"Subways Of Your Mind" (formerly known as "Like The Wind" or "The Most Mysterious Song On The Internet") is a formerly unidentified new wave/post-punk song recorded in 1984 and released in 1985 by German band FEX. A shorter version was recorded around 1984, before the released version.
Search History
1980s - 2004: Origin of the Song
Around the year 1984, a German teenager named "Darius S." had recorded the song onto a BASF Chromdioxid II 90 cassette tape off the German radio station Norddeutscher Rundfunk (NDR).
The song was written down on a track list along with other songs. However, it was listed as "Blind The Wind - ?" as shown below, most likely because he missed the title and artist name.
- Heaven 17 - Sunset Now (1984)
- Depeche Mode - Master And Servant (1984)
- Malcolm McLaren - One Fine Day (1984)
- Simple Minds - Up On The Catwalk (1984)
- Corey Hart - Sunglasses At Night (1984)
- Ray Parker Jr. - Ghostbusters (1984)
- Golden Earring! - Twilight Zone (1982)
- ? - Blind The Wind (1983)
- Captain Sensible - Wot! (1982)
- Dominatrix - The Dominatrix Sleeps Tonight (1984)
2004 - 2017: Beginnings on the Internet
Unknown Pleasures
For his birthday in 2004, his sister, Lydia purchased him a website domain called Unknown Pleasures, named after the homonymous Joy Division album.
Darius then digitized his old radio recordings and used the website to help spread the search for some mysterious songs he had (his other formerly mysterious song, "Old Ned" by Blue in Heaven, was posted here too).
bluuue/Anton Riedel era
On March 18th, 2007, Lydia had uploaded the first 1:15 seconds of the song onto the Usenet group de.rec.musik.recherche, and continued her search on spiritofradio.ca and best-of-80s.de under the pseudonym, Anton Riedel and username bluuue.
The snippet had slowly spread across the internet after this, reaching WatZatSong in 2009 and YouTube in 2011.
2017 - Spring 2019: Gabriel Vieira expands the search
On September 20th, 2017, the Spanish independent record label Dead Wax Records uploaded Anton's snippet of the song to YouTube. It caught the attention of a friend of Nicolás Zúñiga (the owner of Dead Wax) named Gabriel Vieira in early 2019, who posted the snippet to several Reddit subs, coining the name "The Most Mysterious Song on the Internet".
On June 30th, 2019, r/TheMysteriousSong was founded. That day, the Subreddit found the original post from bluuue as well as the other forum posts. They discovered that the song was likely aired on an NDR show called Musik für Junge Leute (eng.: Music for young people) and began to contact the show's DJ Paul Baskerville for any leads.
Links to the full version were found on the old forums but did not work because the file sharing websites Lydia used were defunct by 2019.
Winter 2019 - Fall 2020: media coverage and Lydia rejoins
On July 9th, 2019, YouTuber Justin Whang discussed the search for the song on an episode of his series Tales From the Internet.
After the video was posted, Reddit user u/johnnymetoo. who followed Lydia's original search on Usenet, revealed he had downloaded the complete song in 2007, and posted it to r/TheMysteriousSong.
Later that month, Gabriel Vieira contacted Paul Baskerville, who said he didn't know the song, but was interested in playing the song on his new show, Nachtclub. This was how another mysterious song, On The Roof, was identified, but Like the Wind couldn't be identified. After Paul played LTW on Nachtclub, he told Gabriel that he received negative feedback from listeners.
In August of 2019, the German radio station Radio Eins aired the song, along with an interview from Paul Baskerville. Darius heard the song on the radio, prompting his sister Lydia to get in touch with Gabriel about rejoining the search.
In September, she then digitized the entire tape the song was on, which included other, mostly popular, songs Darius recorded.
In late 2019 and into early 2020, news media outlets, the most notable being Rolling Stone, ran the story of the mysterious song on their websites to attract new attention to the search. Many of these outlets were German media outlets. No significant leads came from these articles.
It was discovered in early 2020 that the synth used in the chorus was a Yamaha DX7. The DX7 was released in 1983, meaning that LTW could not be from any earlier than that year.
Winter 2020 - Fall 2024: NDR playlists
In July of 2020, Reddit user u/flexxonmobil obtained a list of all the songs Paul Baskerville played on Musik für Junge Leute from 1982 to 1984. While Like the Wind was not found on these lists, this prompted Lydia to get in touch with the archivist at NDR for more playlists. All the songs played on Musik für Junge Leute from 1982-1984 were found, but LTW wasn't found.
As of February 2021, 1984 lists from Der Club, Nachtclub, and No Wave, other shows Darius listened to on NDR are being searched.
10 kHz line
In December of 2020, it was revealed using spectrogram analysis that Like the Wind was played on NDR. This is because there is a 10 kHz line in the recording that was found on other NDR recordings, even others that were not from Darius.
This proves that the 10 kHz line was not from the tape deck used to record the tapes. Furthermore, a forum post from 2003 confirms the 10 kHz modulation scheme NDR used.
The reason this was important is that Darius recorded from other stations, such as the Dutch station Hilversum, which did not have the 10 kHz line.
November 2024 - January 2025: FEX & Original Version Found
On November 4th, 2024, a Reddit user named "marijn1412" came across an old newspaper article in the Nordwest Zeitung Archive while researching Hörfest Bands. The article's main topic was about a band named "FEX" from Kiel, Germany, who've won a talent contest for Rock with Wave and Pop influences.
marijn1412 had managed to get in contact with one of the members, who they had recognized to be from a Hörfest 1983 band called Phret. They had sent marijn1412 the songs that he had worked on with FEX and one song was titled "Subways Of Your Mind", which was the exact same song as TMMS. The song was a different performance and the song was eventually placed into GEMA.[1]
On that same day, FEX had provided the live performance of the song, at the Roxi Paderborn in May 25th, 1985 to damn peggy[2].
Then, on November 7th, the band performed the song on NDR1 at roughly 2:30PM.[3] Lydia had spoken to them and was convinced that FEX made the song.[4]
On January 13th, 2025, Michael Hädrich and his daughter found the NDR version tape, aka the version Darius recorded. It's the exact same as Darius's recording, excluding 2 drum beats at the beginning that he likely missed. However, the original master tape remains unfound.[5]
On October 1st, 2025, the band released a music video for the song, directed by Dominik Galizia, featuring several Easter Eggs of the search and FEX, such as the presence of Darius, the original cassette and cassette deck he used to record the song from the NDR at the time, a recreation of original 1980's Ture room, the DX7 of Michael and the original lyric notebook of Ture.
On 2nd November 2025, it was announced that Ture had found a slightly longer version of the NDR demo on his tape, with 7 more seconds, revealing the synth solo of the yellow tape was also on the NDR demo, and being most likely the one taped by Darius at the time. It was released on 4th November 2025, the day of the first anniversary of the solve.
List of old leads
Before marijn1412's post about FEX, there was a lot of leads for the song, that couldn't all be listed here. Please refer to the spreadsheet. This spreadsheet couldn't be edited as it is owned by the mods of r/TheMysteriousSong Subreddit and Discord, and they did not give everyone permission to edit it.
Lyrics
[Verse 1]
Like the wind
You came here running
Take the consequence of living
There's no space
There's no tomorrow
There's no sense (of) communication
[Chorus]
Check it in, check it out
But the sun will never shine
Paranoid anyway
In the subways of your mind
[Verse 2]
Like the wind
You're going somewhere
Let a smile be your companion
There's no place
And there's no sorrow
In the young and restless dreaming
[Chorus]
Check it in, check it out
But the sun will never shine
Paranoid anyway
In the subways of your mind
[Instrumental]
[Chorus]
Check it in, check it out
But the sun will never shine
Paranoid anyway
In the subways of your mind
[Outro]
Check it in, check it out
It's the summer blues
Tear it in, tear it out
It's a real excuse
Check it in, check it out
It's the summer blues
Tear it in, tear it out
It's a real excuse
Check it in, check it out
It's the summer blues
Tear it in, tear it out
It's a real excuse
Check it in, check it out
It's the summer blues
Tear it in, tear it out
It's a real excuse
Check it in, check it out
It's the summer blues
Tear it in, tear it out
It's a real excuse
Check it in
[Fade Out]
[Verse 1]
Like the wind
You came here running
To take the consequence of living
There's no space (space, space, space)
There's no tomorrow
What we need's communication
[Chorus]
Check it in, check it out
But the sun will never shine
Paranoid anyway
In the subways of your mind
[Verse 2]
Like the wind
Going from somewhere
Let a smile be your companion
There's no place (place, place, place)
For any sorrow
Time for young and restless dreamers
[Chorus]
Check it in, check it out
But the sun will never shine
Paranoid anyway
In the subways of your mind
[Instrumental]
[Chorus]
Check it in, check it out
But the sun will never shine
Paranoid anyway
In the subways of your mind
[Outro]
Check it in, check it out
It's the summer blues
Tear it in, tear it out
It's a good excuse
Check it in, check it out
It's the summer blues
Tear it in, tear it out
It's a good excuse
Check it in, check it out
It's the summer blues
Tear it in, tear it out
It's a good excuse
Check it in, check it out
It's the summer blues
Tear it in, tear it out
It's a good excuse
[Verse 1]
Like the wind
You came here running
Take the consequence of living
There's no place
There's no tomorrow
There's no sense of communication
[Chorus]
Check it in, check it out
But the sun will never shine
Paranoid anyway
In the subways of your mind
[Verse 2]
Like your wind
You came here running
Let a smile be your companion
There's no place
For any sorrow
Only the young and restless dreamers
[Chorus]
Check it in, check it out
But the sun will never shine
Paranoid anyway
In the subways of your mind
[Instrumental]
[Chorus]
Check it in, check it out
But the sun will never shine
Paranoid anyway
In the subways of your mind
[Outro]
Check it in, check it out
It's the summer blues
Tear it in, tear it out
It's a real excuse
Check it in, check it out
It's the summer blues
Tear it in, tear it out
It's a real excuse
Check it in, check it out
It's the summer blues
Tear it in, tear it out
It's a real excuse
Check it in, check it out
It's the summer blues
Tear it in, tear it out
It's a real excuse
Check it in!
[Instrumental]
Gallery
External Links
- Rolling Stone TMMSOTI article.
- TMMSOTI Wikipedia page.
- Systemica's full version YouTube upload
- Reupload.
- Like The Wind Genius lyrics.
- Peter Kramer's remastered upload.
- Oddball Karaoke's fanmade instrumental upload.
- BASF 4|1 Full tape recording (Internet Archive).
- Whang's video.
- Orignal NDR version video.
- Music video.