Sven Regener has been making music for many years. He also writes novels and screenplays and reads radio plays. And now he has also gone podcasters with his band Element Of Crime: “Daffodils and Cacti” is his name. He has resisted Spotify and Co. for a long time. The 60-year-old from Bremen told us in an interview what has changed his mind, why he hardly has any free time and which podcast he likes to listen to privately.
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The last time we spoke to each other on the Zündfunk, we had a little discussion about Spotify. Your song catalog wasn’t on Spotify back then either, it was a bit longer ago. Your attitude at the time was analogous: You don’t have to go along with every hype. Almost all albums are now on Spotify and you now have a podcast that also runs on Spotify. What has happened there?
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Sven Regener: So not only on Spotify, also on all other streaming platforms and the records too, of course. Thats is quite easy. This has become so prevalent that it doesn’t make any sense to stink against it. It’s just that the normative power of the factual, you don’t have to talk about it for long. They say the problem is that people say it will definitely get through. It can always be, but it doesn’t have to be that way. And I didn’t know then. And I wasn’t so for it then either. I’ve never been a beta tester, someone who does things first or very early on. And I think that’s quite right. Yes, but in the end it is the same: where the people are, you go with the music.
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When listening to the previous episodes, I got sentences like: “We were never in the Berlin scene”, or you once said “We were always art rockers”, somewhere between Velvet Underground and Bob Dylan. Was it important for you now to capture some kind of band legacy with the podcast?
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No, because that would be too much for me now as if we were to quit as a band. It’s actually not like that. Well, it’s just like this: we can’t play live at the moment and there is also streaming at the same time. I have to say that too, because I think it’s good that you mentioned that, that I didn’t think that was so great at the time. That was also because you don’t necessarily have to find things like that great, but you can still do them because it doesn’t harm anyone. And when it comes to streaming, you get very little of the records, of the credits. So when I listen to a John Coltrane record streaming, I don’t find out who else was there, unless they happen to be on the front cover. And that’s why I recently started adding all the credits to the entire discography on our website, so that you know which musicians have taken part, who has played what, and so on. This is important. And that’s where you realize that a podcast helps, of course, that you don’t really want to see all the stories around it lost. But legacy makes when you’re dead. And that’s not how I see the band.
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In contrast to others, I really like name dropping, because new personalities keep appearing on the radar, from where you can discover new, unknown countries. That’s why I mean it as an absolute compliment when I say “Cacti and daffodils” is a name-dropping podcast for me.
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Yes, that just happens by the way. I don’t mind either, but I think it would be stupid if you did it on purpose. According to the motto: We want to adorn ourselves with it. But that is not the case. But the question is: What do you want to tell? I mean “Try To Be Mensch”, our second record, was produced by John Cale. What else can you tell? So we will talk about Roger Mutenu, or about the Uptown Horns and Peter Scherer and so on. That was the same. Uwe Bauer, our first producer, who was the drummer at Fehlfarben, those are names, yes, but my God, they are also part of the history of the band.
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But what you do with it is that you are negotiating pop history for the past 35 years. Was that a requirement at the beginning when you started the podcast project?
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Yes, at least insofar as you put your own work in this context. That one asks the question of how far that actually fit into that time or not. That people say, for example: Well, when we started there wasn’t any more Berlin scene anyway. It was dead from 1985, so from right there. Because the Neue Deutsche Welle was dead and all the attention was gone from West Berlin. But there was no such thing as the Hamburg School or something. And there weren’t any bands that you were friends with, because everyone cared about themselves and for themselves. That then plays a role, for example. And that’s why you have to talk about the fact that you realize that something new somehow suddenly came up again in 1989/90, that you had the feeling that something was happening here now. In fact, things always happen in pop music in jumps. There are times, I call it the explosion of species, that’s what Darwin calls it, when suddenly a lot of new things arise in a very short time. That was the case, for example, in the early 1990s. And that’s right. In any case, I would claim that we should try to put the matter in this context.
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What is your personal favorite podcast anyway?
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Now of the four episodes we’ve released?
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No, in the whole podcast scene. Do you even listen to podcasts?
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No, little, because I don’t have enough time. That’s the general problem with all audio things, we have a compulsory timing. You can’t read faster or slower than you can with a book. Basically, you have to listen to them and I get very little to that. I’ve written a new novel, made a jazz record. I listened to a lot of music. I just didn’t get into it. But what I find interesting is the podcast by Jan Müller from Tocotronic. I find it very worth mentioning and very worth hearing.
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Have you already been a guest there?
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Will you be our guest soon?
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If he would invite me, I would go. I like Jan very much. I think the podcast is very, very good and interesting. I can only recommend it.
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