99 Luftballons

In June 1982, at a Rolling Stones concert in West Berlin, Nena's guitarist Carlo Karges watched a cloud of balloons being released and drifting toward the horizon. As they shifted shape in the sky, they looked to him like strange spacecraft, and he began to wonder what would happen if they floated over the Berlin Wall into the East. The band also pointed to an old American newspaper story about students who had faked a UFO sighting with a bunch of balloons and a flare. The song Karges wrote turns that idle thought into a chain reaction. Balloons are mistaken for something hostile, pilots are sent up, they show off their firepower, neighbouring countries panic, and ambitious ministers stoke the conflict until a long war leaves no winners. At the end the singer walks through the ruins, finds one last balloon, thinks of someone and lets it go. Released on the band's 1983 debut album, it caught the Cold War mood exactly. Audiences far beyond Germany took to the original. It topped the charts in Australia and reached number two on the Billboard Hot 100, behind Van Halen's "Jump", making it Nena's only American hit. An English version, "99 Red Balloons", went to number one in the UK and Canada, though the band said at the time they were not fully happy with it and felt the song lost something in translation. Four decades on, it remains the rare protest song people dance to, a reminder of how small misunderstandings can spiral.