One night in 1982, I was sitting at home watching a football match on the tv between West Germany and England.
John Motson (the irrepressible Motty!) was doing the commentary and shouted excitedly , Karl-Heinz rummenigge! What a man!"
as the West German expertly flipped the ball into our net from the halfway line.
As usual I was strumming my guitar, so I wrote a song about it.
A few months before I had had a letter from an old friend, Kay Russell. Kay had been part of the Birmingham folkscene.
But now she was writing songs with a girl called Susan Fassbender and she had had an international hit called Twilight Cafe.
She had written to me from germany. it was kay's idea that I tried to get Rummenigge off. She sent me the
name of her German record company.
Well, the record company were interested. But I rather thought they thought they had a better chance with German
couple singing the song. So a record company executive tried writing some German lyrics. A soap star and
an ex-Real Madrid goalkeeper were recruited and they put out a German language version at the same time as ours. they
sold about 15 thousand copies - which wasn't a lot - but it took enough off our sales of aout 60 thousand copies to stop us
getting higher in the charts and getting us more airplay!
record companies eh!
Looking back, we should have gone to Germany and become a cabaret act -performing our mini hit. Still as the philosopher
said - fate farts in face of those named Alan.
German pop music experts will be interested to know that 'Rummenigge' was produced by pop star/songwriter Wolf Maahn.
He had his guitarist Axel Hinkel playing a Fender strat through a Fender twin reverb on it. The drummer was the guy
from Cologne supergroup BAP.
