It Takes Me Higher

For car design "the future" was everything with a fin on it. For faceless studio musicians "the future" was wearing cheap alien masks and gold-lamé ponchos.

Enter Austrian "Space Disco"-Band Ganymed. Having access to the right machines and the wrong clothes at the right time, they immediately took off with their simple but effective debut single "It takes me higher".
Mixing Cerrone, Moroder, Munich Machine and fellow countrymen Supermax with embarassing Kindergarten antics gave them an instant million-selling hit. It´s camp and hypnotising at the same time and much funnier than Space, the French band that came from a similar wormhole.

"It takes me higher" is re-discovered every few years when people recognize the tight production and the full, atmospheric sound.

I used to play this over and over to my friends on dad´s brand new Grundig stereo, which was one of the first models with a wireless (ultra-sonic) remote-control. The volume- and bass-potis would move up and up, controlled by invisible hands and our ten-year old disco-minds would be totally blown by those space-warp syn-drum shots. I guess dad would have been impressed if he knew that his stereo was really capable of bringing the house down.

The album "Takes you higher" rode the space-theme to death. Lots of cringe inducing filler material ("Come on and dance with me") stood against tightly produced electro-funk like "Movin´on a disco planet", "Music drives me crazy" and great instrumental italo-space disco "Saturn".

Here is the stupendous 12" version with an edited appearance in legendary German tv-show "DISCO":


Ganymed released two more pretty mediocre albums with more half-assed space-oddities, but there were more and more earthly themes sneaking into their songs. "Dancing in a disco"(!) and "Rollerskater" must have been attempts to cash in on current fads. In 1980 not only disco was dead, but Ganymed proclaimed "Death to the alien".

They would disband in 1981. By then their bass player was a young, ambitious musician by the name of Johann Hölzel. One year later he would become Austrians biggest pop-star since Mozart: The late FALCO.