The ideal drummer Hans-Joachim Behrendt is dead. He died in Berlin on Monday at the age of 68, 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, founded in 1980 around singer Annette Humpe, Frank Jürgen Krüger, who died in 2007, and bassist Ernst Ulrich Deuker, existed until 1983.
Before Ideal, Behrendt also played with Volker Kriegels in the 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.
