Masquerade – Guardian Angel
#quotefromthe80s
I feel I'm falling apart 'cause I know I've lost my guardian angel
A fleeting glimpse of your heart losing by
From the start, no return
And things will never be the same
#Masquerade #GuardianAngel
Sometimes in the 80s it happened that a song a little out of the box, often not English but perhaps coming from other European countries, managed to break through the tastes of teenagers exactly because of its originality, and became an international success. It happened with Falco and Der Kommissar, with Lio and Amoureux Solitaires, and with many others. But on December 11, 1983, a truly unique song for many reasons came out. A beautiful song with a solemn, symphonic, almost lyrical melody. This song broke into the world of pop, but very little was known about its authors. First, because it did not have a video of its own, and therefore it was not broadcast on circuits such as MTV. Then, because the group that performed it, Masquerade, was completely unknown. Finally, and this is perhaps the characteristic that made it even more particular, because the performers appeared dressed in a makeup and covered with masks, and were never interviewed in the programs in which they were guests. They were announced, they sang, they left.
Masquerade didn’t really exist, they were one of the many projects of a truly unique character in the scenario of German music, a very special author. We are talking about Drafi Deutscher, a German musician and singer of Hungarian origins, settled in Hamburg, who had found some success already in the 60s. Mind you: he was not just an ordinary guy, because he had composed a lot of famous songs for other performers, and I quote one for all: Belfast by Boney M, produced by Frank Farian, the producer behind the Milli Vanilli scandal, discovered lip-synching in a performance of Girl you know it’s true.
Drafi Deutscher lived his entire life as a mysterious and somewhat out of the box character: he was certainly a bizarre and independent professional, gifted with great musical talent. Together with an English musician and keyboardist who had also settled in Hamburg, Chris Evans-Ironside, he composed the beautiful Guardian Angel. Evans had put in synthesizers and some electronics, and Drafi Deutscher had put everything else in it, including vocals.
And here the first mystery arises, because the song is apparently sung by two voices, one lower and one higher, even if they are actually not that different. Well, it seems that both voices were recorded by Drafi Deutscher himself. We said that the song did not have a real video, but even in the TV interpretations Drafi Deutscher never appeared. On the net there are references to some of his troubles with justice due to unspecified crimes, but in short, it seems that he could not attend personally. But I’m sure that even if he could, he wouldn’t have done it, otherwise there would have been no reason to launch a project with an unknown stage name.
As we said, two men always appeared in the TV broadcasts, one generally dressed in black and one in white, both with a face painted in white, and one of them wore a white mask. When interviewed about who these two characters were, Drafi himself replied that he did not know, and that the production company had sought two actors or two dancers for TV performances. After all, this was the approach of producer Frank Farian, who has always distinguished voice and image: it is said that even the voice of Boney M was not the voice of Bobby Farrell, but was that of Farian himself, and certainly the voices of Milli Vanilli weren’t those of Rob and Fab, who barely spoke English in their interviews.
Searching on the internet we find at least different people who lent their image to the Masquerade project, and in fact looking at the videos of the broadcasts sometimes you see a man wearing mustaches and other times not. Two boys from Hamburg, Hans Pitzinger and Heinrich Metzger, were generally hired for the appearances in Germany. In other programs, however, there are different characters that could be Ole Olsen and Günther Urban. I agree that the names do not say much, but I think it is correct to mention them, because without them the song would have lost part of its charm and its mystery. And when we remember this beautiful song today, the images of these mysterious singers immediately come to mind.
Deutscher composed the song in English, and then versions were made in various languages. The German version Jenseits von Eden (“Beyond Eden”) was sung by a person Deutscher knew well, an Italian-German singer who used the stage name of Nino de Angelo, a dark-haired guy (now a white-haired senior) born Domenico Gerhard Gorgoglione, who also recorded an Italian version with the title La Valle dell’Eden.
Drafi Deutscher had a series of health problems as early as the late 1990s, and left us in June 2006, just turned sixty.
Guardian Angel was a resounding success, and topped the charts in countless countries. The one-of-a-kind genius of Drafi Deutscher had entered the history of the 1980s. Of course in incognito, under a mask!
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