Berlin

AMG Review of Berlin

Dave Thompson
All Music Guide

The tide of racial tension that was devouring the U.K. during the early '80s found any number of musical outlets, with the Specials' "Ghost Town" generally applauded as the record that most successfully zapped the zeitgeist of the prevailing paranoia. A close second, however, came roaring not out of the British provinces, but from Germany, where Udo Lindenberg's latest denunciation of his countrymen's darkest past found a grisly echo within the rise of the U.K.'s own far right bully-boys. Wrapped in a sleeve decorated with recent newspaper cuttings all reflecting on the growing visibility of British fascism, and warped against its backdrop of squawking cabaret and nightmarish presentiment, "Berlin" asks its elders how they could have just sat back and watched while the Nazi menace gathered strength, without a care for what the future might hold. "You should have sold your violin," Lindenberg chides his musician father, "or traded it in for a gun...you should have killed Hitler." It's an astonishing performance, one of Lindenberg's greatest English language efforts, and one of the most potent political diatribes rock has ever heard. The EP comprises three tracks, five minutes of "Berlin" backed by the distinctly punkish "Street Sense" and the foreboding futurism of "They're Coming." One wonders, however, how many listeners were even tempted to flip the disc over. "Berlin" was so powerful, and so thought-provoking that, even today, its lyric seems profoundly appropriate.