Extrabreit

In the organizer's words:

They mocked the police, set fire to the school and were as hard as jam. They let the plane take off at parties, conjured up the delights of kleptomania and the abysses of cocaine: at the end of the 1970s, a couple of guys from Hagen discovered the beauty of the three-minute guitar anthem with snotty, subversive lyrics and soon conquered the charts with it: Extrabreit, the inventors of German pop-punk.

The list of their hits is almost as long as their career: the successes of the early 1980s were later followed by ironic rock anthems such as "Ruhm" or "Joachim muss härter werden" as well as the legendary duets with Hildegard Knef ("Für mich soll's rote Rosen regnen") and Harald Juhnke ("Nichts ist für immer"). And time and again they managed the balancing act between melodic punk hits like "Jeden Tag, jede Nacht" and hypnotic, psychedelic heavy numbers like "110" or "Der Präsident ist tot", but also laconic ballads like "Junge wir können so heiß sein" or "Besatzungskind".

It is hardly possible to describe the Extrabreit phenomenon without using the nasty N-word. The New German Wave, proclaimed late but all the more luridly and unscrupulously by the German record industry, had swept the pub rock band, which had already existed for three years at the time, along with it and undoubtedly threw an exorbitantly large audience in front of the Marshall Towers in a phase that lasted two albums. This resulted in an unavoidable nosedive in success and even the withdrawal of love in droves, but the band didn't have to crunch nearly as hard as the NDW stamp itself and the widespread impression that it was a relic from this time, which was regularly celebrated at après-ski level. The band has survived this by focusing on their identity as a live combo.

"Auf Ex", the studio album released in 2020, was recorded and produced at Backyard/Schallsucht-Studio Hagen - and Hagen even plays a bigger role here than it used to in the lyrics of Hamburg native Kai Havaii: "Where I was born / no hipsters are drawn / ... where you look there are broken dreams". The opener "Die Fressen aus dem Pott" was released as a single. "We will not die in beauty and we will never inherit it / We are the food from the pot, made by the good Lord ..." Self-reflective songs such as "Vorwärts durch die Zeit", where ageing as a band or as a private person is addressed as nonchalantly as this Havaii tone of voice allows, never become pompous, as the singer manages to feel both positive and negative at the same time and transcribe this into a few four-to-the-floor lines.