If a friend were to play you The Most Mysterious Song On The Internet and casually inform you that it was a William Von Ghould home demo of an unreleased song from Creeper's forthcoming vampire rock opera Sanguivore, or a long-considered-deleted piss-take off-cut from Beastmilk's excellent 2013 album Climax, you'd likely nod and smile and think nothing more about it.
But if that were to happen, your pal would be a liar, and A Very Bad Friend, and you should almost certainly terminate that 'relationship' immediately.
An over-reaction? Probably. But this is the kind of passion stirred up by The Most Mysterious Song On The Internet, a goth/dark wave-tinged '80s anthem that no-one in the world seems to know almost anything at all about, which has therefore subsequently become a source of endless fascination and frustration to music nerds for the past 16 years, and counting.
Here's the basic background story. At various points between 1982 and 1984, a music-obsessed German teenager going by the name 'Darius S.' would record songs broadcast on the public-radio station NDR 1's Musik für junge Leute (Music for Young People) show. As was 'best practise' for anyone taping songs from the radio in the 1980s, young Darius would take care not to include the DJ's voice on his home-made compilations, which in the case of 'cassette 4' in his collection, meant that alongside tracks from XTC and The Cure, he recorded a synth-heavy, dark wave-tinged anthem which he could not identify, nor indeed the name of the band who recorded it. In 2007, his older sister, known as 'Lydia H.' decided to help her brother out by posting a snippet of the song in question online, in the hope that someone would be able to recognise it. Sixteen years later, no-one has.
In reference to its lyrics, The Most Mysterious Song On The Internet is also known, variously, as Like The Wind, Blind The Wind, Check It In, Check It Out or Take It In, Take It Out, but no definitive answer as to its title, or the name of the artist who recorded it, has ever been confirmed. Paul Baskerville, the British DJ who hosted Musik für junge Leute for NDR 1, has no insight into the song, and isn’t even sure that he ever played it. And so the guessing games continue.
If you wish to know more about The Most Mysterious Song On The Internet, there's a lengthy subreddit dedicated to the song: perhaps you can be the hero who will identify the track, and put the mystery to bed. Alternatively, and we're putting this out here as a warning upfront, you might perhaps end up consumed by the mystery, leading to countless hours arguing online with fellow music nerds, ultimately causing the eventual break-up of every significant relationship in your life, and a spiralling deterioration in your mental health. Hopefully that won't happen, but don't say you weren't warned.
So, with that all said, click below if you want to get involved in music's very own mission impossible...
