Alphaville: To whom it might concern

I am a traveller. i am a friend, an observer, a messenger, sometimes a guardian angel. plus i am a fan of alphaville. i have met alphaville many times, in their early days in munich or, sorry, possibly paris ...mnster? i was at a concert they played, i think, back in '81 after the release of their mega-hit 'lassie come home' in kinshasa, at that legendary arena where mohammed ali boxed against george foreman. i sat next to marian when he and michael signed the million-dollar deal with mca in 1979 and i was the one who, twenty years later, pulled him from that burning car wreck in la just before he..., well, that's another story... there are so many stories, about alphaville, about each of you. i am a traveller. i am a friend, an observer, a messenger and, as i said, sometimes a guardian angel too. it's curiosity that drives me and a peculiar ability that enables me to journey the worlds which you can only enter via your dreams. i envy you for that ... dreams!! i mean i don't need them, after all, i know almost all their possibilities, but it must be excellent merriment. throughout my extensive travels alphaville's music has been a valued companion. marian's unique voice, bernhard's and frank's artistic arrangements, rick's fearless endeavours to find novelty, the drama, the pathos, the music, its grief, its humour, its naivety, the hidden messages, the skill. there is no world or age in which they were truly bad. ... you see, don't forget one thing: there are boring, lonely universes out there in which alphaville never existed, and in others their career followed a distinctly different path. all this can be heard on "dreamscapes": victories and defeats, hits that flopped in other worlds and vice versa, music that was never written elsewhere and, who knows, songs none of you know which nonetheless climbed up the charts in different verisimilitudes. there is much to discover. yet it remains but a wee segment of infinite possibilities ... like millions of sailors in parallel worlds ...