WIRE MAGAZINE'S BIBA KOPF writes about the film 'Mona Mur in Conversation'
WIRE MAGAZINE'S BIBA KOPF writes about the film 'Mona Mur in Conversation'
Dietmar Post (Director),
play loud! productions 2024, 88 mins
War, declares Mona Mur upfront in this film of her in conversation with Dietmar Post, was always her theme, the Cold War her reality. Seated before a large TV monitor that has just screened her recent rendition of the Brecht/ Weill song “ Concerning A Drowned Girl" to Gerhard Schiewe's excellent accordion accompaniment in a Berlin courtyard, she economically pencils in its history in the course of chronologically unfolding her own story. The location, she reveals, is the Bendler Block, formerly an administration building of Adolf Hitler’s Living Space in the East programme where various German resistance members were executed afterthe failed July 1944 attempt on the Fuhrer’s life. Clearly, Mona Mur doesn't play light. Mur was born Sabine Bredy in Hamburg in 1960 to a family who'd migrated across East-West borders from Galicia, historically a landmass inhabited by Ukrainians, Poles, Germans, Austrians and Jews; briefly a kingdom in its own right, and subsequently ruled or occupied by the Austro-Hungarian empire, Poland, the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, and now Poland and Ukraine. Mur grew up listening to her mother singing Russian songs in a beautiful soprano voice. In her teens her own tastes gravitated towards The Doors, heavy and alternative rock. One of the first records she bought was Brian Eno’s Here Come The Warm Jets, but "I was a real hippie with a third eye", she laughs. Things changed when she saw The Stranglers and began hanging out at Hamburg's Rip Off shop/ alternative distribution company, alongside nascent West German punk scenesters including her close friend, the photographer Ilse Ruppert, Rip Off founder, music publisher and film maker Klaus Maeck, and members of Xmal Deutschland and Abwärts. This was an exhilarating time when, liberated by punk’s DIY ethos, young Germans took a long run-up rooted in the pre-Nazi age of Brecht/Weill and began to sing in their own language, unlike their krautrock forebears for whom German language songs still stank like corpses from the Nazi era. Having said that, Mur's 1982 debut 12" Jeszcze Polska was her roaring take of the Polish national anthem, the first half sung in Polish, the second in German, recorded with Die Mieter (The Tenants), her underground all star band featuring Einstürzende Neubauten's Alex Hacke, FM Einheit and Marc Chung (the latter pair also members of Hamburg's Abwärts) and Front guitarist Gode B. Released simultaneously with Hacke aka Borsig's “Hiroshima" by Maeck's short-lived Supermax label, the record also included the key Mona Mur song “Eintagsfliegen” ("Mayflies”), with its English sung payoff couplet “This is my rifle and this is my gun/One is for killing, the other is for fun". Here Mur and her team had forged anew kind of kabarett, equal parts steeled industrial hardcore and scorched torch song. With a view to developing it further, in the mid-1980s Mur moved to West Berlin, for a while sleeping in Einheit's laundry room. Except her brilliant backing band were all taken up with their main group activities and Mur found herself living in on the edge through a long Berlin winter, only intermittently being able to perform. On those rare occasions when her backing musicians were free to join her, they put together a stunning 50 minute torch set including her plague song “Snake", bookended by Brecht/ Weill’s “Surabaya Johnny”. In the late 80s she won the support of Yello’s Dieter Meier, very much a mixed blessing. Meier scored for her a generous two record deal with RCA, the first album of which was produced by The Stranglers' JJ Burnel, the second, titled Warsaw, with producer Grzegorz Ciechowski, formerly of the 80s Polish band Republika. Trouble was, for all his debonair talk and flattering words - “Mona, I see you with 15 men in tuxedos" - when they couldn’t find a label for the album Warsaw, Meier lost interest and it was shelved (until its release in 2015). Thereafter Mur stopped believing in promises and went her own way, making a good living with music for computer games, before re-entering the torch song arena via collaborations with film director Fatih Akin (Head-On, 2004), Flucht Nach Vorn's Nikko Weidemann, and, most significantly, KMFDM's En Esch, with whom she rerecorded her greatest 80s non-hits alongside new compositions and an album, Terre Haute, with Esch and FM Einheit, among other projects. Directed by play loudl's Dietmar Post, In Conversation breaks up Mur’s Mona-logue with film and video footage illustrating her life and times, Post himself keeping his finger on the remote's pause/play buttons as he congenially pushes the story along with comments and questions. Nearing its end, Mona's running out of breath but the pair find time to play one last song from her 2019 album Delinquent. The war is not yet over. Biba Kopf
The Wire - May 2025 (Issue 495)
Check out the film's official website:
Official film website
On IMDb:
IMdB site
Some of here film music:
Listen to the album 'WARSAW' which is featured in the film
Stay tuned for the soundtrack album and dates for the theatrical release in fall of 2025
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