Hans-A-Plast Live At Rockpalast 1980 (CD & DVD)

(MIG) 16 Tracks, DVD Sound: Stereo 2.0; Picture:4:3 /NTSC; Country Code:0, Runtime:70 Min
The Neue Welle band Hans-à-Plast, consisting of two couples, had their first performance in November 1978 at the first No-Fun-Festival in a small youth center in Hanover. The former anti-nuclear song group, which had agitated passers-by in pedestrian zones and sung "Wehrt euch, leistet Widerstand," was fed up with "all the debating at the university."

Instead of thinking for hours and practicing for three years, they got right down to business. In no time at all, they familiarized Annette Benjamin, whom they remembered fondly from the performance of their Braunschweig band Schleim at the No Fun Festival, with their repertoire, so that they had a singer who was very well received not only by the audience, but also by Alfred Hilsberg, who booked her twice for his Markthallen festivals and wrote in the music magazine Sounds: "Annette has the best temperature of all the new bands. There's an energy coming out that can smoothly sing you to pieces."

But not only was she "the absolute hammer," as Sounds editor Michael O. R. Kröher later recalled, but so were the rest of the group. "This was a real rock band."

 

Live, Hans-à-Plast were hell, in the classic sense "clearers without end" (Kröher), their concerts regularly turned halls into seething cauldrons of witches, and they performed wherever they had an opportunity - at an antifa festival in Berlin as well as at the Hamburg punk club Krawall 2000 or at the Wuppertal Börse, where they also met the Fehlfarben, who soon had only one goal: to sell more records than they did.

Instead of waiting for a record company to make them an offer, they recorded an LP, which they initially sold themselves, mainly after their concerts. The cover, a burning rat, had been designed for them by cartoonist Uli Stein, and the record sold like hotcakes thanks to songs like "Rock'n'Roll Friday" and "(Was tun, wenn) Es brennt".

 

The Sounds critics chose her debut album for Rowohlt's Bunte Liste as one of the 15 most important records of the seventies. The Süddeutsche Zeitung called Annette Benjamin "the most impressive stage personality of the New German Wave". And on the occasion of their second LP, on the cover of which a knitting pattern was depicted, the Augsburger Allgemeine praised them for "not putting a plaster over their mouths" but for polemicizing "provocatively against the sanctified prosperity of an unhealthy world.

There were plenty of offers from major companies, but they tended to make fun of them. So they demanded from WEA not only complete control in terms of production and marketing, but also a special catering for the drummer's dog. And instead of signing a well-paid contract there, they preferred to found their own label, which granted them all the autonomy in the world and where people didn't look funny when they took a baby break at the height of their career.

However, even they were powerless against the sellout of the new German wave that the major record companies ignited with the inflationary release of so-called NDW groups. By the time their third album Ausradiert was released in 1983, Sounds had already been sold to Swiss publisher Jürg Marquard and the music landscape had changed tremendously. Singing German was suddenly frowned upon again, and it was clear to everyone involved that they couldn't afford another break. But then the singer, who was tired of being constantly snubbed on stage, became pregnant, and Hans-à-Plast's comeback tour became their farewell tour.

Her appearance on Rockpalast, however, remained unforgotten. If only because of Annette Benjamin's verbalization of the usual greeting there: "Der Rockpalast - zu Gast bei Hans-à-Plast."