FRANKFURT (AFP) – For the last 17 years a worldwide army of online sleuths obsessively tried to figure out the title of what has been dubbed “the most mysterious song on the Internet”.
Now, they have the answer after a chance discovery by one intrepid researcher, who triumphantly reported his breakthrough on online forum Reddit: it is called Subways of Your Mind and was recorded by a little-known 1980s German band called FEX.
The former band members are “absolutely overwhelmed” by the news, 68-year-old Michael Haedrich, who played keyboard and guitar and sang back-up vocals for FEX, told Der Spiegel magazine.
The band had been oblivious to the online phenomenon, he admitted.
The mystery began in 2007, when a German brother and sister uploaded a track online that they had digitised after originally recording it as teenagers on a cassette from the radio.
They asked for help to identify it and audiophiles soon took up the challenge. The track did not show up in any music databases, but online sleuths tried to work out what instruments could be heard and analysed the lead singer’s accent.
Initial attempts to identify the song, soon classified by many as being in the 1980s’ New Wave genre, yielded little.
It was only when the track was uploaded onto Reddit in 2019 that global interest exploded.
A Reddit subforum called “r/TheMysteriousSong” attracted tens of thousands of members, and the hunt was reported on in German media and beyond.
The big breakthrough finally came earlier this week when a user called “marijn1412” said he had identified the song as Subways of Your Mind.
He said he came across former FEX members while researching an event for up-and-coming bands that had been organised in the 1980s by a public broadcaster. The user wrote that he had reached out to members of what was a four-piece outfit from the northern city of Kiel, who sent him a version of the mystery song.
