Strich: Or do you feel uprooted?

Ted: Ha ha, yeah...God...Barbed wire on the toiletseat... rough stuff.. experiences with different materials. Look at that!

Strich: Barbed wire, huh?

Ted: Those were my experiences, my musical development, when as a three year old I fell of the piano stool and cut my nose...That brought me to not playing music for the next thirty-five years.

Strich: I see, childrens anxieties, the struggle wit children's anxieties?

Ted: Exactly.

Strich; But you can't give a more detailed answer?

Ted: There are a lot of things influencing ones development. As a kid growing up in Africa my soul must have absorbed the local kind of music as well.

Strich: It's difficult to categorize your music, but it could be a kind of means to travel over the rooftops of cities.

Ted: There's a word in German that sounds like Blurt but means stupid..(Blöde)

Strich: Where does all this energy come from, to keep this band going? Is it just the fun of doing it or is there a message you want to convey?

Ted: Both, we like both. You see, we never sat down and plan how we could become succesfull. In this regard it's actually quite amazing this band has been going for ten, eleven years in the music business as we know it today. We were very succesfull in Brittain when we started out, we got a lot of press. That was around 1979, 1980. But the A&R guys, when we sat down with the likes of them, screamed "NOOOOOO!!!" and took a run....since then we hardly play in England.

Strich: A boring question: what do you think of the music today?

Ted: It's probably shallow to say that it's becoming more and more monolithic year by year. The whole organistation, the structure of the whole business. For new bands it's much more difficult and when they can't get interest from the major labels, they will break up. Even when you're famous you'll be knocking on some empty skulls with the majors.

Continuation