Alfred Hilsberg

Alfred Hilsberg at the Pop-Up 2006 music fair

Alfred Hilsberg (* 1947 in Wolfsburg ) is a German music journalist and label owner.

Life

Hilsberg was involved in the spread of punk in the Federal Republic of Germany from 1978 . In the music magazine Sounds (issue 3/78) he presented the Cologne / Düsseldorf punk scene with the article “Rodenkirchen is burning”. A year later, he coined the term Neue Deutsche Welle (NDW) in another Sounds article .

As head of his record label Zigzack , he promoted bands such as Abwärts , Einstürzende Neubauten , Die Krupps , FSK , Palais Schaumburg , Die Tödliche Doris , The Wirtschaftswunder , Die Zimmermänner and Xmal Deutschland . Musically, in his opinion less interesting, but later commercially successful bands such as Trio or Extrabreit , he rejected them. In the first five years of existence, ZickZack released over 100 vinyl records and cassettes.

Despite the musical difference, the end of the NDW hype also had an impact on Hilsberg's label: Financially stricken, he, like many of his bands, did not have much left of early success at times. His work from then, however, had a strong influence on the work of the West Berlin genius dilettante scene and the Hamburg school . Since 1992 Alfred Hilsberg has continued his work with the newly founded label What's So Funny About . The first Blumfeld albums and albums by Die Erde , 39 Clocks , Die Haut , Cpt. Kirk &. , Mother , Knarf Rellöm and Saalschutz . Alfred Hilsberg discovered the monostars . In 1997, together with Ray van Zeschau's label Strandard63, he subsequently released the 1991 LP by the Friends of the Italian Opera Um Thron und Liebe on CD. Since 2000, artists such as Rummelsnuff , Woog Riots and Jens Friebe have been able to thank him for their entry into the music business. Also Parole Trixi , one of the first German-speaking Riot Grrrl bands. Since 2010 he has published bands like Doctorella , Candelilla and The Schwarzenbach.

In the long-term documentary We will always go on (George Lindt, Ingolf Rech), Alfred Hilsberg is presented with his work - using current and historical film clips, a biographical text ( and guilt is only the Hamburger Sparkasse ) and accompanying interviews about his work.

In their 2001 book Take Your youth of Jürgen Teipel MoP occurs on the German music scene between Berlin, Hamburg and Dusseldorf from late 1976 to July 1983 as ambitious motor. Hilsberg is also mentioned as a relevant contributor to the music scene of the time in the book Ärger mit der Immortlichkeit ( Sven Regener , Andreas Dorau ), published in 2015 . Even with his commercially successful bands from the early days, Alfred Hilsberg never made an account of the sales that had taken place, so that these bands almost without exception turned to other labels. The fact that he has the image of the selfless idealist and bankrupt, in addition to the method of “better to produce too much than too little”, is sometimes seen as his very special business method.

The biography, The ZigZag Principle , published in 2016 . Alfred Hilsberg - A life for the underground goes back to Hilsberg's plan to write a cultural history of the Federal Republic of Germany from below. A life story in the true sense was not planned. Due to a long-term illness that kept him from writing, his author's contract was terminated and his co-author Christof Meueler, who had been active until then, was given the task of writing a biography. According to Hilsberg's information, the first two thirds of the book can be traced back to the pages he had written up to then. In the last third, not everything is true, and it doesn't explain why certain things happened the way they did. In contrast, biographer Meueler stated in the Tagesspiegel that the planned autobiography was not feasible because of Hilsberg's "grandeur and legend".

literature

• Christof Meueler: The zigzag principle. Alfred Hilsberg - A life for the underground . Wilhelm Heyne Verlag, Munich 2016, ISBN 978-3-453-16803-9 .

Web links

• Website of the labels ZickZack and What's So Funny About
• Article by Alfred Hilsberg in Sounds magazine , October 1979
• Interview with Hilsberg in the magazine NMI Neue Musik Information , July 1991
• Interview with Hilsberg in the Ok-Fanzine , 2002

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Christof Meueler: The zigzag principle. Alfred Hilsberg - A life for the underground . Munich 2016, p. 23.
2. ↑ In the extra section “Come to Hagen”, Alfred Hilsberg is therefore mentioned disparagingly (“Forget Hilsberg and his high school students”).
3. ↑ We will always go on (book and DVD film, ISBN 978-3-943967-01-2 )
4. ↑ They didn't understand punk . Interview with Alfred Hilsberg, specifically 5/2016, p. 52.
5. ↑ In the Paradise of the Unadjusted , article by Gerrit Bartels in the Tagesspiegel of April 22, 2016.