Reddit users have finally discovered the title and band behind the most famous yet mysterious 80s song online.
For nearly two decades, a moody New Wave song recorded off the radio in Germany has left ardent music lovers scouring to the internet for its name and creator.
Dubbed ‘The Most Mysterious Song On the Internet,’ a keen Redditor who goes by @marijn1412 has confirmed that the track is called ‘Subways Of Your Mind’ by the band FEX.
The user confirmed in a lengthy post that he contacted the band after discovering the song and after receiving confirmation, released the name to the world.
He also noted that the band intends to have a reunion soon.
‘About two weeks ago I came across an old newspaper article in the Nordwest Zeitung archive, while researching Hörfest bands. The article was about a band called FEX from Kiel, who won a talent contest in Bremen in Sep 1984 and their music was described as Rock with Wave and Pop influences.
‘It also mentioned their members and one of them I recognised from a Hörfest 83 band called Phret. I managed to get in touch with him and asked him if he still had some old material from those bands. He then sent me some of the songs he made with FEX and Phret… and lo and behold, one of them was titled Subways Of Your Mind. It’s a slightly different version from the one we know.
‘After I emailed him back that the song is actually quite a famous “lost song”, he asked me not to go public with it until he spoke with his old band members. In the mean time though the song did get registered at GEMA and people found out about it. But I’m happy to say that the band members agreed for me to go public with it. So here it is.
‘I’m sure there will be a lot of questions and I hope the band can answer these themselves in the future. I’m just glad and relieved the search is over,’ he wrote on the social community page.
Band member Michael Hädrich later told a German magazine that the group had no idea their song was immensely popular and revealed that it was written by fellow bandmate, Ture Rückwardt.
‘My name is Michael Hädrich and I was a member (keyboards, guitar, backing vocals) of the band FEX, which recorded the song ‘Subways of your Mind’ in 1983. Until recently, we knew nothing about the phenomenon “The most mysterious song on the internet.”
‘He surprised me with the fact that one of the songs had achieved such high visibility.’ he told TZ Magazine.
Hädrich further added that he spoke with his bandmates after being contacted by the Redditor – all of whom were just as surprised as he was- and they began searching their song archives together.
‘It was only when Marijn asked me for old material from my time with bands from Kiel that I dug out my old cassette demos and sent them to him without suspecting anything. Only then did he ask me if I hadn’t realized that the song “Subways of your Mind” was the “Most Mysterious Song On The Internet.”‘
According to the song’s digital trail goes back to 2004, when Darius S. from Wilhelmshaven, Germany recorded a sound byte from a radio broadcast and posted it on a website along with other unknown songs – hoping others could help identify them.
His sister, Lydia then digitized and uploaded a snippet of the song to the internet in 2007, according to Rolling Stone.
Over the next 12 years, the song bounced around online but remained unidentified.
The search for its origins went viral again back in 2019 when a 16-year-old student in São Paulo uploaded the song to YouTube.