claudia brucken tour

Claudia Brücken

Similar artists on tour, bandsintown merch.

concerts and tour dates

About claudia brücken.

• Moscow concerts Moscow concerts Moscow concerts See all Moscow concerts ( Change location ) Today · Next 7 days · Next 30 days
• Most popular artists worldwide
• Trending artists worldwide

• Tourbox for artists

Search for events or artists

• Sign up Log in

• Get the app
• Moscow concerts
• Change location
• Popular Artists
• Live streams
• Deutsch Português
• Popular artists

Claudia Brucken

• On tour: no
• Upcoming 2024 concerts: none

3,638 fans get concert alerts for this artist.

Join Songkick to track Claudia Brucken and get concert alerts when they play near you.

Find your next concert

Join 3,638 fans getting concert alerts for this artist

Past concerts

Electric Dreams

O2 Academy Sheffield

O2 Academy Bournemouth

View all past concerts

Live reviews

I saw Claudia in the early nineties and again at the Trevor Horn concert in 2004 and both were excellent shows. However, her 2015 show in Bristol was really disappointing. There was a pretty low turnout and Claudia didn't seem to be in a very happy mood. I don't know if those two things were connected. The set list was almost entirely her latest material. Many of the new songs were quite nice but also quite slow and quite similar. It would have been nice to have some more high tempo tracks and a bit more variety. It was a fairly short set for the ticket price. There were two Propaganda tracks played (which was fine, I wouldn't have expected many more) but nothing at all from Act or the "Love And A Million Other Things" album which would have been really nice to hear.

Report as inappropriate

Simply Superb.

Need another live concert soon.

Venue was a bit small, could have been bigger, the place was packed. Needed more elbow room and places to sit. None of us fans are 18 any more !

por que nunca vieram ao brasil ??

somos loucos para vermos um show de voces.

voces marcaram nossas vidas e tambem temos vontade de ver voces aqui em nosso pais.

o BRASIL ESPERA POR VOCES .

Posters (4)

Find out more about Claudia Brucken tour dates & tickets 2024-2025

Want to see Claudia Brucken in concert? Find information on all of Claudia Brucken’s upcoming concerts, tour dates and ticket information for 2024-2025.

Unfortunately there are no concert dates for Claudia Brucken scheduled in 2024.

Songkick is the first to know of new tour announcements and concert information, so if your favorite artists are not currently on tour, join Songkick to track Claudia Brucken and get concert alerts when they play near you, like 3638 other Claudia Brucken fans.

Similar artists

• Most popular charts
• API information
• Brand guidelines
• Community guidelines
• Terms of use
• Privacy policy
• Cookies settings
• Cookies policy

Get your tour dates seen everywhere.

• But we really hope you love us.

• International edition
• Australia edition
• Europe edition

‘We were a different side of the 80s. Not the Duran Duran 80s’: the return of Propaganda

Fans of Throbbing Gristle with liner notes on the gender of vampires, the German synth-pop duo somehow broke into the mainstream. Now, after 37 years away, they’re back

I n early 1983, a Düsseldorf band called Propaganda got a message: Trevor Horn wanted them to come to London. It was an enticing and deeply improbable turn of events. Horn was the UK’s hottest pop producer, a man who had unexpectedly turned the hopelessly drippy duo Dollar into a critical cause célèbre and piloted ABC’s debut The Lexicon of Love to platinum-selling transatlantic success, also making it the fourth biggest-selling album of 1982 in the UK.

Propaganda, however, were no one’s idea of a pop band. They were electronic experimentalists, a product of Germany’s burgeoning post-punk Neue Deutsche Welle scene. As vocalist Susanne Freytag puts it, they were attempting: “To go away from American music and find a kind of identity – there was a lot of shame in our generation in Germany , and it was a way of finding, or seeing people using the German language and making new music.” One of their members, Ralf Dörper, had previously been in metal-banging industrialists Die Krupps: he claimed to be less interested in music than he was in film. They had already caused a ripple of controversy in Germany by plundering imagery from the 1920s and 30s: a TV show refused to let them use a film featuring images of Zeppelin airships and Marlene Dietrich because, Dörper later said, “they didn’t understand that we might be questioning values of the past, rather than accepting them”. And they were not huge on melody. One of the songs on their demo tape was a German-language extrapolation of Throbbing Gristle’s entirely tune-free 1981 single Discipline. When the call from Trevor Horn came through, Propaganda scrambled to recruit a new member, Claudia Brücken, on the grounds that none of them could actually sing. “I felt a bit shocked,” says Freytag. “I thought ‘I’m not a singer, I’m happy to go and do something, but oh my God, we need a singer’. She is a very good singer, thank God.”

It was the beginning of one of 80s pop’s most unlikely and enduring stories. Propaganda’s career was brief and turbulent – by 1986, the band had splintered, mired in legal disputes – and they never sold huge quantities of records: their debut album A Secret Wish reached No 16 in the UK. But the people who liked them seemed to love them with a rare intensity. In 2018, when Freytag and Brücken reunited to play A Secret Wish live in London, “people came from Mexico and Japan” to see it. A similar enthusiasm seems to have greeted the news that the pair have made a new album, The Heart Is Strange, with A Secret Wish’s producer Stephen Lipson, under the name xPropaganda. “There’s someone who’s messaged me about coming to the London show from North Carolina,” frowns Lipson, sitting with Brücken and Freytag in a north London recording studio. “He’s bringing his daughter. It’s extraordinary. I don’t understand any of it.”

“Maybe,” Freytag suggests, “Propaganda represents a different kind of 80s. It’s not what we associate with … the Duran Duran side of the 80s.”

Horn had been alerted to Propaganda by NME journalist Paul Morley, with whom he was starting a new record label, Zang Tuum Tumb. The fact that its name came from futurist artist Filippo Marinetti’s onomatopoeic description of the sound of warfare underscored its leftfield, arty approach to pop, with which Propaganda fitted perfectly. “Paul liked the music, but it was also the combination of the name, the weird Germans and the really hard beat,” says Freytag. “It was a bit mad. Paul and Trevor, they were really intrigued by the thought of what they could make with people like us: four quite experimental, strange Germans. That was also appealing for us.”

So Propaganda happily submitted to a ZTT makeover, which involved first Horn, then his deputy Lipson, drastically reworking their sound and Morley decorating their records with impenetrable sleeve notes: one single’s cover featured not one but two lengthy quotes from Italian literary theorist Franco Moretti, the first about Balzac, the second pondering the gender of vampires. “I was experimental – I was very playful with creative things,” says Brücken. “And for me, the opportunity to work with Trevor was amazing, and to work with Stephen and all these fantastic people. I always felt we were doing something together, I didn’t feel like my artistic integrity was at all compromised in any way.”

Under ZTT’s aegis, Propaganda became pop stars, of a sort: within a year, they were on The Tube, performing their German-language extrapolation of Throbbing Gristle’s Discipline to a visibly nonplussed audience. They also performed their debut single, The Nine Lives of Dr Mabuse, which showed what Horn could do with their sound: a sample-stuffed, cutting-edge production with a killer chorus, which still retained the original band’s harsh, experimental edge. One critic memorably called them “Abba in hell”. It made the Top 10 in Germany, meaning Brücken, still at school in Düsseldorf, had to “be excused by my art teacher to go and make a video in Folkestone”. When she returned, bearing the Anton Corbijn-directed, German expressionism-influenced end result, “for my art teacher, it was a total proud moment, because it just dived into German history and the photography was so exquisite”.

Its followup, Duel, earned them an appearance on Top of the Pops. By now, work had commenced on their debut album: distracted by the unexpectedly vast success of ZTT’s other signing, Frankie Goes to Hollywood , Horn bowed out, letting Lipson take over as producer. It took a year and remains a source of controversy within the band: Lipson says he recently “came unstuck” with the band’s fourth member, Michael Mertens, over precisely who did and wrote what during its making. “I think he thinks the songs were more formed than I think they were, that was the crux of it. I remember there’s a song, Dream Within a Dream, and he just had a chord progression. A beautiful chord progression, and acknowledged as such by one and all, but there was no song, no idea, no structure, and I think quite a lot of the songs were like that.”

The sessions sound deranged, a state of affairs compounded by the fact that ZTT had carelessly neglected to set a budget for the recording. At one point, a percussionist was required to stand on a ladder throwing “huge bits of metal” into a porcelain bath. At another, Lipson and a programmer engaged in a “sample war”, taking turns to blast each other with the most outrageous noises they could find: you can hear it on Jewel. Contributions were solicited from Japan’s David Sylvian and Yes guitarist Steve Howe, the latter dragged in as he walked past the studio. The end result was hugely expensive and wildly inventive, but when Lipson played it to the assembled bigwigs from ZTT’s parent company Island, he says it was greeted with silence, broken only by the plaintive inquiry: “Have you got a single?”

A Secret Wish attracted some very high-profile fans: Martin Gore claimed it was a huge influence on Depeche Mode ’s subsequent albums, Quincy Jones wanted to licence it for release in the US, and Horn subsequently claimed he had borrowed its sound on Michael Jackson’s Bad. But cracks had started to appear in Propaganda’s ranks, as Freytag remembers: “We did a tour, a lot of TV appearances, and I remember it worked really well, but after that it was a bit like: OK, we didn’t earn enough money and it was a lot of work, and people became frustrated, didn’t really understand this country.”

Lipson says that a new manager didn’t help. “We spent a fortune doing [A Secret Wish], but it was so worth doing. The manager wouldn’t see it that way because they hadn’t lived the journey.”

Brücken – who married Paul Morley – elected to stay with ZTT, the others left. If nothing else, Propaganda’s split in its aftermath bolstered the mystique of A Secret Wish: its reputation seemed to grow with the passing of time, the vanishing into history of an era when major record labels would bankroll wild experimental follies. There have been various incarnations of Propaganda since, but all attempts to reunite the quartet who made A Secret Wish have floundered, save for a single brief live appearance in 2008. When the most recent attempt to reunite collapsed – “we were working together,” says Freytag diplomatically, “then there was a time when it didn’t really work any more” – Brücken and Freytag struck out on their own as xPropaganda: the plan to write a few new songs with Lipson in order to play live turned into an album.

The irony is that The Heart Is Strange feels exactly like a 21st-century followup to A Secret Wish: not a forensic re-creation of its sound, but a modern album made with the same pop smarts, the same experimental edge, and the same dark undertow, enshrined in songs such as The Wolves Are Returning, a coolly dismayed assessment of the rise of the far right. There’s talk of a followup: an improbable second act to one of the 80s’ most improbable pop stories. “It was just that particular moment in time,” says Brücken, of their first flush of success. “It wouldn’t have happened a year later or a year before, you know – it was just this kind of peculiar series of events that happened that made this moment possible. I mean, if we’d planned it, it never would have happened. I always think that.”

• Pop and rock
• Electronic music

Comments (…)

Most viewed.

• Login/Register

More Live Nation Events

Bluey's Big Play

Bruce Dickinson

Centenary Square Summer Series

Craig David

Crowded House

Follow live nation.

Follow Live Nation for News, Presales and Exclusive Deals!

Track your favourite artists, access presale tickets, and never miss a show!

Claudia Brücken, Susanne Freytag and Steve Lipson announce xPropaganda album

xPropaganda will release new album The Heart Is Strange through ZTT in May

Prog Award winner Claudia Brücken has teamed up with her former Propaganda colleague Susanne Freytag and the band's former producer Steve Lipson (a member of Trevor Horn 's pop prog band Producers), to announce a new album as xPropaganda. The new outfit will release a brand new album, The Heart Is Strange through their old label ZTT on May 20. You can listen to first single Don't (You Mess With Me) below.

The new trio have also announced a London show at The Garage on May 24, where "Claudia, Susanne & Stephen will perform The Heart Is Strange in full, as well as some much-loved Propaganda classics from their back catalogue."

Propaganda were formed in Dusseldorf in 1982 by industrial musician Ralf Dorper. The band signed to ZTT and released their acclaimed debut album A Secret Wish in 1985. Despite hit singles such as Dr. Mabuse and Duel , the band's career became embroiled in legal wrangles and they split in 1990.

The four key members, Brücken, Freytag, Dorper and Michael Mertens, have reunited sporadically over the years. This current activity from vocalists Brücken and Freytag came about after the pair performed two sold-out shows at the Grarage as xPropaganda in 2018, and followed it up by convening with Lipson to begin writing new material

“We always thought it was a shame that an album as distinctive and acclaimed as A Secret Wish seemed destined to be a one-off. It certainly meant a lot to us, and it never seemed right that the story stopped there. Working again with Stephen Lipson and means that we can turn our dreams about what the ZTT follow up to A Secret Wish would sound like into a reality."

Claudia Brücken teamed up with former Tangerine Dream member Jerome Froese  to record the Beginn album in 2018. The same year she won the Outer Limits Award at the Progressive Music Awards.

The Heart Is Strange will be available on coloured vinyl, black vinyl, CD, 2CD and digital

Prog Newsletter

Sign up below to get the latest from Prog, plus exclusive special offers, direct to your inbox!

Get The Heart Is Strange .

Insert quote here

Writer and broadcaster Jerry Ewing is the Editor of Prog Magazine which he founded for Future Publishing in 2009. He grew up in Sydney and began his writing career in London for Metal Forces magazine in 1989. He has since written for Metal Hammer, Maxim, Vox, Stuff and Bizarre magazines, among others. He created and edited Classic Rock Magazine for Dennis Publishing in 1998 and is the author of a variety of books on both music and sport, including Wonderous Stories; A Journey Through The Landscape Of Progressive Rock.

5 essential record player maintenance and care tips to keep your deck spinning for longer

Cool new prog you realy should hear from Marjana Semkina, Dave Foster Band, Pallbearer and more

Watch the video for David Gilmour's brand new single The Pipers Call

Most Popular

• Statistics Stats
• You are here:
• Brücken, Claudia

Claudia Brücken Concert Setlists & Tour Dates

Claudia brücken at o2 shepherd's bush empire, london, england.

• Edit setlist songs
• Edit venue & date
• Edit set times
• Add to festival
• Report setlist

Claudia Brücken at The Garage, London, England

Claudia brücken at bush hall, london, england.

• Dream Within a Dream
• p:Machinery
• When Your Heart Runs Out of Time

Claudia Brücken at The Ruby Lounge, Manchester, England

Claudia brücken at thekla, bristol, england, claudia brücken at st pancras old church, london, england.

• Nothing Good Is Ever Easy
• I Lay all Night
• Day is Done
• Walk Right In
• One Summer Dream
• Time to Make Changes
• Everyone Says 'Hi'

Claudia Brücken at Gruenspan, Hamburg, Germany

Claudia brücken at postbahnhof, berlin, germany, claudia brücken at nachtleben, frankfurt, germany, claudia brücken at zeche, bochum, germany.

Claudia Brücken

More from this artist.

• Artist Statistics
• Add setlist

Most played songs

• p:Machinery ( 7 )
• Dr. Mabuse ( 5 )
• Cloud 9 ( 4 )
• Dream Within a Dream ( 4 )

More Claudia Brücken statistics

Nobody has covered a song of Claudia Brücken yet. Have you seen someone covering Claudia Brücken? Add or edit the setlist and help improving our statistics!

Artists covered

Act David Bowie Kate Bush Electric Light Orchestra Heaven 17 Onetwo Roy Orbison Propaganda

View artists covered statistics

Gigs seen live by

25 people have seen Claudia Brücken live.

Itzi101 ftodg Montysgigs hbomb IainN1 SLSJP chappers2306 LozFace lazarusheart awesomo_ben moggieboy DeeDeeAnt Liveshowz Milloman darkness BMGS juniorbearuk johnbelam Strange101 MartinBelam Maddi69 Xhedron asdarkasblack neilkelly gaffer101

Claudia Brücken on the web

Music links.

• Claudia Brücken Lyrics (de)
• Official Homepage

Tour Update

Marquee memories: alien ant farm.

• Alien Ant Farm
• Apr 26, 2024
• Apr 25, 2024
• Apr 24, 2024
• Apr 23, 2024
• Apr 22, 2024
• Apr 21, 2024
• FAQ | Help | About
• Terms of Service
• Ad Choices | Privacy Policy
• Feature requests
• Songtexte.com

• listening party
• existing artist
• See all results

No matching results

Try a different filter or a new search keyword.

Search all Bandcamp artists, tracks, and albums

• artists PRO view site
• edit profile
• subscription subscription
• view collection
• showLinkedBands(!showLinkedBands())" data-test="linked-accounts-header">

Instead Onetwo

Cloud Nine Onetwo

Item Onetwo

This Happened Claudia Brücken and Guests

Claudia – The Cover Versions Claudia Brücken / Claudia Brücken + Andrew Poppy

Claudia on Vinyl Claudia Brücken / Onetwo

Where Else…

The Lost Are Found

Onetwo, Remixed Onetwo

Claudia Brücken London, UK

Welcome to the There(there) Bandcamp store for Claudia Brücken, Onetwo and associated releases.

• claudiabrucken.co.uk

contact / help

Contact Claudia Brücken

Streaming and Download help

Shipping and returns

Report this account

• terms of use
• switch to mobile view

Claudia Brücken

Coming to prominence as the lead vocalist in ZTT s influential hit-making Düsseldorf combo Propaganda, Claudia Brücken was one of the more distinctive more...

Follow Claudia Brücken on Ents24 to receive updates on any new tour dates the moment they are announced...

• Be the first to know about new tour dates
• Alerts are free and always will be
• We hate spam and will never share your email address with anyone else
• More than a million fans already rely on Ents24 to follow their favourite artists and venues

Fans who like Claudia Brücken also like

Most features of this page require JavaScript. Please enable JavaScript in your browser.

Eventim UK places great importance on data protection. You can read our data protection statement here .

• To shopping cart

• Claudia Brucken

There are currently no available events for Claudia Brucken. Sign up for our Ticket Alarm to receive an email once new events go on sale.

Biography - Claudia Brucken

Claudia brucken fan report: ratings and reviews, congratulations you are the first to post a fan report for claudia brucken..

Your opinion is an important decision criterion for other visitors to attend an event. Share your experience with future visitors to this event. Please remember to pay attention to our netiquette. Fan reports are released by our editors. We reserve the right not to publish posts that violate our rules.

Your personal recommendations

Your browser does not allow third-party cookies. To continue, please click the button below to open the ticketing page in a new window.

Your browser doesn't allow cookies. To place an order, please change the browser cookie settings and reload this page.

• News & Reviews
• Tours & Tickets

Claudia Looi

Moscow Communist Tour: A Two-Hour Walking Tour in Moscow

By Claudia Looi Leave a Comment

Follow the leader in Moscow Communist Walking Tour

As the tour name implies, the Moscow Communist Tour highlights the history and places impacted by communism from 1917 to Perestroika. Everyday at 4pm just before the evening rush hour, travelers gather at Lubyanka Square, in front of the Solovetsky Stone Monument to meet the Communist tour guide.

We were asked to do the same.

To get there we took the metro to Lubyanka metro station located just under the square. At 3:45pm when we arrived at the square no one looked like tourists at all. I was a little nervous because all communication was via email with Moscow Free Tour Company the day before. Did the group leave without us?

A woman forced us to take her brochure in Russian. It had something to do with an election. As I sat on the green bench, another lady came over and sat next to me. She didn’t look like a tourist to me. Meanwhile my husband and teens were exploring around the park.

The communist walking tour started when Irina arrived with several tourists who already joined her earlier on another tour called the free Moscow walking tour. The Communist tour isn’t free. After collecting cash from all the tourists including us, Irina pointed to the yellow building. She said it was the KGB headquarters. Inside and underground were secret passageways and prisons. Unfortunately we didn’t step into the KGB headquarters or visit the passageways and prisons.

KGB Building

Before we left the square she pointed to the Solovetsky Stone Monument. The monument was constructed to commemorate those who were victims of Soviet-era torture and persecution.

Solovetsky Stone Monument

From the KGB headquarters we walked on the Theatralnyy Road to the historic Metropol Hotel owned by the KGB. Known as the Tower of Babel of the 20 th century, Metropol Hotel was opened in 1901 with all luxury amenities like hot water, refrigerator, elevators and telephones. Foreign dignitaries that visited the former Soviet Union were housed at the Metropol.

Metropole Hotel Moscow

During the Soviet-era the hotel was also called the Second House of Soviets where Chicherin, Sverdlov and Bukharin lived and worked.

Next to the hotel is the Revolution Square, an important square during the 1917 Revolution.

Revolution Square Moscow

In front of the Bolshoi Theater

Across the street from the Metropol is the famous Bolshoi Theater. We were at the Bolshoi to see the CCCP letters. These are some of the remnants seen throughout the Communist Tour.

Bolshoi Theater

CCCP inscription at the Bolshoi Theater

From there we were told to be aware of the next stop, the Gulag Museum. It would walk deeper into the dark and eerie past of the Soviet-era. While walking, there was definitely no signs of communism. Everything around the area was posh and luxurious. We passed by shops, restaurants, outdoor cafes on Petrovka Street and the intersection of the famous Arbat Street, the pedestrian shopping street of Moscow .

Arbat Street

Porsche, Mercedes, Audi, BMW and many more luxurious cars were parked on the street. Not just one or two luxurious cars, there were over 10, all parked in a row outside boutiques and restaurants.

Gulag an acronym for Chief Administration of Corrective Labor Camps and Colonies was the Soviet forced labor camp systems during Stalin’s rule from the 30s to 50s. Countless prisoners spent years detained and forced into hard labor in these labor camps. Today the museum guides are dressed liked the guards.

Just outside the museum the atmosphere was totally different. Russian wealth is looming. As I walked on Stoleshnikov Pereulok street, every shop was showing signs of lavishness and indulgence with stores like Ferragamo, Jimmy Choo, Versace, Prada and the likes. It is the most expensive street in Russia.

On Tverskaya Street we stop by Moscow Bookstore, one of the oldest and biggest bookstores in Moscow. Inside we went downstairs to look at reprints of Soviet propaganda posters. It was not appropriate to take photos. So I don’t have photos inside the bookstore and photos of the propaganda posters.

We went to Moscow bookstore to look at old Soviet-era posters.

Tverskaya Street

Eliseevsky, the famous grocery store is a must visit store in Moscow. Opened since 1901 and through the Soviet-era, this luxurious grocery sells all types of caviar, sausages, cured meat, cheeses, wine, dips, chocolates and more, just like when it was first started.

Eliseevsky the famous neo-Baroque grocery store in Moscow. Open over a 100 years ago by Gregory Eliseev. Inside are crystal chandeliers and all sorts of caviar, even Tolstoy wrote about it in Anna Karenina.

The most interesting part of the tour inside this grocery store was not the food items. It was the crystal chandeliers, high arches and interesting décor. It is located in the historic part of Moscow on Tverskaya. The question was, “Why was this grocery store run continuously even through the Soviet-era?”

The Communist Tour ends at Pushkinskaya Square (Pushkin Square). Unfortunately the two-hour tour did not have toilet stops and news was McDonald’s at Pushkinskaya Square was closed two weeks prior to our visit. It had the most decent toilets in the area and the only place where you could easily use the toilets.

Having no choice and needing to find a toilet we made our way to an Armenian Restaurant across the street from McDonald’s. This is a beautiful restaurant with views of the street and square. The food was amazingly delicious and expensive.

I recommend this tour if you are looking for a tour that provides stories and a two-hour walk around Moscow city center. We paid 950 rubles per adult and 550 rubles per student for the Communist Tour in September 2014.

Information: Moscow Free Tours 

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

You must be logged in to post a comment.

Please go to the Instagram Feed settings page to create a feed.

Electrostal History and Art Museum

Most Recent: Reviews ordered by most recent publish date in descending order.

Detailed Reviews: Reviews ordered by recency and descriptiveness of user-identified themes such as wait time, length of visit, general tips, and location information.

Electrostal History and Art Museum - All You Need to Know BEFORE You Go (2024)

• (0.19 mi) Elektrostal Hotel
• (1.21 mi) Yakor Hotel
• (1.27 mi) Mini Hotel Banifatsiy
• (1.18 mi) Elemash
• (1.36 mi) Hotel Djaz
• (0.07 mi) Prima Bolshogo
• (0.13 mi) Makecoffee
• (0.25 mi) Amsterdam Moments
• (0.25 mi) Pechka
• (0.26 mi) Mazhor

The Independent: ‘How We Met’

Author: Nick Duerden / Source: The Independent / Published: 16th September 2012

Claudia Brücken, 48

The singer of Propaganda, the German synth-pop act whose biggest hit was 1985's "Duel", Brücken lives in London with Paul Humphreys, a founder member of the group Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark.

I first met Glenn in 1984. My band had recently arrived from Germany, and we were about to make a video for our single "Dr Mabuse". We met up with the video's director, Anton Corbijn, at Glenn's house, because his then wife, Sarah, was doing the make-up.

I was already well aware of Heaven 17, and very excited about meeting them. But I seem to remember them just sitting on the sofa, silently observing what we were doing. They were dressed, as they always were, terribly well, so austere and quite Germanic as well. And cool, very cool.

I was married to [former NME journalist] Paul Morley at the time, and we began to bump into Glenn and Sarah a lot on the club scene. Once, coming back in Glenn's car from a night out, we'd had had a little too much to drink, I think, and we got stopped by two police officers. But one of them recognised Glenn, and then me, and even Paul! He was quite the music fan, and instead of giving us a ticket he talked to us about music and our influences, and then let us go!

Our friendship was cemented when we were asked to contribute a song to the Nicolas Roeg film Insignificance. It was called "When Your Heart Runs Out of Time", an old country and western song, but Glenn and I, of course, did our own particularly avant-garde take on it.

We've been good friends ever since. We live close to one another in London, and we both have dogs, so we often bump into each other on Primrose Hill. Ours is a very relaxed friendship. I'm also dear friends with his second wife, Lindsay. She used to be in my band in the 1990s.

There is a lot of nostalgia for 1980s acts right now, and I think that anything that has the power to make an audience feel good is great. But I see myself as more of an evolving artist, and so I'm a bit resistant to nostalgia tours. Because I am of a certain age now, it is difficult to reinvent yourself, but that doesn't mean I shouldn't make music. Glenn feels the same. He is doing film and TV music now, but I keep on encouraging him to get Heaven 17 back together again. It is my wish for them to do so. They were such a great band.

Glenn Gregory, 54

Born in Sheffield, Gregory formed Heaven 17 in 1980; the band's hits included "Temptation" and "Come Live With Me". He now works on TV and film soundtracks, and lives in London with his wife, Lindsay.

Oh, I remember very well my first sighting of Claudia. She was so striking, and there was something about her I found… commanding. Perhaps it was simply that English wasn't her first language, or that she was German, but she could say whatever she wanted and you would listen. I'm sure she was very nervous, but there was a self-assuredness to her.

And she was so interesting, really avant-garde, very much her own person. We hit it off very quickly. I was good friends with her then husband, and we would all go out clubbing together: to the Zanzibar Cocktail Bar in Covent Garden, then the Limelight. When we wanted a change of pace, we would tell everyone we were off to Mumu's, members only, no one else allowed. Mumu's was Paul and Claudia's front-room.

We've collaborated various times. I sang on the B-side to her single "Duel"; we did the Nic Roeg song together; and more recently I played at one of her shows in London. It was a retrospective of her career, and I joined her on stage for a few songs. We reinterpreted one of Heaven 17's old hits, "Temptation", and I have to say it felt fantastic to revive it.

Claudia is on to her second [major] relationship now, and I'm on to my second wife, and we are still friends, so we have come through all of that together. And my wife is godmother to Claudia's daughter, so there's that link, too.

She has become more Anglicised over the years – but not too much, mercifully. She used to make me laugh so much in the early days. She was so very German. Long before mobiles, I remember us waiting outside a phone box. She had an important call to make, but we had to wait. Suddenly, she rapped on the door, opened it, and barked at the man inside that it was her turn now. "Claudia, Claudia," I had to tell her, "we don't behave like that over here." "But Glenn," she replied, "he has been in there for over 15 minutes, and I need to use the phone!"

Claudia has been encouraging me to make another Heaven 17 album. It's tempting, and seeing Claudia do her new album – which is brilliant – does make me think. Who knows, maybe one day…

Return to the Coverage/Press index

ELECTROSTAL HISTORY AND ART MUSEUM: All You Need to Know BEFORE You Go (with Photos)

• (0.19 mi) Elektrostal Hotel
• (1.21 mi) Yakor Hotel
• (1.27 mi) Mini Hotel Banifatsiy
• (1.18 mi) Elemash
• (1.36 mi) Hotel Djaz
• (0.07 mi) Prima Bolshogo
• (0.13 mi) Makecoffee
• (0.25 mi) Amsterdam Moments
• (0.25 mi) Pechka
• (0.26 mi) Mazhor