Pancake (band)
Pancake is a German rock band from the 1970s and early 1980s.
history
The forerunner of the band was the school band “Nyrvana Pancake”, founded in Winnenden near Stuttgart in 1971 , which originally played rock music with a psychedelic touch. In 1972 she released a first single called "Open Your Eyes". In 1974 the name was shortened. But it wasn't until 1975, with the album "Roxy Elephant", that they caused a sensation in the German krautrock scene. The work recorded with the line-up Walter Negele (guitar), Werner Bauer (bass), singer Hampy Nerlich, Tommy Metzger (guitar), who later joined the Hanoverian band Victory as Tommy Newton , and Kono Konopik, later Anyone's Daughter (drums), received positive reviews and was recently re-released on CD on the Garden Of Delights label .
In 1976 the band was reshuffled several times. From then on she devoted herself to a symphonic variety of progressive rock and replaced the second guitar with keyboards. In the line-up of Hans Derer (drums), who came from Anyone's Daughter, Peter Indrak (bass), Heinz Bertsch (keyboards) and Rainer Röhm (vocals), they performed several times and got a record deal with the small Heidelberg label Blubberlips, das 1977 released the album "Out Of the Ashes". In the summer of 1978 Bertsch was replaced by keyboardist Tommy Kircher, Indrak by then 17-year-old Klaus Scharff, a talented bassist who - coming from the group "Siddhartha" - later became known as the producer of the Fantastischen Vier . For singer Rainer Röhm, who was not replaced at first, Hans Derer briefly took over the vocal parts. With this creatively very productive quartet line-up, the band embarked on a much acclaimed short tour in September 1978, of which there is also a sound document - a 16-minute version of the song "Roxy Elephant" with lots of rhythm changes. This work, recorded with a simple cassette recorder over a mixer, can be heard as a bonus track on the 2008 CD edition of "Out of the Ashes". Immediately after the tour, the band hired a singer for the first time: Biggy Zmiercak.
While Scharff left in 1979 and was replaced by Ralf Scheibe (bass), keyboardist Tommy Kircher left the band in the middle of the production of the third album to join the Italian group "Sphinx". Although many of the compositional ideas came from Kircher, the group quickly managed to find a replacement: Uli Frank, a keyboard player from Stuttgart who is now also active in the Aqua Loca group. The band recorded the album "No Illusions" with him and also went on tour. However, although the LP, which was even distributed worldwide, was well received by some critics and songs like "No Touch of Illusion" were heard on the radio a few times, the group broke up in May 1981. In January 2013, the Garden Of Delights label also released this album - and enriched it with unreleased studio recordings from 1980 and a one-off live runion concert from 2002.
With the singer Alix Koch, the group then started a German rock project called "Alix" (1981 to 1983), with which the band played many concerts, but a studio album produced by the musician Lenny McDowell was never released. Negele, Frank and Derer wrote some songs that - under different project names - were released on high-circulation hit samplers. The two best known: The song "Märchenfee", which was also integrated into the musical "Nachtkind" by Chris Evans and Walter Wigand, and "Mann aus Eis", which has been covered several times - including a version by the punk band Normahl and the According to Negele, Pancake's "legitimate successor" group: Late . On their debut CD "Remember the Time", released in 2006, you will find, in addition to "Mann aus Eis", several songs by Derer, Negele and Frank that were composed during the pancake period. Among other things, the title "Panmade", a driving instrumental piece with which both Pancake and the group "Alix" opened their live concerts.
In 2018 Frank and Negele released another album together with singer Regina Riegel under the name Gina Is Late.
Discography
- 1972: Open Your Eyes (single, as Nyrvana Pancake)
- 1975: Roxy Elephant
- 1978: Out of the Ashes
- 1980: No Illusions
- 2008: "Roxy Elephant" (new edition as CD)
- 2010: "Out Of The Ashes" (new edition with live bonus track)
- 2012: "Pancake Live (2002)" (only as download album)
- 2013: "No Illusions" (new edition on CD with unreleased bonus tracks)
As Late : "Remember The Times" (2006)