local record shop when I found one in a bright yellow and orange sleeve. It was labeled Moskow Diskow on one side, Rock Around The Clock on the other. The artist name was TELEX. I’ve always liked bizarre cover versions, so I decided to risk 50p.

What I had discovered was a radically different vision of pop music—all electronic, stripped down, deadpan funny. These days I can say that it’s as if Kraftwerk met Pet Shop Boys in a café in Brussels, but back in 1980 there was nothing like it. (Sure, Kraftwerk used similar noises back then, but the attitude was completely different.)

In April 1980, I watched the Eurovision Song Contest. I expected to hate all the music; that was part of the train wreck appeal of the thing. To my surprise, TELEX turned up as Belgium’s entry. They played their song, an archly self-referential song about singing in the Eurovision Song Contest.

When it was over, the stunned audience sat in dead silence. One of the members of the band stepped out from behind a synth and took a photograph. There was more awkward silence, then a little nervous clapping broke out here and there.

It wasn’t until 1992 that I’d see a better performance at an awards show. That was the year that the KLF treated the Brit Awards audience to an unexpected duet with Extreme Noise Terror, followed by a round of blanks fired from an automatic rifle.

I spent years trying to find more TELEX releases. I even tried record stores in Brussels. I scored a vinyl album, and friends who had had more luck made me some tapes. Finally, in 1993 the entire back catalog was released on CD, and thanks to the wonder of the Internet I was able to order a copy from Belgium.

Now it’s 2006, and TELEX are back. Check out the podcasts for a glimpse of what you’ve been missing. These guys were electroclash 20 years before electroclash was invented.