ALIVE
Starting
I joined ALIVE while still playing with CZAIKA RANCH - maybe I was not busy enough. CZAIKA was more hands-on, ALIVE made a restart with mark III and they had remarkable good songs with detailed keyboard and guitar work and Christian background. The remaining part of mark II was Marcus Stelz on guitar and Roland Schilz on keyboards, both great musicians. I was able to bring in drummer Steffen Janke and singer Tanja Frank (Hollaus), which was really a jump-start for the new formation. Quickly we wrote songs and refined some of the older ones. Our first home-made recording "Der blaue Planet" is unfortunately missing. We played some gigs around Pforzheim but realized finally that we lost speed and we were not able to develop any further.
Mark IV
So we decided to make a change and restarted without keyboards and the new drummer Jochen Blum, who was a professional percussionist. We added Tim Frank who backed Marcus Stelz doing the main guitar work. With this team we developed a lot of great songs and moved from German to English lyrics. We attended several band workshops and had the possiblity to improve our songwriting with the aid of professional coaches.
Mark V
Tim Frank left the band and went together with his wife to Nepal as a missionary. He tragically died in a motorbike accident at Kathmandu. Soon after he left the band he was replaced by Günther Walther. In 1998 we had our first CD recording "7 o'clock news" with Robin Schmidt (2496mastering). In 2001 we luckily got some money from my employer reinisch to record a Christmas present CD for their customers, where we of course stepped in. The recording "2001" was engineered again from Robin Schmidt.
Last months
Later on it got more and more difficult to keep the band together with everyone doing their own jobs. So we decided to record the remaining good songs in Günthers small homerecording studio and named them "Private Recordings".
