The ideal drummer Hans-Joachim Behrendt is dead. He died on Monday at the age of 68 in Berlin, as his widow confirmed to the dpa. As “Hansi”, Behrendt had great success with the band Ideal (“Blaue Augen”, “Berlin”) in the days of the Neue Deutsche Welle. The band formed in 1980 around singer Annette Humpe, Frank Jürgen Krüger, who died in 2007, and bassist Ernst Ulrich Deuker existed until 1983. Behrendt was the singer on the ideal song “Schöne Frau mit Geld” from 1982.
Before Ideal, Behrendt also played with Volker Kriegel’s 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.
Humpe described Behrendt on the RBB station Radioeins as a “very close confidante”. She recalled “what an excellent drummer Hansi Behrendt was”, who “like nobody played drums back then”. Behrendt “played very percussively, grooved insanely and had a timing that very few drummers have”. She rarely got that again after that.
