Saâda Bonaire: The unlikely band constructed in a German immigration centre
Sometimes, the greatest musical collaborations can come from the most unexpected of places. Artists can spend years attempting to find a perfect backing band to carry out their musical desires, whereas others come together quickly, largely as a result of circumstance. That is certainly the case with the little-known post-punk outfit Saâda Bonaire, who recruited their band from people at a local immigration centre in Bremen, Germany, during the early 1980s, in the hopes of achieving musical greatness.
The origins of Saâda Bonaire are invariably tied to one man, DJ Ralf Behrendt. A prominent DJ within the local scene in Bremen, which is rarely cited as a musical hub for Germany. Particularly during the 1980s, Berlin was seen as the centre of both East and West Germany’s cultural exports, as styles of punk, new wave, post-punk and synthpop began to inspire the nation’s youth. Nevertheless, Behrendt had the desire to form a band as a means of exercising his deep, widespread interest in styles of synthpop and post-punk, in addition to funk, disco, and dub reggae.
Perhaps as a result of this limited music scene in Bremen, the DJ was forced to work with what he had. So, his fiancee, Stephanie Lange, and friend, Claudia Hossfield, were quickly recruited as the vocalists for Behrendt’s new group, Saâda Bonaire. For the most part, the band’s material was placed around the central focus of these female vocalists, who would often contrast a sultry, sensual vocal style with lyrics detailing themes of sexism, misogyny, and the issues faced by women at the time.
Regardless of this defiant message, Saâda Bonaire was never going to get far as an acapella group. In desperate need of instrumentation, Ralf Behrendt began to poach musicians from the local immigration centre in which he worked. Although this decision was born out of necessity, it also helped to imbue the music of Saâda Bonaire with a much wider body of influences, including Eastern instrumentation and the aesthetics of traditional African music.
A band with such an eclectic, unpredictable sound was never going to top the charts, but that was hardly the aim of Saâda Bonaire. DJ Ralf Behrendt had formulated the band as a means of musical exploration, and they certainly achieved those aims. There was no other band, either in West Germany or the wider world, that sounded quite like Saâda Bonaire; their endlessly unique construction and range of influences made them true originals.
Adding to this sound, the band recruited the Barbadian guitarist and producer Dennis Bovell to produce their work, owing both to Behrendt’s interest in dub reggae and Bovell’s impressive track record within the sphere of post-punk, having worked with the likes of The Slits, The Pop Group, and Orange Juice among countless others. Bovell was essential in the creation of Saâda Bonaire’s unique and eclectic sound, particularly in making it palatable for audiences.
While many other post-punk bands of the 1980s were being praised for their originality and inventiveness, Saâda Bonaire were largely omitted from the conversation. Seemingly, it is EMI who were at fault for this, as they pulled the budget and all marketing for the band just prior to the release of their first – and, as it turned out, only – single, ‘You Could Be More As You Are’ in 1984. This decision is largely in keeping with the track record of EMI at the time, but it did mean that Saâda Bonaire were forced to fall into obscurity after its release.
That was until 2013, when the Brooklyn-based independent label Captured Tracks sought out Ralf Behrendt, along with Lange and Hossfield, to find out what had happened to the rest of Saâda Bonaire’s recordings. As a result, the label was able to compile the original single with eleven previously unreleased tracks ripe for rediscovery. Hearing the music in the present day only seems to amplify just how ahead of their time Saâda Bonaire were. Their existence just goes to show that, sometimes, all you need to form a groundbreaking band is a goal and willpower; the rest will fall into place.
