Better Days: Whirlpool Productions Special (November 2022)

Last week Whirlpool Productions received the Holger Czukay Prize for Pop Music from the city of Cologne. Reason enough for Paul aka The Conservative to dedicate a full edition of Better Days Radio to the trio of Hans Nieswandt, Eric D. Clark and Justus Köhncke.

It all started in the early nineties at Cologne’s Rose Club, where Hans Nieswandt, then also an editor at Spex, ran a deep house night called Whirlpool. Together with Californian DJ, singer and keyboarder Eric D. Clark and regular guest Justus Köhncke, the first own productions were made for those club nights. The debut maxi “Fly High” / “Gimme” from 1993 quickly carried the name beyond Cologne.

In 1995 the debut album “Brian de Palma” came out on Hamburg’s Ladomat 2000, followed by “Dense Music” in 1996. And then the unexpected happened: “From: Disco To: Disco”, with Eric D. Clark on vocals and partly recorded at the Can Studio in Weilerswist, turned into a European hit and stayed at number one in Italy for nine weeks in the summer of 1997. “The Cold Song” made it into the German charts, “Crazy Music”, built on a Bryan Ferry composition, followed in 1998, and after the third album “???” the trio released “Lifechange” in 2001.

I first heard Whirlpool on “Scall The House Vol. 1”, a 1995 house compilation on Freudenhouse that opened with “Fly High”. I was blown away by how different it sounded from everything around it: brave, playful, never taking itself too seriously.

The first part of the show goes back to the early Ladomat years with “Fly Hi”, “Harvest”, “International Cigarette” and “Gimme”, before the hits “The Cold Song”, “From: Disco To: Disco” and “Crazy Music” take over. The second half follows the members into their solo work: Eric D. Clark as Phattitude and with “To All The People I Owe Money To”, Justus Köhncke with “2 After 909”, “Shelter” and “The Answer Is Yes”, and Hans Nieswandt with “Freaks, I See Life”. The acoustic version of “The Cold Song” closes the circle.

This show is a personal homage to the three of them and a reminiscence of Cologne in the nineties, when Hans and Eric were residents at the Funky Chicken Club. I was a regular there, and those nights shaped me more than I could have known back then.