written by Marian Gold, Bernhard Lloyd and Frank Mertens

produced by Colin Pearson, Wolfgang Loos and Andreas Budde

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Germany’s Alphaville is a three-piece synth-pop band I’m almost a

bit embarrassed to say I failed to unearth for a long, long time. It

wasn’t actually till circa 2006, probably, when I found a sort of...

what you might call a specialty CD, called ’80s Cardio Mix, by The

Chris Phillips Project—which is in fact exactly what it sounds like. (Actually... technically, it’s just called Cardio Mix, but any ’80s music aficionado can take one look at the track listing and know it’s a dedication to the decadent decade.) It was released in 2004, and contains 15 tracks originally from the ’80s, amounting to just about an hour long total. The tracks are up-tempo exercise-style versions of the songs, one leading straight into the next with no breaks in between, and steadily increasing just a bit in tempo with each track. The album’s become really special to me since, and something I put in the middle of a dance/exercise playlist to speed-walk to. I recognized the first 14 tracks from the beginning. (The original artists/bands are not printed on the Cardio Mix CD’s packaging, so even if you’re an ’80s pop junkie, there might still be a bit of detective work involved.) Number 15 is entitled “Forever Young.”

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Aha, I thought, well, there’re a lot of songs called “Forever Young,” both hits and non-hits. My first thoughts were Rod Stewart, and then the Carol Parks lullaby from Care Bears Movie II (in The List, found here). Those were the only ’80s “Forever Young”s I knew... Bob Dylan had a hit with his own “Forever Young” in the ’70s—famously covered by The Pretenders in ’94—which Rod Stewart’s mirrored in sentiment. (Bob and Rod felt there should be a little discernable difference, so they carried quite different-sounding beats.) So you might imagine my surprise when I listened to Cardio Mix, reached the final track... and didn’t recognize it at all. I looked up the lyrics.

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...Alphaville?

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I did not know this name. This, I thought, must be a one-hit wonder. That I was correct about. (Unless of course they’re your favorite band, in which case everything they’ve recorded is a mega-hit.) I found out the song came out in September ’84, from this Münster, West Germany band I’d literally never heard of. Oh, I’d have found it eventually via some other source. But when I listened to it and then bought it on iTunes... my mind was blown. I thought... this is an inCREDIBLE song!! HOW have I never heard this before now?? It helped that I heard this awesome cardio version first, and so I knew the original one would be pretty cool. But... not quite this cool. There’s a reason it’s since ranked up there with my absolute favorite songs of all time. As an American, to my ear, acts from other lands around the globe have a way of bearing songs with a sort of... unique, homemade touch in their production. The music video’s similar, with a parade of young and old souls passing through a diamond-shaped portal, ostensibly into... a realm of eternal youth. All I can say is words won’t do it justice. So don’t take mine for it; by all means, see for yourself.

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P.S. Also included here is the song’s Special Dance Version, an offering on the 12” maxi of the single. You can see in the YT video title that it was added as a cut on the special edition re-release of the Forever Young album in 2019, as tends to happen when classic albums are remade. This differs from traditional (re)mixes in that for this version, lead singer Marian Gold recorded the vocals anew.

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Have notes to add? Let me know!

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YT:

full original version

full Special Dance Version

music video

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Alphaville’s official website