Music was my first love
Hello dear viewers, I am Lo Brandis, also known as Lothar Brandes. I want to tell you a story about a German musician who is not Eminem, Mick Jagger, Taylor Swift, or Sir Elton John. I will share the stages I have gone through, what was interesting, what was beautiful, what was super good, and what was bad. Yes, that's how life goes. It all started with Hendrix. I was and still am a Hendrix fan. But Hendrix on the piano? Can that work? Of course it can.
Hendrix was not only a brilliant guitarist but also had great songs behind him. I then thought, maybe it works on the piano too. I tried it, I sat down and actually, I believe it works. What do you think?
How did I get into music? As a child, I started playing the piano very early on, then in school bands, in different formations, and then I entered the professional music scene with the group FEE during the Neue Deutsche Welle era. We had a good run, selling 150,000 LPs (yes, LPs were still a thing back then). We had a lot of fun and went on tour a lot. It was a great time.
In 1984, I moved to Hamburg and founded the advertising music production company "modern toys music" together with my partner, guitarist, singer, and composer Kelvyn Hallifax. I was born in London and also made music there, released records, and then sailed to New York. I then went on a tour of Germany with an American band and coincidentally got into advertising music through my girlfriend.
We were very lucky and immediately started full-on in the business. We won international awards, including two Gold Clios in New York for Marlboro and Pizza Hut. We also won many awards at the Cannes Advertising Film Festival and had a lot of work. The business was booming, but it was also hard work.
Now, let's talk about some interesting examples of commercials we produced between 1985 and 1995. You can really see that things were a bit different back then.
The band Kraftwerk made a jingle for Expo 2000 that was 4 seconds long and cost 400,000 DM. Some people thought that was too much. Günter Jauch said he wanted to reproduce this jingle with us within 10 minutes. So, we went to Cologne and tried it. We had 10 minutes. Günter Jauch sang "Expo 2000" and we actually managed to add the vocoder effect within 10 minutes, making it sound like Kraftwerk, well, sort of.
Here comes one of my more classical-inspired compositions for piano. I moved away from Hamburg and settled in the countryside. And then I wrote a piece called River Wabe, so River Wabe now, or would you rather see an advertisement? Preferably Ajax or Tesla or Audi or Ford or joint lubricant or a Step Fresh Peach spray?
In a state of deep relaxation, it occurred to me that I had studied before. So, I took a position teaching music and English at Hamm Gymnasium in Hamburg. In the absence of a film crew, I placed my smartphone on the music stand of the Steinway grand piano and recorded a music lesson. The task for the students was to paint a picture based on my music.
The students loved it. Gift of Love is an idea that my partner Jasmin Kray and I had in Hamburg - namely a website, a website where you could choose music offerings for specific occasions, for specific events, and it should work like a digital greeting card. But in this case, it was a bit more, you could choose a song on the website that matched the occasion, and then you could simply record a text directly on your phone without any registration or anything. A greeting text or something up to 30 seconds. It would then be automatically mixed into the music, and you would have a personal message that you could send. It was quick, it came immediately via email, and you could listen to it and send it right away. A brilliant idea, actually, but unfortunately, after financing the programming, we lacked the funds for promotion. Yeah, that wasn't so nice. Give it a listen.
Well, you have to do something for your health too. So, I instrumentalized - orchestrated - composed music for yoga films, well, in any case, I made music for it. No one loses out on that, right? Or how was it, cat thread?
Dear listeners who have made it this far, and dear musicians, keep making music. Music has always helped me in good times and bad. The money is there. It's just elsewhere, with the streaming platforms, the record labels, the multinational corporations. Stay tuned, follow me on YouTube and Instagram for what I like to do with this music.
