Die Doraus Und Die Marinas ‘Fred Vom Jupiter’ single artwork.

Sometime in 2009, Steve Lamacq interviewed Mute‘s Daniel Miller on 6Music. I missed it and forgot to listen again via the website, but Mrs Smith happened to listen. She told me that Lamacq had discussed his favourite early Mute release, and so I asked her what it was. She couldn’t remember who it was by, what it was called, only that it had kids singing on it and – and I thought this was genius to have remembered this – it had a catalogue number of MUTE19.

And so I rushed upstairs, grabbed the CD-sized Mute catalogue in which I mark the releases I own, and scoured for a record with this number. I was disappointed to find that it was ‘Fred Vom Jupiter’ by Die Doraus Und Die Marinas, a record I’d tried many times to track down up to that point but which never, ever seemed to come up on eBay, and I’d given up. That day, however, it was on eBay amazingly, and for a paltry fiver filled in a major gap in my collection.

Worth it? Absolutely.

Die Doraus was Andreas Doraus and a bunch of session musicians, while Die Marinas were a revolving group of kids who, on this track were Dagmar Petersen, Claudia Flohr, Michelle Milewski, Christine Süßmilch and Isabelle Spelly. A friend of Palais Schaumberg member and future Mute artist Holger Hiller, Dorau was barely eighteen when he recorded the sessions for Blumen Und Narzissen in 1981 in Düsseldorf for Kurt ‘Pyrolator’ Dahlke from Der Plan’s Ata Tak imprint. The album was produced with Dahlke and Ata Tak co-founder Frank Fenstermacher. The album’s packaging presented Dorau as a clean, good-looking pop heart-throb, potentially surprising anyone buying the LP given its amalgam of angular post-punk and adventurous synthwork.

Die Doraus Und Die Marinas ‘Blumen Und Narzissen’ LP artwork.

The lead track from the album was ‘Fred Vom Jupiter’, written by Dorau and Olaf Maureschat. The track would became a massive hit amid West Germany’s homegrown post-punk Neue Deutsche Welle movement. The single was originally released by Ata Tak in 1981, while Mute licensed it for release in the UK the following year. In hindsight, that move looks relatively opportunistic to catch some of the momentum of the single’s success in Germany for UK listeners, as Mute didn’t option either the album or any of Dorau’s copious other output with Die Marinas or as a solo artist.

‘Fred Vom Jupiter’ is, at face value, a novelty electronic pop track, perhaps in the style of Miller’s own Silicon Teens project – the sleeve certainly supports this. However, that would ignore the harsher synths and noises evident behind the innocent German accents of Die Marinas’ ramshackle choir. If you do ignore these, what you do have is a blissfully original slice of early electronic pop which fully deserves its cult status as a collector’s item. It’s incredibly catchy like all good pop should be, although my knowledge of German is so weak now that all I can understand is the title which is sung and repeated at the end of the chorus; but its infectiously hummable if nothing else. The sleeve helpfully explains what the song is about: ‘From Jupiter comes Fred, the marvelous Kosmonaut. All the girls feel enthusiastic about him and want to keep him here forever.’

The darker sounds are explored more wholeheartedly in the pulsing, electro-industrial instrumental on the flip, ‘Even Home Is Not Nice Anymore’ which was co-written with Fenstermacher. The sleeve explains that ‘Fred has come home to his planet after his “excursion” to earth. But there he feels very lonely and realises…’ – realises what, we are not told. Whereas ‘Fred Vom Jupiter’ is a cute pop track with a bit of edge, the B-side is claustrophobic and edgy and anything but twee. Its beats speed up as the track progresses over its short duration, rising like pulsing jackhammers inside your head, a huge throbbing bass synth anchoring the entire track into a sense of panicked urgency.

First published 2009; updated and re-posted 2018.

(c) 2018 Mat Smith / Documentary Evidence