The Captain of Her Heart's Log

By Kurt Maloo

How a Swiss boy became the Captain of Her Heart. Kurt Maloo, a singer-songwriter from Zurich, Switzerland has released four solo albums after his group Double disbanded in 1989. Although he will always be remembered for his biggest hit. After all these years he became "The Captain Of Her Heart". He's now looking back by checking his log.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Nov 11, 2013
• ISBN: 9781483511931

Book preview

It was way past midnight and she still couldn't fall asleep…

…the first line from a song, hammering into his head with its over-compressed piano line from the headphones of a tiny portable AM/FM. The bungalows around the Roosevelt Hotel's David Hockney pool looked empty. By his side, the pianist sat in a comfortable lounger; his old friend and musical partner, watching amused and triumphant as he delicately winced for the second time, surprised at his own voice, so near, so intimate in the song.

Too long ago, too long apart…

…the snare was loud, filling more space than they'd given it. The song breathed freely, the sound fit perfectly; everything was larger, wider than where they'd recorded. A few steps further: Grauman's Chinese Theatre, Hollywood Boulevard 6925. He loved the cinema's opulent forecourt; the Oscars were awarded here for a while in the 40s. He wouldn't look at the Walk of Fame, the star signs.

The Captain Of Her Heart

…the first Oscar was, however, awarded here in 1929, right here in Roosevelt Hotel, where his feet dangled now in the pool; even Elvis Presley and Marilyn Monroe had stayed here. Maybe Marilyn in the room he was staying in now.

A deep radio voice cut through the last bars of the song

you're listening to KISS FM…

…he gave the headphones back to the pianist, before stretching lazily on his lounger in the evening sunlight of California; and falling slowly into the blue pool. He opened his eyes underwater and saw Hockney's mural. Even the light reflected above him seemed painted. He had to master himself to surface again.

This was how I imagined a book must be written, about a very important time in my life. I would like to prompt the biographer: He arrived there, where he always wished to be, because he belonged there – but there was no biographer and so I began, to remember myself.

Hollywood

The day before, we – that is, Felix Haug, our manager Peter Zumsteg, and myself – landed at Los Angeles LAX, on an American Airlines jet from New York. LAX sounded like a sedative and we felt as if we'd taken a couple of its pills. Two days in New York, the first stop promoting our new album; too short to get used to the new time zone, and then immediately westwards, where we lost another three hours. In the arrivals hall, someone held a board to his chest: DOUBLE, and we followed him in a trance to a white stretch limousine, a black driver in a silver vest waiting for us under the immaculate Californian sky. The picture went well with our music. The radio promoter, already seated in the limo, introduced herself as Jenny; she didn't fit so well. She was blond, voluptuous, and wore a white leather miniskirt and white pumps. The skin-tone, halftransparent tights were compulsory in the USA, even when it was in the high eighties. It was clear that Jenny's wardrobe consisted wholly of outfits for working with rock bands. Today she was wearing her most discreet outfit. She was professionally friendly, her smile not unduly contrived.

Well, maybe it would have become so if we'd asked for more than a Thai take away. She reminded us why we were in Los Angeles and told us we would soon be driven to an interview at the first radio station. We wolfed the Thai chicken down right out of its styrofoam, then felt sluggish and heavy, with a terrible thirst for chilled Cola.

At the station the DJs asked short, trivial questions; our answers were as dry as our mouths, but the ordeal was soon over and after saying how absolutely delighted we were to be at KISS FM we were back in the roomy limousine sitting on worn leather seats, drinking Cola with crushed ice.

As we drove down Sunset Boulevard I thought about 77 Sunset Strip, a TV show from my childhood. I gazed out of the window but Number 77 must have been elsewhere. The promoter seemed slightly confused when I asked; she explained that only Latinos lived there now and strongly cautioned us against heading further east on the Strip, as she called it.

77 Sunset Strip's main characters were Mr Bailey, the boss, and Kookie, his assistant. Kookie was dubbed with a ridiculous German voice, the best thing about the whole show when I was a child. I'd tried to mimic this partly sing-song, partly manly voice until my mother finally threatened a television ban, even though we didn't own a television. I always had to go to a friend's house to watch 77 Sunset Strip, Fury, Sea Hunt, or Ripcord. When my parents finally bought a television I was already 13 years old. Because of this my mother sometimes let me go with her to watch grown up TV at a friend's house, after the 20:15 Tagesschau. I remembered Das Halstuch, a series which emptied the streets, and Das Haus, a gothic movie about an estate agent who wanted to sell the house to a young couple. At the end, with much eerie music, the agent disappeared – to my horror, into the apartment wall, where she had existed as a ghost since her murder. For years afterwards, whenever I thought of this film the hairs would stand up on my neck.

Our silver-waistcoated chauffeur drove us straight past a security guard and onto the grounds of A & M Records. The record label belonged to Herb Alpert, a world-famous trumpeter, and his manager Jerry Moss. They'd both rented the old Charlie Chaplin studios in Hollywood, low half-timbered buildings like coach houses. The phrase Bohemian villages came into my mind, why I didn't know, since I'd never been in Bohemia. We were personally welcomed by Herb Alpert; he led us to his studio and played us his latest composition on his grand piano with a Midi connected keyboard. He was relaxed, a man who had made it in life, and he enjoyed showing off his new toy. We were equally enthusiastic about Herb Alpert and his Midi-Piano. Then to the screening room, where we were shown the final cut of our latest music video, shot in Paris over a couple of weeks. I immediately liked the video director, an Englishman called Nick Haggerty. He was tall, slim, very reserved, a real gentleman, with an awkward, old-fashioned manner that made for a quiet, respectful atmosphere on set.

We'd already shot two videos, or actually three, for the same song. We won a prize for the first in a Swiss TV competition; that was before the song had even been released. A famous Swiss director had shot it with a TV crew. We filmed around Lake Geneva and even rented La Suisse, a historic 73-meter paddle steamer. I'd already been on this steamer as a child, sailing from Lausanne in Switzerland to Thonon Les Bains on the French side of the lake, where my father had grown up. For years, I'd spent my summer holidays there with my cousin, though he wasn't really my cousin: we called him that because our families were very close. He was two years older than me and was allowed to play in short trousers; I however had to wear a pinafore according to the old French custom, since I wasn't yet going to school. The first couple of days of holiday were embarrassing but since other boys wore pinafores at my age, I soon stopped thinking about it.

We played in the Eternit tubes lying around a gravel pit; we scratched our arms and legs on blackberry bushes and caught snails and frogs which were cooked in garlic that evening.

My parents didn't join me the last time in Thonon. My grandmother unexpectedly died a day before we wanted to travel and my parents insisted I nevertheless go, alone with my cousin and his parents. I still don't like thinking about this; I cried a great deal and felt abandoned, even though I liked my cousin's parents. We stayed in the house of Mémé, grandma in French. She was a small, thin, resolute person who would tolerate no backtalk or cheek. When she called us à table, we children had at most one minute to wash our hands and run to the large kitchen. Or else there would be trouble. Mémé's face was furrowed with uncountable wrinkles and when she was in a good mood she let me sit on her lap and run my little index finger along the lines in her face. My next summer holidays alternated between the sea and the mountains. I didn't like the mountains, which meant I only had a proper summer holiday every two years.

At some point during the shooting of our first video the director remarked that the cameraman was either a genius or a charlatan. He was alarmed that the cameraman hadn't even measured the distance between lens and subject. Every time he asked if the shot was okay, the cameraman replied with a thumbs up. When the footage was viewed, however, it was all either blurred or jittery; in some of the shots I had to sit in a Cadillac and you could even see the cameraman reflected in the car's polished metal. The Swiss TV people were all extremely embarrassed and offered to do the whole thing again. After a bit of polite hesitation the director agreed, with the stipulation that most of the video be shot in his home village in the Valais Mountains. The new video would be even more expensive than the first.

After this difficult scene the director had virtually unlimited means at his disposal: a helicopter flew a white piano to the top of a glacier for a short scene; we had a white Cadillac, a Riva Boat and at the end of the video I valiantly piloted a two-engine Cessna over the Alps.

The second, or rather third video, was done in a photography studio. It was a monochrome blue and featured me and Felix at four different instruments. The photography was doubled with a cross-fade technique, so the Double Duo became a quartet. When the song became a hit in Europe, the American record label decided to shoot another video just for American MTV. There were two important requirements: one, it must to be in color; two, it must have lots of beautiful women walking about Paris.

So now we sat in front of a monitor in the old Charlie Chaplin studios in Hollywood, watching the final cut of our latest video with all the beautiful women. It was the first viewing and the director was rather tense, but that was perfectly normal; I remembered how completely alien my own songs had sounded the first time I heard them on a bass-heavy A & R stereo system. Though I felt confident about the end product at home or in the studio, the tension during presentation kept hitting me in the gut. I saw again the ugly offices, black veneer desks with their innumerable, unheard demo tapes, and the gold discs that had made it onto the wall. I thought of cowboy-booted feet stamping to the wrong beat, or to songs no one in their right mind would stamp to.

The American video opened with a blur, out of which the first of the seven models slowly emerged. She had big earrings and dark, melancholy eyes; she looked rather anemic. She froze half to death throughout the night shooting, which made her look even slimmer, even more fragile and delicate. I would have liked to get to know her a little, but there weren't any opportunities during the short film shoot and then like a ghost she was gone. Then there was the moody Scottish punk girl (on YouTube she would later always be confused with the actress Denise Richards). Then the 18-year-old, prematurely-grayed Marie Seznec, a Hermes model.

Later, Marie would become the muse and still later the right hand of fashion designer Christian Lacroix; he liked to send her across the catwalk in a wedding dress at the end of each show. She married the owner of Les Bains, a Paris nightclub I visited frequently when I was later living in the City of Lights. She was the only model from that video who I went on to see in my private life. I wasn't really interested in the other girls, for example a blond Swedish-looking beauty who rode a bike through the Bois de Boulogne in a straw hat. I didn't realize that the shot was meant as an allusion to a Brigitte Bardot film. I just thought it was terrible. It reminded me of a tampon advert. There was another equally sickening