The Comedy of Errors: Deutsch Amerikanische Freundschaft - Goldenes Spielzeug (1 May 1992)

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This track from DAF’s 1981 album, Gold Und Liebe, found its way on to Peel’s playlist for 1/5/92 thanks to a note in his Norwich trousers,”Being in showbusiness, I have a pair of trousers for every major town and city in the UK” and which reminded him to play Goldenes Spielzeug (Golden Toy) for “Will and Valentin, the Spanish persons” suggesting either that the note was written by them or that he’d had too much to drink when he made the note.

Peel looked to tie the track into contemporary settings, describing DAF as “Grandfathers of techno”.  Certainly Gabi Delgado-Lopez and Robert Gorl were veterans by 1992 having released their first records in 1979.  However, I upon hearing it was transported back to childhood bedtimes.
Between the ages of 4 and 7, I was a right shit when it came to going to bed.  My parents could get me into my room, OK, but I was buggered if I was going to lay down and sleep.  I put it down to a mix of too much energy (one night, I apparently got out of the house and ran in my pyjamas and Wellington boots down the centre of Kimberly Park Road, until I was found by a group of teenagers who took me back home - like all potential infant near death situations, I have no memory of doing any of this, just parental record), resentment at people still being allowed to stay up while I had to stay in one place and plain old fashioned night terrors. Fear of the dark certainly, but more a feeling of drowning in the huge centuries of time that it seems to take a night to pass when you’re a child and awake.  Sleep and nights seem a monumental waste of time when you’re a kid - think of all that play you could be having.  Not to mention having to be quiet and reserved, which was particularly important in the 3-4 years that my mother ran our house as a bed and breakfast in summer, while taking in students over the winter.  I couldn’t accept having to switch myself off before everyone else in the house when my parents said, “Bed time, David”. There were rows, screaming and tears, and that was just my parents.
Eventually, they gave me a proposition.  I could continue to be awake, to play quietly in my room and have my light on provided that I stayed in my room when they told me it was bed time.  This sounded fair to me, but I still missed the distraction of sounds or other people - I was raised as an only child after all.  My Dad rectified this by putting an old transistor radio on in my room, at discreet volume and this was the final piece of the puzzle in terms of getting me to bed.  Indeed some combination of light, radio and, from my 10th birthday in 1986, television was my regular bedtime routine up till around 1990 when I finally grew out of it all.
What does this have to with DAF though?  Well, in the early 1980s when I first started to have a radio on in my room, I quickly became enamoured of retuning channels and what I sought more than music
was voices/conversation.  It’s wholly possible that I listened to the John Peel wingding on a number of occasions over 1980-83, but I have no true recollection of doing so, even though I knew him for some of that time as both the host of Top of the Pops and someone on the radio.  I am far more certain though of listening to overseas radio channels in France and Germany, babbling through the foggy medium wave as though they were broadcasting behind two layers of concrete.  The unintelligible languages providing companionship at least; the sudden piercing jingles; meandering adverts; long silences which were then broken by records - often Top 10 hits that I knew, but equally likely to be foreign Europop.  It was company and it helped me face up to the lengthy night ahead.  But it was also frightening.  The long silences after an advert or a news break on those foreign channels often meant something ominous was coming.  I vividly remember being riven with fear on my bed as the haunting opening movement to Vienna by Ultravox peered out of the audio gloom.  Or it would be something persistent and unsettling like O Superman by Laurie Anderson.  I was caught in a petrified limbo - if I turned the radio off, I would be plunged into silence again; if I retuned the radio I might find other tunes just as frightening.  I wish I’d had the sentience to find and recognise Peel back then. Someone once said of him that whenever he played a frightening or unsettling piece of music, the un-nerved listener just had to keep repeating “Peel will be back in a minute”.  He brought the extreme to your radio, but his presence was a safety net and his calming, bemused voice was an island welcoming you to safety and congratulating you on listening to something that had yanked you out of your comfort zone.  In Radio 1’s pre 24-hour days, it was tempting to think of him as the last person in Radio 1 each day, charged with locking up and turning the lights off at the end of his show.  An image no doubt seered into the imagination by the “Goodnight and good riddance” clip of him reeling off the records he played in one late 1970s show, in a completely dark studio except for one anglepoise lamp set over his head.  My radio listening in those early infant days lacked that calming figure.  Instead, I had to blunder, unprepared to face tracks like Goldenes Spielzeug.  That chilly
Germanic vibe of the period is in place alongside the fractured, brittle vocal which sounds like it’s being guided through repressed memory theory.  Essentially it’s the synth horn blasts that won me over as well as nostalgia for bedtimes past.  By the end of the decade, synth blasts sounded absurd and naff - their fakeness cheapening any piece of music they were attached to.  But throughout this track, the effect is used with great subtlety and skill providing a striking counterpoint to the tinkly backing that forms the skeleton of the track.  “Wake up.  Look here. Pay attention” it seems to be saying and it was precisely those surprise elements that kept me wary but entranced while unfocusedly  listening to the radio on those long early 80s nights.  The track has been remixed by Lor for their latest album, Reworx.

Have you come to sing me a lullaby, Midge?



Videos courtesy of Stormcloudgrey (DAF) and Ultravox