Before he died, he was content with a middle-class life as a building contractor. In the 1980s, Hans-Joachim Behrendt and his bandmates from Ideal shaped the Neue Deutsche Welle. Now the drummer is dead.
The ideal drummer Hans-Joachim Behrendt is dead. He died in Berlin on Monday at the age of 68, as his widow confirmed. As “Hansi”, Behrendt had great success with the band Ideal (“Blaue Augen”, “Berlin”) in the days of the Neue Deutsche Welle.
The band, founded in 1980 around singer Annette Humpe, Frank Jürgen Krüger, who died in 2007, and bassist Ernst Ulrich Deuker, existed until 1983.
In an interview with Radio Eins, Humpe looks back on the time he spent with Behrendt. He was a fun-loving, humorous person and an excellent drummer, Humpe remembers, a drummer who played very differently. “He was a very close friend of mine. And we talked a lot, listened to a lot of music together,” says Annette Humpe. “He was very inspiring.”
Before Ideal, Behrendt also played with Volker Kriegels in the Mild Maniac Orchestra and the Neonbabies. There he met Humpe and Krüger. After the dissolution of the joint band Ideal, Behrendt took part in individual projects, but then withdrew more and more from the music business into a middle-class life as a building contractor.
