After the band split, Remigius Drechsler went to Embryo for a while before forming his own project, Kontrast. There were other line-ups during the last period of the band. My grandparents, both tailors, got a larger apartment there after being bombed out at the end of World War II. My mother also lived there, but she left me to my grandmother after she separated from my father.
The wedding had been canceled just before I was born and she wanted to be free again and also be able to work. She studied violin and he oboe and drums on the side. Sadly, all the student parties with lots of music took place in the apartment before I was born, and what was left was a piano in the living room on which I struck a few keys every now and then. That told me a lot about my attitude towards music, or at least I thought it did.
What I remember of him is only a shadow bending over me once in the kitchen and a faint impression of him coming down the stairs when my grandmother took me to visit him at his work once when I was four. Then he moved to Cologne and only the monthly payments were telling that he still existed. Years later, when I was touring the area with Out of Focus, I tried to visit him, but learned from a neighbour that he had moved to Andernach a year ago.
And again quite some years later, passing Andernach on the way home, I thought of looking for him, but was already too tired for a stop and drove on. Not long after that he died, and his two sisters and his second son contacted me, and then we met for the first time, and they told me many stories about my father. What was very sad and at the same time completely crazy was that after my brother here, Johann, who had worked with Out of Focus as a roadie for a while, had tragically died just two weeks before in an accident while on vacation in Croatia, that I have been given a new brother, so to speak.
At that time, a lot of classical music was broadcast, and the weekly hit parade, which I always waited for. But neither Mozart, Beethoven or Bach, nor all that mostly rather boring pop music could really grab me and it took a few more years until the Beatles entered the world.
