Element of Crime: Charly Hübner’s music documentary only in cinemas today | NDR.de – Culture – Film

by Bettina Peulecke

The title song is so typical of this atypical band, which is quite unique in German rock and pop history. Their singer and lyricist, the musician and author Sven Regener, has mastered the art of expressing sad everyday poetry with his melancholic, flippant style and unmistakable voice. In the film he remembers the 1980s in Berlin, when “Element of Crime” was still young and the Wall was still standing.

When they just got going in the clubs in what was then Berlin’s Kreuzberg 36 district. “No matter what you played, everything worked,” says Sven Regener in the film. “Nobody asked: Where are you from, who are you? That wasn’t the case. This openness was of course good.”

Charly Hübner has been a fan since the 1980s

Charly Hübner was also open when the band approached him and asked if he wanted to make a film about them. It wasn’t his idea either, but Hübner did something that he never does otherwise: he spontaneously agreed.

A mini-tour through Berlin was organized specifically for this film at various venues, from small clubs to larger open-air venues, which Hübner and his team accompanied.

The director came into contact with the band for the first time in 1988: “We always exchanged audio cassettes with each other, and I was handed one and someone said: It’s great stuff from West Berlin. Then I turned it on and it came on. “The Ballad of Jimmy & Johnny” – that was the spark.”

They used to sing in English, later in German. The band members describe their style as a pretty wild mix: “That was no wave, no jazz. Rehearsals were forbidden. One piece was called ‘Art, Landscape and Architecture’. “It’s all just slapped together,” like a stew.

A journey through time through Berlin

There are many flashbacks that provide insights into an attitude to life in a city that was seething. Element of Crime has been on the road for almost four decades, and the band’s history is also a journey through time through Berlin. Pictures from the 80s and 90s can be seen; in conversations with Hübner, the members remember what it was like when they also liked the Neue Deutsche Welle song “Kleine Torch brenn” by Markus, which was at the time Dieter Thomas Heck was on the ZDF hit parade – long before MTV existed.

“Many people expected something completely different because they couldn’t do the band at all,” says Regener. Instead, they played slow love songs for the punk audience. “They were all standing against the wall at the back in the dark and there was no one in the front,” said Regener. “Then you pull out the old conceptual art tricks, turn around, play with your back to the audience, and in between maybe a little insult or something.”

Not quite as close as “Wild Heart”

Sven Regener no longer has to make this registration today. The audience at the concerts shown, whom the frontman always kindly points out in advance that they might be filmed because Charly Hübner is making a film about them, knows and loves the band. The documentary is certainly a must for Element of Crime fans – even if it doesn’t get quite as close to its protagonists as Charly Hübner managed to do in his great music documentary “Wildes Herz” about the punk rocker from Feine Huhn Fischfilet.