Carlo Karges
{{Short description|German guitarist and songwriter (1951–2002)}}
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Carlo Karges (31 July 1951 – 30 January 2002) was a German musician known for his work as a guitarist and songwriter for the rock band Nena.
== Personal life ==
Karges was born in Hamburg in 1951 and grew up there with his single mother. He began developing his musical abilities as a student, when he started to play guitar and to compose his own songs, and thereafter played as part of a number of groups, including Tomorrow's Gift and Release Music Orchestra. In 1971 he became a founding member of the group Novalis, in which he played as a guitarist and keyboardist.
Karges died at the Eppendorf Clinic in Hamburg on 30 January 2002 at the age of 50, due to liver failure. He was buried in Hamburg's Ohlsdorf Cemetery.
Nena
In 1981 he joined Gabriele "Nena" Kerner, Rolf Brendel, Jürgen Dehmel, and Uwe Fahrenkrog-Petersen in establishing the eponymous band Nena.
He wrote the lyrics of the band's most famous song, "99 Luftballons", released in 1983. He was attending a 1982 Rolling Stones concert at the Waldbühne (the "Forest Theatre") in West Berlin, when they released a large mass of helium balloons into the air. He wondered how East German or Soviet forces might react if the balloons crossed the Berlin Wall, and thus he conceived the idea for the song about a major war resulting from misidentification of a mass of balloons.{{cite magazine|magazine=Der Spiegel|date=25 March 1984|title=99 Luftballons und das Chaos der Gefühle|url=http://www.spiegel.de/spiegel/print/d-13510424.html|language=de}}
References
{{Reflist}}
External links
- {{AllMusic|class=artist|id=mn0000139930|title=Carlo Karges}}
- {{Discogs artist|451811-Carlo-Karges}}
{{Nena|top=yes}}
{{Authority control}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:Karges, Carlo}}
Category:German new wave musicians
Category:German rock guitarists
Category:German male guitarists
Category:German male songwriters
Category:Musicians from Hamburg
Category:20th-century German guitarists
Category:Deaths from liver failure
Category:Burials at the Ohlsdorf Cemetery
Category:20th-century German male musicians
Category:20th-century German musicians
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