FOYER DES ARTS – Die John-Peel-Session

Beschreibung

The author Max Goldt is well known to the general public. Not so the musician Max Goldt, who came across the guitarist and songwriter Gerd Pasemann through a classified ad in 1978. Their joint collaboration in the 1980s resulted in the musically contrasting project Foyer des Arts: „Melancholic, sometimes resigned tracks alternated as a matter of course with comic and surreal ones,“ wrote Max Goldt in the booklet to his CD box set „Draußen die herrliche Sonne“. John Peel liked Foyer des Arts so much that he not only played all the songs from the album „Die Unfähigkeit zu Frühstücken“ several times on his show, he also invited the duo to record a session and were one of only a few few German-speaking bands to do so.
In 1986, after a two-year delay, Foyer des Arts released their sophomore album Die Unfähigkeit zu Frühstücken. BBC Radio DJ John Peel liked it so much, he featured one track after another on his show. Gerd Pasemann and Max Goldt were ultimately invited to record a (John) Peel Session, a rare and distinguished honour for a German-speaking band.
The Berlin duo made their way to London in October 1986, where they were joined by three members of The Higsons, an energetic combo with plenty of experience as session musicians. Indeed, they only needed one rehearsal to learn the four songs that Foyer des Arts brought with them, two from the aforementioned album and two brand new tunes : “Könnten Bienen fliegen” and “Frauen in Frieden und Freiheit”.
Recording took place the following afternoon in the legendary Maida Vale Studio 4, the regular home for the Peel Sessions. “The musicians were excellent and the atmosphere was really relaxed,” Max Goldt recalls, “and afterwards we met John Peel in his favourite pub, The Vine Bar.”
In the year 2000 Goldt asked the BBC what had happened to the session tapes, only to learn that they had probably been wiped. This was not a huge surprise, as the BBC archives were notoriously unreliable. Entire Dusty Springfield shows disappeared, apparently deleted. Twenty years later, the Cologne-based sound engineer Tom Morgenstern, with the help of a colleague from the BBC, managed to unearth the lost tapes. And here they are, 35 years on, as fresh as the day they were made.