Tale of the Tape: The story behind DAF’s acerbic gem ‘Alles ist gut’
It’s now 45 years since Alles ist gut, DAF’s most pivotal album and one of the essential records of Germany’s Neue Deutsche Welle movement.
Concurrent to New York’s no wave underground and the La Movida Madrileña that struck Spain’s musical fringes, the post-punk found a mutoid permutation across numerous cities and towns across the country, with potent flashes sparking amid Berlin and Düsseldorf’s counterculture. Reigniting the febrile artistry that scored the Krautrock scene a decade earlier, the new wave unleashed a disparate cluster of eclectic but like-minded punks and synth enthusiasts eager to forge a new German musical identity.
Right at the fore, among the likes of Einstürzende Neubauten’s industrial racket and the Dada theatre of Der Plan, stood DAF. An acronym for Deutsch-Amerikanische Freundschaft, the avant-garde collective would release 1979’s Ein Produkt der Deutsch-Amerikanischen Freundschaft and the following year’s Die Kleinen und die Bösen, the first LP release for Mute Records, in the vein of loose, punk-spiked experimental music veering between abrasive electronics and arresting garage thrash.
It was 1981’s Alles ist gut, which heralded the arrival of a skewed pop ingenuity, however. Reduced to the core duo of Robert Görl and Gabriel Delgado-López, DAF furthered their relationship with famed producer Conny Plank and sought to cut an infinitely more steamier and irreverent take on the burgeoning synthpop exploding from the UK and sweeping across Europe, piquing the interest of Virgin Records boss Richard Branson to take a punt on the pair.
The album marked DAF’s new Mk II arrival with a seizing cover. Bathed in sweat and homoerotic allure, Delgado-López’s ambiguous front, a fraught waver between amorous invitation and cornered hostility, illustrated the new direction Alles ist gut had embraced. Gone were the unbolted experiments of old; DAF’s third LP dealt with sinewy, pulsing electropunk at its most slithering. Fed through a taut filter of razor synths and meaty resonance, Delgado-López’s panicked, vocal commands march slightly out of step with Görl’s martial percussion attack, all eagerly eschewing music’s heritage as well as clamouring for the physical within the machine.
“I never understood why this fresh movement, punk, was using the instruments of the fathers, the guitars,” Delgado-López told The Quietus in 2017. “We wanted to create music that had no tradition at all, certainly not the Anglo-American rock tradition.”
Later, Görl further attested to DAF’s fascination with the primal in their beefy synth skulk, “We wanted to bring muscles. We did punk as electronic – very energetic, very body-orientated.”
A conceptual anchorage towards the base would lie in DAF’s lyrical collages. As well as the carnal beat between analogue sequencers and live drumming, the pair would spit refrains and repeated mantras suiting their sturdy, Teutonic tongues. None would prove so gleefully provocative as ‘Der Mussolini’, the synthpunk classic bristling with vascular ARP Odyssey pummel while Delgado-López chants to “tanz der Mussolini” and “tanz der Adolf Hitler”, prodding the German nation’s hobgoblins with desecrating irony. In an era still stuck in post-war silence, such dancefloor lyricism ruffled serious feathers among the establishment harbouring fresh memories of the country’s Nazi past.
Along with the toybox eccentricity of ‘Der Räuber und der Prinz’ and ‘Sato-Sato’s illicit hiss, Alles ist gut would turn heads in the punk and electronic subterranean, if making little commercial splash. DAF’s third album would kickstart their so-called ‘Virgin Trilogy’, followed by Gold und Liebe in the same year and 1982’s Für immer, before announcing the first of their on-off hiatuses just as the NDW scene grew too popular for their liking.
The world of electropunk and EBM would play catch-up in due time, Belgium’s Front 242 eschewing frigid coldwave for a more bruising industrial attack, and London’s Nitzer Ebb would sharpen their synths for the string of belligerent albums they’d drop with Mute, but so much of the alternative world across the 1980s and beyond would owe a debt to DAF’s insectoid disco, Alles ist gut still glowing with dripping, alien allure all these years later.
Never Miss A Beat
The Far Out Post-Punk Newsletter
All the latest Post-Punk content from the independent voice of culture.
Straight to your inbox.