History Box Vol. 1: The Brain Years

When we started our musical journey over fifty years ago, no one would have guessed that Epitaph would still be active in 2023. In the late 1970, we lived with our wives, roadies, dogs, cats and bats in the "Alten Schulhaus" in the small German village of Graue in the Lüneburg Heide and jammed and composed new songs. Our last album "Return To Reality" had been verry successful. So, our record company, Brain Metronome, wanted a new Epitaph production. Our drummer Fritz Randow was impressed by the drum sounds from Hotline Studios in Frankfurt, so we went to record there. It turned out to be a more disco oriented studio with plasmatic people. Not exactly the place for a rock band. But we made the best of it and put out a reasonable sounding recording. Shortly after recording, Michael Karch, our keyboardist, decided to leave the band so we were back to our "Twin Guitars". We used to play our new songs live before recording. Playing live, our songs had the adrenaline pumping power of Epitaph. This influenced our decision to record the next album live rather than in the studio. I'm not sure if this has ever been done before, but it was born out of a fear of not getting the Epitaph signature sound on an LP. So, we booked Connie Plank's mobile studio for the album "Epitaph Live" and recorded our new songs live in front of an audience. Only two songs had previously been recorded. Altogether, we recorded three shows in three days. The recordings were then mixed in the Horus Sound Studio in Hanover by Jan Nemec as sound engineer. Our drummer Fritz Randow had accepted Eloy's Frank Bornemann offer to join the band. Everyone was dissatisfied with the situation, so the line-up split up and Cliff moved to Dortmund to work again with the original line-up of Bernd Kolbe and Klaus Walz and with Norbert "Panzer" Lehmann on drums. This is the line-up which recorded the album "Danger Man". (Cliff Jackson January 2023)