Knef has a dark, occasionally faltering voice, but that doesn’t prevent it from bopping along to pop as innocent as a daytime TV margarine commercial or sounding “right” sailing along with breezy strings.
As a singer, Hildegard Knef was a kind of grown-up, German counterpart to the French yé-yé girls svengali’d into stardom by Serge Gainbourg, like Sylvie Vartan and France Gall in the sixties and seventies.
A semi-iconic European actress who also enjoyed some minor success in Hollywood and on Broadway, she was a beloved chanteuse in her homeland in the seventies, with a voice reminiscent of a mid-career Marianne Faithfull, but worldwise and arch rather than world-weary. Hans Niewswant is a celebrated and cerebral producer who moves effortlessly between the DJ booth and Goethe Institute.
The opening looped vocal “für dich” sets the generous tone of Nieswandt’s treatment of Knef—this is all for us, and with love. Working purely with the original music, no electronic add-ons, his technicolour layering beautifully brings out tinkling electric piano and suave guitar in a kind of aural equivalent of Andy Warhol’s cartooned Marilyn Monroe portraits. He maintains the easy-listening, lounge jazzy “salt and sugar” of the original arrangements, even as he transforms them for a spacier ear, once as a playful nightclub reggae number. Knef has a dark, occasionally faltering voice, but that doesn’t prevent it from bopping along to pop as innocent as a daytime TV margarine commercial or sounding “right” sailing along with breezy strings. And of course, how can you possibly resist a collection featuring a track called “The Year 2000”?
Hilregard Knef – Remixed 12 Version is available on Bureau B. [Release page]
