Bobby Trafalgar did an infinitive number of recordings and soundtracks to some of the strangest films ever made. Unfortunately he hasn’t composed anything in the last 30 years. Some of his songs have recently been re-discovered by todays cult vinyl collectors and reached cult classic status.

Essential Sounds of Bobby Trafalgar 1968-1990

Remember when all car models didn’t look alike? Furthermore they looked great and had great names like Kharmann Ghia and Alfa Romeo Julietta Spider (we will never prepare to want something named Hyundai -- ever!).  They also came with 8-Track cassette players “for the quintessential sound and comfort on the road to cool” as the Bogen-Presto Multiplex Cartridge Company once promoted their equipment.  Well, this is the road to which we’re heading once more, and like you never heard it before.

Since the days of The Persuaders, Transcendental Meditation, Roy Lichtenstein, Carnaby Street, Shaft’s Big Score, Scandinavian Sex Reports (or even German Schoolgirl ones), the Italian Giallo fever or the sounds of Ennio Morricone, Art Vandalay, Bert Kempfert, Gert Wilden and Peter Thomas, recent years has seen some reissues as well as some revaluation to impressive impact.  Film festivals and video labels are devoted to what once was called trash but now is pop art.

CD collections finally turns up, soothing those who no longer can afford those surrealistic prices charged for vinyl that once more often than not dwelled in the cut-out bins.  Books, magazines, TV shows, revival bands like The Mike Flowers Pops, even the odd high budgeted Hollywood product (i.e. Ed Wood or Boogie Nights) arises like Phoenix from the ashes, all of them paying homage to the era of fascinating frenzy, genial gestures and psychedelic perfection.

Following these attributes, the name of Bobby Trafalgar could be the epitome in those five very syllables.  This CD is dedicated to this all but forgotten but truly ingenious musician of the wilder years this side of Sodom and Gomorrah.  If it felt good they did it, and the sounds of Trafalgar certainly sounds it.

Little is known about his years as a Romanian native, but Trafalgar was born Bogdan Trefer in the war year of 1942.  His family came from a long line of artistic and creative stock, all of which would have little weight at the time of the Stalin regime.  Young Bogdan still took violin, then piano lessons and performed in the Third Pioneer Brigade Orchestra of Bucharest in the early fifties, and was soon getting attention from different state conductors of range.  Touring in the eastern block soon commenced, with brief visits to Paris and Berlin.

Thanks to these trips he discovered jazz and rock n’ roll, and the siren sounds of west soon called upon him.  It was at this point in 1961 he managed to defect into West Berlin during the Ulbricht celebrations of that year.  He paid the rent first as bar pianist at the famous Klempinski Hotel, then as accordionist in Die Josef Moosholzer Rytmusgruppe, performing in some of the most popular knackwurst restaurants of the time.

He found his creative outlet during late night jam sessions, where he often sat in together with like-minded, as the already at that time immensely successful bass player James Last.  Through Last be was introduced to bandleader Horst Herrman, at that time arranger for the Berliner Rundfunk, and soon landed the spot as piano soloist.  Soon he was backing vocalists like Hildegard Knef, Zarah Leander and even Marlene Dietrich who took an instant liking to the young prodigy.  It was she who took him over to London’s Hammersmith Odeon and New York’s Carnegie Hall as replacement for her then musical director Burt Bacharach, who was away doing songs for a new Doris Day movie.  Two weeks with the vibrant New York scene of the early sixties with it’s art house theatres, beatnik lifestyle and around the clock musical stimulated the fresh arrival of Trafalgar who heard Bill Evans at the Village Vanguard, saw 8 1/2 and Breathless and went to exhibitions with Andy Warhol soup cans.

It was 1963, the same year as the movie How the West was Won.  It could have been the exact name of the new chapter in the career of Bobby Trafalgar, the thoroughly gifted fully defected Rumanian pianist-arranger, who by now bad left his native name and country behind him, as well as the violin.

As the Dietrich tour now was at an end, be returned to Europe thoroughly stimulated and decided to try his hand at composing.  Back in Germany be got in contact with producer Wolf C. Hartwig, specialist in sordid accounts of crime, delinquent youth culture and the horrors (as well as delights of) the sexual side of things and wrote the scores to film like Die Jungen Tieren von St Pauli (The Young Animals of St Pauli), Ein Gorilla im Haut des M‰dchens (A Gorilla in the Skin of a Girl) and Wagenwild! (Carcrazy!).  These where the years when the so called good names of established talent easily mixed with the more dubious exploitional talent, or perhaps the lack of it, to interesting results to say the least.  In these films, one often saw international actors such as Gert Frˆbe, Horst Bucholz and Klaus Kinski enjoying themselves as they scared the clothes out of different well shaped starlets and models whose enthusiastic screams and exhausted seams always made up for lack of acting ability.  Trafalgar also did unaccredited arrangements for Ennio Morricone and Daniel White.  Bobby Trafalgar travelled wherever his work took him and once again returned to the United States in 1968, this time for a longer and stranger sojourn.

The late 60s and the early 70s offered a no-holds-barred way of life and a way of art that seemed limitless.  Trafalgar released psychedelic dance records together with his backup band The Trafalgar Squares (in spite of this the tongue-in-cheek name the group was indeed very hip to the most contemporary of sounds), be went into different musical ventures of oriental as well as militant black jazz poetry.  The Trafalgar Squares wasn’t your ordinary group but also part of a commune with influences from Buddhism, existentialism, mysticism and ufology.  The collective was formed in 1969 and lived isolated 150 miles out in the desert.  After 18 months “the temple” fell apart and the group split in early 197 1. The bass player is now mayor in a small Utah town.

This was when Bobby Trafalgar decided to change his sex.  Looking back he now finds that decision a bit hasty, and managed to change back a few years later.  During this period he discovered the moog sythesizer and it came to be his favourite instrument from hereon.  He is supposed to be scene in the lost Ed Wood film Take it out in Trade as a madame sporting a pink skeleton around her neck, but it remains to be seen if the movie is ever found again.  The rest of the early seventies are as enigmatic.

1976 saw the return to music from a five-year hiatus 6 with the movie score to the French porno film “Hotel d’Amour” by Francis Hulot starring Brigitte Lahaie and the lovely Kitty McBride, who also became Mrs Trafalgar. Trafalgar later stopped composing again for reasons unknown.  Rumours say that Kitty left him joined a lesbian S/M camp in San Francisco in 1982.

The last Recording from Bobby Trafalgar was released one year earlier, and he then vanished into obscurity.  Other rumours are that he turned to the lucrative market of commercial jingles and later television infomercial music.  In any case he should be heard for a unique musical vision in any of the fields he pursued, and this is all in the collection assembled by HÂkan Lidbo, the young, talented music producer who accidentally met Bobby Trafalgar a couple of years ago. The idea to re-edit and re-master his classic Recordings was presented to Repap and finally Bobby Trafalgar is back on the scene, ready to be discovered by a new, hip generation.

The era of the sixties and seventies was truly an age of nonconformity and true freedom of expression.  For all of us who experienced those years and took the unique zeitgeist for granted, the trends for logically hip ones, the movies for soundly signing the times and the musical sounds for fads of fashion -- well, we woke up and smelled the eighties and then the nineties in just 9 1/2 weeks, or before you could say A-Ha!, and all of a sudden all was over and would never come again.  Thanks to the best of modern-day devices like digital reproduction, remastering and remixing they have -- but most of all thanks to the timeless sounds of men (?) like Bobby Trafalgar.

T.J. Mulholand, Modern Culture Critic

Some of Bobby Trafalgar’s classic recordings:

Pictures from Bobby Trafalgar’s many friends in the showbizz jet-set:

Videos: