Gruff Rhys: The Hills Are Alive

Seven degrees of separation? How are Chris Frantz and Tina Weymouth of Talking Heads and Tom Tom Club connected to Brooklyn retro synth trailblazers Xeno & Oaklander? We unpick the tangled webs…

Once upon a time, at the dawn of the electronic age, Mark Reeder ran away to join the circus. He never came home again.

“It was a fact of life as a little kid,” recalls Alexander Hacke, musician, producer, filmmaker and long-time Einstürzende Neubauten member, born and raised in Berlin and a major participant in the city’s post-punk, pre-rave scene in the 1980s. “I’d go out on the street and play, go around one more corner, and there would be a wall.”