Saâda Bonaire "The 90's"
After Captured Tracks published our 2013 self-titled LP “Saâda Bonaire” and its 2015 follow up EP, “Covers”, all 18 songs of our 1980s recording sessions had been released. Our vaults were empty. Saâda Bonaire finally came into being. While we vaguely remembered making another album's worth of material in the 1990s, the masters to this 1990s LP had been destroyed in a fire. After 27 years of being in a coma, we considered ourselves extremely lucky to have been resuscitated in 2013. No need to push our good fortune further. For us the book of Saâda had been completed. The end.
Spring of 2020. After an epic excavation of her cellar in Berlin, our friend and vocalist Andrea Ebert comes across a battered old suitcase. She can recall closing the suitcase up around 1999, however she cannot remember what exactly is stored inside the suitcase.
Andrea dusts off the wilted piece of baggage, lays it flat on the ground and forces the rusty clasps open. She comes across a black binder. She unseals it and to her amazement she finds an assortment of Saâda Bonaire demo cassettes recorded between 1992 and 1994. These cassettes were made nearly thirty years ago. Their existence had long been forgotten. This cluster of cassettes contain the mixdowns of Saâda Bonaire's entire 1990s studio sessions. In spite of having being stored in a damp cellar for over twenty years, the tapes are in pristine condition.
With the discovery of the 12 songs on these tapes, and their 2022 publication by Captured Tracks on the LP "1992", we feel it neccesary to add a second chapter to the story book of Saâda Bonaire
Before doing so, we feel it best to enlighten our readers with a reduced version of our 1980s adventures. So let us travel together back in time for a moment, to 1983. The high and low point of our career.
1983 - 1986
We spent a large amount of time and money in 1984 preparing our debut single, You Could Be More As You Are for EMI Germany. The tune was written, produced, and designed to act as a failsafe rocket which would propel us directly to the top of the charts where we could then climb further up the ladder to fortune and fame. The single was slated for a November release on EMI Germany.
Just prior to our debut's release date, a feud over at EMI between the finance department and our A & R man had finally come to a head. Our A & R man had been spending too much money on partying with the artists and charging it to the company's expense account. He had been warned numerous times to cut down on his superfluous "business escapades", but our company contact failed to heed his superiors warning. Come November he had overstepped his budget limits yet again. Punitive measures were finally to be implemented by the finance department.
What better way to teach this disobedient A & R man a lesson than to go after his favourite new signing, Saâda Bonaire? The finance department did exactly just that. Days before its release we received a phone call from the company about the goings on. Our debut radio masterpiece, You Could Be More As You Are, was to be taken out of print upon its release date. In addition, all further Saâda-EMI releases planned for the future were declared null and void. We had fallen victim to something no hooky verse, sing along chorus, or super-slick production, could have protected us from: intra-label politics.
Our co-vocalist and friend Claudia Hossfeld jumped ship shortly after the EMI debacle.
Easy come easy go. Saâda Bonaire on under the guidance of Ralph with Steffi taking over as the sole vocalist for the group. For the next two years we continued to write and record songs. We were under the illusion if we could only turn out another hit, we could easily find another label.
The end of 1986 arrived and in spite of mailing out dozens of demos, each chocked full of what we perceived were hits, we received barely any response from the record companies. Demoralized by non-stop music industry rejections, the idea of Saâda Bonaire finally started to fade away like some mirage vanishing along the desert horizon.
It seems the circuit which had been driving our music project had finally blown out. We took the final step ourselves, unplugged Saâda Bonaire from the electrical fantasy socket and disbanded. Projekt vorbei. The end.
THE TALE OF BONAIRE: CHAPTER TWO
THE 1990s. (1991 - 1995)
It is only real if you can do it twice.
Come 1991 a cluster of people, places, and things around us were discreetly falling into place, and the fates would soon channel a burst of energy into the Saâda fantasy once again.
In 1988 Ralph had began a production collaboration with his friend Mike Ellington. Mike had built a recording studio in the catacombs beneath the sex shop his father owned.
For the past three years Ralph and Mike had been honing the craft of using mutiple AKAI S1000s and an Apple computer to compose and produce music. In 1991 the duo realised the instrumentals they were turning out were sonically and musically too fine to be used as backing tracks for the local acts they had previously been producing. The composer/production duo decided it was time to use their skills for their own project. This meant calling up Stephanie Lange for vocals bringing the fantasy of Saâda Bonaire back into focus.
As coincidence would have it, Mike Ellington also had a close friend who was a singer, Andrea Ebert. Andrea had grown up singing in the church choir and was professionally trained as well. Her supercharged voice could run circles around anything the boys programmed on the Akai. Her voice was also a perfect contrast to Steffi's deadpan vocal style.
So in 1992 Saâda Bonaire was up and running once more. This time the project was made up of four drastically different personalities: an introverted studio wizard, an arrogant dreamer, a soon to be downtown New York night club it girl, and an art restoration student.
This formation saw us operating in a healthier atmosphere than our 1980s incarnation. Previously our method of invention was to send the girls off to scat alongside a local jam band for ten hours with the hopes they would come home with some small jingle or melody which could eventually be developed into a song. Since the Akai 1000s were a jam band in and to themselves, Mike and Ralph could now compose and record polished fully arranged instrumentals for Andrea and Steffi to take whom and develop their own vocal parts and lyrics outside of the studio via a four track recorder. When Andrea and Steffi had their vocals ready and were well rehearsed the two would come back into the studio and we would track the final vocals there.
In 1992 and 1993 we had already recorded eight demos and sent out two batches of cassette tapes to local labels. However, we still were not getting any response.
In 1993 Andrea took the DATS of some of our songs to our Bremen friend Matthias Heilbronn for additional mixing and editing. Matthias was working in Francoise Kevorkian's Axis studio and also lived with Frankie Knuckles, one of our long time heroes. We thought perhaps his New York City touch may help get us a record deal. Matti's production and editing can be heard on the songs So Many Dreams, and That's Right.
Andrea returned from New York at the end of 1993, bringing some of the lower Manhattan club vibes with her. We recorded four final songs. Our tempo jumped up to 130 and the style of the tunes was pure house.
Come 1994 we had were sitting on multiple mixes of twelve different songs. We had made five large mail outs to the labels and still no company would take us. And why would they? How does a music project made up of four strikingly opposite individuals go about scoring a record deal with material produced and recorded in a studio housed beneath a sex shop? Ultimately no label would take us as we were too odd for any industry marketing person to place us in a box and sell us to the masses. We fit nowhere. We were a fusion of too many contradictory elements. We had songs which were listenable both at home and in the club. One of vocalists had professional training and could blow the windows out of a room with her voice while our other singer was laid back, crackly, and dead pan. Our backing tracks were a mix of slick synthesised instruments and programmed drums created by state of the art equipment with antique Turkish and Kurdish acoustic folk instruments loosely overdubbed on top. And finally no one could ever peg our country of origin as being German. At times we sounded more British than the British. At times more American than the Americans.
It was 1994. We had spent three years working on the project and we still had no record deal to show for it. The circuit which driving our music project had blown out once again. And so it was time to pull the plug yet again. We would have to wait 27 years for the twelve songs from our nineties sessions be unearthed, digitised, remastered, compiled and released.
In the end the similar bizarre near destruction and recovery of the material featured on both of our LPS as well as the 30 year lag between the recording and publication of the music seems to have been part of the plan all along. Our circuit was never blown. Simply bent.
Written by Andy Grier (2022)
