I consider myself something of a connoisseur when it comes to synthpop, and yet I had never listened to or really knew much about Alphaville’s debut album Forever Young until quite recently. I was familiar with the title track and some of the singles, of course, but I assumed that these were merely one hit wonders by random British 80s synthpop acts. I didn’t even realise that they were the work of the same band. Given my marked Anglocentrism, maybe this is unsurprising, because in the UK, Alphaville were not particularly successful; I couldn’t find any information at all on the commercial performance of this album, the title track barely made it into the top 100 when released as a single, and they cracked the top 10 only once, with “Big in Japan”. They were equally anonymous in the US.
This relative lack of success is galling indeed, because Forever Young is in fact one of the best synthpop albums of the 1980s. I approached several supposed synth classics with high expectations and found myself disappointed – Human League’s Dare, Duran Duran’s Rio, Gary Numan’s The Pleasure Principle, even some of the early records by Depeche Mode, who I consider the masters of the genre. In such cases, the coldly detached and inhuman electronica begins to grate and even bore after twenty minutes of relentless, icy automation, to the point where I assumed that this was a basic feature of the genre, that it’s impossible to sustain the synthpop sound for an entire record. But Forever Young disproves this hypothesis. I expected not very much from a little known European OMD rip-off and, well, expectations were exceeded, to say the very least.
Alphaville were a German synthpop duo formed in 1980s West Berlin, and they sported the same look of peroxide hair and austere, dead-eyed, Neue Sachlichkeit-style stares familiar from any other new wave, new romantic act of the time. But on Forever Young, the band’s Germanic, Weimar-era eurocool is lent a slightly sinister and unnerving adumbrate by the fact that three of its opening four songs reference the defeated Axis Powers of the Second World War. Indeed, disconcertingly, there’s something slightly fascoid about Forever Young. The shimmering and glacial “Summer in Berlin” offers a weird, futurist vision of Germany’s divided Cold War-era capital in which, perversely, but tellingly, carnal acts are seemingly ubiquitous – “kissing by the crossroads”, a romantic summer spent by the Berlin Wall, with nuclear annihilation only a sleepy apparatchik’s accidental button click away. “To Germany with Love” is speedier, more frantic, but its references to a Teutonic émigré writing back to the “nightmare nation” of his youth echo the Bonn Republic’s largely unsuccessful attempts at post-war Vergangenheitsbewältigung (or “mastering of the past”).
The fascist triptych at the start of Forever Young is completed by the shrill oriental stylings of “Big in Japan”, which is supposedly about a pair of heroin addicts, but which to me sounds like a paeon to a heartbroken rockstar looking to ameliorate his sadness by reminding himself that his band is popular among Japanese teenagers. The Manic Street Preachers circa 1993, basically. Certainly, whoever thought to use this utterly brilliant song to introduce the daily highlights package of the 2020 Tokyo Olympics deserves a raise. Ultimately, though, we are dealing here with a most suggestive cocktail; three coldly futuristic synthpop snippets loaded with references to the two nations which defied the West, paid the price in the form of utter devastation, and were then rebuilt as high-tech, liberal democratic utopias, with lots of historical skeletons in their closets.
Much of the rest of Forever Young deals with the more prosaic fayre of femme fatales, erotic longing, and messed up relationships, but even here, the composition of the songs, and their complementation with dramatic, flashing, dashing, thrusting strings, sets Alphaville apart from the – in my opinion –more one dimensional stylings of, say, the Human League. “A Victory of Love” kicks the album off, and the menacing aloofness of its opening synth beat seems to imply that the title is meant to be ironic. The vocals, initially marked by an almost comical post-punk sombreness, become increasingly hysterical. The lyrics reference a femme fatale who “plays with love” and “pulls the strings”, with this character seemingly making another appearance on the twinkling, delicate, but unsettlingly seductive “Fallen Angel”, in which she abandons our narrator in the red-light district. So maybe he’s in love with a prostitute, a familiar noirish, Depression-era trope.
Other songs turn the tables, however. “In The Mood” introduces us to Jacky, who is “locked in a silent dream”, married to an inattentive, chain-smoking drunk, getting older, losing her looks, and perhaps in therapy. The song advises her to “play with fire” – that is, to reinject some youthful vigour back into her increasingly miserable existence. The song closes with a glittering synth solo and slightly sinister spoken voice section, in which the narrator invites poor Jackie to take a holiday with him. Thanks but no thanks. “Sounds Like a Melody”, meanwhile, is Forever Young’s equivalent of mid-album filler – but even this song is great, good enough to be an early Depeche Mode single. Its erotic lyrics are drenched in references to faded Hollywood heroes like Cary Grant and Grace Kelly, yet another allusion to the Americanised popular culture of 1950s West Germany, with the country rebuilding at a frenetic pace, enjoying an unprecedented Wirtschaftswunder, and busily trying to forget about all of those not-very-nice things it had been doing just ten years previously.
But if such songs invoke the immediate post-war era, Forever Young’s closing section takes us squarely back into the 1980s, with a succession of Duran Duran-style meditations on and celebrations of the opulent and decadent lifestyles of the rich and famous. The manic, bouncy, slightly unhinged “Lies” rejoices at the fact that “everyone’s going to Hollywood”, and treats us to a succession of cynical showbiz quotes about “making a big lie” and how “everything’s an interview”. The delicate synth at the end of the song perhaps indicates how vulnerable these young, wide-eyed German boys from the provincial town of Münster felt at being suddenly catapulted to fame by the success of “Big in Japan”. But if “Lies” deals with fame, then “The Jet Set”, the album’s jittery closer, is about the money; the international class of finance people and bankers who, it seems, are eager to live it up because “this could be the final year” – that is, the Cold War could turn hot at any moment.
There’s not a single dud track on Forever Young. It’s great from start to finish, despite the fact that it never really deviates from the quintessential synthpop sound; there’s not a guitar, a piano, or an organic drumbeat to be heard. The album maintains its vibrancy with strange sounds, compelling vocals and lyrics, and fantastic songwriting. This perhaps comes most visibly into focus on the album’s title track, a genuinely heartbreaking paeon to youth and the horror of ageing. Once again, Alphaville’s West German roots are evident in the constant references to the fear of nuclear annihilation – “are you gonna drop the bomb tonight?” – an obsession which did not, for example, preoccupy too many of the British synthpop acts, simply because they were not on the frontline of the superpower rivalry.
Moreover, though the song hints somewhat at fascism’s obsession with eternal youth, with a young, striving “next generation” destroying the established order and “turning our golden faces into the sun”, the song is not a fascoid moment; it’s far too human, melancholy, beseeching those in charge of the nukes not to do anything stupid, to preserve life and youth. In that sense it’s a song about Germany’s successful post-war rehabilitation as much as anything.
*****
Highlights: “Summer in Berlin”, “Big in Japan”, “Forever Young”