This is it boys, this is war

Act: Nena
Title: 99 Red Balloons
Year: 1984
Chart peak: 1

It's surely no accident that on the international league-table of UK hitmakers, Germans come a long way down the list. There's just something about Germanic vowels that sounds wrong to Anglophone ears, and there are really only two ways of getting around it: either go for an air of detached teutonic cool (Kraftwerk, Propaganda), or shout a lot (Wagner). But what's this? Step forward, Gabrielle "Nena" Kerner, a German singer who somehow made those Germanic vowels sound rather good.

Nena-the-singer formed Nena-the-band in 1981 after her previous group, The Stripes, disbanded. Joining her were her boyfriend Rolf Brendel (drums), Joern-Uwe Fahrenkrog-Peterson (keyboards), Carlo Karges (guitar) and Jurgen Dehmel (bass). Their sprightly new-wave sound (rather like a deutsche Blondie) was an immediate success in their native Germany, their debut single "Nur geträumt" going to number one.

But "99 Red Balloons" - or rather, "99 Luftballons" - was the biggie. The first verse, a near-acapella, has Nena and her unnamed companion buying some balloons and letting them go - and then when they do, all hell breaks loose. The swarm of party acoutrements triggers a computer somewhere, the air force is scrambled, war ministers convene, the music switches back and forth between frantic keyboard riffs and a more sedate funky bass solo until the inevitable happens: the end of the world. And if the hairs on the back of your neck don't stand up when Nena sings "and here is a red balloon" in the coda, then you must be either bald or dead.

The scary thing is that the scenario wasn't even that far fetched, because in the early 80s the US military was placed on full-scale nuclear alert repeatedly for unidentifed flying things that turned out to completely innocent - weather balloons, model gliders, particularly well-fed geese, that sort of thing. How close did we actually come to an accidental nuclear war? Probably closer than we'll ever know. Don't have nightmares.



With so much power coming from the lyric, it seems bizarre that in most Anglophone nations, the song was a hit in its original German version. People were actually buying the record not understanding what it was about (though as the German version was more about UFOs attacking from outer space - hence, presumably, the Captain Kirk reference, which survived to the English translation - that's probably just as well). In the USA, it was issued with the German version on one side and the English version on the other, which seems a reasonable compromise though strangely not copied in the UK where the flipside was an unrelated song... in German! The UK album which followed had one side in English and the other in German, and included both versions of the hit, though the English one was included in a bizarre, very 1980s extended club mix.

Nena-the-band went on for another couple of years before splitting, and Nena-the-singer has released a whole load of albums in Europe, many of them for children. In 2003, she teamed up with Kim Wilde for a Euro hit "Anyplace, Anywhere, Anytime" which failed to do anything in the UK. Her latest LP, a set of cover versions called "Cover Me", is to be released next month.

Sadly Carlo Karges, co-writer of "99 Luftballons", died in 2002 of liver failure, but the song will live on for a long time to come. Not only has Nena-the-singer remade it a few times, but it's been covered by countless other acts (albeit ones with even fewer hits to their credit!) and it's regularly held up as one of the definitive one hit wonders of all time - even making it into the title of Brent Mann's excellent book on US one-hitters, "99 Red Balloons... and 100 Other All Time Great One Hit Wonders". Hang on, shouldn't that be "99 Luftballons..."?

And more than two decades on, Nena-the-singer is still the epitome of German new-wave cool. And notice I didn't even mention her hairy armpi... damn.