An old mystery involving the tape recording of an unknown song has finally been solved by internet sleuths, nearly four decades after it began.
The mystery began for one family in the 1980s, when a family member recorded a song off the radio onto a cassette tape. The family clearly liked the song, but were unable to identify who it was by. Decades later in 2007, the person’s sister, who goes by u/bluuely on Reddit, began asking for help on various Internet forums.
“In the beginning, there were many unknown songs on my brother’s tapes. Most of them were solved within a couple of days or weeks because many radio DJs used to play their fav songs more than only once. When the song in question got aired again, my brother mostly was able to get the band and the title,” bluuely explained on Reddit. “He thought (or let’s say, hoped) it would be the same with this song. But as we all know, this time it didn’t happen.”
Others joined the search too, with a subreddit dedicated to the “The Mysterious Song” amassing over 59,000 members. YouTubers and dwellers of other areas of the internet joined in the search too, with one retouched recording receiving over 3 million views, and articles about the hunt catching the attention of Rolling Stone.
u/bluuely and others attempted to get more information about the song, including asking a programmer at the German public radio station NDR where the recording is believed to have come from.
A few years ago, the search looked pretty cold. But renewed interest has finally led to the band and song being identified. Reddit user marijn1412 was looking through old newspaper archives when they spotted an article about a band named FEX from Kiel, Germany, from September 1984.
The Redditor recognized one of the band members from another band he was in, named Phret.
“I managed to get in touch with him and asked him if he still had some old material from those bands. He then sent me some of the songs he made with FEX and Phret,” marjin1412 explained on Reddit, “and lo and behold, one of them was titled Subways Of Your Mind. It’s a slightly different version from the one we know.”
The band was unaware that the internet had been searching for their music, but gave their blessing for marjin1412 to post the new recording and reveal the song title, ending a four-decade-long hunt that began with one boy not noting down song names with enough diligence.
