Xmal Deutschland created a completely alien soundscape that felt disorientating and bleak.
We like to pretend influencers are a new thing, but they’re really not.
In musical terms, it doesn’t always make for an edifying sight to witness your favourite artists barrel-scraping for new engagement ideas on TikTok or Insta, but that’s just where the exposure lies now. Back in the day, the real influencers were DJs.
Given the beige characters of most on-the-mike people now, this might seem hard to believe but when radio was still king the people spinning the tunes had all the power, and when it came to the underground there was literally only one tastemaker worth listening to: John Peel.
Xmal Deutschland were a Peel sort of band right from the off.
Catalysed out of Hamburg’s small alternative scene in 1980, Caro May, Rita Simon, Manuela Rickers, Fiona Sangster and Anja Huwe began rehearsing together in a practice space their boyfriends’ bands used, despite none of them having any kind of musical background.
At this point the idea of Gothic rock was more of a British journalistic construct than a movement, from which Siouxsie And The Banshees were the most public face and of which Bauhaus’ doomy neck biter anthem Bela Lugosi’s Dead was its best-known anthem.
At the time, the phrase held no relevance for Xmal Deutschland despite their brightly coloured hair and kohl-eyed stares. They went into the studio to record their debut single Schwarz Weld with little allowance for events at The Batcave or anywhere else, and with its primitive rhythms and rudimentary synth, it was a track without pretence that relied chiefly on post-punk for inspiration.
It was on its B-sides Die Wolken and Großstadtindianer – the lyrics were written and sung exclusively in German – that some kind of pattern then began to emerge, via the former’s lost-in-a-fog keyboard motif and the latter’s unsettling, claustrophobic death disco.
You were probably wondering, but this is where John Peel comes in. Recorded the next year, Xmal Deutschland’s follow-up single Incubus Succubus tapped consciously or not deep into goth’s emerging zeitgeist.
A clear leap forward, the menacing, dubbed phrases, scrambled guitar and harsh, chanted vocals created – as they were probably intended to – a completely alien soundscape that felt disorientating and bleak.
For his part, Radio 1’s nighttime connoisseur of the weird and wonderful was smitten, offering Xmal Deutschland a chance to deliver the track as part of their first session.
It’s the undoubted centrepiece of Early Singles 1981-82, joined here by B-sides Zu Jung Zu Alt and Blut Ist Liebe, the latter breaking cover with a naked and unexpected ska riff, whilst Kaelbermarsch and a fearsome, echo peeling live version of Allein speak to the gravity and power Xmal Deutschland generated in such a short space of time.
At only eight tracks, as a compilation there’s a definite feeling of the story barely getting started before it ends though. Just over this horizon, for example, came signing to the glacially cool British label 4AD and a subsequent career featuring sound and line-up changes that lasted through a four-album lifespan.
Peel especially though never lost faith, even when the C-86 crowd and acid house gurners made groups like Xmal Deutschland collectively seem like they came from the ancient past.
His devotion summed up the yawning gap between now and then right enough: old-school influencers usually did it because they liked what they endorsed, rather than just getting off on the act of influencing itself.
In abstract, Early Singles (1981-1982) is an effective, if by definition incomplete, walking tour of goth’s cobwebby archives.
