Gabriele Susanne Kerner is better known by her stage name Nena, under which she rose to international fame in 1983 as the lead vocalist of the band Nena with the Neue Deutsche Welle song '99 Luftballons'. Later that same year, the band re-recorded this song in English as '99 Red Balloons', and it became a world-wide hit single. But she didn't suddenly appear out of nowhere, and had been paying her dues for some years as part of the band The Stripes. Her musical career began on in July 1979 when guitarist Rainer Kitzmann founded the Stripes and, on the basis of having seen her dancing at a local disco, asked her to audition for the position of the lead singer. The group were based in Hagen, and performed songs with English lyrics, acheiving a minor hit with the song 'Ecstasy', but never gaining mainstream success, and so they disbanded on in March 1982. THey had recorded an album for CBS in 1980, from which 'Ecstasy' was lifted as a single, and so when the band spolit, CBS offered Nena a record deal if she would move to Berlin and make music with German lyrics. In May 1982 she and her then-boyfriend Rolf Brendel moved to West Berlin, where they met future band members guitarist Carlo Karges, keyboard player Uwe Fahrenkrog-Petersen, and bass player Jürgen Dehmel, and together, they formed the band Nena. In June 1982, they released their first single, 'Nur geträumt', which became an instant hit in Germany after the band appeared on the German television show 'Musikladen', and the following year the band released its first album 'Nena', which contained the singles '99 Luftballons' and 'Leuchtturm', and from that point on they never looked back. Combined with the success of the Nena band years, she has sold over 25 million records, making her the most successful German pop singer in chart history, but everyone had to start somewhere, and so here is The Stripes' one and only album, featuring a young Nena on lead vocals.
Track listing
01 Strangers
02 Tell Me Your Name
03 Observer
04 Don't You Think That I'm A Lady
05 Leaving The Suburbs
06 I'm Not...
07 Tres Chichi
08 You Must Be Good For Something
09 On The Telephone
10 Weekend Love
11 Kicks In Berlin
12 1:59
13 Radio In Stereo
