The Cheat Valentine Volker Rebell, Nils Selzer, Strassenjungs 60s Hessen-Beat

	€		36
	$		42

It's a pity that our Hessian radio presenter legend Volker Rebell didn't record an entire LP with the CHEATS.

These 2 beat songs are definitely top notch!

Also unbelievable, but true, the tender beginnings of the Frankfurt street boy punk rocker Nils Selzer can be heard here.

The "Valentine" was a very popular typewriter and the song, which is actually a commercial, is about that typewriter.

The Flexi was numbered and probably not available in stores.

Cover (small stamp) as new and Flexi as new.

Here is my research on this German top beat rarity!!!!

PS...hope it's ok that I copied the text, Volker.

Kind regards from Sprendlingen

Jurgen.

The CHEATS - The cheats deserve a place of honor in this publication, as they were the first national winners in a beat competition. That was in 1965 in Kassel. Volker Rebell: "We were surprised ourselves that we won. The size of the company only became clear to us when we were there, namely that preliminary rounds had taken place in Allen larger cities. And we didn't really get along that well. But we were the only ones who sang German lyrics. And before that, when we submitted our title sequence, we also submitted our lyrics. There was a German teacher on the jury, and he must have been impressed that we wrote socially critical texts in German. I was already doing cabaret at the time, and overall we felt really rebellious back then, and so were the lyrics. The music was more like Kink's "You Really Got Me". I still know the opening lines by heart: "They scream 'Youth is bad!' They must shout, for they are righteous. 'Young people are good for nothing,' they say without prejudice. You must know: (spoken): because young people are only a reflection of their environment!"> - There was also a middle part in which I spoke a longer text rhythmically, which could - in 1965 - have been one of the first German-language rap attempts . When we became winners, we were supposed to appear on the TV show 'The Golden Shot' with Lou van Burg. The gig never happened, supposedly because there were only three of us, and supposedly part of the image of a beat band was having four mushroom heads. The fourth of the festivals, the Red Rocks, were supposed to perform in our place, but our manager protested. But I don't know to what extent there was anything to it at all, whether it wasn't all a duck." 

Nothing came of the record deal supposedly linked to the festival win. Volker Rebell: "We recorded 'Thoughts of a young person'." With Hans Podehl as independent producer. Nils Selzer: "We spent a few days in the studio in Frankfurt. Then it went on like this. We were then told, 'This is not good yet; we still have to change that!' And so on...when we asked at some point when we should come back, there were postponements and evasions."
Volker Rebell: "Supposedly he played it to a record company, and they found that we sang wrong towards the end of the song."

Things were going so well for the band. After the band was founded in Offenbach in 1962, when Volker Rebell, voc, lg, Karl Peter Köhler, dr, and Rudi Marschall, b, got together to play twist music, they quickly switched to the new Merseybeat in 1963 - straight in time, because the first real gigs came. When Rudi left the band in 1964 he was replaced by singer, guitarist and bassist Nils Selzer (pre-Orgon, pre-Solo, pre-Strassejungs). And the band had gigs en masse, around 400 in the next 3 years - 3 of them in 1965 in Nottingham. Volker Rebell: "The contact to Nottingham was made by a school friend who was in Nottingham during the school holidays at the time - he didn't arrange any real gigs for us, but rather a few appearances at school festivals and parties. A German beat band - that was something extremely exotic for the English. Also for English women, by the way. My most vivid memory of Nottingham is of a little English girl who used to say 'I don't like French kisses!'"

But the Hessian Ami clubs were also hit by the cheats. Volker Rebell: "When you were then allowed to perform in the American clubs, that was the higher initiation. Although we sometimes felt pretty stupid with the lyrics we listened to from the record. We didn't get a lot of the lyrics right, so we just sang them phonetically. The GIs must have noticed."

Nils Selzer: "We also played at a fashion show once. Besides us, there was a guy who sang German hits in totally broken German to the playback. He asked if we could do some blues numbers with him. That's what we did. It was Howard Carpendale!" They also played at a festival with Christopher and Michael, the "German Simon & Garfunkel" - in 1969 Michael de la Fontaine was supposed to get Volker and Nils to produce his solo album "Harlekins Singsang".

In 1966 the band took part in the beat competition of the city of Frankfurt, and as a result a record release took place, the CBS publishes a sampler, recorded live in the Volksbildungsheim der Stadt Frankfurt. The Cheats contributed a rather rustic and fast-paced version of the Byrds follow-up hit "Mr Tambourine Man" "I'll Feel A Whole Lot Better".

Volker Rebell: "The beat competition in Frankfurt was a big frustration for us. We went into the race as winners of the German beat parade in Kassel, had clearly won the Frankfurt preliminary competition and were pretty sure we would also win the final round. But things turned out differently. As in Kassel, we wanted to win again with a self-written, German-language song. At the last minute I finished a new song that we did a quick rehearsal in the restroom just before our competition performance. This culpable overconfidence then led to the debacle: we kept making mistakes, I got muddled while singing or completely forgot the lyrics line by line. What an embarrassment in front of so many people - and, above all, on such an important occasion. Actually, the song wasn't bad at all, but we never played it again.
But because our second competition entry was quite successful - we played the Beatles song "We Can Work It Out" with an accordion (!) - luckily we didn't fail completely. I think we finished 3rd. or 4. place - it should be the 3rd otherwise we wouldn't have been allowed to play our encore "I'll Feel A Whole Lot Better" at the awards ceremony." 

All in all, the music of the cheats became more complex from now on, more original pieces appeared: Nils Selzer: "Complexity was Volker Rebell's thing, he wrote music that had many chords and wasn't just limited to major and minor." When Frank Löw came on as the new drummer at the beginning of 1967, a new repertoire had to be worked out, and in addition to their own pieces, they tried to improvise on texts by Heinrich Heine. It was not until 1968 that the cheats were released again on a record. The Olivetti company had come up with a new portable compact typewriter, and because they wanted to sell it to young people, they gave the advertising campaign to an agency that worked with Heinz Edelmann, the animator of the Beatles film "Yellow Submarine". Volker Rebell had a friend in the advertising agency, and he had the idea of ​​advertising the writing instrument with a song. So Volker Rebell composed complex music, very Popsyke-like, and Ralf Geisler came up with a freaky hymn of praise for the device and a little more: The thing was packed in a box designed by Heinz Edelmann
Cover and then given away to potential customers - if you sent in your coupon. Volker Rebell (music) and Ralf Geisler (lyrics) wrote a second song "That's My Day" together, which was released together with the commercial song "Valentine" as a regular single on CBS . The record even got some airplay on Radio Luxembourg. In 1969, when Frank Löw died, the cheats got their old drummer back and continued for another year. But then they too had to pay their tribute to the nightclub and broke up. Since then, Volker Rebell has worked for Hessischer Rundfunk.

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The free setting tool. List your items quickly and easily and manage your active offers. The CHEATS - The cheats deserve a place of honor in this publication, as they were the first national winners in a beat competition. That was in 1965 in Kassel. Volker Rebell: "We were surprised ourselves that we won. The size of the company only became clear to us when we were there, namely that preliminary rounds had taken place in Allen larger cities. And we didn't really get along that well. But we were the only ones who sang German lyrics. And before that, when we submitted our title sequence, we also submitted our lyrics. There was a German teacher on the jury, and he must have been impressed that we wrote socially critical texts in German. I was already doing cabaret at the time, and overall we felt really rebellious back then, and so were the lyrics. The music was more like Kink's The CHEATS - The cheats deserve a place of honor in this publication, as they were the first national winners in a beat competition. That was in 1965 in Kassel. Volker Rebell: "We were surprised ourselves that we won. The size of the company only became clear to us when we were there, namely that preliminary rounds had taken place in Allen larger cities. And we didn't really get along that well. But we were the only ones who sang German lyrics. And before that, when we submitted our title sequence, we also submitted our lyrics. There was a German teacher on the jury, and he must have been impressed that we wrote socially critical texts in German. I was already doing cabaret at the time, and overall we felt really rebellious back then, and so were the lyrics. The music was more like Kink's