Reinhold Heil

Torsten Schmidt

So, I would very much like you to welcome a person who’s excelled in two, if not three, different areas that you can do, maybe even four, depending on how you want to define it, but most of all has worked a lot in this very town and had his hands in I’d say at least five of the best ten German pop songs ever, outside of his soundtrack and scoring work. So please join me in welcoming Mr. Reinhold Heil. [applause]

Reinhold Heil

Thank you.

Torsten Schmidt

So, when you arrived in this town, what did it look like? When was that?

Reinhold Heil

September, October, 1973. I was 19 years old, I had just finished my high school, and I had miraculously passed an entry exam into the Hochschule für Musik here in Berlin, West Berlin, actually. And what did it look like? It smelled really bad because our friends, the communist rulers of East Germany, loved to use brown coal, surface-mined coal, for energy. So we had all these brown coal power plants that were sending unbelievable amounts of sulfur into the air. So that was like a constant presence in the air, the smell of sulfur, in West Berlin, coming from East Berlin.

Torsten Schmidt

Yeah, the coal and the dust and the wind didn’t care about borders.

Reinhold Heil

It was glorious. The glorious old days. It was just absolutely magnificent. You wish you would have been there for sure.

Torsten Schmidt

And it just stank.

Reinhold Heil

Yeah, it stank. A lot.

Torsten Schmidt

What did you do to overcome the stink?

Reinhold Heil

You stopped thinking about it, except for the morning when you would cough up the phlegm and it was kinda darkish.

Torsten Schmidt

Charming. Welcome to a very German conversation.

Reinhold Heil

So apart from what you voluntarily dragged in there, there was other stuff that polluted the air.

Torsten Schmidt

We listened to a bit of Mahavishnu [Orchestra] earlier, that was your s--- then, right?

Reinhold Heil

Yeah, my s--- was different every other year and then everything else was absolute s---. So at that time I was opinionated and I knew this was the best music and it happened to switch every year. So, because I was so much into jazz fusion rock music, so Mahavishnu Orchestra, Weather Report and then I realized everything comes from Miles Davis, so then I listened to Bitches Brew, which still is one of my island records. I wish I would one day do the electronic version of Bitches Brew, and I will actually. Before I die I will do that. So that was my thing and everything else was bulls--- so I completely missed the early David Bowie, I looked down on that, Roxy Music, the whole glam rock thing.

So then, 1976, ’77, I was asked by a friend, a guitar player, he said, “I have this singer coming from East Germany, do you want to join that band? It’s going to be very sort of eclectic rock music and old fashioned German music, all kinds of stuff.” And I said, “I don’t know.” So then I had to kind of catch up with all this music that I had looked down on for years.

Torsten Schmidt

Good thing a lot of that happened in the fenced-in city.

Reinhold Heil

Yeah, that’s true. Although of course we also, since I’m from... I’m like a country bumpkin from near Frankfurt, and I was for a long time, it took me a long time to adjust to the big city, so I went home a lot over the weekends. And using a car, it was horrible, you had to stand at the checkpoint in the south of Berlin for two hours, then you were let into the GDR, you had to stay on the Transitstrecke [transit route] and there were only two rest stops that you were allowed to go to, and then on the other side you had to stand again and you were checked. As it turns out, after the wall came down, they had x-ray machines at the border, so the amount of x-rays that we all got was also pretty gnarly.

Torsten Schmidt

Good thing you’re still here with us.

Reinhold Heil

I’m still here but I have a lot of people who are no longer here from my generation. I don’t know. Of course we can’t pinpoint. There was nuclear fallout from all the tests in the ’50s, so there’s other s---. In any case...

Torsten Schmidt

Welcome to the uplifting vibe of the ’70s and ’80s.

Reinhold Heil

It was glorious for sure.

Torsten Schmidt

Within that vibe you played in a bunch of like proggy bands and a lot of your comrades, there was a big scene of things that were a little different to what was going on in the pop music kind of thing.

Reinhold Heil

What’s interesting is that people now think there was a scene in Berlin. There were about ten different scenes that didn’t have anything to do with each other and were, again, looking down upon each other, this is the idiotic thing about this time I think.

Torsten Schmidt

That’s still a very German thing, yeah.

Reinhold Heil

Yeah. And then there was this time when Nina Hagen came up in ’78, ’79, and then there was the origins of the Neue Deutsche Welle. Record companies came to Berlin and were basically dragging half-finished projects, bands, out of rehearsal rooms and gave them record deals. And I was not super, super successful, I just played in that band. That was kind of one of the instigators of this whole thing and I dared saying in public, “I really think these bands should be left alone until they’re done.” And I got a huge backlash from the musicians who were very happy to be signing a record deal just because they’re from Berlin. Because of course there were no outlets for them. There was no YouTube, there was nothing they could self-release. We all had to go through this needle ear of the record companies, of the A&R managers, those were the gatekeepers to fame or to even being heard anywhere out there. So if you don’t convince an A&R manager that he will give you a deal, and might even be a s--ty deal, you will not have a record. So of course it was a stupid thing to say, I should have just kept my mouth shut obviously. Be nice to your fellow musicians because everybody who gets a deal is another person who gets a chance.

Torsten Schmidt

Can you recall when you first heard or saw a band with the very not West German name Lokomotive Kreuzberg?

Reinhold Heil

You know what, I never saw them because I wasn’t interested. They were very famous in Berlin because they did rock theater and they did it very specifically for, you know, apprentices, young people who were learning a craft, and they were organized in unions, like the IG Metall. So they actually got subsidies from the IG Metall but they were real communists, like East German-style communists. In West Berlin. There was the Sozialistische Einheitspartei Westberlins, they were members and they were trained, they did agitation, they did the whole shebang. And of course, country bumpkin from West Germany, completely apolitical, so I didn’t even understand the first thing about it. And then I met them and they were in the process to actually make a band with the most famous dissident from that scene, from the political system, that they were supporting all these years. So it was...

Torsten Schmidt

That’s definitely worth reading up on ’cause it is probably a little too complex of how both the West and the East tried to infiltrate cultural and creative scenes on both sides, and tried to finance, more or less openly, certain individuals in order to get their particular messages across.

Reinhold Heil

Yeah, I don’t know if I would just call it like that because there’s also opportunism. Musicians are, by nature, somehow also opportunists. So Wolf Biermann, who was a Hamburg-born guy, who was a communist, who had deliberately gone to East Germany to live there as a communist, and he was a singer-songwriter and he wrote critical songs. So of course he wrote critical songs about the GDR system. He wasn’t afraid. So eventually they silenced him and he had to deal with a West German record company. I don’t think there was any specific undermining strategy going on, so of course he was happy to sell a s--- ton of records in West Germany. So he had a very privileged status in East Berlin. At some point, since he couldn’t perform in East Germany, because they didn’t let him anymore, he did a big tour in West Germany and they didn’t let him come back. So he was the first big dissident, and then a whole bunch of East German artists, directors, writers, actors, musicians, signed a letter in solidarity with Wolf Biermann, and then the Stasi went to their homes and put them under pressure and said, “You have a privileged status here. If you want to continue having that then you have to withdraw your signature from this letter.” And about 50% did and the other 50% left for the West. So there was a huge cultural brain drain of the GDR into West Germany, and a lot of them actually made it pretty well in West Germany, and others completely withered away. It was a very sad story.

And Nina was, because she was the stepdaughter of Wolf Biermann, was of course among the people who left. So in 1976, she came to West Berlin. She immediately, through her stepfather, had a connection to CBS Records in Frankfurt, they gave her a record deal and sent her to London and said, “Look, there’s stuff going on in London.” It was punk, it was the birth of punk, and she was literally hanging out with the Sex Pistols and there was a girl group, The Slits, who was in the whole scene with the Sex Pistols. She hung out there for six months but she couldn’t find musicians for a band that she could then go home and record with. So she came back to Berlin and she met this guy from the Lok Kreuzberg, from that political, East German communist basically, band in West Berlin. So it was really super ironic when you think about it. And I knew that guy and so he asked me, and I was still going to the music academy and I said, “I can’t do it, I need to first graduate.” I was that straight-laced and really... “Yeah, this is an opportunity, I like CBS Records, there’s a lot of my favorite records came out on that label.” That was an issue for me. “Bitches Brew,” for instance, is on CBS Records, a whole bunch of things that are absolutely amazing because it’s one of the big record companies. Yeah, two weeks later he called me again and said...

Torsten Schmidt

Who is this he?

Reinhold Heil

This is Potsch, the guitar player of the Nina Hagen Band, who used to be with Lokomotive Kreuzberg. And he says, “We tried two other keyboard players, we think that you have to be, you have to come, you have to meet everybody and you have to go to the rehearsal room with us.” And that’s what I did. And I couldn’t help it, I had to join that band. It was just too good an energy. I had never experienced anything like that. The drummer was just unbelievable, the kind of energy that he has as a drummer.

Torsten Schmidt

His name was?

Reinhold Heil

Herwig Mitteregger. He’s still a really good friend of mine. We had not that much to do with each other in the last 30 years but still good friends.

So, yeah, all of the sudden I had a professional record deal and I was still going to the music academy. So I went from the Bahnhof Zoo to Kreuzberg, Paul-Lincke-Ufer. By the way, Paul-Lincke-Ufer used to be a s--hole with rehearsal rooms. Now, probably in that same rehearsal room that we were in in 1977, ’78, there’s probably some banker now, in a fancy apartment that’s...

Torsten Schmidt

And there was Hardwax Records in between, and all these things that were important for it.

Reinhold Heil

Paul-Lincke-Ufer is great, I would totally move there now. So anyway, yeah.

Torsten Schmidt

Maybe to give people an idea of this, this fantastic little video that shows different iterations of Nina and the band in a short clip.

Reinhold Heil

Oh that’s good.

Torsten Schmidt

Maybe can we see the first two or three minutes of video number one, please?

(video: Nina Hagen evolution montage)

Well, there’s a bit of variety in that material.

Reinhold Heil

Yeah, you’ve asked yourself, where was I? I was not in the picture anywhere and actually I was audible only in one of those little snippets. So there were three snippets from when she was a pop star in the GDR and then there was our... The first piece on this album [holds up a vinyl copy of the album] called “TV-Glotzer,” which was actually a cover version of a piece by The Tubes, who nobody is aware of anymore I don’t think.

Torsten Schmidt

That song in particular has a lot of drama in itself. Is it worth playing it from the record?

Reinhold Heil

Yeah, I saw that they have vinyl players here, so I thought, OK, let me dig through my archives, which are in boxes in my garage of course. [takes record out of its sleeve] This is a Japanese pressing, and they were supposedly better. I’m not sure if it’s really that much better.

Torsten Schmidt

Now that you play it it’s going to be worth only half of it now anyway.

Reinhold Heil

Yeah, it’s a virgin pressing. I don’t think I’ve ever played this. So this is about 40 years old, maybe 38 or something. And it’s that very record.

Torsten Schmidt

Maybe before we listen to it, there’s different stages in that song, and as you were involved in the way it was created can you probably give a few pointers to what happens in it?

Reinhold Heil

You mean in the lyrics?

Torsten Schmidt

In both the lyrics and the way the song evolves.

Reinhold Heil

The song structure is really exactly what’s in The Tubes’ piece, and The Tubes’ piece is called, “White Punks on Dope.” So it has lyrically nothing to do with it, which is always, by the way, the best way to deal with a cover version. Just write an original version in the other language because you will never get anything musical if you try to actually get the meaning across. We’ll come to that.

Torsten Schmidt

We might, yes.

Reinhold Heil

We might come to that. All right. So, Nina, of course, just wrote her version of what it is like for an East German to come to West Germany and see what’s going on on television, so it’s all colorful, it’s overwhelming in terms of the amount of stimulants that are coming down on you as an innocent East German. And I think that’s basically what the song is about. So “Ich glotz TV,” I watch television and I switch through the channels.

Torsten Schmidt

But glotz is stronger, it’s leering...

Reinhold Heil

To stare, yeah.

Torsten Schmidt

Yeah, staring, leering, somewhere along those lines. It’s definitely the kind of thing that parents and grandparents would say to you when they would want you to stop watching that evil machine.

Reinhold Heil

Right, it’s basically the equivalent of the iPhone now. Just stop staring at the screen. Quite harmless. [puts needle on the record] You know what, I actually have this thing and I haven’t operated it in a few weeks. Wait, let’s do it properly. Of course not. There you go.

(music: Nina Hagen Band – “TV-Glotzer (White Punks On Dope)”)

Torsten Schmidt

[applause] So there’s bits in there that any German over 25 would remember, and the rest that they wouldn’t, but there’s also, I want to say at least five or six decades of pop music in that song, it’s that super... I don’t want to call it classical but it really draws from blues and boogie woogie and that kind of stuff and then it gets into all of a sudden punk happens and then...

Reinhold Heil

And then jazz rock happens.

Torsten Schmidt

Then jazz rock happens, then it somehow preempts nu-metal, and then it almost preempts like massive rave anthems. There’s like everything in there in like a short amount of time.

Reinhold Heil

Yeah, we were not aware of any of that, of course. That’s always the nice thing. You’ve just got to be innocent about what you’re doing. You just do it for the fun of it. Seriously. The most memorable things that I was ever involved with have a background of complete innocence and fun. Playfulness. Not thinking about money, not thinking about success. Yeah, thinking about groupies, but maybe in the far distance, future. But, you know. So, seriously, and I have been involved in projects where the people said, “Wait, we have to make another record because we need to pay our taxes. We didn’t know we had to pay so much taxes.” I said, “Well, I told you, you had to pay a lot of taxes for your incredible income that you’re making with your super hit.” And then they go, “Yeah, but we have to make a record.” And I go, “But you’re not ready to make a record.” And they made the record anyway, so... And then it wasn’t successful, and then they couldn’t pay their taxes anyway. Anyway. So what I’m saying...

Torsten Schmidt

He’s basically saying whatever comes in, put a certain portion aside.

Reinhold Heil

Put it aside, for sure, and put something else aside for the uncertain future. Or maybe don’t, because there won’t be any now. We always... Punk was always about no future. Now, what the hell, right? So yeah. I think that’s really what that was. It was having an amazing band to play with, it’s this absolute energy where there was no click track, there’s no computer involved. I was able to afford synthesizers. You know, all my money went into synthesizers.

Torsten Schmidt

Which ones did you use on there?

Reinhold Heil

Well, my first one was my Minimoog. I still have that. And then for this particular band, I bought a Yamaha CS-80, which was just fresh at the time.

Torsten Schmidt

OK. Advances were good then.

Reinhold Heil

That was... Yeah. My entire...the other people needed to live from their advances, but I was still in school and my dad supported me. And actually, my mom supported me. My mom gave me 5,000 Deutschmarks for that CS-80 that I still have, of course.

Torsten Schmidt

Okay. I was gonna make a really bad Berlin hip-hop joke about your mom giving you money for the synth, but f---ing hell, 5,000 Deutschmarks for a CS-80?

Reinhold Heil

No, the CS-80 was 13. So I got my advance, that was three, I had saved up five, and my mom gave me five.

Torsten Schmidt

And how did you pay the five people to move the machine?

Reinhold Heil

Yeah, I know. Actually, I think I got a bad back in the context, because we then had to leave the Paul-Lincke-Ufer, so there were no elevators. And we had a rehearsal room at the Theater des Westens on the third floor. That was s---ty.

Torsten Schmidt

So you took the CS-80 out and on tour?

Reinhold Heil

Yeah. And then when we went on tour, of course, we had roadies. So that was good.

Torsten Schmidt

Yeah, but how many times did you have to repair the chips on it, then?

Reinhold Heil

It only got an overhaul once, in ’96. Yamaha was nice enough to... ’Cause I told them I was going to emigrate to the States, and then they called me and said, “Send us your CS-80.” I’m going, “Why?” “Just send it.” So I sent it, and they sent it back and it was all fresh. It was beautiful.

Torsten Schmidt

OK, so you are the one that’s responsible that there’s no replacement chips around anymore.

Reinhold Heil

No, no, that’s not true. Actually there is one guy, and I just found him, I’m so happy. It’s just a half-hour drive away from me. He has, easily, at any given time, he has about ten CS-80s sitting in his workshop, and he’s making them good again. And so I have no idea. I mean, the density of CS-80s in Los Angeles must be amazing.

Torsten Schmidt

I mean, on that little deviation there, the machine is known for Vangelis mostly, I guess. And what other things?

Reinhold Heil

Yeah, I don’t know. For me, of course. ’Cause I played it like nobody else played it.

Torsten Schmidt

All right.

Reinhold Heil

Sorry. It’s true.

Torsten Schmidt

So, did you schlep it into the Hansa studios as well?

Reinhold Heil

Yeah, of course. I schlepped it into the Quasimodo even when I was still playing with my jazz rock band on the side, because that was conveniently just down from the third floor of the Theater des Westens, into the basement of the Quasimodo. So yeah, I got a bad back in this context, for sure.

Torsten Schmidt

Maybe the bad back was also due to the performances, ’cause the backing band somehow had its own life pretty soon.

Reinhold Heil

Yeah. Nina left us. This is why I’m only in one of those snippets, ’cause we had a run starting in the summer of ’77. Started rehearsing. Our first gig was in February ’78, then we produced the record, we did a tour when the record was out, in the fall of ’78. We did another tour all the way through Europe in the spring of ’79, and on that tour, or right after that tour, Nina left the band. So that was it. It was basically, it was just under two years. And then I graduated from the academy four weeks later, which was very traumatic, the whole thing, just to go through all of that. And then we were sitting there as a backing band of an amazing front person, and we were super traumatized by the fact that everybody just wanted her, and there was this petty jealousy in the band of her. Looking back, how could you be jealous? Why aren’t you just happy that you were standing behind her, and that you’re part of the project? So, but you know.

Torsten Schmidt

But there’s rumors she also made it a little harder for you to be happy by claiming a pretty strong part of the shares for her.

Reinhold Heil

Well actually, it wasn’t really like that, because originally we actually formed a company, and we were equal shareholders. And the only way she got more was because she wrote more music, and she wrote pretty much all the lyrics. So she got a much higher share from the back end, but that was very justified through the creative work. And we had a publishing company together, so the publishing share was our socialist contribution, it went into... And I think this is still a good model. I actually came up with that model because I learned something about copyrights and publishing rights, and I said, “Well, we should have the capitalist competitiveness, that whoever writes the best pieces and the most of them gets more money, but there should be a socialist aspect to it.” I still believe in this kind of combination, by the way, so I’m very much anti-neocon, economy that started with Miss Thatcher and Mr. Reagan and is now about to drag us all down. So, I’m also not Communist. I’m not pro-communism, because I really don’t think that would work very well, but this kind of interesting mixture between having an incentive to actually contribute something and at the same time being taken care of is nice.

Torsten Schmidt

So, the tragical state of social democracy in the Western world is probably our lunch.

Reinhold Heil

Well, I don’t know. I think it wouldn’t be so tragic if the social democrats would remember why they exist, right? But let’s not get into politics. But this politics kind of went into this business model, so to speak. So we were a company, we shared the royalties, she got a little more. And of course that wasn’t really enough. And interestingly enough, Wolf Biermann was the guy who was saying, “Hey, Nina, we are in capitalism. Don’t behave like we’re still in the GDR.”

So that was one of the things. The other thing was that Frank Zappa’s manager at the time was Bennett Glotzer, and he had an eye on her. So he kind of helped undermine the band. There were drugs involved and all kinds of things.

Torsten Schmidt

Edit suite.

Reinhold Heil

There’s a scene in the movie called The Doors, which is the story of The Doors, that two lawyer types would take what’s-his-face aside, and talk to...

Torsten Schmidt

Jim Morrison.

Reinhold Heil

Jim Morrison. Sorry. Sorry about my Alzheimer. And they talk to him and say, “It’s not about the band, it’s about you, man. You should go solo.” And I think that’s exactly what happened there. So then she went solo, and she went really downhill, because she just randomly took musicians, and then she kind of stabilized and had a deal with CBS in America, and had a pretty good run.

Torsten Schmidt

How many albums did you guys record with her?

Reinhold Heil

Two. So we recorded this first album in Hansa. And then the second album, we already had it composed, and arranged, and rehearsed, and tried out on this European tour in the spring of 1979, and then she left the band. And then of course we had negotiations about how to separate, because we had contracts. Luckily, we actually had contracts, because otherwise we would have just been dismissed by the record company, by her, by the management, and so on, and so on. So we kind we had a bit of a negotiation, a strong position of negotiating. We could have blocked her for many years. Of course, we didn’t want to do that, but we said we want to get something out of it. So what we got out of it was the publishing rights, and the fact that we actually did record that second album. And this was after we were already sort of hating each other in public. We recorded an album. And the plan was that we were going to record the backing tracks at Hansa Studios here in Berlin, and that she was going to sing in Stockholm at the Abba studios without us being present. And at the last second, she changed her mind, and she came to the Hansa studios. And we had actually a really interesting week with her in the studios. And it was sort of the beginning of my career at a producer, ’cause I wasn’t her ex-boyfriend. That was Manne, our bass player, so there was.

Torsten Schmidt

Manne Praeker.

Reinhold Heil

Manne Praeker. It was a bit of a problematic situation. And I was the one who studied music production, more on the classical side. So I was like super interested to produce her vocals. And I did that. And I kind of learned how to do it. And of course I had the experience of one and a half years in the band, that if you wanted to contribute an idea, you don’t go and say, “I have an idea, and it is blah blah blah blah blah” You just say it surreptitiously, and you float it. And then when she says, “Hey, why don’t we do this?” You go like, [does a thumbs-up] awesome.

...It’s one thing to deal with narcissists, problematic personalities. If you want the situation to function, of course. The other thing would be to say, “You’re a narcissist, let me just walk away from you.” Because that’s what you do with narcissists, usually. But unfortunately we’re in the entertainment industry, so we have to deal with narcissists, and if we’re not a narcissist ourselves, then we are an enabler, automatically. And the more aware we are of that, the better, you know? Just at least understand what the situation is psychologically. So that was a very, very interesting learning experience.

And there was this guy Edu Meyer, who was one of Hansa’s engineers who had worked on all the Bowie albums. He wasn’t intimately involved in the production, but he came and... He lived out in Britz, which is not far from here on the other side. And he had the home-grown marijuana that was just the best stuff. It was like champagne, it was amazing. I’m not much of a marijuana guy, but this was so good, and it actually helped us go through that week. [picks up a record] So, should we play “African Reggae,” maybe?

Torsten Schmidt

Give peace a chance.

Reinhold Heil

From that album? No?

Torsten Schmidt

Maybe. I mean, considering we’re already 40 minutes in, it’s like... Yeah, but “African Reggae” would be the one to look for right now. While you probably tell us one or two things about the historical importance or significance of Hansa Studios, have you tell us a little bit more... [Heil puts the record on the turntable] Oh. Oh yeah. OK. Maybe let’s get a quick idea of it, then.

Reinhold Heil

No, no. I can, we can talk about it. Hansa Studios was in this old ballroom at the wall, and looking out at the wall. And at Potsdamer Platz where you cannot imagine how it looks unless you look at photos. It was this beautiful, old turn-of-the-century building that was the only one of it’s kind, and there was basically no man’s land around it. Here was the wall, and then there was more no man’s land, and there was the second wall, and you could see Hitler’s bunker. There was this little hill in the no man’s land that had been Hitler’s bunker. And when you walked onto the platforms on the Western side, you could overlook this situation, and sometimes you would just stand there during the day and go like, why is this moving? And you realized there were hundreds and hundreds of rabbits, because they didn’t have any natural enemies and they weren’t heavy enough to trigger the mines, the landmines that were in the...

Torsten Schmidt

In the death strip.

Reinhold Heil

In the death strip. So, yeah, that was kind of interesting.

Torsten Schmidt

But on the more uplifting, musical side, what were the things that were recorded in there?

Reinhold Heil

Yeah, well the Berlin trilogy of David Bowie’s mainly. And then a whole bunch... I really don’t have an encyclopaedic memory of what was recorded there.

Torsten Schmidt

Like Udo Jürgens, Frank Zander, Depeche Mode.

Reinhold Heil

Oh, for sure. Depeche Mode later, yes, in the ’80s. All the really, really good Depeche Mode stuff. Construction Time Again, one of my all-time favorite albums, actually, really good, was produced there. And, yeah, it had this big hall that wasn’t particularly suitable for recording. And perversely, because it was still the ’70s, they had all these walls blocking off so that it wasn’t... That the ambiance of the room wasn’t so prominently featured. Until we did the second album, when we said, “Hey, let’s put the drums on the stage and record the room.” So we kind of insisted on that. Hansa guys weren’t interested, they wanted the dry ’70s sound.

So anyway, this is then “African Reggae.” So this is from that second album that we recorded at Hansa Studios, with her not there, but then coming and recording the vocals. And the vocals are really, really chaotic. There’s a s--- ton of stuff that you don’t hear that we had to sort through at the end. It’s very, very improvisational. And unfortunately, it’s also a long piece.

(music: Nina Hagen Band – “African Reggae”)

Torsten Schmidt

Right. “African Reggae,” the Nina Hagen Band. [applause] And I guess that something that we will get to a little later as well is, you can definitely see a lineage of why something like Maurizio and Basic Channel also happened in this town. It wasn’t only the love for Jamaica, but there was people experimenting with off-beat things in this town beforehand. The band that’s playing on there, what happened when you got abandoned?

Reinhold Heil

We decided to stick together somehow and do something. Actually, this is a time when our manager kind of came in and really played a big role. This guy’s name is Jim Rakete, and he was a photographer, really, originally. He wasn’t a music manager, and slipped into it because he was so fascinated with Nina. So two years earlier, back in ’78, he became our manager, and then later became Nina’s manager, and had a management company for about, not quite ten years. And he came at this point, and he said, “We have to do something like a concept album. And you used to do rock theater,” which was the other three guys, not me, “So let’s do something like that.” And we did it in English language, it was called the Spliff Radio Show, and it was the story of a pop star. The rise and fall of a pop star. Actually, we did it a year or two before Spinal Tap, and it was a little bit similar. It was maybe not quite as funny. And so we got ourselves a front person, and we called them “front pigs,” because of course we were traumatized by Nina, so we called the front person...

Torsten Schmidt

It’s also an old military term.

Reinhold Heil

Front pig?

Torsten Schmidt

Yeah. “Frontschwein.” Yeah.

Reinhold Heil

Right. So we hired the front pigs. We were not the backing band who was hired by a famous star, we were the backing band hiring front pigs. So we should have just gone to therapy, I think it would have been a lot easier, but... So we did this project, and it was also pretty energetic. And our Australian front pig that we hired, his name is Alf Klimek, was an amazing, energetic comedian and actor, and not much of a singer, but he was really good.

So we toured Germany over, I guess, two years with that, and we sold many records, but never enough to go into the charts. So we sold something like 35,000 every six months, it wasn’t enough to get into the German charts at the time. Just to give you an idea how many records people bought. This stuff. It was amazing. Like people had, you know, like the Nina Hagen Band album I think sold 500,000 in Germany. The first one. The second one, maybe 350 or something. And the Spliff Radio Show ended up selling 250, which is a gold record, but over many years.

So that was kind of the foundation. It was a bit of an underground hit, maybe. And of course, we had a lot of people following us because of the Nina Hagen Band, so it was easier for us to start. And then, we changed the direction. We fired all of our front pigs, and we wrote some German stuff again, and we sang it ourselves, although none of us was a particularly great singer. So we kind of just blended in with that Neue Deutsche Welle, the new German wave that started with Nina, but then had bands like Ideal, most prominently Fehlfarben, all these kinds of things. Really, really good stuff, actually. DAF, Deutsch Amerikanische Freundschaft, still pretty much my favorite band from that time, which has a lot to do with Conny Plank, the producer. One of my regrets is never going to Conny Plank and becoming his assistant for a year or two. Missed opportunities.

Torsten Schmidt

Well that Rhineland countryside life is not for everyone.

Reinhold Heil

[laughs] Yeah. I was kind of happy to be in Berlin. And stuff was obviously happening, so there wasn’t ever the time where I had to go look for stuff, it just came to me, luckily.

Torsten Schmidt

Ironically, the song that then all of a sudden propelled you out of that slow-selling, underground following thing did not have only German lyrics in there. And I guess there’s a bit of a story.

Reinhold Heil

Yeah. We then went back to Paul-Lincke-Ufer, by the way, with the Spliff Radio Show, they let us back in there, which is remarkable. And we started recording. We had an eight-track tape machine. And then there was a room in Moabit, least likely to be a cool place in Berlin, but it was like a giant hall, and they had a food großhandel.

Torsten Schmidt

Wholesale.

Reinhold Heil

Yeah. And there was a cooling section, so that was fairly well insulated, and that became the Spliff studio. So we called ourselves Spliff, we rented a place that was suitable to be a studio, a rehearsal room where you could actually record. We bought a recording desk, that was what we toured with, because we knew we wanted a recording desk. We didn’t have enough to buy two desks, so we bought the recording desk and toured with it. And then we produced that album, 85555 in 1981. Here’s the original pressing. [holds up record] This is Jim Rakete’s cover design. He used the American way, of doing a paper back with the silver foil, very nice. And he did horrible photos of us. He put us in suits and shirts.

Torsten Schmidt

That’s one of the most expensive photographers you can find in this town and this country.

Reinhold Heil

Hate, hate, hate every photo from that era. So we did these weird minimalist German songs, and we changed our approach. Everything had always been played live by the band, rehearsed to death, so every note was there. And then we played it live, mostly without clicks, and that was the two Nina Hagen Band albums and the Spliff Radio Show album, all done this way. And now we had our own studio, and we had our own 24-track machine, and Neumann microphones, and the minimum, bare minimum what you needed to do a professional recording. And, of course...

Torsten Schmidt

Bare minimum, Neumann, yeah.

Reinhold Heil

It was 120,000 Deutschmarks that our publishing company gave us in advance, in order to get us the bare minimum. We had an Otari 24-track machine. Our desk we already had. We had to have two big JBL speakers. So today, how much do you need? 5,000?

Torsten Schmidt

Yeah, but that Neumann would still help.

Reinhold Heil

Yeah, but you have all these copies now that you can buy for 350 that don’t sound that much worse. So it’s a different situation. Of course, you can also no longer make money with music, so there’s the trade-off.

Torsten Schmidt

But then I guess you kind of did... And before we usher in video number two, so the people would know what to watch for. You got rid of the front pigs. Who is singing on that track?

Reinhold Heil

I am singing on that track. I also wrote it. I wrote it in about five minutes, and it’s one of those silly things that kind of follow you, like a piece of s--- that you stepped into. And I don’t hate it, because I always... People say, “Well, don’t you hate this song, because it makes you so unhip, because it’s such a schlager?” And I go, “No, I don’t hate it, because... I actually love it because I moved in it.” Meaning, the royalties from that song enabled me to buy a beautiful loft with my own studio in it, in Schöneberg. So I don’t hate the song.

Torsten Schmidt

And a lot of kids around Germany and other countries got to...

Reinhold Heil

And so, of course, long, long story... And I’m so sorry about my tangents. I always go off on tangents. And I asked him to keep me in check, and it’s almost impossible, I know.

Torsten Schmidt

We have whips hidden...

Reinhold Heil

But you asked me about the Italian. Why is there Italian in there? So it’s a song that longs for Italy. I love Italy, and it’s full of stereotypes of Italy. And the reason why it’s called “Carbonara,” is because we went from that rehearsal room in Huttenstraße in Moabit, to the next corner, and there was an Italian restaurant, which wasn’t Italian, it was run by Lebanese people.

Torsten Schmidt

Like almost any Italian restaurant in this town.

Reinhold Heil

Yeah. And the Lebanese lady there was so nice. Whenever we had a record done, or whenever we were getting ready to go on tour, she would stand in the kitchen for a day and cook Lebanese food for us. It was so amazing. So, and of course we ate carbonara for six Deutschmarks and 50, and drank a Coke, because we really didn’t have that much money, right? So we did that almost every day. So that’s where the inspiration to the song comes from, and it’s all about the fantasy of going to Italy and meeting one of those beautiful Italian girls.

Torsten Schmidt

Video number two, please.

(video: Spliff – “Carbonara (live in 1982”)

Well, there’s Italians in the room as well.

Reinhold Heil

It’s live. It was live. Oh my god, the other guy sang so much better than I, I am so out of tune, and they are actually really backing me up. They have more practice.

Torsten Schmidt

What did change with that song? For the band, what did it change?

Reinhold Heil

Well, we had number one album with this album. And there were actually some other really, really good songs on it. It’s totally worth listening to. And this was just... It made it to number five in the singles charts. It was funny, because there were people who were placing bets that we were going to completely flop with this, when we first presented it, because of the context that we presented it into that was at ZDF Rocknacht in Westfalenhalle. 20,000 people who came to see Foreigner, Meatloaf and Saga. And they threw us in there as the opener. And we played them an album that nobody had heard because it wasn’t on the market yet. It was December ’81. And people were like, “What?” And the second night, we actually, luckily... They had two nights. The second night, we sprinkled in a few pieces from the Spliff Radio Show that a lot of people had known. So it was a much better night. But the response in a 20,000 auditorium, playing this completely new album was absolutely flat. Nobody was interested. So then we went on tour and it went, took like four or five months and then it was number one. Because people were able to listen to the recording at home, so they understood what the lyrics were and I guess, it didn’t translate into a giant Westfalenhalle.

Torsten Schmidt

So when you’re right there in the middle of Westfalenhalle you’re playing... I mean, flat is better than getting bottles thrown at you. But still, how much did you want the floor to open and swallow you?

Reinhold Heil

You know, I don’t know. It’s interesting, because we had our fair share of embarrassing appearances. We had certainly concerts that weren’t attended well. Stuff like that. So at least there were a lot of people there and we were very much in a fighting spirit. So we didn’t give up. It wasn’t, “OK, this is the end of it.” Although other people around us were crying, literally crying and saying, “This is the end.” And we didn’t feel it, like that. We knew we had something good at our hands.

Torsten Schmidt

But outside of, what at the time for many people would be considered a novelty hit, you had other material on the album that people loved. And with the next album, you had another big hit that we’re not going to listen to, “Das Blech,” which...

Reinhold Heil

I actually had that for that first album already, but I wasn’t done with the lyrics. So luckily, we had that on the album right after. But actually, that second album came out nine months after the first one. Which is ridiculous, when you think about it.

Torsten Schmidt

That’s pretty brave, though. But then again...

Reinhold Heil

It wasn’t us, it was the record company. Greedy, greedy, greedy. Oh look, they had a number one. Let’s put the other one out.

Torsten Schmidt

“Das Blech,” as you say, you wrote the lyrics. What are the references in there?

Reinhold Heil

References? You mean, what are you talking about? What the lyrics are saying?

Torsten Schmidt

Yeah.

Reinhold Heil

Well, it’s you go into the club and you take in the club scene. And god, it’s really not a deep lyric. Should I give you the philosophy behind what it’s like to go into a club...

Torsten Schmidt

No, no. There was talk also about references...

Reinhold Heil

There were references to James Brown, of course. There were reference to classical music, how I hate classical music, how I love the dance music and it had a four on the floor beat. It wasn’t techno but it was kind of... Disco, if you want to call it that. And it didn’t have a chorus, it actually had... The chorus was instrumental, it was all synthesizer. So it was very unconventional and it just had a clever, little hook line and it had that little banter about what it’s like in a club.

Torsten Schmidt

Maybe we should play it, even though we were not going to. So just that you get a feel for it.

Reinhold Heil

Yeah like, you know, James Brown’s coming and talking to me and says, “How dare you steal black music.”

(music: Spliff – “Das Blech”)

Torsten Schmidt

So “Das Blech” by Spliff, which, hard to believe, was a massive, massive hit then.

Reinhold Heil

Yeah, I don’t know massive. It went to number five, just like “Carbonara” did.

Torsten Schmidt

I mean, that’s in times when number five meant more than the entire top 100 would sell in a week these days.

Reinhold Heil

Yeah, but that’s the time. There were people selling millions of records at the time. And it wasn’t us.

Torsten Schmidt

What I found more interesting though is, there’s other tracks on there, like “Die Maurer” or “Glaspalast,” and I would to listen a little bit to “Glaspalast,” with you probably telling us what the song is about and then how...

Reinhold Heil

I can’t tell you because that’s a Herwig Mitteregger song, and he always wrote metaphoric lyrics, which I loved, I adored his lyrics. My lyrics were always on the nose, pretty clear, “This is the story I’m telling and ha, ha, ha. Or not.” And I actually learned how to hate that. This is why I actually also stopped writing songs and went into producing. I just didn’t see myself as an entertainer and I loved people who wrote more [Bob] Dylan-inspired lyrics, for instance. And it didn’t matter whether the music’s like Dylan, but just metaphoric poetry for lyrics. And Mitteregger is like that. So he’s talking about the Glaspalast. I don’t know what it is...

Torsten Schmidt

What is your guess?

Reinhold Heil

I don’t know, it’s some sort of ivory tower. What’s your guess? Do you have one?

Torsten Schmidt

I mean I was like, what, seven at the time or so. And it just felt with all the Cold War paranoia that there’s a lot of that in, ’cause the track is a bit paranoid, too, in a way.

Reinhold Heil

For sure, but it’s also very cinematic. So we were always thinking about creating movies. And this is kind of funny, because now I’m working for movies. But we were trying to produce these movies in people’s heads when they listen to the songs. “Glaspalast” for sure one that does that. One of my favorite tracks. There’s a lot of synth in there.

(music: Spliff – “Glaspalast”)

[applause] Yeah, I haven’t heard this piece in a long time. It’s a very obviously anti-war song. So, you know. It’s not that metaphoric. I guess the Glaspalast is the people who send the hundreds of thousands of people out to fight, and they’re sitting... Anyway, yeah.

Torsten Schmidt

You were hinting at it being cinematic and that obviously became your second career later. At that time, you already had a first interaction with the TV and scoring world, right?

Reinhold Heil

Yeah, it was Tatort, and we did a feature film and we did it with technology that was not suited for doing movies, movie work. So we used stopwatches and we had no idea what we were doing. We also didn’t even ever ask somebody who would do it. So it was kind of, it was pretty awful.

Torsten Schmidt

But I mean it’s not entirely bad. A lot of other people...

Reinhold Heil

The Tatort was pretty bad, I think. There’s one piece I really liked that was at the end of it. But...

Torsten Schmidt

But doing a Tatort was not a bad thing...

Reinhold Heil

You’re not going to play one of those, are you?

Torsten Schmidt

No, no, no.

Reinhold Heil

Oh, good.

Torsten Schmidt

No, this isn't, ain't Nardwuar. But doing a score for Tatort was a thing that a lot of other German bands, that people would search out for nowadays, which do a lot, like Can, Irmin Schmidt, Popul Vuh, tons of people, would try that... What is the format? It’s a weekly...

Reinhold Heil

It’s a weekly, it’s one and a half hours. It’s different teams of crime-fighting cops. So you have these different stars and it’s as federal as the federal republic of Germany. So you have each ARD station is doing their own kinds of Tatorts and I guess they have two months to do them, because it takes the round. I don’t know. So we did the [Horst] Schimanski Tatort. That of course, was pretty legendary in the ’80s. He was pretty good. Pretty funny.

Torsten Schmidt

Everything that happened during the Spliff times also led you to probably like a next step in the career, and I would love to see 20 to 30 seconds of clip number four.

(video: The Stripes – “Tell Me Your Name”)

So the quality of the recording is sadly not there but it’s something that’s pretty tough to find these days. How did you hear about this band?

Reinhold Heil

I was at the office in Frankfurt, CBS records, in A&R manager’s office. And I was going through a list of 45s, just while talking to him, absentmindedly going through. And then of course, stopping with one where there was a picture of a very cute girl. And I took it out and it said, “Ecstasy.” I said, “Oh wow, she’s into sex overtly? Hmm. Let me listen to this.” And they put it up and it was this song by The Stripes and they were singing in English and she was singing in English. It was called “Ecstasy” and she was super sexy. And I said, “Well this is not something that would sell but she’s good. Her voice sounds really cool.”

So I didn’t think much of it and then six to nine months later, the A&R manager called me up and says, “Well the band split up. We kept the singer, obviously. She’s moving to Berlin and we’re giving her a solo deal and maybe she’s looking for some musicians and they’re looking for a producer. Would you want to do it?” I said, “Sure, we have a studio. Why not.” So they were clever, they gave us this 120,000 and they got the biggest million-selling hits produced in this s--ty little cooling room in Moabit for very, very little money. I mean, the productions were ridiculously cheap for them. It was very profitable for them. For us, too, but it also destroyed our band, because she became so big that the entire management, the entire infrastructure that we had created for ourselves was basically... This band was sucking the air out of the room. And we felt like we were almost superfluous and it was really diminishing our drive as a band. Because I was then very much focused on it and produced... The first album, we produced really quickly, like in about four weeks. Then of course, with the success, you get that Fleetwood Mac effect. The third album took five months and I had two off days in the five months. It was completely ridiculous.

And the success went down from there, from the four weeks of having just fun and not thinking about anything. To, “Oh my god, we need to be internationally competitive now. We have to do all this, put a string section on and this and that.” Taking five months to do it and I think from the first ... It was a million. The second was just over half a million and the third was about a quarter of a million. So we’re halving the success with tripling the effort.

Torsten Schmidt

So before we get into the laborious efforts of trying to keep up something, maybe let’s skip “Nur geträumt” and rather go to number five, video number five please.

(video: Nena – “99 Luftballons”)

Reinhold Heil

[applause] So these were the early days of MTV, where in America and in Britain they were already producing really elaborate and expensive music videos. Very creative. By some of the best filmmakers they had. And we in Germany didn’t do that. And we also didn’t want to spend that money and we didn’t think that any of our stuff would sell outside of the country. So what happened there was, this was a Dutch TV station that invited Nena and they produced something like a really cheap music video on one of their Truppenübungsplätze so where they did the war games. That’s why they were able to actually detonate something at the end, for reals. But it was kind of a s--ty video. And then CBS took that, gave them a little money for it and that was what was running on MTV in America. Didn’t prevent the success, obviously.

Torsten Schmidt

Who made the call? Because the first song that she had out, which was... I want to say a number one hit, “Nur Geträumt.”

Reinhold Heil

Number two. It actually flopped first. It came out, we produced it in January, came out in May, with a cover that showed Nena on it, but she kind of looked like she was emaciated. It was a pretty awful photo. Very artistic but she just didn’t look the way she really looked. And it was kind of a cheap, stupid looking cover and didn’t do anything. So completely flopped. And then she was invited, the band was invited to a nationwide broadcast with only German language songs. And they re-released the single with a different cover. And then it went number two. And started this whole craziness. And after that, we produced the album in the fall of, I think ’82.

Torsten Schmidt

I mean the first song was a pretty traditional boy meets girl or girl dreams about boy kind of scenario. Classic bubble gum kind of pop. And this was at the height of East/West tension, nuclear paranoia to the max. And this song about the 99 balloons that somehow...

Reinhold Heil

Trigger World War three, yes.

Torsten Schmidt

But at the same time, catchy as hell. How did the Americans take to it? How did they even hear about it?

Reinhold Heil

Yeah. That was an interesting thing. The lyric, by the way, written by the guitar player who was a, what they call, gypsy. He was a roamer, I think. And he was one of the sweetest people I’ve ever known, he’s unfortunately no longer with us. Pretty genius lyricist and he came up with that story. And it was just absolutely magical. And actually how it even became a single was a thing, because people in the band and around the band were all saying, “This is the next single.” And I was going, “But this is not a conventional piece of pop song.” It’s very different, it has these three very different parts, it has a little funky thing and then it goes up tempo. I don’t know. And so was the A&R manager of CBS records. So we had a long conversation, about an hour long, where we were debating whether this could be a single or not. And at the end, we were going, “OK, f--- it. Let’s just do it, see what happens.”

And it was really the stupidest conversation you could imagine. Because everybody else who had heard the song was like, “This is amazing.” And we just had to overthink it. So...

Torsten Schmidt

And how did it reach...

Reinhold Heil

And then America. So America was, there was another big phenomenon in the ’70s here, which was called Wir Kinder vom Bahnhof Zoo and it was the story of a girl who at 14 had to prostitute herself at the Bahnhof Zoo in order to finance her heroin addiction. And her name was Christiane F. And she also became a musician and she had an album out, in ’82. And she traveled the world. It was very underground, it wasn’t mainstream at all. So she went to Los Angeles and a very famous radio DJ, Rodney Bingenheimer, interviewed her, and at the end of the interview asked her, “So what are people listening to in Germany?” And she reached into her little briefcase and pulled out “99 Luftballons.” And she played it and people called into the radio station saying, “Can you play that again?”

So this is how it started, where CBS records US, in New York didn’t give a s---. And the A&R manager there, I met him about a year later. He told me the story. He was totally in my face, he didn’t care how bad he looked in the story. He told me that his girlfriend was from the publishing company, who also administered the rights to this song, and who had become aware of it, because there was some airplay going on, and who had told him, “You have to release this. You have to put this song on the release schedule.” And he was not interested one bit. Until she finally decided to no longer have sex with him, because of that. And I actually believe that and I actually believe that there might be tons of other reasons why she didn’t have sex with that guy. He was a complete fucking dork. [laughter] Anyway...

Torsten Schmidt

I mean, it’s a Greek theme. There’s Greek plays about that.

Reinhold Heil

I guess. So she said, “No more sex unless you put that on the schedule.” He put it on the schedule on a Friday so he could have sex on the weekend, I guess. On Monday, is being called into his boss’s office and said, “What’s with this German girl that gets all the airplay, are we doing anything about that?” And he’s like, “I just put it on the release schedule.” And his career was saved that way. But it’s basically a one-off. It’s a one-hit wonder. It’s considered a one-hit wonder in the States but absolutely everybody knows the piece. So if I want to make myself important, I just bring up that I produced it.

Torsten Schmidt

In America.

Reinhold Heil

In America, yes.

Torsten Schmidt

Why do you think she never caught on in the same way she caught on in Germany, for example?

Reinhold Heil

They didn’t tour there and they didn’t get any support from the record company. I mean, they toured pretty much everywhere else. I don’t really think they every did a proper America tour and I think that’s what it really takes. And then all the international production was no longer exotic sounding. So there’s your clever strategy of, “Oh we need to sound international.” No we don’t.

Torsten Schmidt

Which is kind of interesting...

Reinhold Heil

We have to sound like ourselves, you know. And that’s the big lesson to learn for everybody, from pretty much any story you will hear. Just sound like yourself. Be confident and find something, find something for yourself that’s kinda cool. And then stick to it.

Torsten Schmidt

Speaking of which, it might be worth watching 45 seconds of video number six, which is where she was on Top of the Pops in England, and you can get an idea of how they translated the lyrics. Even if you don’t understand the lyrics, it will sound like a different song straight away.

Reinhold Heil

Well, of course everything had to go really fast. It had airplay in America already, so, “We have to do an English lyric version!” Which is true. They had to do an English lyric version, because American mainstream radio would not play foreign language songs. No Spanish, no “Despacito,” nothing, at that time. Those are all completely separate markets, and so then who was going to do the lyric? It was a guy who played keyboards for Barclay James Harvest, who they had by chance met somewhere. And he had a little demo studio at home, and he put it on the drum computer and made a little arrangement for himself, because he’s a keyboard player so he could do that. Everything was nice and metronomic, whereas in the German version, the beginning and the end are freely performed. The keyboard player wrote the music, played the string synthesizer pad, and she was singing simultaneously in the studio.

So we did click track for the rest of it, but the beginning and the ending, completely free. And of course he did it with the drum computer, and his lyrics were pretty much not fitting on this thing. And how she pulled it off, I have no idea, but she did pull it off to somehow squeeze these words into this free-played opening and ending of the song. And I lobbied the s--- out of everybody to try and get a better English lyric and it didn’t happen, because it had to happen so fast.

Torsten Schmidt

So please, 45 seconds of that tragedy.

(video: Nena – “99 Red Balloons” (live on Top of the Pops))

How does that feel, when you worked on something real hard, you have a vision, and then there is some dork somewhere saying, “F--- off. No?”

Reinhold Heil

Yeah, well I wasn’t the boss of the whole thing. I was also just an enabler. Management was more important, record companies were more important at that point, and I wasn’t a powerful producer. I was there every moment, and I was telling them my opinion about everything, and sometimes they would listen and sometimes they wouldn’t. In that case, they wouldn’t. The vindication that comes later is kind of painful too, because the guy sued us. He didn't to, he actually wanted 100% of the lyrics because “99 Red Balloons” was not a translation of “99 Luftballons.”

Torsten Schmidt

So hang on, he did a wack job, and then he used that as justification?

Reinhold Heil

Yes, and he won in Great Britain, because the judge just thought that made sense, but he didn’t win for the rest of the world. But he actually got all the lyrics, and so everybody else got correspondingly less money for it. It was kind of funny.

Torsten Schmidt

Okay, maybe there’s the root of Brexit right there somewhere.

Reinhold Heil

Maybe.

Torsten Schmidt

Speaking of being right there, you were, outside of being a producer, you were a keyboardist mostly, or a key player. How does that feel when you write and compose something, and then you have some other guy perform your stuff all the time?

Reinhold Heil

Well, I didn’t write “99 Red Balloons,” so I didn’t write any of their material. It was kind of the other way around. People were very respectful of Spliff as being really, really good musicians, so there was now a really good and very successful album that came out simultaneously, right after our successful stuff came out, right in the middle of it, and they were going, “Oh yeah, of course it’s not that band that’s playing, it’s the Spliff people.” And that’s not true. I mean, I play certain things on that album, because...but I didn’t write them, so it was the other way around. I became a session musician for my artists when I thought, “Well, the funky part, come on, you can play that better.” And then we’d try it for awhile, and he says, “Why don’t you play it?” And I played it, and so it’s on there now, but most the stuff is for sure him, and all the drums, that’s the drummer. There was a lot of hard work going into making it a thing that the band actually did, and they did the arrangements, they worked the music. I was hoping they would get the glory, and they kind of did.

Torsten Schmidt

I guess they kind of did. How many keytars did that guy own?

Reinhold Heil

In the studio, there’s never a keytar.

Torsten Schmidt

But I mean, there were a lot of kids who were like, “What is that thing?”

Reinhold Heil

Yeah, it’s nothing, it’s just a thing that works on television. But there’s a new keytar by Roland, and I’m not saying that it shouldn’t be pursued, especially since it’s lightweight and very powerful and wireless. It’s the opposite of why I had it, I had a thing that was called Moog Liberation. It was not a liberation, it was a burden. It was hanging around your head like this, the weight of about five guitars. And it had a power supply in it, no it didn't have a power supply...It had a synth in it, and that sounded s--ty, so you had to send that to a module at an Oberheim SEM. I did that only during the radio show, it was just so stupid I just couldn’t go on with it. And then MIDI came, and it was a little bit better, then the Yamahas came out. Then when you see Uwe, the keyboarder from Nena, he always has that thing, and pretends that he played that on the record, of course he didn’t play it on the record.

Torsten Schmidt

Don’t ruin it. No, but at the same time I was really glad when Flake of Rammstein, told us that he, as a kid, like many kids when they saw performances like that, would start painting or drawing little keys on cardboard and then building their own little synths, and then just play around.

Reinhold Heil

Yes. Of course, because it looks so stupid, you’re stationary behind this thing. This is why I always stood behind my keyboards, I couldn’t sit down. Now if I would play live, I’m 64 years old, I would definitely sit down. I have not even 20% of that energy that I had back then, I would practice for hours to jump as high as I could possibly do it, which required to be on a certain offbeat when you jumped, so that you could come down and hit some accent exactly right. That required real energy and real practice, I wouldn’t do that anymore.

Torsten Schmidt

You didn’t need a gym then.

Reinhold Heil

No. And then we stopped playing live and I got all fat, that’s true.

Torsten Schmidt

Still, when the gym wasn’t needed, maybe speaking of keyboard sounds, there’s this guy.

(music: Nena – “Leuchtturm”)

[applause] I guess what’s kind of interesting there is how there’s different worlds coming together. You’ve got a very synth-heavy sound, you’ve got something that hints at certain elements of maybe even dance music and underground dance music, and then at the same time you’ve got this super macho guitar riff, which is a combination that worked a lot in pop music at the time. Like Trevor Horn and a lot of people would do, I don’t know, let’s say Yes, “Owner Of A Lonely Heart” and songs like that, which would really try to...

Reinhold Heil

Yeah, that was of course much better, because it also had Art Of Noise people in it. So you had the Fairlight sampling stuff, you had the origins of break beats, which we didn’t have at all. So like that kind of visionary thing that Trevor Horn had going, and what else was happening at the time that had break beats already in the early ’80s. I don’t think we were that groundbreaking with any of this stuff, and again, this is also from the first album still in ’82, so it was very playful. The band was very playful, and this was one of the pieces where they allowed me to do something. So I did the beginning, the whole little bubbly thing with the echo sound, that was actually a modular, it was a Roland System 100m that that was done with, and we used a lot of my Jupiter-8 on the album, otherwise it was all Oberheims. Beloved, beloved Oberheims. I adore Tom Oberheim. He’s one of...I don’t have many idols, Miles Davis, Igor Stravinsky, Tom Oberheim maybe.

Torsten Schmidt

He’s a sweet, sweet man.

Reinhold Heil

Yes, and he’s a genius. I have a four-voice that I just had restored, it’s just ridiculous. But I do everything in a box, by the way, so everything I do for movies... I have a modular, I use it every once in awhile, but really if it has to go fast and if I have to reproduce something, you know.

Torsten Schmidt

Using that as a segue into your second life, and speaking of box, I mean it sounds super minimal, but at that time or somewhere around that time you also owned one of those Fairlights as well?

Reinhold Heil

Yeah, I bought a Fairlight in ’84, and I bought a IIx series, IIx which comes from 1978, ’79, you know, so it was already at the end of its lifespan, and the [Emu] Emulator II had just come out, and I wanted one, and we were going on tour, and I couldn’t get the Emulator II, because they kept pushing the release of it. You know, “vaporware,” you know what I’m talking about. So I bought the IIx and I took it on tour, which was an absolute frigging disaster. You know, eight-bit synth, it’s super legendary but you have nothing in there, there’s no sample memory in there to speak of, eight-inch floppy disks, stuff would break, collapse in the middle of a gig, and it was just pretty awful. And I bought it because they promised me I would have to only pay the price difference once the series three came around, which was two years later, and then it was another 100,000. It was ridiculous, yeah, definitely not...

Torsten Schmidt

I mean, 100,000 then would get you, what, like two houses?

Reinhold Heil

No, no, no, not quite. An apartment in Berlin was already several hundred thousand, but you could’ve gotten an apartment for the Fairlight, yes. A small one.

Torsten Schmidt

Why?

Reinhold Heil

No, that’s a good question. There’s no reason, there’s no reason. Because I could. And status, I don’t know. I don’t think I ever made anything super famous with it. I did good stuff with it, but not anything that became a huge hit or anything.

Torsten Schmidt

When does this whole thing become a bit of a trap, when you’re like, “OK, I’ve got this advance money coming in, I’ve got some new royalty checks here, I’ve got a little bit of that and this,” and it’s like, “Oh yeah, of course I’m going to... Instead of an apartment I’m going to get another machine?”

Reinhold Heil

Well, luckily I did get the apartment first so. And there was a thing, you know, West Berlin was entrapped here, so there was a lot of tax incentives to stay in West Berlin. Actually, it was not a bad time to invest in gear.

Torsten Schmidt

Jumping ahead in time, why and when did you leave Berlin?

Reinhold Heil

I left in early ’97, and yeah, I don’t know, I was a producer for the rest of the ’80s, I was very unhappy about that at the end of the ’80s, because I thought it was going to be all glorious, because it started with “99 Red Balloons.” Basically started at the top and then worked its way down, which wasn’t surprising because “99 Red Balloons” is a super unusual situation, with so much luck to make it a world hit. Yeah, but I was also frustrated about the fact that I was just polishing other people’s music. I don’t want to say “turds,” but, you know, other people’s music, and then make it as good as possible, wasn’t the same as writing songs. And I wasn’t really going to go out and do songs, although I actually did produce a solo album in the ’90s. Took me five years, because I was completely OCDing about it, and never released it because I was chicken, because I would’ve had to show myself, basically pull my pants down in front of everybody. And somehow I couldn’t get myself to do that, because of fear of rejection. After so much success, I had fear of failure. And it was really bad, and it’s really, really a sad story. Now also at the same time, I saw that lots and lots of little labels came up, and that kind of gatekeeper thing with the A&R managers was still there, but actually a much bigger variety of musical styles were possible. I was going, “Yeah, the market is flooded with stuff, what do they need my solo album?” Reality, I was just chicken. So that album is actually still sitting around. I finished it in ’96 and then I moved to the States. I was married to an American woman and she wanted to go back to California, so I moved to California, without a really good plan of breaking into the Hollywood business. And I don’t think I actually ever really broke into that business, and especially because I moved to Santa Barbera, which is two hours outside of Los Angeles, which is way too far away.

Torsten Schmidt

You’re not attending the film composer Monday brunch in Malibu then?

Reinhold Heil

No, but I can now because I live in Woodland Hills, it’s just 20 minutes through Topanga Canyon, I could go there. I actually wanted to, sometimes it’s supposedly good, but actually we have a Topanga composer junto, with people like Cliff Martinez and Charlie Clouser, it’s actually really nice, it’s very intimate.

Torsten Schmidt

That doesn’t sound like an entirely bad breakfast coffee.

Reinhold Heil

No, that’s not a breakfast, that’s a different thing. It’s actually just for the people around Topanga, so and it’s always in the evening. Yeah, so then I sat in Santa Barbera and I didn’t really know what to do. I actually tried to produce an album with Nina Hagen, who lived in Topanga Canyon at that time. And there was a deal with a record company in Germany, and so I built my studio in Santa Barbera, and I had Nina over, and it completely ended in failure, because I was thinking, “Oh, let me just do an album the way Nina is, let’s just have Nina have the reins.” Of course it was exactly the opposite, because Nina needs a structure, and stuff needs to happen really fast, as long as she’s still interested. She has ADD of the heaviest degree that you can imagine, and she’s at the same time the biggest talent that I’ve ever seen. I mean, on this level like Michael Jackson or so, like completely genius, extemporating lyrics that rhyme, have a rhythm and are funny, for instance, just like that. And I couldn’t get the record finished, because she just lost interest because I was fiddling around with it for too much. So that was my first thing that I did over there, and that was not good. And then the only sort of saving grace was that I had, just before I left, I had met Tom Tykwer, and together with my friend Johnny Klimek, was the younger brother of the guy who was in the Spliff Radio Show, which is why I knew him, we had done a score for Tom’s second movie called Winterschläfer.

And so then I put my house on the market, I sold my beautiful apartment in Schöneberg, and I bought a house in Santa Barbara, California and left. And as I’m leaving, Tom gave me the screenplay for Run Lola Run. And I read it, and called Johnny back, Johnny was back here in Berlin, and I said to him, “Even if they don’t pay us any money, we have to do this movie, it’s going to be unbelievable.”

Torsten Schmidt

What had Johnny done in the meantime? Because he had a bit of a career.

Reinhold Heil

Johnny had a career in the ’80s with their band called The Other Ones. So they had a few hits, and they were actually also successful in some other countries and had toured. And then they were sick of that, or Johnny was very sick of that, and then he started in ’88, ’89, he started with the techno pioneers. He produced Dr. Motte, and he produced Paul Van Dyk, and had a few solo projects on the side for himself. And then by the mid-’90s, he was sick of that, because he said it became really repetitive. So he was looking for doing something with me, and he realized that I was just sitting around because my girlfriend had died in 1991, so I was in a bit of a slump. I was producing this solo album in my beautiful palace of my studio in Schöneberg, didn’t have that much to do with other people, met some actors, some directors, and got very interested in the film thing, but also was not confident enough that I was able to do that, because I had been in the music academy but I hadn’t studied composition. So I knew music theory, I had written songs, I had ideas, but I thought, “Maybe you can’t do that, since you didn’t do the proper education.” So that took me a lot of years, and then all of the sudden, this opportunity by chance comes up. Of course, it wasn’t that much by chance, because Tom Tykwer had been a fan, he had been in the audience when we played with Nina Hagen. Of course, he had mostly looked at Nina, he was 15 at the time, and sometimes looked over to me because he also played piano. And so when Johnny said that he was working with me, he said, “You don’t mean that guy.” And so that kind of sold him because he had been a fan of the band, and then he wanted to work with me, and so the three of us became sort of a little film music band, and learned in our stupid way how to put music to pictures, how to start telling a story with music, and not having a perfect hit song structure with an intro, a verse, a bridge, and a chorus.

Torsten Schmidt

As far as division of labor goes, is it easier to work with a director that has no musical ambitions, or do you get in the way if...

Reinhold Heil

It depends, it completely depends. I mean, in this case it was really nice because he was the boss. You know, that’s the thing in film, it’s a very collaborative thing, film, with so many different arts, and everybody heads a department, there’s a director of photography, a screenwriter and so on and so on. But at the end of the day, there needs to be somebody who calls the shots, and the director is the one who calls the shots, sometimes it’s a producer. Tom was a producer as well, ’cause he was co-owner of a production company, he was also an “Auteurenfilmer,” so he had written the screenplay himself. So it was very clear, nobody had to do the elbow thing like in the band, where everybody’s fighting for dominance of where to go, which direction, which pieces to write and which pieces to do how. So that was a really really nice experience, to go, “You know what? This is kind of cool.” We just offer him a bunch of possibilities, and he just takes his pick, and there’s never a fight, it’s actually always fun. So that’s how that was. Then I was in California and they were here, and we did Run Lola Run. We started here, in Berlin, with the opening, the introduction, we did that in Johnny’s bedroom studio, and then they came over for a few segments, several weeks, and we actually made most of the score in Santa Barbera, in sunny California. It was all about techno and all about Berlin.

Torsten Schmidt

Shall we watch some of that?

Reinhold Heil

Sure, why not?

(video: Run Lola Run snippet)

Torsten Schmidt

Writing a pop hit is stressful enough, and writing a solo album, as you told us as well. Now, here you’re entering an arena where you are starting to compete with the Michel Legrand’s and god knows who.

Reinhold Heil

Yeah, yeah. We were painfully aware of that, and this is why of course Run Lola Run was the perfect entrance, because we would use a familiar vernacular of electronic dance music to score a movie. So there had been other movies at the time, cause we did this in early ’98, late ’97, early ’98, and I think the year before, was Trainspotting. So there was of course a bunch of techno music in Trainspotting and the difference was that in Trainspotting, they used pre-existing music, they licensed a bunch of stuff, Underworld, and really, really, really cool stuff. You can see that the second “Running Two” in Run Lola Run was actually very much influenced by Underworld. Yeah exactly. But, you know, the difference was that we were actually using this style of music and we were working to picture, and I think that hadn’t really been done before, so I think there’s definitely something ground-breaking about that approach. To use a pop music style and actually use it to score a picture in an almost traditional film scoring approach. And, of course, orchestrally, we knew very little, so whenever, then, other challenges came where we had to record an orchestra, we needed to first study it and learn it.

So that went on over the years and I think another highlight where that kind of hit us on the highest level was Perfume, and this was in 2005, 2006. We spent about a year writing that score, and it was all orchestral, and we ended up getting the Berliner Philharmoniker under Simon Rattle to perform it, which was kind of... It broke our neck financially, but it was kind of worth it.

Torsten Schmidt

Which is obviously a very different situation for the director as well, ’cause I mean there he was relatively new with Run Lola Run, and Perfume was one of the biggest-selling German language books in the world, translated in so many languages.

Reinhold Heil

Yeah, there was pressure. And it wasn’t his own production company. It was actually Constantin Film, so, Bernd Eichinger had gotten the rights for the book. This was actually a movie that was made about just that. There’s a movie about Bernd Eichinger getting the rights for Perfume.

Torsten Schmidt

Eichinger, probably for context, is the guy who produced Das Boot, The Neverending Story, yadda, yadda, yadda...

Reinhold Heil

Yeah. The Name of the Rose, things like that. So then Tom was hired as a co-screenwriter and director of Perfume, and he told us in 2004, he said “This is gonna be challenging. Better get rolling right now,” and so we started writing some sketches and very melodic themes, and we did them with some avant-garde ensemble in New York, recorded them really cheaply and sort of had some MIDI mixed with chamber stuff as layouts already before the movie was shot. And this became sort of the blueprint for Tom’s way of working and avoiding using other people’s music to temporarily cut the film. It’s like the worst nightmare of a film composer is the temp music, because by the time the composer comes on and is supposed to write something original for the film, the editor, the director, the producers have seen it a thousand times with somebody else’s music. You know, there might be John Williams or something on there, and you go, “How am I supposed to now come up with something that’s my own idea?” And it’s very, very hard to get that through, and often it means that you just imitate, because otherwise they will fire you. So, there’s the phenomenon of the so-called “temp love,” and in order to avoid that, Tom just said, “Let’s write a whole bunch of music before we even start shooting the movie so then we can temp the movie with our own music.”

Torsten Schmidt

But you would need a lot of confidence and trust from the director in order to get into that position, I guess.

Reinhold Heil

Yes. Yeah.

Torsten Schmidt

Shall we run that example?

Reinhold Heil

OK so, Perfume, this is from the middle of the film where Grenouille, the guy with the extremely sensitive nose, smells this beautiful girl from like a mile away, ’cause she’s driving by in this stagecoach and he’s then following her. We turned it into a beautiful aria. I think I have to tell you something about the creative process. Wasn’t this also about the creative process? Very interesting, because Tom was shooting... This piece did not exist before the movie was shot. So he was shooting it in Spain, and he had like a very, very simple melody in his head, and it was just like a semitone thing. And he said, “How am I gonna record this?” This was just before iPhones, like literally a year or so before the iPhone, and he didn’t have a little mini recorder on him, so he called his own phone number and left a message and sang onto his voicemail.

So then, six months later, we’re sitting in Munich, in post-production, and he says, “Wait, we can call the voicemail. There is a bit of melody.” And so we call the voicemail over and over and over. The problem is, with voicemail, with like telephone, especially with cellphone technology is, they scramble this, they compress it and they compress it optimized for speech, not for pitch. So, the pitch was all over the place and he could not get it together anymore. So we got vaguely inspired by that, it wasn’t really intelligible, what he had sung there. So, but that was the origin of the beautiful soprano piece that we see there, and the rest is just me on the keyboard with a tremolo string sample and then translated onto the page and played by Sir Simon Rattle and the Berliner Philharmoniker.

(video: Perfume snippet)

Torsten Schmidt

Charming.

Reinhold Heil

Charming young fellow. He wants her scent. [applause]

Torsten Schmidt

So, how different is the process for working on something like that, with the Berlin Philharmonic, having Sir Simon Rattle there as another gatekeeper, rather than sitting there with your JP8 and the strings on there?

Reinhold Heil

Well, the thing was, again, this piece didn’t exist beforehand. We had another orchestra session in the middle of this because we got the idea with the Philharmoniker, Simon himself had the idea, cause he, of course, was aware of the novel. He was aware that this was gonna be a big project and Simon is not only a genius musician and the leader of the best band in the world, actually, at that time. I think the Philharmoniker, under Simon, were the best band in the world. Absolutely. Unbelievable. If you ever, I guess it’s over now. He’s gone, right? Is he gone already? Yeah. So, he had the idea because he’s also, of course, a clever marketing person, and he realized that being on this project was gonna be cool. And then, of course, he was a little disappointed with how easy the music was that we wrote, and we, of course, wrote it for the film and everything had to pass muster with Tom, and maybe with Bernd, although Bernd didn’t really get involved. And so we had another orchestra, and we pre-recorded a bunch of this stuff with them, and then we had to, because the Philharmoniker deal wasn’t done, we had to keep them ready to potentially be the orchestra. Then I had the wonderful job to call them up and tell them, “Sorry it’s not gonna be you. It’s gonna be the Philharmoniker after all,” which was probably the s--tiest thing that I’ve ever done as a film composer. So, sorry. And it wasn’t my decision, but you know...

Torsten Schmidt

Someone’s gotta...

Reinhold Heil

Somebody’s gotta do the dirty job of telling the poor conductor, who is fantastic. Really, really a wonderful musician, and some snippets made it in there, illegally. So, I don't know, I can’t tell you about the process. I mean, we just worked our asses off for months and months and months, and the film was cut in the meantime, and then it was changed again, and then we had to change the music, and it was basically like babysitting the score. It was totally, it’s not the Hollywood method. The Hollywood method is they shoot the film, they cut the film, they think about who to hire and then they hire a composer, composer gets confronted with a cut that’s pretty close, or maybe not, to the final cut. He’s also confronted with the temp music, and then he starts writing, and he’s a pro and he knows how to do it, and they do it with the best orchestras, with the best technicians, and the best studios, and everything costs a million dollars, and then it’s done. And in our case we didn’t have the budget, we didn’t have the experience, we didn’t have the best musicians, and then after all, we did have the best musicians, but they weren’t experienced with film scoring. So, we of course didn’t give them a click track. Usually you give film players in London or in Los Angeles or in Prague or in Budapest, wherever they are, they play with click tracks. You don’t hire the Berliner Philharmoniker and give them a click track. That’s just not gonna happen. So we did it with streamers, and Simon is a f---ing genius, the way he conducted this. If it wasn’t the first pass, it was definitely the second pass that was just right on. And then the film was still cut a little bit and I had to do a month of music editing, and then it was just done. It’s the opposite of the Hollywood method.

Torsten Schmidt

Speaking of Hollywood method, and we strongly encourage people to go into your back catalog and look at different examples, but you got even more work in the long-form narrative, AKA binge-watching world, and scored and worked for a lot of different TV series.

Reinhold Heil

Yeah, that just kind of turned out that way. I don’t know why, but it just turned out that way, and I actually, then, ended up enjoying it quite a bit cause you can start developing things over time because you want to kinda stick to the same thematic material but you want to, obviously, not do it exactly the same way all the time so you have to mix it up and always work it to picture, and you become better in, what I said earlier, the storytelling aspect of film music in a way. And I just put together an album for Deutschland 86, which is the second season of Deutschland 83, which was somewhat unsuccessful in Germany and successful in the rest of the world three years ago.

Torsten Schmidt

Well, it was probably a little too close to home for most people here.

Reinhold Heil

I don’t know. I really loved it. I loved working on it. And it was on RTL, so people didn’t really watch it cause it has too many commercial interruptions, and RTL then hated not having good ratings and it took them a long time to find another partner. Now they have Amazon. So, this is gonna come out at the end of the month on Amazon, Deutschland 86. And it’s the same hero, so it’s a lot of the same thematic material, and a lot of it plays in South Africa. It has to do with apartheid, with the ANC, Angola, Libya and Berlin terrorism, 1986, you know? All based on true historic background, but, of course, dramatized. So, I was able to use a lot of the material from the first season and then make it African, make it Saharan and all that stuff. It was kind of cool.

Torsten Schmidt

So, you would stick with a character across different seasons and...

Reinhold Heil

Yeah, not always. I mean, obviously, you want to write a bunch of fresh stuff, right? But there were some themes that were just too connected to characters or to the show itself, so then you find a twist to bring them back.

Torsten Schmidt

Maybe before we open up for questions, shall we run a little example of some of that TV work?

Reinhold Heil

Yeah, I don’t know. There’s this really short one and a half minute trailer for the schlockiest show I’ve ever done, which is Helix. That was on the Sci-Fi Channel. It’s a sci-fi show that I very much enjoyed cause it was really a bunch of crazy stuff that I was able to do. There’s three different scenes there, just cut together for an appearance at Comic-Con and the end of it is the main title, which is just a 12-second piece of easy listening music in a horrific, super-schlocky, sci-fi horror TV show.

Torsten Schmidt

Alright.

Reinhold Heil

Do you have that one? Helix?

Torsten Schmidt

Please think of your questions as we run this.

(video: Helix snippet)

Reinhold Heil

The epitome of artistic subtlety and metaphoric work, right?

Torsten Schmidt

Questions.

Audience Member

First, I have to say I’ve never heard another synth player use portamento in such a nice way as you do it. And then I read that you, at some point, formed some kind of self-support group with two other producers, Gareth Jones from Depeche Mode and Udo Arndt. What was that like? What did you talk about?

Reinhold Heil

Well, self-support group. It was a breakfast, you know? Monday mornings. We just went somewhere for breakfast and shared the misery of how it is to produce other people’s music. We all were in Berlin, we were good friends and we worked together on the second album of The Rainbirds, the three of us. Udo Arndt had produced the first one, I had just played some keyboards on it, and then the second one was like another one of those elaborate, “Oh now we have to follow up this breakthrough album with something amazing,” so then we had three producers working on it with Fairlights and Akai samplers and crazy s---. Then we just met on a regular basis and we sort of planned to do a whole bunch of productions together. Crazy thing is, producers don’t get that much money. They get three points and really not that much up front, so that kind of ended fast, and we had to kind of go our separate ways, in terms of the work again, but we’re still good friends. So it was...the support is just being able to talk to another person who understands the situation and you just tell them something, “Oh yeah, of course this is what’s going on.” Just to be able to process it is helpful. It wasn’t really any help, per se, there was never a solution to the problem of having to produce an artist.

Audience Member

So, what were the problems, exactly?

Reinhold Heil

Well, you know, things like I hinted at, like all of a sudden, everything has to be higher and better than what they started out with, and when they were successful with what they started out with, you’re like, “Why don’t you just keep on going, and you just keep on having fun and let your creativity flow, and don’t overthink it, and most certainly, don’t think about what other people will think, or what the record company will think. I’m here to protect you from that.” And then you realize you can’t because it’s not like you’re locking them into the studio. So, I think that’s the biggest frustration, is to see it go downhill once the success comes. All of a sudden the fun goes away because there’s so much pressure and that’s very sad. Because I think the best things come without the pressure, when people actually love each other and they make the music because they enjoy each other’s company and they get triggered by each other’s creative sparks. That’s kind of a thread throughout my career, and my career is not that extensive, in terms of my productions. It was several years and it was several projects. There was actually one project where I was really, really, really happy about it, they made such pop music. They were classic pop songs. I was going, “This is going to be a smash hit,” and then, the production took five months and they were talking about stretch limousines and groupies during the production. That thing never even took off because they didn’t even have the innocence that other people had during their first album. So, you know, that was another confirmation of how stupid that is, so I really didn’t want to do it anymore and I haven’t.

Torsten Schmidt

Damn the ’80s.

Audience Member

Hello. I have a composition question, kind of a technical one. I guess when writing for TV or film, you’re often given a piece or some imagery that might be 30 seconds or it could be ten minutes, and you know when you’re watching that, when you want a certain moment, a musical moment to happen, do you have any tips or tricks on how to frame your tempo or your timing to get to that point from when you started?

Reinhold Heil

Yeah. The storytelling thing, it comes with experience. I don’t think about it, I just feel it. And then I don’t get to necessarily do it the way I want to because then there’s a spotting session and of course, you also get the temp music.

There’s one tip I can really give you and that is if there’s temp music, and if you know that the scene was cut around the temp music, don’t copy necessarily the temp music, but stick to the pace of the temp music. Figure out what the beats per minute are, if there’s some changes, just stick to that, and you will see that whatever you come up with, it can be completely different, but as long as the pace is the same, it will match, and they will be happy because they’ve gotten used to that kind of pacing.

I give you an extreme example. I did one film with Tom Tykwer, which was called Drei, not a very successful, very art-housey movie from 2010, and we didn’t have the budget to do the music beforehand, so there was temp music in there. Some of the temp music was Radiohead. It’s like the worst, right? So you have a song, and Thom Yorke opens his mouth, and you have thick emotion coming from the screen, and you go, “How am I gonna match that? It’s not gonna happen.”

So, I had a piece, it was just a piano piece, it was like the opposite of a Radiohead piece, and we’re like, “Maybe we should try this one,” and Tom was like, “I can’t do that. No. No. It has to be something like that.” So, my piece was in a completely different tempo and they had a beautiful montage that was already done. The editor, Mathilde Bonnefoy, was also the lady who cut Run Lola Run, she’s just amazing, had done this beautiful quadruple-screen montage of events that had a certain flow to it that was kind of slow and absolutely one of the most magnificent visual things I’ve ever seen, and then there’s this Radiohead piece, and I’m going, “Oh f---.”

So what I ended up doing is, I used a pocket calculator, I determined the beats per minute of the Radiohead piece, I knew my piece wasn’t anywhere near it. I couldn’t possibly run it at that beat per minute, and then I tried different factors, divided by four times three, divided by three times two, or whatever, and I just tried all of them and realized, “OK, this is closest to the Radiohead piece.” So then, I used that tempo that was at a certain factor of the Radiohead piece and, of course, it worked perfectly because the flow of these beautiful, slow montages was still working with my piece. And it took Mathilde, who was the editor, it took her two weeks to convince Tom to try it, and we ended up having it in the movie five times. So that was a humongous success on my part, as a film composer, on a pretty much insurmountable problem, and it was solved with a pocket calculator. It had everything to do with the pacing of the temp music and how the scene was cut around it.

Audience Member

Amazing, thank you.

Torsten Schmidt

Well, if there’s no more questions right now, I would very much like you to join me in thanking Mr. Heil for his time and being here tonight. [applause]

Reinhold Heil

Thank you. It was fun.