Musician Stephan Eicher: “I think hair length is a reason for discussion”

taz: Mr. Eicher, “Eisbär” by Grauzone is one of the most famous songs of the Neue Deutsche Welle: “I want to be a polar bear, in the cold polar.” How did you get involved with Gray Zone?

Stephan Eicher: My brother Martin was a guitarist in Grauzone. When they went into the studio to record “Eisbär” in 1980, they said: Stephan, come with me. The three of us recorded the album a year later: my brother, the drummer Marco Repetto and I. I played synthesizer and guitar in Grauzone.

taz: Grauzone sang in German. That was new back then – in Germany as well as in Switzerland.

Eicher: The fact that German was sung in Germany is of course a different context than in Switzerland. German-speaking Switzerland has a completely different language every 30 kilometers, i.e. Schaffhausen German, Zurich German, Bernese German. If you come from these places, you don't understand the Valais people. The fact that German-speaking Switzerland retained these dialects had to do with the Second World War. They wanted to distance themselves from Germany. When my brother said I was singing High German, I said: Wow, that's brave.

taz: Who wrote the lyrics for Grauzone?

Eicher: My brother wrote most of the important stuff. Martin was also the singer of Grauzone. “Polar Bear” is by Martin. “Slaughter” is by Martin. Then we started writing together, playfully: “The journey as a couple is half as far.” A bit like the Gallagher brothers. Super interesting, creative, but also very, very tiring.

Eicher was born in 1960 in Münchenbuchsee, Switzerland. During the filming of the documentary film “Unerhört Jenisch” (2017) by Martina Rieder and Karoline Arn, he and his brother Erich looked intensively into his Jenisch family history.

After the success of Grauzone, Eicher lived in France, among other places, where his music is consistently at the top of the charts. The writers Philippe Djian and Martin Suter wrote texts for him. Most recently, the album “Poussière d'Or” was released in 2025.

taz: Grauzone was a romantic pop band. But the attitude and the themes came from punk. The coldness in social relationships, the rebellion against authoritarianism. Why did punk appeal to you?

Eicher: For me, it was the aesthetic of punk that first attracted me. First you saw the photos before you even heard the punk singles. But we in Switzerland very quickly heard the music of the Clash and the Sex Pistols. This has to do with the fact that we are very rich children. So not me personally – we in Switzerland. Rich kids could fly to London, shop there and bring singles back. There are no cultural reasons why there were so many synthesizer bands in Switzerland. Sorry to spoil that idea. We just had enough money to buy synthesizers and Telecaster guitars. For me it was visually interesting: no matter what a Telecaster sounds like, it just looks sexy. That's a good reason to make music.

taz: Many punks tell the story that they saw Johnny Rotten from the Sex Pistols or other punks from London in photos and thought: I want to be like that too.

Eicher: It's extremely interesting that it can be done by eye. The eye is much faster than the ear. You see the flash - and then a little later there's a crash. I hadn't had that thought yet, but it's absolutely correct. I've seen these photos from Siouxsie and the Banshees or X-Ray Spex. That was very, very strong. Fashion is great. Fashion is expression.

Eicher: Yes. I've always been more influenced by American music. When you put two metals together, an alloy is created. I find that exciting. I found Irish folk songs that met the blues and together gave birth to rock 'n' roll more interesting than Irish folk music and blues alone. Ramones was perhaps the most important band for me. I thought: I can do these two handles too.

taz: In the 1970s, Germany and Switzerland were still relatively authoritarian, norm-obsessed societies. Was punk an answer to that for you?

Eicher: No idea, let me think about it. My brother and I didn't live in Bern. We lived in a farming village in Münchenbuchsee, ten kilometers from Bern. My brother was very extreme as a punk. I was more of a new wave guy, but he was really badass. And he was always attacked on the way home, every evening when he came home from school - we went to school in Bern. Every time he came home with a new scratch. I often asked him: Why are you doing this to yourself? He said: No, that's a compliment. I'm not one of them. That may be an answer to your question: We didn’t want to be one of “them.” Whoever that is.

Eicher: Being against something is certainly more intelligent in fashion and culture than in politics. I do think that hair length is a point of discussion. That interests me more than the question of whether the earth is flat or round. I have more to say about hair length. In Zurich there were these clashes over the opera house.

taz: “Züri is burning” was the slogan of the youth movement in May 1980. It caused a ruckus because the city approved 60 million francs for the renovation of the opera house, but did not want to finance space for an autonomous youth center.

Eicher: During the unrest I was also on the streets with Grauzone, there was a lot of adrenaline and rebelliousness. When you're 18 or 19, maybe sexually frustrated, breaking windows is a kind of compensation. Back then, in 1980, it was a bit repressive, the police were very present. Soon there was the AJZ, the independent youth center. But I never went there.

Eicher: I found it all unwashed. There were drugs in the AJZ. I wasn't interested in that either. And it was so messed up. I was more on an aesthetic trip. I went to the art school, which was right next door.

taz: It was obvious that you started making music early. You grew up in a musical family.

Eicher: I have another big brother, Erich, who also makes music. We always played music in the family, except for my mother, who loved literature more. My mother was very chic, very bourgeois. My father came from eastern Switzerland, from Graubünden, from a difficult family. These were Yenish, people who travel. The Yenish people were still very oppressed in the 1970s when I grew up. There is even a film about how Yenish children were taken away from their families.

taz: Between 1926 and 1973, Swiss authorities, the “Aid for the Children of the Landstrasse” and church institutions took at least 600, but probably thousands, Yen children away from their parents. Many of the children experienced brutal violence in homes and foster families.

Eicher: My parents never really talked about it. They said we would leave this culture and move to Bern, where the Yenish culture does not exist. But music is also part of this culture. My father played music. Violin, double bass, accordion. My grandfather played the violin in the Chur orchestra. All three brothers played music. So perhaps it was a slightly divided family that found harmony in music. The family somehow functioned there. That shaped me.

Eicher: Even today, when I'm not feeling well, I sit down at the piano or play the guitar. It's good there, I understand the world. There is the film “Unerhört Jenisch”, which is dedicated, among other things, to the Yenish music culture. My big brother Erich and I also appear in it. I was visited in the Camargue for the film; I was living near Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer, a place of pilgrimage for traveling peoples. Maybe I did a bit of searching there. I don't speak the Yenish language, I didn't grow up in this culture, but it certainly left its mark.

taz: In the area in southern Germany where I come from, Yenish was part of everyday life. There, even non-Jenish people my age still know a few Yenish words. At least Gadsch, that means human, Tschai – girl, schugger – sweet, gwand – decent, beautiful. Or Glischde, that's the police.

Eicher: You know the language better than I do. This touches me now.

taz: Apart from music, what were your points of contact with the Jenish world?

Eicher: As a child, I was always a little afraid when family visited us, some of whom lived in Switzerland and some of them in France. There was a lot of darkness and unspoken things. My father could drink beer from a bottle and not have to swallow. And when he did that, a little drunk, the whole family would say: "He's drinking a beer! Come see! How does he do that?" Drinking beer from large bottles while standing and smoking. The women also smoked. My grandmother always looked at her cigarette very disparagingly. The men wore great shoes, always polished to a shine. Otherwise a bit loose. Their language had a Yenish touch, or so they said in Switzerland. Their music also has a different swing.

taz: So you were also fascinated by the aesthetics and style of your Yenish relatives early on?

Eicher: Yes. Kings make me nervous. Dictators too. The beggar already has something. But is there something in the middle? And that's where the princess and the prince come into play. Yenish people have a bit of a princely quality about them. The white shirt is always very well ironed. The rest might be a bit baggy, but the white, prince-like shirt, I liked that when I was little.

This text first appeared in wochentaz, our weekly newspaper from the left!

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taz: The shoes have to be shiny, the shirt has to be clean and ironed.

Eicher: You have work there. I sometimes support the Yenish Association in Switzerland. Sometimes I go and play at their festivals. And then I feel a little embarrassed. Because they're pretty damn chic. I always feel slightly underdressed there.

taz: You started with cool new wave music, later it was sad pop songs and chansons. Even later you recorded Swiss folk songs such as “Hemmige” or the “Guggisberglied”.

Eicher: Today I do more folky things, simply because the noise is good sometimes. Do you know Moondog? This was a composer from America who lived on the streets dressed as a Viking. He wrote the arrangement for my version of the Guggisberglied. That was the most punk attitude you could imagine: what Stephan Eicher did after electronics were Swiss folk songs in a minor key.

taz: The Guggisberglied has dark lyrics, it tells about a love story that doesn't end well.

Eicher: No, of course everyone dies there. Romeo and Juliet. It's a Jenish song. Swiss folk music was played and brought around by the Yenish people. Until someone put a device down, recorded it and said: I composed this. That's another sad story. And if I play the Guggisberglied with the Traktorkestar, who make Slavic brass music, or with Taraf de Haïdouks from Romania, then they can play it straight away. They know that. Then I did that. I do a lot! I have 25 hours a day, I'm so lucky compared to other people. I love my work. I love making music so much.

taz: The fact that the institutional, racially motivated persecution of the Yenish people in Switzerland only ended in 1973 has still not been properly understood historically. Recently, Swiss historians have called for more clarification.

Eicher: In Germany you stopped the persecution in 1945.

taz: Not quite. In Bavaria, for example, the Nazi files on Sinti, Roma and Yenish people were used by the police for decades after the end of the war under the name Landfahrerkartei. The Munich police's rural driver's office was officially dissolved in 1970.

Eicher: Look, I'm getting goosebumps, I'm getting really cold. I thought things would have changed in Germany after the war. But you also kept Siemens and Hugo Boss. Hey guys, at least change the name! It's frightening sometimes. I wouldn't actually be there because my grandmother was on the list for sterilization. In the film mentioned there is the scene where my brother, who is a notary, is sitting in the archive and finds my grandmother in a document. She is on a sterilization list. She got around that. Otherwise we wouldn't be sitting here together right now.

taz: Did your grandmother know that she was on this list?

Eicher: We don't know. My family were scissor grinders and peddlers. My brother Erich also found a connection between the Eichers and the Waser, Kollegger and Moser musical families in Graubünden in the archives. This wasn't discussed in my family either. My father was already 84, it was the time of Covid, when I brought the film to him in the retirement home and played it. Then a light came into his face. That lasted three minutes. Then the first interview came and he closed the computer and said: “Don’t ever talk about it.” Now I'm getting cold again because I also have children and I think... It would be good if you could somehow... Yes. Now maybe I'm going a little too far. I often have panic attacks and then I imagine situations that I have never experienced myself. Someone in my family experienced this. I'm not mystical. But there are moments when I feel uncomfortable. And my children have it a bit too, and I would have liked to explain where it comes from.

taz: The psychoanalyst Jacques Hassoun calls these the “smuggling paths of memory”. The parents pass on their story to the children, even if they don't tell anything.

Eicher: My father closed the computer and told me: “Don’t ever talk about it.” Still maybe in that fear. I have another aunt, maybe I can find out more about her. But my feeling tells me that that won't happen. Maybe it's also good if you can suppress things. You also have to be able to suppress it.

taz: Sometimes it is necessary to suppress things for survival. But it has also been proven that people who suffer from extreme stress and are persecuted pass on this experience physically and psychologically to the following generations.

Eicher: I would sign that. I am generally a happy person. Blue sky, wow! Rain? It's good too! But sometimes it gets to me and I ask myself, where does it come from? Making music helps. Making music is the only thing I'm not afraid of. Yesterday on stage I was already stressed because nothing was going right. But I've found that I actually approach things like this with a lot of courage.

taz: You didn't let it bother you, even though there were problems with the sound. That was impressive.

Eicher: Everything is performance. Even if it goes wrong. It takes the debacle. That too has to be part of a concert.

taz: But you have to be cool enough to allow that.

Eicher: That's punk! Squeaking in the corners is good. It must be a bit dangerous. It has to be a bit spicy, the currywurst. Otherwise you can't eat it. I'm already scared. But you have to live.