Alfred Hilsberg in the Berlin »Kaffee Burger«. Where else?
Photo: Imago/Votes-Roland Owsnitzki
Today, where capitalism has won across the board and the music industry is managed by financial entrepreneurs and civil servants who are no more interested in art than for the black among their fingernails and who could sell shower curtains as well as pop music, only people remember Alfred Hilsberg, for music in their adolescence more or is a consumption or a business model.
Hilsberg, born in the dreary in 1947, was an illustrious personality. And he was a stylish figure of the musical subcultures of this very poor country, which is now very poor on subcultures. His father was a worker at VW, his mother housewife. At the request of the father, Alfred started learning piano games at the age of eight. He had talent, but the Strauss Walzer curled him. “He preferred composers who made a slightly different music, for example Béla Bartók,” says the only book about Hilsberg’s life and work. The tendency to the musically different and idiosyncratic seems to have been pronounced early. Alfred’s father was annoyed, he had nothing left for the musical modernism. “What do you teach my son?” He is said to have snapped at the piano teacher.
In the 1960s, the growing Alfred, like many young people, started fleeing to the cinema, and even made experimental short films with a 16 mm camera. “We were just subculture and thought something else every day,” reports a friend at the time.
In 1977 Alfred Hilsberg organized the first punk rock concerts in Germany: appearances by the vibrators and the stranglers. In 1978 he wrote the first article about the phenomenon in this country, which was only read by a small interested minority, “Sounds”, which was only read by a small interested minority at that time. From London he brought the early punk rock plates to Hamburg in the car, where friends then emptied him the trunk.
A short time later – accompanied by the opening of the record of the record shop “Rip Off” (“There was a couch and a coffin as a table”), which became the headquarters of the Hamburg punk scene – the foundation of the plate company Zigzag in 1979. On this first German indie label, as one would call it today, Hilsberg published music, which, if it hadn’t existed, would probably have never been pressed on records: a music that had often been incomprehensibly sounding out of the spirit of the punk rock and the »do it yourself« idea, created and performed by bands like cosmonaut dreams, the deadly Doris, the dodis, dodis, Disposal, downwards or ghost drivers and who did not hide the fact that they had no ambitions to “storm the hit parades,” as was said at the time. It was about cultural self -authorization. The label operator also released the debut album of the collapsing new buildings in 1981.
He did not want to promote the consensus, Hilsberg once said, but the contradiction. In fact, the man has shot a nose for the most desolate musical mainstream in Germany: in the 90s and 2000s, he continued his commitment as an explorer and sponsor of new and other music, published the first album of Blumbeld in 1992 and, 21 years ago, the first record by Jens Friebe.
“He liked the self-organized, non-commercial; He liked the spreading will to establish his own musical culture without submitting to the rules of the cultural industry, “writes Jens Balzer in his obituary in” Zeit “and calls him the” great enabler “. “He was never interested in commercial success, but for artistic radicalism,” says the Berlin magazine “Tip”.
A few years ago, Christof Meueler, who heads the ND Feuilleton department, had numerous conversations with Hilsberg and many of his contemporaries and wrote the opulent book mentioned above about this taste-proof cultural impresario and pioneer of German-language punk and new wave music (“The Zigzack principle”, 2016). Now Alfred Hilsberg died in Hamburg at the age of 77.