That mystery '80s song - you know, that one. The one that at some point in your life someone must have played you and asked ‘do you know who did this?’ and you shook you head. Yeah, that one. Well, it seems the mystery is over and someone has claimed it as their own.
It all started back in 2007 (yes, that long ago). An Internet user named Lydia went on an online forum and asked if anyone could identify a song that her brother Darius had recorded off German radio back in the 1980s.
Nobody could place it for sure. Come 2019 and the search widened out as social media and Youtube users attempted to identify the track, which by now was known as ‘Like The Wind’ because its use of that phrase in its opening line. The timeframe was narrowed to some time in the mid-'80s due to the prominent use of the Yahama DX7 synth, which didn’t come out until 1983. But still, there was no positive confirmation of title and artist.
And so the mystery went on. The song acquired its own Reddit page and its own Wikipedia entry. Now suddenly last Monday (November 4) a user of that Reddit community has finally come up trumps. And the answer is it’s...Subways Of Your Mind by FEX.
Who? Well, yeah exactly. All we know at present is that FEX were a band from Kiel on the German Baltic coast and they operated in the mid 80s. Michael Hädrich, who played keyboards and guitar in the band has come forward, claimed it and confirmed it as theirs to the German magazine Tz.
“We hadn’t noticed all this Internet phenomenon at all, mainly naturally, because the title of the song was not known on the Internet and was therefore no relation,” Hädrich said. He explained that it was only when the Reddit user requested copies of the band’s old material that he joined the dots. “Only then did he point me out whether I didn’t realize that the song Subways of your Mind is the ‘Most Mysterious Song on the Internet’.”
So artist and song have been reunited, a la Long Lost Families. But this isn’t the end of the story. Far from it. The decade and a half search for the owner of Subways Of Your Mind has sparked a whole new online phenomenon. ‘Lostwave’ they call it, tracks that in spite of the vast search engines we have at our disposal now and the hive mind of the Internet, elude easy identification.
Here’s a link to the Lostwave Reddit page. Go on – dive in!
