Photo Credit: redo
The mystery surrounding a long-unknown radio-ripped clip has been solved after nearly 20 years. Here’s the band behind the internet’s most mysterious song.
An old internet mystery has finally been solved after nearly 20 years. The song was originally recorded off the radio in Germany and has long stumped internet sleuths and music aficionados. Now, “The Most Mysterious Song On the Internet” has finally been identified.
The song’s story begins in the 1980s, when a group of people in Germany recorded a song they heard on the radio onto a cassette tape. Lydia, also known as bluuely on Reddit, the sister of the person who recorded the cassette, uploaded a digital copy of the song to several online forums in 2007. She wanted to learn anything she could about the song.
Though not confirmed, it’s generally believed that the radio station the song was recorded from was NDR1, on the program Musik Für Junge Leute — “Music for Young People.” But other details remained scarce, despite several people stumbling onto Lydia’s posts over the years and trying to help.
But in 2019, Reddit got involved in the mystery. A user known as gabgaskins posted the song in 44 different music-related subreddits — which eventually culminated in the formation of mystery’s own subreddit, r/TheMysteriousSong. Later that year, the song caught the attention of a YouTuber called Just Whang, who made a video about it, further escalating online interest in the search.
Investigators even tracked down the former host of Musik Für Junge Leute, but he wasn’t able to help. Even Rolling Stone wrote about the mystery, while investigators analyzed different versions of the song from various sources, chasing down dozens of leads. But enthusiasts were met with dead ends at every turn.
Finally, the past few months took the investigation to Hörfest, an annual festival of local musicians sponsored by a Hamburg-based public broadcaster. Users compiled a list of hundreds of bands who had played at the festival and started going through them one by one.
This led to Redditor marijin1412 coming across an old newspaper article in a regional German paper. “The article was about a band called FEX from Kiel, who won a talent contest in Bremen in 1984 and their music was described as Rock with Wave and Pop influences,” wrote marijin1412.
The same user recognized one of the names in the article and reached out to a Michael Hädrich, who was a member of a Hörfest 83 band called Phret. He sent them some of the songs he made with FEX and Phret — and the mysterious song was among them, titled “Subways of Your Mind.”
Hädrich was astounded to learn the song was famous on the internet and considered a piece of lost media. He contacted the other members of the band and registered the song in the GEMA, a German organization for musicians. A full and cleaner version of the song was also uploaded to Vocaroo.