A bunch of music-minded sleuths have been trying to track down a mysterious song for well over a decade now, and hope that maybe you can help crack the case.
If you’ve ever used the internet, then you’d likely be aware of how good it is for tracking down the most esoteric of information. Why, we’re at an age where even typing “what song goes ‘doo doo doo’” into Google will likely give you an answer.
However, for all of the progress that technology has made, we still appear to be living back in the dark ages when it comes down to tracking down those elusive, unlisted songs from our old mixtapes.
Back in 2013 though, a long-standing mystery was put to rest when an unknown New Wave song was finally identified after a 20-year search.
The track in question was ‘Up On The Roof’ by Johan Lindell, a Swedish musician who had long abandoned the world of music in favour of becoming a painter. Add in a lack of internet usage, and you had a mystery that could have still been going today if not for some intrigued music fans.
Check out ‘Up On The Roof’ by Johan Lindell:
Now, years later, a similar search is underway, with another Reddit user taking to the Tip Of My Tongue subreddit to track down a post-punk track that, by all accounts, sound like it should be something of an anthem of the genre.
Redditor Gabriel Vieira has been conducting his search for the track for a number of years now, explaining that their search dates back to 2006, when several people descended upon an internet forum to look for help identifying a mysterious song.
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“At that time, it was common for many people to ask in forums about unknown songs, even because it was a time when many still used cassette tapes, specially tapes from decades ago,” they explained. “Many of these songs were discovered after a while, but only this has never been discovered.
“No one knows the band that sings this song, no one knows what country the band is, no one knows what year it is (certainly the ’80s), and unfortunately the full song has never been released.”
So, what do we know? Well, a cursory listen to the track shows us that the song appears to have been written and recorded during the height of post-punk’s popularity, with some people pointing out vocal similarities to the likes of Joy Division, and even musical similarities to Scotland’s Lowlife.
However, while the general consensus appears to be that the band in question are not from an English-speaking country, the lyrics are not authoritatively transcribed, and folks tend to think this tune may have been recorded for either a demo tape or a radio program.
“Although it seems that the song is sung in English, I’m not sure if the band is British, American, Russian, German, French, etc.,” Vieira wrote on YouTube.
“What makes it difficult to identify this song is that the softwares & websites that have the function of identifying songs (for example: Shazam), does not recognize this song, that is, this means that the band is an independent band that maybe recorded this song on a cassette tape and never released it, or if it was released, it was by an independent label.
“Listening to the song, we can notice that the band is formed by: Singer, Drummer, Guitar player 1, Guitar Player 2, Bass player and a keyboard player, but that’s something that we can’t confirm 100%.”
Logically, if the mysterious track exists online somewhere, it must have come from a primary source, right? Well, we run into an issue there as well, with the earliest sources for the song coming from a YouTube video that lists it as an unknown song, and an entry on Wat Zat Song? which features someone else attempting to identify the tune.
“Probably the title of this song is ‘Like The Wind’, but I can not confirm it, because the origin of this song is unknown, I do not know where it came from,” Vieira added. “But for it to be here online, surely someone put it on the internet!”
Take a listen to the song below, and if you happen to know what this mysterious song is, be sure to head over to Reddit to help solve this mystery at long last.
Of course, as someone said the last time we tried to track down an unknown song, the answer might err on the side of a conspiracy theory: “What if a band from 2002 recorded the song in an attempt to sound like 80’s new wave, and told everyone it was a lost song from the 80s to see how believable they sound?”
Frankly, that’s looking possible at this stage.
Check out the mystery song in question:
