Weekend Diversion: Trio “Da, Da, Da”

In 1982, German band Trio released an eponymous album that contained a song called "Da Da Da I Don't Love You You Don't Love Me Aha Aha Aha", though it’s usually just called “Da Da Da”. It was their biggest German hit, and their only hit outside Germany (where it was called "Da da da, ich lieb dich nicht du liebst mich nicht aha aha aha"). The band had three more hits in Germany before breaking up in 1984.

Trio were practitioners of what they liked to call, Neue Deutsche Fröhlichkeit ("New German Cheerfulness"), music reduced to a simplistic structure. It was simple, unchallenging, and kinda catchy.

In the 1980s, I liked a lot of music that no one had heard of. It was mostly still pop music of one sort or another, with some exceptions, but some of it remained outside the mainstream. In this case, I had the American version of their album, Trio and Error, and, in fact, I still have it—it’s one of the albums I brought back from America. I’d pretty much forgotten about the song until it was used in a Sakata Rice Crackers commercial aired in New Zealand. That commercial reminded me about the album, which led me to bring it back to New Zealand with me—clearly advertising works in some ways, at least.

The version in the video above is from Britain’s Top of the Pops TV programme, and is best described by the person who posted it on YouTube:

“Trio mime their way through the English version of their classic hit. A golden moment in TV history—it has everything you'd expect of 1982: A Casio VL1, a chain smoking guitarist, a robotic dancer and an audience of teenagers who have quite clearly been cajoled into being a piece of kinetic performance art by a TV producer on zero budget…”

Ah, those were the days…

See also the Wikipedia entries on the band and also on the song.