Back in March, Song of the Day featured a tune dubbed the Most Mysterious Song on the Internet. Known only from a tape made from a radio broadcast back in 1984, both its title and the band who recorded it were lost, even to internet sleuths, who spent 17 years looking for the answers.
Last week they found them.
Many of the clues investigators had amassed turned out to be right. As many guessed, FEX were Europeans singing in English, and the Yamaha DX7 synthesizer used on the song was correctly identified. The band, formed in Kiel, West Germany, in 1983, was part of the Neue Deutsche Welle, the German equivalent of New Wave. They recorded a cassette EP with the song, titled “Subways of Your Mind,” in 1984, but broke up when keyboardist Michael Hädrich moved to Munich the next year.
Hädrich, bassist Norbert Ziermann and guitarist and front man Ture Rückwart, who wrote the song, knew nothing about the internet phenomenon until a Reddit sleuth contacted Hädrich, who provided a clean copy of the original and a live recording from 1985, establishing the band’s authorship. All three are still active in music, but nobody connected them to the song, possibly because “Subways of Your Mind” was never one of the proposed titles. (Various listeners, deciphering muddied vocals, guessed the title might be “Like the Wind” or “Check It In, Check It Out.”)
Was the prize worth the search? The DJ who played it on German radio 40 years ago didn’t think so. When the song was played for Paul Baskerville, he said he didn’t remember it because it wasn’t memorable. As one wag noted in the comments, “Most bands spend years trying to find their audience, this audience spent years finding their band.”
Once the mystery was solved, it was only days before the three former bandmates got together for the first time in years (they don’t know what happened to their drummer, Hans Seiver). They recorded an acoustic version of “Subways of Your Mind.”
For you completists, here’s the live version that Hädrich dug up.
