Underground Hero: In the Cool of the Night: Kiev Stingl is dead

Kiev Stingl, one of the coolest singers and poets in the Federal Republic of Germany, is dead. But only small circles knew about him; among the less well-known, he was an exceptional figure. He lived his life as an eternal insider tip – in the darkness of his texts, obsessions and habits. He often sounded a lot like Lou Reed and that gave him a strong style: “Buy me dark / give me night / come close to me,” he sang in the early ’70s (but only now released at his death), “Hello baby, hello baby, the boys tell you” in 1979 and again in 1989: “It’s so, so hot to watch you when you do your lips, / I’m lost around you, that’s what you want.” And then he got so old that he fully experienced the decline and historical obsolescence of those poses of arrogant masculinity that were considered the ultimate cool thing from the late ’60s to the late ’90s. It didn’t bother him much, he kept his sunglasses on forever. As has only now become known, he died on February 20th in Berlin at the age of 81.

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“I am absolutely certain: there is no market for me,” he told Alfred Hilsberg for an article about him in the music magazine “Sounds” in 1979, and he was right. “The coldness of the future” was the headline because at the time he supported the thesis: “When making things you always have to be ice cold and have no feelings. If you can control the feelings, you can express them.” He sang about bodies and spirits, about intoxication and traveling, and only sounded so out there and cool because he recorded his singing without the music that came first after. They were simply arranged songs, made by professional musicians from the bands led by Udo Lindenberg and Achim Reichel and later by part of the Einstreichen Neuhäusern.

They were completely solitary records, but even as an older man he explained in an interview: “I only really liked the term underground once, and that was in connection with the band Velvet Underground. Otherwise one could punish the conventionality with which he is repeatedly used.” Like Lou Reed with this band, Kiev Stingl sang on his two best albums “Devil” (1975) and “Hart wie Mozart” (1979). Like Reed, Stingl started out as a poet in the early 1970s in the Hamburg literary magazine Boa Vista, and like Reed, he was one of the few older artists recognized by the punks when he performed at the legendary indie festivals in the Hamburg market hall appeared. He avoided wider recognition through various escapades. It wasn’t until the end of the 80s that he stopped drinking and drugs, but then he stopped recording music after 1989, apart from a superfluous mini-album from 2022 with electro-like reworked demo tapes from the 80s.

Favored by his parents’ wealth, Stingl was a free spirit who, despite his search for deep expression and outcry, had a sense of irony when he made the cover of “Hart wie Mozart” look like a front page of “Spiegel” (which was written by… was banned) or when he called his third record, a disco album, “I wish the Germans all the best” in 1981. “At times there was a fear that Stingl could become a kind of Klaus Kinski of the music scene,” wrote Jochen Knoblauch in “Junge Welt” in 2017 when his old albums were re-released. He didn’t – because he always managed to turn off into the cool of the night just before the point when pathos becomes embarrassing.

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