Band: Happy Straps
Label: tapetopia & aufnahme + wiedergabe, Berlin
Year: 2023
C-50, hand numbered edition of 100
Artwork: Laireen & tapetopia
Liner notes: Henryk Gericke
€ 12.00
Postage & packing not included
Happy Straps was deeply rooted in East Berlin’s alternative scene in the mid 1980s. Café Mosaik was a hotbed of the bohemian scene in Prenzlauer Berg, where dreamers, freaks and artists would meet – ‘negative elements’ who would positively charge each other’s batteries or drive each other insane about their prospects of finally being allowed to leave the GDR. At Café Mosaik Chris Schwartinsky and Jörg (‘Heini’) Heinemann, who had founded the band in Frankfurt-Oder in 1983, met Claudia Böhme and asked her to join the band as a singer. In this line-up the band illegally opened for various GDR bands with state permits, which Happy Straps themselves never bothered to apply for. In the rehearsal space of one of those official bands – Feeling B – Happy Straps found refuge and Feeling B’s casio player Christian ‘Flake’ Lorenz, who would later become the keyboardist of Rammstein, contributed to both Happy Strap cassettes. The two Happy Straps tapes were released in editions of 50 copies as What a Pleasure in 1985 and Last Pleasure in 1986. But by the end of 1986 all band members had left the GDR to start new projects in the West, such as Gunjah, Johnson Noise and Rammstein. Tapetopia’s cassette Pleasures 1985-1986 combines both Happy Straps tapes.
(based on the liner notes by Henryk Gericke)
tapetopia is a series of releases based on cassettes from East Germany’s 80s underground, particularly from the East Berlin Mauerstadt music scene, featuring original layouts and track lists. For over 30 years after their initial “release” the music on these tapes was neither available on vinyl nor CD, but they were important statements in the canon of the GDR subculture. Despite the miniscule number of original cassettes in circulation at the time many of the bands were popular in countercultural circles, a factor that made them highly suspect among the government’s own inner circles. tapetopia is run from Berlin by Henryk Gericke.
