After 17 years, the “most mysterious song on the internet” has finally been identified. The song, called “Subways of Your Mind,” was recorded by a little-known 1980s German band called FEX. The mystery began in 2007 when a German brother and sister uploaded a track they had recorded from the radio as teenagers.
The tape mostly featured songs from popular bands like XTC and The Cure, but one song remained unidentified. Online sleuths took up the challenge, trying to work out what instruments could be heard and analyzing the lead singer’s accent. In 2019, the track was uploaded onto Reddit, and global interest exploded.
A Reddit subforum attracted tens of thousands of members.
Mysterious song identified by Reddit user
The breakthrough came when a user called “marijn1412” identified the song as “Subways of Your Mind.” He came across former FEX members while researching an event for up-and-coming bands organized by a public broadcaster in northern Germany in the 1980s.
The Reddit user reached out to members of the four-piece outfit from the city of Kiel, who sent him a version of the mystery song and revealed its name. Michael Haedrich, who played keyboard and guitar and sang back-up vocals for FEX, said the band members were “absolutely overwhelmed” by the news. Haedrich, who is still a musician and lives in Munich, said it was the first time he had heard about the massive search effort.
“I thought it was amazing that someone was interested in music by a band that was only successful regionally, if at all, and that was over 40 years ago,” he told Spiegel. The band members now want to reissue “Subways of Your Mind” and are trying to track down the original recording of the song. Their success may have been decades in the making, but Haedrich said, “for us, it has just come suddenly.”
