A quiet girl like this....
became, in a few years, a loud one like this.
Having just posted Suzi Pinns, from 1978's "Jubilee", (yes, I know... Queen Elizabeth II's silver jubilee was in 1977, the film arrived a little late).... it brought me to thinking of other women in the punk era. And to Nina Hagen. Nina was born in the same year as Ms.Pinns, 1955, but in East Germany.
By the time she was nine she was considered an opera prodigy, she was expelled from the Free German Youth group at the age of twelve, left school and joined a band at sixteen, went to stage school, formed a band... 'allowed' to leave East Germany in 1976, she was listening to punk music in Hamburg, travelled to London, mixed with the Sex Pistols, The Slits, and othercentral figures of the punk movement. (I got all that from Wikipedia)... I first heard her when Icelandic punk friends played her records to me.
(disclaimer: I was NEVER a punk.)
I did, however, have a couple of her albums, on tape, which I'd listen to whilst working.
I'm sure she's absolutely deranged, but hey! she makes me laugh.
Quote: "I can't sing gospel, I'm a white chick"
Ha! makes Debbie Harry look like Goody Twoshoes!. Mind you, this is her being the very model of genteel restraint.
Here she is being a bit more herself.....
hi soubriquet, you made me have a wee trip down memory lane. when i was in undergrad school, we all got into bronze casting and were on a nina hagen binge at the time. we used to heat up the bronze and when it was melted and ready to pour and we had all our protective gear on, someone would crank up the nina hagen and we let the molten metal flow. i never understood a word she said but we all got a big kick out of her and of course it mystified any onlookers who happened to be spectators.
ReplyDeleteFunnily enough, approaching top temp on the kiln, fire bursting out all over, red angry glow, roaring, a cone of flame above the chimney, I used to like listening to Nina then, the tourists would be peering into the big windows from the coffee shop, at the mud-smeared crazy, dancing around the flame-filled box of roaring madness, and I'd be oblivious, listening to Nun-Sex-Monk-Rock, or Radio Yerevan....
ReplyDeleteMaybe it's crazy persons' fire-music?
At one pottery, the kiln was outside, under a canopy, and at night stray bursts of flame and a glow around the doors, peep-holes, burner quarls, cracks in the brickwork, everywhere was fire.
One night the fire service turn up, lots of trucks and men, not the local guys from the village, they were on a shout elsewhere, these guys were scrambled from twenty miles away... Someone going past on the highway had reported a building on fire.
They took a while to be persuaded that it was supposed to be like that.
Needed to be fed doughnuts and coffee in order to keep them from trying to douse it.
punky chicks, yay! hey, where has RDM gone to?
ReplyDeleteMiss Universe, universal raaadioooooooooo!!!
ReplyDeleteThanks for the pointy tip toe down memory lane!
Never heard of her before, absolutely fantastic.
ReplyDelete