They played their hit on Jimmy Kimmel’s show and achieved platinum status five times in the USA alone. Milky Chance and their song Stolen Dance are one of Germany’s greatest music exports – yet hardly anyone has heard of them.
An amazingly clear sky over Anchorage, Alaska. Not a cloud, it’s completely blue, not long ago, we’re talking summer 2022. Two lads from North Hesse – unremarkable at first glance and even beyond – step onto a huge festival stage and the audience collectively goes crazy. The band can take it, after all they normally play headliner shows elsewhere in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Mexico, Europe or the USA. But would you recognise the two musicians if they were queuing behind you at the checkout? Probably not. Milky Chance are world stars and yet they aren’t famous. The global career of Clemens Rehbein and Philipp Dausch is largely based on just one track: Stolen Dance.
Let’s rewind a bit, to the beginning of the 2010s. Two hairy, scruffy teenagers meet at a school in North Hesse. They hang out, watch House together, and at some stage they head off to explore Europe with their mates in a VW campervan. Short of cash? You bet. Busking helps them extend the trips. In the morning they simply keep playing until they’ve scraped together enough money for breakfast – sometimes that’s accomplished very quickly. Music in general is an important subject. For their own songs they mix guitar folk with exceptionally dry beats. The concept of "indietronica" has existed since the nineties, but it’s not until twenty years later that the genre really blossoms. The fact that Milky Chance would play quite a significant part in this is something they still haven’t realised at this point. At first it’s more a case of creating a stage-set for a band: they have no rehearsal room and they use freeware programs from the internet to record tracks. A paradigm shift in the pop world of its day can be traced here: what began with the music platform MySpace is by now more than a promise: with the help of the internet, musicians can produce their own tracks and then immediately publish them. The songs by the band that isn’t even a band – yet hits a nerve and mushrooms rapidly online, Stolen Dance most of all. Only the music matters, there’s no concept, no record company, no live performances so far. Nevertheless, the Viva Con Aqua initiative invites the band to play music in the interval at a poetry slam in Munich. Clemens and Philipp are apprehensive, but accept. They still remember the name of that first venue, because it so fittingly describes the status of their act back then: Provisorium.
And I want you
We can bring it on the floor
You've never danced like this beforeMilky Chance: Stolen Dance
Music labels have restructured during this time as well: record deals for internet phenomena? Why not? The success of the British band Arctic Monkeys, who became famous thanks to MySpace, shows the way. To begin with, Stolen Dance is only published as a download track. But the early hipster boogie track is an avalanche gathering force – thereby guaranteeing the release of their debut album Sadnecessary. The unpretentious YouTube video has notched up almost a billion views to date. Numbers like that are no more than a dream for most German acts – and not just for them. Yet many fans of the duo don’t realise even today that Milky Chance are a German band. Where the hell is Kassel? But maybe one reason Stolen Dance becomes a global hit is precisely because the song sounds so universal. It describes a generation, a sound, an attitude to life – and in the best possible sense it proves how borderless pop can be. The song’s significance can be seen from the fact that its creators are still touring internationally even eleven years after its release. A teenage bedroom project by two school chums has become one of Germany’s most popular acts ever. Did they put Kassel on the world map? No. But that was never their intention.
April 2024