You have to love those Internet mysteries. The ones where someone uncovers some mysterious fragment of a historic artifact, and the Internet’s hive mind tries to uncover the mystery.
Well, such a mystery was revealed last weekend.
Follow along with me.
In 1983, a German radio station played its usual mix of new wave and alternative music. Someone recorded the broadcast off-air on a cassette tape, and identified most of the songs on the list. I mean, it wasn’t hard to pick out Depeche Mode and Heaven 17 …
But there was one track that the listener could not identify, and the on-air DJ never introduced or described.
This song.
The vocals were already packed down into the music, and the monaural cassette only added to the muddiness. The lyrics were almost indecipherable – “Ride the Wind?” or “Drive the wind?” Was that the title of the song, or was it something else?
Mind you, this is 1983. We’re now in 2024, and for the past few years, the mystery of this song has confounded Internet sleuths. There’s even a Reddit forum, r/themysterioussong, where that community tries everything in their capacity to identify the track. Or maybe to enhance that monaural cassette recording to distill any micro-fragment of a clue.
Heck, I even played this song a couple of times on my Nightowl Radio Show revival on WHCL, but even then, I had no idea who sang it, what the song title was, what the lyrics were, or anything more than anyone else.
Well, last weekend … someone figured it out. They were researching several German bands for an unrelated project, and as one does when researching such things, they got in touch with one of the performers from those bands. After a few conversations, the bandmember sent some old cassettes to the researcher – who immediately recognized one of the tracks as the mysterious Internet song.
Well, that “mysterious Internet song” was recorded by that bandmember when he was with a group called FEX. And the song’s title? “Subways Of Your Mind.”
In fact, the vocalist / keyboardist from FEX, Michael Hädrich, will participate in a Reddit AMA (Ask Me Anything) on the r/themysterioussong subreddit, beginning today. Here’s a link to the subreddit.
Trust me, I speak from experience. Lost media is never truly lost; and sometimes even the fragments can be reassembled into something tangible.
Chuck The Writer 
Oddly enough, I’ve been following this mystery for the last year or so. As is the case, there were many false leads. This is kinda cool.
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