In Person

Remember when all car models didn't look alike? Further more they looked great and had great names like Karmann Ghia and Alfa Romeo Julietta Spider (we will never pretend to want something named Hyundai -- ever!) They also came with 8-track cassette players "for the quintessential sound and comfort on the road ".
Well this is the road to which we're heading once more, and like you never heard it before; not since the days of The Persuaders, transcendental meditation, Roy Lichtenstein, Carnaby Street, Shaft's Big Score, Scandinavian sex reports (or even German schoolgirl ones ), the Italian Gallio fever, Art Vandalay, Bert Kampfaert and Peter Thomas!

Recent years have seen a resurgence in this unique era in culture as film festivals, video re-issues and cd compilations are showing, what once was considered trash is now high pop art. The cd collections have helped those who cannot afford the silly prices paid these days for pieces of vinyl that once hung around in the bargain bins of yesterday. From books, magazines, tv shows, revival bands like Mike Flowers Pops and even the occasional hollywood project (Ed Wood & Boogie Nights) they rise form the flames paying homage to an era of a fascinating frenzy of genial gestures and psychedelic perfection.

One of the true leaders of this ethos IS ..... Bobby Trafalgar!

Repap's CD compilation is dedicated to this all but forgotten but truly ingenious musician of the wilder years this side of Sodam and Gommorrah. If it felt good they did it and the sound of Trafagar certainly reflects this.

Little is known about his years as a Romanian native, but Trafalgar was born Bogdan Trefer in the war year of 1942. His family came from a long line of artistic and creative stock, all of whom would have little weight at the time of Stalin's regime.

Young Bogdan still took violin, then piano lessons and performed in the Third Pioneer Brigade Orchestra of Bucharest in the early fifties, and was soon getting attention from the country's best conductors. Touring in the Eastern Bloc soon followed with trips to Paris and Berlin. Thanks to these trips he discovered jazz and rock'n'roll, and it was not long before he could hear the call of the west.

It was at this turning point in 1961 that he managed to defect into West Berlin during the Ulbrecht celebrations of that year. He paid the rent first as a bar pianist at the infamous Klempinski Hotel, then as accordionist in "Die Josef Moosholzer Rytmusgruppe" performing in some of the most popular knackwurst restuarants of the time. He found his creative outlet during the late night jams sessions, where he often sat in together with like minded players, as the already successful bass player at the time, James Last. Through Last he was introduced to band leader Horst Herrman, at that time arranger for the Berliner Rundfunk, and soon landed the spot as piano soloist. Soon he was backing vocalists like Hildegard Knef, Zarah Leander and even Marlene Dietrich who took an instant liking to the young prodigy. It was she who took him over to London's Hammersmith Odeon and New Yorks Carnegie Hall as replacement for her then musical director Burt Bacarach, who was away doing songs for a new Doris Day movie. He spent 2 weeks in the vibrant new york scene of the early sixties with its art house theatres, beatnik lifestyle and around the clock music, it really stimulated Bobby Trafalgar. He heard Bill Evans at the Village Vanguard, saw 8 1/2 and Breathless and went to Andy Warhol exhibitions.

it was 1963, the same year as the movie How The West was Won; it could have been the perfect title for the next chapter of Bobby Trafalgar, the thoroughly gifted and fully defected romanian pianist-arranger who by now had left his native name and country behind him, as well as the violin! as the Dietrich tour was now at an end, he returned to europe full of ideas and decided to try his hand at composing. Back in germany he got in contact with producer Wolf.C. Hartwig, specialist in sordid accounts of crime, delinquent youth culture and the horrors (as well of the delights of) sex. He wrote the scores to films like Die Jungen Tieren von St. Pauli (The Young Animals of St. Pauli), Ein Gorilla Im Haut des Madchens (A Gorilla in the Skin of a Girl) and Wagenwild! (Carcrazy!).

These were the years when the so-called respectable names in the business mixed with the underground talent to interesting results, to say the least! In these fims one often saw international actors such as Gert Frobe, Horst Bucholz and Klaus Kinski enjoying themselves as they scared the clothes off different shaped starlets and models whose enthusiastic and exhausted screams always made up for lack of acting abilility. Trafalgar also did uncredited arrangements for Ennio Morricone and Daniel White at this time.

Bobby Trafalgar travelled wherever his work took him and once again returned to the States in 1968, this time for a longer and stranger sojourn. The late 60's and the early 70's offered a no-holds barred way of life and a future of art that seemed limitless. Trafalgar released psychedelic dance records together with his backing band The Squares (in spite of this tongue in cheek name the group was indeed very hip to the most contemporary sounds), he went into different musical ventures of oriental as well as militant black jazz poetry. The Trafalgar Squares wasn't your ordinary group but also part of a commune with influences from Buddhism, existensialism, mysticism and ufology. The collective was formed in 1969 and lived isolated 150 miles out in the Nevada desert. After 18 months "The Temple" fell apart and the group split in early 1971. The bass player is now a mayor in a small Utah town. it was after this event that Bobby Trafalgar began to experiment in transvestism and during this period he discovered the Moog synthesizer which came to be his favourite instrument. Legend has it that he is seen in the lost Ed Wood film, Take it Out In Trade, as a madame sporting a pink skeleton around her neck but it remains to be seen if the movie ever resurfaces again. The rest of the early seventies is just as enigmatic ...

1976 saw the return to music from a five year hiatus with the movie score to the French porno film "Hotel d'Amour" by Francis Hulot starring Brigitte Lahaie and the lovely Kitty McBride, who also became Mrs. Trafalgar. Trafalgar later stopped composing again for reasons unknown. Rumours say that Kitty left him to join a lesbian camp in San Francisco in 1982. The last recording from Bobby was released one year earlier and then he vanished into obscurity. Other rumours are that he turned to the lucrative market of commercial jingles and later television infomercial music. In any case he should be heard for his unique musical vision in the many fields he pursued, some of which have been assembled on this collection.

The era of the sixties and seventies was truly an age of nonconformity and true freedom of expression. This is for all of us who experienced those years, who took the unique zeitgeist for granted, the movies for taking the snapshots, those hip cats and the musical sounds in fashion -- well, it seems we woke up and smelt the eighties and the nineties in just a few weeks, or before you could say a-ha! And all of a sudden it was over, forever ...

Thanks to a stroke of luck, sheer persistance and the fantasic technology we have today, many of these pieces of music have been taken from vinyl, film and 8-track then redigitised, remastered and/or remixed by Hakan Lidbo from Sweden. If you listen carefully you can hear the personality of the man 'Bobby Trafalgar' contained in these tracks ... wonderful!!!

TJ Mulholland
Modern Culture Critic, Stockholm, Sweden

WOW - This is undiscovered brilliance....- Andy Votel - Twisted Nerve