The Stiller Has singer has plumbed the depths of Switzerland like no other musician. His lyrics were tough, his live performances were legendary. Endo Anaconda has now died at the age of 66.
Endo Anaconda brought life to the stage as a singer (here in July 2010 at the Gurten Festival in Bern).
Andreas Flückiger aka Endo Anaconda was a highly unusual figure in the Swiss music scene. He was loud, poetic, often untameable in private life, a choleric with pronounced addictive behavior. A real Rock’n’Roller, in Helvetic format.
The band that made Endo Anaconda famous was founded in 1989: Stiller Has were a volatile duo formed from the remnants of various Bernese formations. Multi-instrumentalist Balts Nill turned out to be a contrasting but congenial partner. What Anaconda and Nill hatched was unparalleled in this country. The idiosyncratic duo rumbled along with punky guitar riffs, with small keyboard figures, but sometimes also with a whole wild brass band, as on the milestone “Landjäger” from 1994.
Powerful words
Stiller Has cultivated the consequent combination of Rock’n’Roll and folk music. The mostly minimalistic musical accompaniment – only later did guitarist Schifer Schafer von Rumpelstilz join them – met Anaconda’s powerful lyrics.
They had it all: In his best moments, Anaconda described his psychological shortcomings, his addictive behavior, the impossibility of love in a barely disguised autobiographical way. Then there were the songs about Switzerland. As the son of an Austrian mother, Endo Anaconda may have had a special view of his Helvetic homeland. In any case, no one plumbed the depths of this country in song format like he did.
He sat down with the other “Giele” in the bar to chat meaninglessly over a bottle of wine. In plays like “Walliselle” he transformed the map into a psychogram of Switzerland. In “Znüni näh” he described the customs of the local working world. Then he followed the beautiful, green «Aare» again. So he moved constantly in the world of little Switzerland, so he sat in the “tea room” in the suburbs, so he walked between the motorway feeder road and the shopping center.
Love-hate would be a big word, but sometimes these lyrics made you laugh in your throat. Songs like Föhnfenster: You have a wonderful view of the mountains and at the same time suffer from headaches and wanderlust.
The ballads of the Bern formation around the singer and lyricist came to life on stage. Unforgotten is a performance at the Gurten Festival in Bern in the 1990s, where the formation Stiller Has performed as a replacement for an unusual British band in the big tent in front of several thousand spectators. You would have expected a home game, a confirming, civilized appearance in front of your own audience. Instead, the concert turned into one of the most rousing performances by a Swiss band that I have ever experienced.
And that was because of the man, who stomped across the stage, panting and sweating, heaved his lyrics into the microphone, repeatedly started a snotty yodel, and then philosophized almost Dadaistically between the songs about leek cake and its connection with love relationships that had become boring. It wasn’t just a concert, it was a multimedia, theatrical-musical performance of a kind that is very rarely seen by local bands.
It was these intense live performances that made Stiller Has famous and even legendary. Even more than the countless songs that Endo Anaconda added to the canon of dialect rock, even more than the classic albums like “Landjäger” or “Moudi”, which sold surprisingly well. Stiller Has temporarily slipped into the top league of the local charts, and that was as amazing as it was deserved. Because hardly any other formation has consistently paved its own way – and that also crossed the mainstream from time to time.
mildness of age
The formation changed over the years, Stiller Has became the solo vehicle of the singer and lyricist. Without his two long-time teammates Balts Nill and Schifer Schafer, however, the music lost its punk bite as well as its urgency, instead it now had a cabaret side. That wasn’t bad, it was just different: The still hate had become old-fashioned, so to speak.
For a long time, mediocrity seemed a foreign word to the Bernese word and song artist Endo Anaconda, one that had no place in his vocabulary. This shaped his appearances on stage, but also his private life. Years of excess with alcohol and drugs took their toll. Anaconda, the heavy stage animal, suddenly became gaunt. Again and again we heard that he was struggling with major health problems.
When he did show up again and again to add another album and another tour to his artistic career, he seemed almost indestructible. But now Andreas Flückiger aka Endo Anaconda, the gifted singer, poet and live performer, has died at the age of 66 after a short, serious illness.