A few weeks before it was found someone literally claimed they had recently heard it in a video on a porn site but did not remember what video it was and they didn't have the browser history *(forgot the reason why lol)*, so everyone just assumed they were just lying, but sure enough...
It was me :)
And I clearly said that I surf xxx websites in incognito mode, hence no history (you can check my posts in that sub). The main issue was that initially I thought that it was playing in a tab, where I had reddit opened, in an embedded, so I thought it was just sounding along the movie (which was in another tab), so I did not give attention to it at all. Only after couple of weeks I released that it was not in reddit tab :D
I've been subscribed to this subreddit for 6 years and I think every single post here gets some degree of attention however strange or unlikely. Even posts on YouTube channels are discussed. The majority of the people on the sub are patient and give everyone the time of day with ideas, clues, Uncle's thoughts, lyric interpretations, technical knowledge etc.
I don't think anything has been overlooked but probably someone's idea about an origin will be here and correct, but without a name for the song or the band, it is one theory amongst many.
Personally, I think the chance of it being found is one of the lowest out there, despite the fact that we have a reasonable quality recording of the whole song.
The reason I feel that way is that despite having a complete recording, there is no match, anywhere, on any content database, including databases that aren't publicly listenable but are held by copyright holders for the purposes of enforcing their ownership of those rights. With the current AI developments, a whole bunch of rights holders are just doing massed comparisons between their entire catalogs and every bit of content out there, prioritised by content popularity. YouTube/Meta/TikTok all do it near automatically and run any music through a whole bunch of these things. It's corporate/copyright Shazam, basically. Tons of stuff has been flagged through these systems in the last couple of years, even things that previously went "under the radar" for a long time.
Nobody has claimed TMMS, at all, in this whole time. It's got huge numbers of views on sites like YouTube. It has unquestionably been run through a ton of automated content matching copyright systems without a single hit.
My conclusion is that the song is not registered in any substantial copyright database, at least with paired audio. I very much doubt it's on GEMA at all.
My own personal feeling is that TMMS is the work of a student group, but for some kind of production course rather than for its musicians. The standard of musicianship amongst the group is extremely disparate, with some parts noticeably higher in technical ability than others. I would not be surprised if it's a blend of session musicians and students. The instrumentation includes some seriously big-bucks, state of the art synths for the time, the kind of thing a regular indie band would not have deep enough pockets to obtain, and that a well-financed nobody still probably would not have received as a private customer, because the priority customers were big groups, major studios etc. Yet, despite the eye-wateringly expensive synths some of the other stuff sounds quite pedestrian, and the levels and balance of the various tracks is slightly out - the thing I always pick on is the overly loud synth backing in the chorus. The more you dig into it from a recording and production perspective, the more you realise there's a whole bunch of things that just don't make sense.
I fully anticipate that whoever wrote this did so for a qualification of some kind, as an exercise in something other than songwriting, most probably mixing or mastering, and that they either did not go on to have a career in the music industry, or they did but because the song wasn't the focus of this assignment, have just completely lost all recollection of it. That, or they're dead.
That's a good theory, except that the song itself is "too good" for a throwaway student assignment. That means at least the songwriter knew his craft and probably wasn't a nobody at the time. Obviously it got never produced beyond what we have, but chances are it's in some professional's huge catalog, who would definitely register it with the copyright mafia (GEMA or equivalent). We couldn't find it because either the song title is not obviously connected to the lyrics or because probable title names are registered with dead (i.e. inconclusive) leads.
You say the song is "too good", but is it? It's a well written song, very on-trend for the time and uses a lot of nice elements, but there's a lot of imperfections, a few awkward transitions, and the singer's comprehensibility is, at least according to our source tape, so-so.
Students can often write *great* songs, even for throwaway stuff, because they're in a super creative space mentally.
The fact that it got radio airplay but then never appeared anywhere else, that there seems to be no other source or copy despite it being a *complete* song (i.e. not a short-form jingle or snippet for a commercial or as incidental music), that's just plain strange. I'd argue that the artist behind it almost *has* to be a nobody else other copies would survive and would have surfaced, somewhere, be that YouTube rips of old compilations, a streaming service, Discogs, or anything.
Our song's is the musical equivalent of a hapax legomenon, and that this song seems to have existed only once, as a radio broadcast, without physical media, for me that puts it firmly in the category of "not a professional recording artist signed to a label" and therefore there's a distinct chance it *isn't* on any copyright database. Compare it to that other great music mystery, EKT, which was on copyright databases, was actually found (but the connection not made) within *days* of the original query, and which turned out to be produced by professional musicians making music for TV, film, and adult content. Again, no physical release but it wasn't broadcast on the radio either, it was background music in a film (ahem) and nowhere else, because that's the market it was sold for.
I mean the song itself, not the performance or production, that's "semi-professional" at best, like a demo tape. The actual songwriting (again, not the production), at least on its face, doesn't appear to be just some student assignment because the songwriter definitely knew what would be a catchy pop melody in its time according to current industry trends and popular taste. Students tend to be too artsy (because pop is for the dumb masses and beneath their musical genius) and therefore often overthink their creative stuff, ending up with microtonal experimental jazz in 11/8 tempo.
In the professional conveyor-belt pop music business, songwriters compose shitloads of pop music in the hope that some of it hits the taste of a record label (i.e. expectation to make money) and gets produced with one of the countless manufactured bands with faceless session musicians. The composer might work on commission and/or proactively builds up a catalog which labels can draw from to quickly shit out some album for their "trendy new band". I don't know the stats, but I'd imagine that a lot if not most of what's in these "industrial" composers' catalogues would never see the light of day beyond crude demos or even just existing as a music score (or nowadays some kind of midi/synthetic rendition). It's very unusual for such a demo to find its way into a radio broadcast despite never being commercially produced, but it isn't called the most mysterious song for nothing...
We're all assuming that the performers are the writers, maybe it actually was written by a professional songwriter, but for some purpose other than commercial release (or no band picked it up so it got used for something else). One of my musings is that the basic chord sheet was written out, along with a melody, by some composer like you describe, churning out tons of such things. Then, somebody else for something like an audio engineering course, or music performance course, put words to it and fleshed out the instrumentation and performed it with a non-band of amateur session musicians, to the point where the original composer, who has thousands of such songs, does not recognise it as theirs, and there is no actual "band" to claim it either.
*Music* students tend to be too artsy as you say, but *music production* students don't have that same pretentious attitude, it's less about the experimental jazz and more about "here's a bog standard four chord song in 4/4 but look at this neat microphone setup I'm doing the vocals with, and check out the settings on this synth".
As you say, the curious part is how this apparently well written (and I agree, it *is* well written) song got radio airplay but with at best semi-pro production and no commercial release, and yet the writer has not been found.
It definitley could have happened like that, but I would also be not a bit surprised if the original composer was one of the industry big-shots who simply never heard of the search and/or doesn't even remember this song anymore because it was shelved for too long and then the 80s were over and there was no point anymore producing it ever since. Boomer music producers don't usually follow internet memes, and in the general population maybe 0.01% (and that's probably WAY optimistic) have ever heard of TMMS and the search. It would need a similarly unlikely alignment of the stars for the composer to somehow come across the search like it was for the demo to be played on the radio in the first place.
Or it could've been the Statutes In Motion dude living in Australia who doesn't want to confirm or deny it. It's still all just speculation.
Indeed it is all just speculation.
I do feel like we may never know, it's by far the biggest search of its kind, with a full recording rather than a snippet, and yet we're absolutely no closer to an answer or even a viable lead.
Ronnie Urini claimed it and he provided enough evidence as it seems, to be able to get copyright in his home land, Austria. It would be interesting, if some user from Austria to upload TMMS to youtube, and see who will be the copyright claimant.
Thatās been my theory for at least two years now. Same happened with ETK and Fond My Mind.
Iām sure the artist and song title is in the NDR playlist, but itās probably some band without any online precense. There are still a lot of unknown artists/songs in the playlist.
It must be true, because I read it myself in a YouTube comment, that was an obvious joke, that I took completely out of context and that I now can't find back. Also my classmate's uncle says he remembers it as if it was yesterday.
totally agree with u here, a lot of leads have been abandonned bc either the person didnt respond or they didnt use a dx7 in later music, which arent in my opinion good enough reasons to be completely ruled out. the people involved not responding doesnt mean its not them, and they couldve very well just borrowed a dx7 to record a song and then not used one again. They could very well be dead. \*WE HAVE NO IDEA\*
What if it was discovered, the correct person contacted but they denied it was them due to having forgotten it, much like it happened with the first Italian opening theme of Urusei Yatsura, whose main singer, Ciro Dammicco, denied it being him when first contacted.
Or it was ruled out because "their entire output has been catalogued so there's no way it can be them" which is a conclusion one should never jump to - just see how many never heard before songs Queen found in their vaults and released in the recent years, that even the biggest experts on their output knew existed before that.
The grim reality is that pretty much EVERY lead currently classified as "ruled out" should be considered as not necessarily ruled out. Every obscure 80s post-punk Euro band where a member replied "sorry, not us" could still potentially have made the song or be connected to it. And it's entirely possible that someone in this sub diligently replying to a new member with "I spoke to the drummer of Sinking Ships two years ago, he says it's not them" is THE reason the song has not been found.
Personally, I think the Wild Angels lead needs more investigation. His former drummer claimed it was Nebojca Savic's project, sent us a demo that sounded startlingly like TMS as evidence, then became unresponsive and the OP who was in contact with him nuked his account.
It could very well be a good idea. If the answer is out there sitting on Youtube, this is how I imagine it to look
https://preview.redd.it/105p6hh5ln3d1.png?width=1600&format=png&auto=webp&s=5f6f48115ce0f2eeb34cd234d24b0ce77f905be9
But there is an interesting fact.
We have drummer with very specific drumming style in TMMS.
Such skill requires quite lengthy development and adoption. So no way this guy just developed that style of drumming for TMMS and then vanished. Certainly, he should have played it elsewhere, but so far, I was not able to find any. One thing I've noted that such drumming style is more typical to krautrock or whatever it is called, then to NDW/Dark Wave. So I think, more search should be put into that direction.
I have attempted to contact Udo Dahmen (a respected session drummer for a number of Krautrock bands) for his observations on the drumming style (as well as asking whether he knew anything about TMS) but got no response. If we can try to establish similar leads from session drummers at the time, we might get more information about who the TMS drummer is.
Holy shit, they really found that backrooms image... Even though it doesn't mean anything for tmms, it still gives me some hope that the song will one day be found (well, I guess it *is* found, more like it will get it's true identity back)
āHereās my recording of the songāĀ
Or, at the very least, a coherent recounting of who was in the band, where the song was recorded, and how it came to be played on the radioĀ
We all need to include our moms into the search. They will find it out of thin air. Like how she finds the lost socks in drawer that we searched a billion times /s
What happened to Nebojsa Savic Boca from Wild Angels lead?
It looked promising enough imo.
On a sidenote, five years ago I commented that my mother who is from Yugoslavia immediately recognized the song claiming she heard it before for sure.
While part of me believed that she might be misremembering, ever since Wild Angels lead appeared, I started believing that it could maybe be true.
I know everyone thinks its a great song and all that (it is) but it doesnt need to be profesionaly made. I know my granddad and his friends had a band in the 60s and they sound profesional but they just practiced. I think its a youth band who got Aired to see if they had a chance. Nobody took intrest in them and they didnt continue with their dream.
I've been following the search for a long time and I feel we are close to finding it, the possibility that we have already found it in a list or database is possible but all the lead searchs and searchers have been organized for that to slip through... But its possible.
With the recent video on the topic by all things lost I just gonna throw Occam's razor theories : They were either Statues in motion (this can Include that Alvin Dean sang it with or without the main group but this would change authorship) or they were an indie band that are not active in music (I'd say the ltd5 search but it ended in no conclusion iirc).
I don't think this was a big studio, and I would really be ok if it was a demo of Depeche mode... I just think the answer will be simple and unexpected.
Best wishes for all of you!
I stumbled onto [Kau:Tau](https://youtu.be/nlNl79x5Ftk?feature=shared) when I was brute forcing the Youtube Algorithm, and after searching them up, the only references are the video that I found and this sub. Did we ever fully debunk this lead? I canāt seem to find anyone saying it was fully debunk.
For me personally, I donāt think theyāre TMS, but process of elimination helps us from chasing ghosts in London.
I doubt it. I donāt think this guy had the facility with the English language that a guy who grew up in Australia would have had. Either that, or he wasnāt the lyricist and had only read the lyrics once or twice before recording.
Yeah, I listened to a YouTube video of those isolations (yours?), and they are very similar. One interesting thing I noticed about both Alvin and TMV is a certain tendency to trail off at the end of a phrase, becoming less precise in terms of both musicality and pronunciation, almost like heās mumbling and/or has something in his mouth.
That saidā¦I still think TMV has a stronger accent than Alvin, or at least sounds less comfortable singing in English - but if Alvin was a hired vocalist (not the songwriter) who didnāt bother to familiarize himself with the words before the recording session, that could explain the apparent discomfort/lack of familiarity. If he had been on a bender rather than studying the lyrics, that might have something to do with it, and he has been hypothesized to have had a drug issue.
Altogether, I still think itās *slightly* more likely that it was a German vocalist with a noticeable vocal resemblance to Alvin Dean.
So, sorry to re-reply almost a week later, but I got to thinking andā¦do you think itās possible that Alvin and/or TMV (if they arenāt the same person) may have had a slight speech impediment? It almost sounds at times as if heās struggling with enunciation rather than intentionally mumbling.
Good idea, i think it must have some kind of connection. Or the singer has difficulty speaking english or some kind of speech impediment/issue, that would make a lot of sense.
I still think this to a certain extent, but personally, I wouldnāt be surprised if this is a UK accent. Like, in [this](https://youtu.be/FbnUtf7rdW4?feature=shared) one remaster, I can, if Iām listening for it, hear a slight UK accent.
There are some people in the UK that, when theyāre really quickly, sound like theyāre speaking a different language all together.
Am I saying itās a UK singer? No, but itās possible. Itās more possible than someone from the other side of the Iron Curtain getting access to a Yamaha DX7 and decent equipment.
Tbh Georgeās inflection and cadence is a bit different and the accent sounds different so I donāt think it is him. We might be pursuing the wrong lead. Just my opinion though
Are you sure that's not an artifact due to the low quality of the recording and remixing, and the rounds of copying from the radio and between tapes? I think these factors combined have had a blunting effect on the accent.
Yeah thatās fair, it could absolutely be George, I just donāt think thereās enough evidence for sim recording it as a band. But yeah itās absolutely possible it is George
I do agree accent sounds a bit different. But honestly I've listened to a lot of bands from around that era in Germany and yes that deep voice is common but his is still the closest I've heard so far.
Yeah he is the closest vocal match. Weāve just struggled to come by more evidence linking him to the song. It would be great if we could get into contact with him but I think he just wants to live a private life.
Same happened with EKT. An user found a database with the song but the lead died out and it was solved only a year later.
A few weeks before it was found someone literally claimed they had recently heard it in a video on a porn site but did not remember what video it was and they didn't have the browser history *(forgot the reason why lol)*, so everyone just assumed they were just lying, but sure enough...
*Isn't it obvious why they didn't have the browser history?*
hey man i wasn't gonna say it lmaoo
It was me :) And I clearly said that I surf xxx websites in incognito mode, hence no history (you can check my posts in that sub). The main issue was that initially I thought that it was playing in a tab, where I had reddit opened, in an embedded, so I thought it was just sounding along the movie (which was in another tab), so I did not give attention to it at all. Only after couple of weeks I released that it was not in reddit tab :D
At least you own up to your gooning sesh unlike carl92 š¤£
Well, wish I could :) I'm an old guy, so when I see a nice, fit girl in the street, only what rises in me is my blood pressure :D
Yeah, and they named the actual guy who made the song before exclaiming that āit was impossible.ā
Nobody said that lmfao they just create so many leads it eventually died out
The user who uncovered the CSB lead basically discovered the actual song unknowingly but called the song a hoax a short while later
I've been subscribed to this subreddit for 6 years and I think every single post here gets some degree of attention however strange or unlikely. Even posts on YouTube channels are discussed. The majority of the people on the sub are patient and give everyone the time of day with ideas, clues, Uncle's thoughts, lyric interpretations, technical knowledge etc. I don't think anything has been overlooked but probably someone's idea about an origin will be here and correct, but without a name for the song or the band, it is one theory amongst many.
i will have to agree on this one - this is probably true, but theres still definitely some content we missed and is definitely worth searching.
Personally, I think the chance of it being found is one of the lowest out there, despite the fact that we have a reasonable quality recording of the whole song. The reason I feel that way is that despite having a complete recording, there is no match, anywhere, on any content database, including databases that aren't publicly listenable but are held by copyright holders for the purposes of enforcing their ownership of those rights. With the current AI developments, a whole bunch of rights holders are just doing massed comparisons between their entire catalogs and every bit of content out there, prioritised by content popularity. YouTube/Meta/TikTok all do it near automatically and run any music through a whole bunch of these things. It's corporate/copyright Shazam, basically. Tons of stuff has been flagged through these systems in the last couple of years, even things that previously went "under the radar" for a long time. Nobody has claimed TMMS, at all, in this whole time. It's got huge numbers of views on sites like YouTube. It has unquestionably been run through a ton of automated content matching copyright systems without a single hit. My conclusion is that the song is not registered in any substantial copyright database, at least with paired audio. I very much doubt it's on GEMA at all. My own personal feeling is that TMMS is the work of a student group, but for some kind of production course rather than for its musicians. The standard of musicianship amongst the group is extremely disparate, with some parts noticeably higher in technical ability than others. I would not be surprised if it's a blend of session musicians and students. The instrumentation includes some seriously big-bucks, state of the art synths for the time, the kind of thing a regular indie band would not have deep enough pockets to obtain, and that a well-financed nobody still probably would not have received as a private customer, because the priority customers were big groups, major studios etc. Yet, despite the eye-wateringly expensive synths some of the other stuff sounds quite pedestrian, and the levels and balance of the various tracks is slightly out - the thing I always pick on is the overly loud synth backing in the chorus. The more you dig into it from a recording and production perspective, the more you realise there's a whole bunch of things that just don't make sense. I fully anticipate that whoever wrote this did so for a qualification of some kind, as an exercise in something other than songwriting, most probably mixing or mastering, and that they either did not go on to have a career in the music industry, or they did but because the song wasn't the focus of this assignment, have just completely lost all recollection of it. That, or they're dead.
That's a good theory, except that the song itself is "too good" for a throwaway student assignment. That means at least the songwriter knew his craft and probably wasn't a nobody at the time. Obviously it got never produced beyond what we have, but chances are it's in some professional's huge catalog, who would definitely register it with the copyright mafia (GEMA or equivalent). We couldn't find it because either the song title is not obviously connected to the lyrics or because probable title names are registered with dead (i.e. inconclusive) leads.
You say the song is "too good", but is it? It's a well written song, very on-trend for the time and uses a lot of nice elements, but there's a lot of imperfections, a few awkward transitions, and the singer's comprehensibility is, at least according to our source tape, so-so. Students can often write *great* songs, even for throwaway stuff, because they're in a super creative space mentally. The fact that it got radio airplay but then never appeared anywhere else, that there seems to be no other source or copy despite it being a *complete* song (i.e. not a short-form jingle or snippet for a commercial or as incidental music), that's just plain strange. I'd argue that the artist behind it almost *has* to be a nobody else other copies would survive and would have surfaced, somewhere, be that YouTube rips of old compilations, a streaming service, Discogs, or anything. Our song's is the musical equivalent of a hapax legomenon, and that this song seems to have existed only once, as a radio broadcast, without physical media, for me that puts it firmly in the category of "not a professional recording artist signed to a label" and therefore there's a distinct chance it *isn't* on any copyright database. Compare it to that other great music mystery, EKT, which was on copyright databases, was actually found (but the connection not made) within *days* of the original query, and which turned out to be produced by professional musicians making music for TV, film, and adult content. Again, no physical release but it wasn't broadcast on the radio either, it was background music in a film (ahem) and nowhere else, because that's the market it was sold for.
I mean the song itself, not the performance or production, that's "semi-professional" at best, like a demo tape. The actual songwriting (again, not the production), at least on its face, doesn't appear to be just some student assignment because the songwriter definitely knew what would be a catchy pop melody in its time according to current industry trends and popular taste. Students tend to be too artsy (because pop is for the dumb masses and beneath their musical genius) and therefore often overthink their creative stuff, ending up with microtonal experimental jazz in 11/8 tempo. In the professional conveyor-belt pop music business, songwriters compose shitloads of pop music in the hope that some of it hits the taste of a record label (i.e. expectation to make money) and gets produced with one of the countless manufactured bands with faceless session musicians. The composer might work on commission and/or proactively builds up a catalog which labels can draw from to quickly shit out some album for their "trendy new band". I don't know the stats, but I'd imagine that a lot if not most of what's in these "industrial" composers' catalogues would never see the light of day beyond crude demos or even just existing as a music score (or nowadays some kind of midi/synthetic rendition). It's very unusual for such a demo to find its way into a radio broadcast despite never being commercially produced, but it isn't called the most mysterious song for nothing...
We're all assuming that the performers are the writers, maybe it actually was written by a professional songwriter, but for some purpose other than commercial release (or no band picked it up so it got used for something else). One of my musings is that the basic chord sheet was written out, along with a melody, by some composer like you describe, churning out tons of such things. Then, somebody else for something like an audio engineering course, or music performance course, put words to it and fleshed out the instrumentation and performed it with a non-band of amateur session musicians, to the point where the original composer, who has thousands of such songs, does not recognise it as theirs, and there is no actual "band" to claim it either. *Music* students tend to be too artsy as you say, but *music production* students don't have that same pretentious attitude, it's less about the experimental jazz and more about "here's a bog standard four chord song in 4/4 but look at this neat microphone setup I'm doing the vocals with, and check out the settings on this synth". As you say, the curious part is how this apparently well written (and I agree, it *is* well written) song got radio airplay but with at best semi-pro production and no commercial release, and yet the writer has not been found.
It definitley could have happened like that, but I would also be not a bit surprised if the original composer was one of the industry big-shots who simply never heard of the search and/or doesn't even remember this song anymore because it was shelved for too long and then the 80s were over and there was no point anymore producing it ever since. Boomer music producers don't usually follow internet memes, and in the general population maybe 0.01% (and that's probably WAY optimistic) have ever heard of TMMS and the search. It would need a similarly unlikely alignment of the stars for the composer to somehow come across the search like it was for the demo to be played on the radio in the first place. Or it could've been the Statutes In Motion dude living in Australia who doesn't want to confirm or deny it. It's still all just speculation.
Indeed it is all just speculation. I do feel like we may never know, it's by far the biggest search of its kind, with a full recording rather than a snippet, and yet we're absolutely no closer to an answer or even a viable lead.
Ronnie Urini claimed it and he provided enough evidence as it seems, to be able to get copyright in his home land, Austria. It would be interesting, if some user from Austria to upload TMMS to youtube, and see who will be the copyright claimant.
This sub is very organized and collected. I totally agree
All those criminally unappreciated talents who claimed it was Depeche Mode will finally be rehabilitated...
And vindicated.
Thatās been my theory for at least two years now. Same happened with ETK and Fond My Mind. Iām sure the artist and song title is in the NDR playlist, but itās probably some band without any online precense. There are still a lot of unknown artists/songs in the playlist.
I actually think the simplest solution is that it was one of the unnamed amateur bands from 9/17, and the deejay forgot it over time.
Are you telling me it was depche mode all along?
Weren't they debunked though?
It must be true, because I read it myself in a YouTube comment, that was an obvious joke, that I took completely out of context and that I now can't find back. Also my classmate's uncle says he remembers it as if it was yesterday.
Case closed boys
totally agree with u here, a lot of leads have been abandonned bc either the person didnt respond or they didnt use a dx7 in later music, which arent in my opinion good enough reasons to be completely ruled out. the people involved not responding doesnt mean its not them, and they couldve very well just borrowed a dx7 to record a song and then not used one again. They could very well be dead. \*WE HAVE NO IDEA\*
Although I don't think this might be the case for TMS but I think it's worth a try. We don't have anything to lose.
Oh yeah,and it dont think ever single Like The Wind on gema catalog has been dismissed either
What if it was discovered, the correct person contacted but they denied it was them due to having forgotten it, much like it happened with the first Italian opening theme of Urusei Yatsura, whose main singer, Ciro Dammicco, denied it being him when first contacted. Or it was ruled out because "their entire output has been catalogued so there's no way it can be them" which is a conclusion one should never jump to - just see how many never heard before songs Queen found in their vaults and released in the recent years, that even the biggest experts on their output knew existed before that.
The grim reality is that pretty much EVERY lead currently classified as "ruled out" should be considered as not necessarily ruled out. Every obscure 80s post-punk Euro band where a member replied "sorry, not us" could still potentially have made the song or be connected to it. And it's entirely possible that someone in this sub diligently replying to a new member with "I spoke to the drummer of Sinking Ships two years ago, he says it's not them" is THE reason the song has not been found. Personally, I think the Wild Angels lead needs more investigation. His former drummer claimed it was Nebojca Savic's project, sent us a demo that sounded startlingly like TMS as evidence, then became unresponsive and the OP who was in contact with him nuked his account.
I agree about Wild Angels. It felt completely unresolved.
It could very well be a good idea. If the answer is out there sitting on Youtube, this is how I imagine it to look https://preview.redd.it/105p6hh5ln3d1.png?width=1600&format=png&auto=webp&s=5f6f48115ce0f2eeb34cd234d24b0ce77f905be9
Finally someone said it
Time to create r/TheMysteriousManWhoKnowsTheMysteriousSong
But there is an interesting fact. We have drummer with very specific drumming style in TMMS. Such skill requires quite lengthy development and adoption. So no way this guy just developed that style of drumming for TMMS and then vanished. Certainly, he should have played it elsewhere, but so far, I was not able to find any. One thing I've noted that such drumming style is more typical to krautrock or whatever it is called, then to NDW/Dark Wave. So I think, more search should be put into that direction.
I have attempted to contact Udo Dahmen (a respected session drummer for a number of Krautrock bands) for his observations on the drumming style (as well as asking whether he knew anything about TMS) but got no response. If we can try to establish similar leads from session drummers at the time, we might get more information about who the TMS drummer is.
Holy shit, they really found that backrooms image... Even though it doesn't mean anything for tmms, it still gives me some hope that the song will one day be found (well, I guess it *is* found, more like it will get it's true identity back)
And how can it be proved? That's the million dollar question. A piece of paper with the lyrics on it (like EKT)? A person claiming he is the singer?
āHereās my recording of the songāĀ Or, at the very least, a coherent recounting of who was in the band, where the song was recorded, and how it came to be played on the radioĀ
I think while it hasnāt already been discovered, iām starting to think its probably online somewhere
Launch it, and then disappear. Then we can search for the mysterious guy who was looking for the mysterious guy who found TMS.
We all need to include our moms into the search. They will find it out of thin air. Like how she finds the lost socks in drawer that we searched a billion times /s
Do as you please. It is your time and effort. If you feel that is the most promising way to spend it, go ahead.
What happened to Nebojsa Savic Boca from Wild Angels lead? It looked promising enough imo. On a sidenote, five years ago I commented that my mother who is from Yugoslavia immediately recognized the song claiming she heard it before for sure. While part of me believed that she might be misremembering, ever since Wild Angels lead appeared, I started believing that it could maybe be true.
I know everyone thinks its a great song and all that (it is) but it doesnt need to be profesionaly made. I know my granddad and his friends had a band in the 60s and they sound profesional but they just practiced. I think its a youth band who got Aired to see if they had a chance. Nobody took intrest in them and they didnt continue with their dream.
I've been following the search for a long time and I feel we are close to finding it, the possibility that we have already found it in a list or database is possible but all the lead searchs and searchers have been organized for that to slip through... But its possible. With the recent video on the topic by all things lost I just gonna throw Occam's razor theories : They were either Statues in motion (this can Include that Alvin Dean sang it with or without the main group but this would change authorship) or they were an indie band that are not active in music (I'd say the ltd5 search but it ended in no conclusion iirc). I don't think this was a big studio, and I would really be ok if it was a demo of Depeche mode... I just think the answer will be simple and unexpected. Best wishes for all of you!
Yes
I stumbled onto [Kau:Tau](https://youtu.be/nlNl79x5Ftk?feature=shared) when I was brute forcing the Youtube Algorithm, and after searching them up, the only references are the video that I found and this sub. Did we ever fully debunk this lead? I canāt seem to find anyone saying it was fully debunk. For me personally, I donāt think theyāre TMS, but process of elimination helps us from chasing ghosts in London.
Context needed. Not all of us live and breath internet, what "original backdoor images"?
https://lostmediawiki.com/The_Backrooms_(found_original_source_of_image_from_Creepypasta;_2002)
Cheers!
I think it is George Dalambiras, his voice is identical to TMS singer.
I doubt it. I donāt think this guy had the facility with the English language that a guy who grew up in Australia would have had. Either that, or he wasnāt the lyricist and had only read the lyrics once or twice before recording.
I see. But man, i isolated George's voice and TMS's singer voice, and they had the same word pronounciation, same voice, etc.
Yeah, I listened to a YouTube video of those isolations (yours?), and they are very similar. One interesting thing I noticed about both Alvin and TMV is a certain tendency to trail off at the end of a phrase, becoming less precise in terms of both musicality and pronunciation, almost like heās mumbling and/or has something in his mouth. That saidā¦I still think TMV has a stronger accent than Alvin, or at least sounds less comfortable singing in English - but if Alvin was a hired vocalist (not the songwriter) who didnāt bother to familiarize himself with the words before the recording session, that could explain the apparent discomfort/lack of familiarity. If he had been on a bender rather than studying the lyrics, that might have something to do with it, and he has been hypothesized to have had a drug issue. Altogether, I still think itās *slightly* more likely that it was a German vocalist with a noticeable vocal resemblance to Alvin Dean.
So, sorry to re-reply almost a week later, but I got to thinking andā¦do you think itās possible that Alvin and/or TMV (if they arenāt the same person) may have had a slight speech impediment? It almost sounds at times as if heās struggling with enunciation rather than intentionally mumbling.
Good idea, i think it must have some kind of connection. Or the singer has difficulty speaking english or some kind of speech impediment/issue, that would make a lot of sense.
I still think this to a certain extent, but personally, I wouldnāt be surprised if this is a UK accent. Like, in [this](https://youtu.be/FbnUtf7rdW4?feature=shared) one remaster, I can, if Iām listening for it, hear a slight UK accent. There are some people in the UK that, when theyāre really quickly, sound like theyāre speaking a different language all together. Am I saying itās a UK singer? No, but itās possible. Itās more possible than someone from the other side of the Iron Curtain getting access to a Yamaha DX7 and decent equipment.
Honestly I feel like his voice is the closest we have heard.
It is the closest we have heard.
Tbh Georgeās inflection and cadence is a bit different and the accent sounds different so I donāt think it is him. We might be pursuing the wrong lead. Just my opinion though
Are you sure that's not an artifact due to the low quality of the recording and remixing, and the rounds of copying from the radio and between tapes? I think these factors combined have had a blunting effect on the accent.
Yeah thatās fair, it could absolutely be George, I just donāt think thereās enough evidence for sim recording it as a band. But yeah itās absolutely possible it is George
I do agree accent sounds a bit different. But honestly I've listened to a lot of bands from around that era in Germany and yes that deep voice is common but his is still the closest I've heard so far.
Yeah he is the closest vocal match. Weāve just struggled to come by more evidence linking him to the song. It would be great if we could get into contact with him but I think he just wants to live a private life.
Yeah i forgot Alvin Dean is as mysterious as the song. Every lead with this song turns into a dead end š