PINK CREAM 69 TRIVIA
Trivia
Their Japanese debut was not the first album but the second. Marquee / Avalon records that the 1989 debut Pink Cream 69 first made its name in Japan as an import, and that the band only got a Japanese release with One Size Fits All in 1991. Their first Japanese tour followed — and it went straight onto tape: the shows were issued as the video Size It Up! Live In Japan.
The awkward-looking name Pink Cream 69 was taken from a cocktail. Marquee Inc. / Avalon, the company that has handled the band in Japan, gives that origin on its artist page: the name was suggested by the name of a drink. Plenty of hard rock bands end their name in a number, but this 69 is neither a year nor a founding date — it comes off a drinks list.
Pink Cream 69 came together in 1987 in Karlsruhe, in the south-west of Germany. Its Japanese licensee Marquee / Avalon lists the four founders by nationality as well as by instrument: Germans Andi Deris on vocals and Alfred Koffler on guitar, American Dennis Ward on bass and Greek Kosta Zafiriou on drums. The band is usually filed under Germany, and it was never a German-only line-up.
The door to a major label was a magazine competition. According to the band's own history page, Pink Cream 69 won the Metal Hammer newcomer contest held at the Rockfabrik club in Ludwigsburg in 1988. A run of lucrative major-label offers followed, and the band signed with CBS — the company now known as Sony Music.
Andi Deris left after the third album, Games People Play. Marquee / Avalon puts the reason as the shift towards a heavier, darker sound, which he disliked; the band he went to was Helloween, then looking for someone to follow Michael Kiske. The band's own biography dates the departure to 1994 and gives musical and personal differences as the cause, with Helloween and a solo career as the destination. One of melodic hard rock's best-known voices moved straight into German metal's best-known band.
After Endangered the band made public that Alfred Koffler had focal dystonia — a serious condition, in the words of the band's own biography, affecting his left hand and his playing. For the shows that followed they brought in a second guitarist, Uwe Reitenauer, to take weight off Alfred on stage. Reitenauer went on to become a permanent member, and by In10sity in 2007 the biography describes him as a regular part of the band. Marquee / Avalon dates the five-piece line-up from the 2003 tour.
The tour history the band kept on its own site lists 360 dated shows between 1988 and 2011. Germany accounts for 235 of them; then come Switzerland with 18, Sweden and the Netherlands with 12 each and the United Kingdom with 11. Japan has 7. The busiest year on the list is 1990, with 57 shows — the year after the debut album. Twenty-one countries and territories appear in it altogether.
On 25 November 2019 Dennis Ward announced on his own Facebook page that he was leaving Pink Cream 69, after 32 years. Blabbermouth reported it the next day. Ward described the decision as anything but spontaneous: he had played only a handful of shows with the band in recent years, was not enjoying the few there were, and no longer felt comfortable on stage. He was explicit that it had nothing to do with his other work — playing with Gus G, joining Magnum, or his studio career as a producer and engineer — and that he bore the band no ill will. Roman Beselt had often stood in for him.
The first Japanese visit, in 1992, was five shows. The tour history the band published lists three consecutive nights at Club Citta on 30 January, 31 January and 1 February, then Nagoya Bottom Line on 4 February and Osaka Moda Hall on 5 February. The band's own history page counts the trip the same way: five shows in Japan. Three nights running in one hall is not a small booking for a European band three years past its debut.
The video Size It Up! – Live In Japan was filmed on 31 January 1992 at Club Citta in Kawasaki; the band's own release page gives that date and venue. It was the middle of their three nights at the hall. The tape came out in 1993 on Sony Music Video Enterprises under the number 200492, and the running order takes in Take Those Tears and One Step Into Paradise from the debut album as well as White Men Do No Reggae, which had been the Japanese bonus track on that record.
At the end of 1991 Pink Cream 69 put out two EPs eighteen days apart, both titled like map coordinates. 36° / 140°, released on 21 November, was the Japanese edition, catalogue number ESCA 5509. 49° / 8°, released on 9 December, appeared in Europe on both CD and LP. The two track lists — six songs and seven — overlap almost completely: an acoustic Ballerina, a studio jam through Detroit Rock City, a remixed demo from 1988. The official site never explains what the two titles point at, but which record was meant for which market is plain from the catalogue numbers and the formats.
A Japan-only bonus track was close to standard practice for this band. Counting the entries marked Bonustrack Japan in the official discography gives ten releases. It starts with White Men Do No Reggae on the debut Pink Cream 69 and runs through A Good Waste Of Time on Games People Play, Easy on Food for Thought, Livin' My Life For You on the live album #Live#, Always Love You on Electrified, Queen Of Sorrow on Endangered, The Edge of Sorrow on Thunderdome, Slave To What I Crave on In10sity, an acoustic The Spirit on Live In Karlsruhe and an acoustic remix of Vagrant Of The Night on Headstrong.
From the 2000s on, the Japanese edition always reached the shops first. Setting the release dates on Marquee / Avalon beside those on the band's official site: In10sity, 21 March 2007 against 23 March 2007; Live In Karlsruhe, 30 September 2009 against 16 October 2009; Ceremonial, 23 January 2013 against 25 January 2013; Headstrong, 25 October 2017 against 10 November 2017. Japan came first in all four cases, sometimes by two days and sometimes by more than two weeks.
One Size Fits All, the album that gave the band its Japanese debut, was reissued in Japan on 17 July 2019. It came out as volume 45 of Sony Music's HR/HM Legend 1000 line — the hard rock and heavy metal arm of the label's 1,000-yen budget series — under the number SICP-6176 at 1,100 yen including tax, as a limited pressing available until the end of December 2020 and carrying newly written liner notes. The series drew fifty titles from the Columbia and RCA catalogues Sony Music holds, and this edition runs to eleven tracks, including the CD bonus track We Taught The Children.
The band's official contact page carried a heading of its own — Record Label Japan — alongside management and the record company. The entry under it is Marquee Inc. / Avalon Label, in Yaraicho, Shinjuku-ku, Tokyo. A German band's official site, in other words, gave its Japanese outlet a dedicated line of its own.
The second Japanese visit, in 1999, was shared. The band's tour history lists Osaka Banana Hall on 5 March and Tokyo Club Citta on 6 March under the billing Pink Cream 69, D.C. Cooper. The official history explains the pairing: the tour was made with the former Royal Hunt singer, whose first solo album the Pink Cream 69 instrumentalists had played on. They had made the record their touring partner was out promoting.
The film of the 1992 Kawasaki show stayed on VHS for seventeen years. It reached DVD for the first time on the two-disc set Past & Present in 2009. In the contents Blabbermouth listed, Size It Up – Live In Japan runs 58 minutes, features the band with Andi Deris singing, and had previously only been released on VHS tape. The same package carries the 88-minute Karlsruhe concert of 24 January 2009, 55 minutes of interviews and backstage footage, and 31 minutes of the band's video clips.
The long name got shortened, in Japan as in Germany. Marquee / Avalon's artist profile describes a band that gigged hard from the moment it formed, shared stages with a great many acts on the strength of a live show unusual for newcomers, became something of a musicians' band — and picked up an affectionate fan nickname along the way: the great Pinkies.
Scroll the band's published tour history to the bottom and it ends on two 1988 dates at the Rockfabrik in Ludwigsburg, 24 April and 26 December. Nothing in the 360 entries is older. The Rockfabrik is also the venue the same site's history page names for the 1988 Metal Hammer newcomer contest they won. Which of the two dates was the contest is not stated anywhere on the site.
Deris was replaced only after a run of auditions. The singer who came through them, David Readman, made his entrance on the fourth album, Change — produced in Los Angeles, and pointed in a more modern, more open direction, as the official history describes it. Readman is English: the band's own member page gives his birthplace as Burnley in the north of England and his previous bands as Adagio and Sixmyth. A band founded in Germany would be fronted by an Englishman from then on.
After Live In Karlsruhe the band went quiet for a while. Marquee / Avalon dates the restart to 2012 — and to the same moment the founding drummer Kosta Zafiriou left and Chris Schmidt took his place. The line-up that came out of it made Ceremonial, the band's first album in six years. Their own biography files it as their second studio album for Frontiers Records and the first made with their new drummer.
The members of Pink Cream 69 have also worked on a record by Helloween's former singer. Marquee / Avalon records that in 2005 the band helped make the debut album of Place Vendome, the project fronted by Michael Kiske — with the exception of their own singer, David Readman, who did not take part. The band whose vocalist had gone to Helloween as Kiske's replacement ended up backing Kiske himself.
While the band was quiet, Dennis Ward and Kosta Zafiriou were playing in Unisonic. Marquee / Avalon names their bandmates there as Michael Kiske, Mandy Meyer and Kai Hansen, and notes the strong response the album met. Two of the men who built early Helloween thus ended up in a band with the rhythm section of the group that had supplied Helloween its singer.
In 1999 Pink Cream 69 turned up in a television film on the German public broadcaster ARD. The band's history page describes it as a guest appearance, with the song Shame. Shame opens the previous year's album Electrified and was also released as a single with a video. The same autumn the band made a brief trip to South America.
Ceremonial was made across two studios. The band's own biography says part of the recording was done at Hofa Studios and the mixing finished at Dennis Ward's private room, The TrakShak. Ward's stated rule for the album was that a song has to be a hundred per cent ready and that they would take as long as it needed — which, he explained, is what leaves room to experiment and to reach the best result available. Having a bassist who is also the producer, with a studio of his own, is not incidental here; it is how the record was made.
Past And Present also carries an acoustic set the band played at their local summer festival. The official release page dates it to 20 July 2007 at Das Fest, the open-air festival in Karlsruhe, with guests: Gunter Werno on piano, Tommy Baldu on percussion, and Silke Hauck and Diana Kloo on backing vocals. The same DVD includes footage from Masters Of Rock in Vizovice, Czech Republic, from July of the same year. The main concert on it was recorded on 24 January 2009 at the Festhalle Durlach.
The band's tour history keeps the names of the acts they opened for as headings. White Lion in 1989, Europe in 1992, Bruce Dickinson in 1998, and — at the top of the list, in 2011 — Helloween and Stratovarius. That last one put them on the same stage as the band that had taken their singer. Of the 1992 Europe run, the official history says it covered fourteen countries over three months.
On chart placings, the band's own biography names particular records. One Size Fits All and Games People Play, it says, landed high in the official German and Japanese album charts; Sonic Dynamite in 2000 reached the official German album chart again; and Thunderdome in 2004 entered the German album chart once more. The Japanese chart is named only for those first two follow-ups.
The major-label years ran to six. According to the official history, in 1995 Pink Cream 69 played a co-headline tour with Thunderhead and, after six years of working with Sony Music in total, changed their business arrangements. That is a little over six years from the CBS deal of 1988 and six years from the debut album. In the 2000s the band moved to the Italian label Frontiers Records, which released In10sity in 2007, Ceremonial in 2013 and Headstrong in 2017.
On 3 March 2020 the band announced a new guitarist and a new bassist at once. Blabbermouth reported that Marco Wriedt was taking over from Uwe Reitenauer, who had left late the previous year, and that Roman Beselt was replacing Dennis Ward. Wriedt had been a member of Axxis and the driving force behind 21 Octayne. Koffler explained that the search was neither long nor difficult: Wriedt had once deputised for Reitenauer on the Helloween and Stratovarius tour, had done the job well, and was the only call the band made when it needed a guitarist. Beselt had studied classical music and had already played bass and sung with the band at festivals in Russia, Spain and the United Kingdom.
Headstrong arrived on the band's thirtieth anniversary. Blabbermouth reported the release for 10 November 2017 on Frontiers Music Srl, as their twelfth studio album overall. It was produced by the bassist, Dennis Ward, and played by the same line-up as 2013's Ceremonial, and it came packaged with a bonus live album drawing on songs from across the band's catalogue. The first track made public was the opener, We Bow To None.
The method behind Headstrong was set out in advance. Dennis Ward looked back to 1989 and the first album, when the band took pride in being a guitar band with heavy riffs and soaring vocal melodies, and said that after Ceremonial it had become clear they needed to take one step back in order to take two forward. His plan was specific: revive that earliest way of writing, cut down the amount of keyboards, and keep the production to as few layers of sound as possible — the aim being to stay as true as they could to fat, crunchy guitars.
The twentieth-anniversary concert was played at home in Karlsruhe. In the details Blabbermouth published, the January 2009 show is the centre of both the double live album Live In Karlsruhe and the double DVD Past & Present, whose total running time passes four and a half hours. The drummer, Kosta Zafiriou, described the night as a special one for the band: twenty years on from the first record, ten studio albums behind them, and a hometown concert being filmed for their first DVD — a mixture, as he put it, of looking back and of excitement about the show ahead.