TOM LIWA mit Flowerpornoes, die hängenden Gärten von Ehrenfeld-Köln

In the organizer's words:

After the two great concerts by Tilman Rossmy and die Regierung, his friend and companion, another favorite artist and indie hero of mine, is now coming to the gardens for an exclusive show.
Tom Liwa with Flowerpornoes are guests at "Sonntags in den Gärten" and they have the Greatest-Hits double vinyl album (20 POWER HITS, released by Misitunes, Hanseplatte, September 2025) with them.

Oh I'm looking forward to it;)
Tickets are limited, grab them quickly.

tom liwa, indie.cologne.events & die hängenden gärten von ehrenfeld present:

What: Tom Liwa with Flowerpornoes (D, Indie-Pop)
as a guest at "Sundays in the Gardens"
► tomliwa.de
► tomliwa.bandcamp.com
► https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7mmcEtzQryY

When: Sun. 19.5.2025
Where: The hanging gardens of Ehrenfeld
Admission: 18:00, start: 19:00
🔴 Event
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☆ Tom Liwa with Flowerpornoes ☆
Eleven songs on TOM LIWA's greatest hits double vinyl album (20 POWER HITS, released by Misitunes, September 2025) come from FLOWERPORNOES albums. So what could be more natural than to take old friends Markus Steinebach, Giuseppe Mautone and Birgit BBQ Quentmeier along on part of the tour, which celebrates more than forty years of work? As Tom once said: "The band will probably never break up - we'll probably just die one by one at some point!" As it's hopefully still a long time until then, we're looking forward to a handful of concerts with the grandmothers of modern, German-language indie pop, to electrified, multi-layered, shimmering and psychedelicized versions of Liwa's songbook and unique stage performances somewhere between Muppet Show and Angry Birds 2.

Tom Liwa: "20 Power Hits" (Misitunes), release date 26.9.)
"20 Power Hits" - we know that one! From K-Tel! The biggest stars were always represented on the LPs in the 70s: Albert Hammond, Cliff Richard, Elton John. For Tom Liwa, these compilations were a "gateway into pop music", and now he opens the gates to his own "20 Power Hits". Except that they are not hits in the true sense of the word. And not 20 songs, but 21 (because they include a completely new, previously unreleased song).
40 years in 20+1 songs: that can't be possible, of course, but it works surprisingly well. A total of 23 musicians (and four band names) are represented on the opulent double album - and many different versions of the singer/songwriter, who founded the Flowerpornoes in Duisburg in 1985. Since the nineties, Tom Liwa (far beyond the Hamburg school) has helped define what clever German pop can be. In addition to the Flowerpornoes, he has been on the road with Sundown, Mikrosaivo and the Leuchtturmband, invented Paradies der Ungeliebten and recorded with the Tim Isfort Orchestra. He has been the musical director for theater plays such as "Salome" (Oberhausen 2019) and "Azzurro" (Bremen 2023), and there is also a documentary about him: "Wir haben die Musik" by Marc Ottiker (2008). Liwa has released more than 30 albums and several books - and for his 60th birthday in October 2021, the video compilation "Die Geschichte des Horrorfilms" lasting several hours.
In 2022, the German magazine Rolling Stone voted Tom Liwa's "Eine andere Zeit" album of the year - the first German-language work since the magazine was founded in 1994. The follow-up "Primzahlen aus dem Bardo" (2024) with jazz saxophonist Luise Volkmann also made it into the top ten.
While the pandemic paralyzed many creatives, Liwa launched the digital singles series "Topic Tom de Terre", in which he addressed current topics ranging from world politics and philosophy to Christmas. And he decided to release super-independently in future: his regular albums are now released on Bandcamp without a label, distributor or promotional machinery - digitally and on CD, but not on vinyl. "20 Power Hits" is therefore also something very special in this respect:
The retrospective is only available as a double LP! This was made possible by the collaboration with the fine Hamburg label Misitunes.
The 20+1 songs were not simply arranged in chronological order, but distributed over the four sides in a kind of creative tetris - the narrative moment is always important to Tom Liwa. Incidentally, he himself is not an avowed vinyl lover. His personal collection would probably shock people who care about mint quality: "It has no market value because the records have been on the shelf for years where the cat got to them.
That means all the spines are scratched. And many of the LPs are full of cat hair or have been used as a breakfast tray."
Of course, all listeners will be missing at least one track, because 20 songs on more than 30 albums is a very small number. But Tom has set tough criteria for the selection - three, to be precise.
It's not sales figures, we're not talking about ABBA or Queen here: "One criterion for me was that the songs had an extended reach. For example, because we were on an important music magazine sampler, because they were used on a soundtrack or something, or because they were released by a busy record label like Grand Hotel Van Cleef, which did more advertising and videos. The second criterion is that of being a crowd favorite. So tracks that have been requested over and over again." When Tom Liwa makes a record, the songs are all hits for him first. Just killers, no fillers! And then he sometimes wonders himself which ones remain. Which ones does he still play live after years, and which not? "It's not always logical. They're not necessarily the best. It also depends, for example, on whether they are perhaps very complicated and whether I, with my foggy ADHD brain, simply don't know the chords at some point or can't remember the lyrics. And there are songs that haven't aged particularly well because the lyrics just don't work for me at some point." Themes and attitudes change, but the personal signature remains.
And what's the third factor? The Mike Krollmann category! His childhood friend taught Liwa to intuitively understand what a hit is. Verse, chorus, hook, lyrics: Everything has to be right. Incidentally, they are currently writing new hits together again as Sundown - while the Flowerpornoes and the Leuchtturmband are still fixed points in Liwa's cosmos. Bands are allowed to have different loves running in parallel, and Tom still has plans for all his musician friends. "I'm not the type to break up.
I'm the guy who behaves badly so that the others break up," he says - but that obviously didn't work here. Fortunately. Because a fact that Tom Liwa has either masked or trumpeted far too loudly for decades, he can now finally accept as a fact: "I know that I'm not just any songwriter, but a world-class songwriter - and that, above all, nobody can write Tom Liwa songs as well as I can. I'm definitely the best Tom Liwa songwriter in the world."